Isak could not help thinking, even in the midst of calamity, that late middle age was turning him into the oldest fool in the world. When Sargenti looked up from the starscape, she noticed that his lips were pressed together, but he seemed to be smiling wryly. She felt an urge to reach for him, but then stowed it away and returned her attention to the pad.

But her impulse did not go unsuspected.

It could never have worked, Isak told himself. He was born in the 1990s, and could still remember when Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Ronald Reagan were alive. By the time Sargenti reached sixty, he would be nearly twice her age—not that such chronologies really mattered anymore.

“One other thing …” he started to say, feeling a surge of genuine affection for her. The old fool in him had restrained it too long, hoping not to let it grow into more. But she had crept into his heart despite his self-control, and he had, without fully realizing it, accepted her presence there.

“Yes?” she asked, pushing her seat back from the pad.

Isak motioned at the floor of the cave, toward the outer wall of the wheel, beneath which lay many kilometers of rock and the surface of Ceres. “How well do our internal communications leak through the rock?”

“Not very well, I’m glad to say. The rock shields us.”

“I wonder,” he said. “Call it corrosive paranoia setting in, but I think we should restrict all communications to hand-delivered messages for a while. We’ll have to stop anything that can leak radio waves, however weak. We can’t accept even the smallest risk of being found.”

“Messengers? That’s like living in ancient Greece! Do you think we can live like that?”

“We won’t have to for very long,” Isak said. “Only long enough to reacquaint ourselves with some nineteenth-century technology.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can our factory make about six hundred klicks of wire by this time next week?”

“Wire? Six hundred klicks? Oh, I get it.”

“Exactly, Science Officer Sargenti—telephones,” he said with a wry grin, then walked past her to where coals were burning in a deep fireplace cut into the balcony wall.

A new rack of pipes lay over the coals, gathering heat for the household water tanks. In the long night that was coming to Ceres, most of the forests, cultivated with painstaking care during the last twenty years, were going to die. But as long as the Cerans did not burn it too quickly and produce a smog problem, they would have enough firewood to last two hundred years or more.

Isak tossed two fresh logs on the fire. A sudden flurry of sparks cast a soft orange light on Sargenti’s otherwise pale face, and when he turned around, he found himself yearning for her warmth. Did it make any sense to tell her? Or had she always known how he felt, but had simply not cared to encourage him? He regretted, given the odds against prolonged survival, that he would probably never know.