“Good, good.”

Susan sent it sailing across the lab. Tam snatched it from the air and began leafing through the first chapters. One of only two real books she had brought with her, the ninety-year-old edition was autographed by Isaac Asimov, James Powell, and her grandfather. All three of the authors had anticipated the Sargenti-Peterson discoveries, and later in life had even drawn blueprints for the first Valkyrie starships.

“It’s all here,” said Tam. “Folsome microbodies, organized elements in the Orgueil and Murchison meteorites, and most important of all, what they all mean.”

“Now, Prime—ah, Captain…” Susan stopped and looked agitatedly around the room.

“Go on. Say what you were going to.”

“Captain, aren’t all these protocells just an irrelevant oddity, considering what’s happened?”

For two days now, Second Officer Skurla had been dropping hints to Tam, trying as gently as possible to compare any continuation of the original mission to Edith Russell’s tidying up of her stateroom before proceeding to the lifeboats on the sinking Titanic, a symptom of what the historian Walter Lord had called the Yorktown Syndrome, after the hundreds of sailors who had lined up their shoes neatly in rows on deck before abandoning the sinking aircraft carrier. Tam’s favorite example of such behavior was the fictional Scarlett O’Hara trying to go back and lock the door of the house before fleeing the Atlanta fire. History was filled with thousands of examples of people tending to absurd details in time of crisis; but this was not one of them.

“Oh, no,” said Tam. “There’s no Yorktown Syndrome here!”

Susan looked at her dubiously and was about to speak, but Tam took a deep breath and said im mediately, “Two things I want you to understand. First, I’m done with protocells for now. And second, none of this is as irrelevant as you might have thought at first glance. Don’t you see it? Look there, on the screen. It’s as obvious as your big toe! The miracle we call life was drawn from a disarmingly simple bag of tricks. It’s all nothing more than the most likely chemical reactions undergone by some of the most abundant elements in this part of the universe. So the whole universe—”

“Must be trying to make life,” Susan finished for her.

“Exactly.”

“So the universe was bound to throw up competitors, and one of them has found us.”

“And here we sit, Susan, in the nucleus of a comet. We and our machines must learn to evolve very quickly from here on, if we are to have any chance of addressing the competition.”

The look of agitation on Susan’s face changed to one of disbelief. “You can’t be thinking of going up against them.”

“Of course not. I’d just as soon challenge the Sun. No, there is only escape for us. And I’m afraid escape has become a race against extinction. And I’m afraid we are going to lose.” Tam pointed at the wallscreen. “Do you see that big globule in the center? The one being devoured by all the others?”