As he sat quietly, Crichton hobbled to the table and stopped by his chair, and Isak realized that if the Intruders had their way, what was left of the most successful species ever to walk the Earth would perish again, along with the rank newcomer, Man. All the effort that had gone into resurrecting the dinosaurs, albeit at a more manageable scale, would be for nothing.

Crichton, whose hip replacements still did not work as well as they should, took a step toward him and gazed up at him with his left eye, as if preparing to say something, then came forward and lay his long neck across Isak’s lap.

“We’ll go down together this time,” Isak said, scratching Crichton’s head. The apatosaur snorted contentedly, and Isak realized again what a miracle this miniature saurian was—and even more precious now that he was again one of the last of his kind, if not the last. Even with genetic defects and hip replacements, he was a whole sentence out of Earth’s library of life, whose volumes were now all but gone. The cometary strike which had destroyed the dinosaurs more than sixty million years ago had been merciful and slow compared to the swift swords that had butchered humanity.

As he rubbed Crichton under the chin, Isak reached for his pad with his right hand and called up a view of the site at Ceres’s north pole where the gamma ray telescope would soon be built. Starlit spidery shapes moved to and fro on the Lunar-like surface, throwing up streamers of dust as they excavated a cradle for the gamma-detector tanks. They were like a swarm of black insects, these builders, communicating by tight microwave and laser beam, so as not to be detectable by the Intruders. He and Sargenti had always communicated in a looser way, through subtle channels, leaving each other’s feelings to delicious guesswork.

Isak wondered again about Ceres’s artificial rotation, and whether the Intruders would be observant enough to notice that it was spinning with a force sufficient to fling stones near the equator into space with an acceleration of one half Earth gravity. Surely it would be apparent to any close observer that without engineers, Ceres could not have held itself together, and would long ago have flung itself apart. He decided that Sargenti had the right idea. They had hit all the major centers of life first and would systematically go through all the lesser possibilities whether there was life there or not. Ceres would be destroyed whether it did anything to hide itself or not.

He watched the spidery robots sinking shafts into the polar dust and tried to imagine how Ceres might be hidden from the Intruders. Maybe they’ll just overlook us, he thought. Why would they want to be so thorough? In human experience only a great hatred might create such dedication. They don’t know us at all. We never did anything to them. So they’ll probably overlook Ceres, he told himself. It was a great leap of hope, he realized, to conclude that because humankind and the Intruders didn’t know each other, the aliens might overlook the remnants of humanity; but hope was all that could keep his people going. What would Fred Haise have done in a situation such as this?