For Babu, the astronomer, there was the rueful satisfaction that the first contact with aliens had been totally exhausting and totally exciting—while it lasted.

For Bishop there was the question of why he was here at all. He had been born and raised in the previous century, and had personally known the members of Tarter’s group before volunteering for Project Biotime, a concept whose roots could be traced back to Powell and Tima.

While designing robot space probes to get under the ice of Europa, Powell and Tuna were forced to practice with deep-sea robots on Earth. Along the way, they had discovered that eggs and larvae on the abyssal plains usually drifted for hundreds of years at two degrees above freezing, until they blundered upon a life-giving volcanic vent or a whale carcass or a ship full of food that fell out of heaven. They survived their journey by existing in a state of suspended animation. And once the biologists learned how to emulate these organisms, whole new worlds were opened to them.

Project Biotime had been the brainchild of a Wall Street investment banker who devised and financed diverse medical applications for the newly discovered deep-ocean chemicals. As the twentieth century had drawn to a close, human bodies were routinely being cooled down to two degrees above freezing, with all metabolic functions flat-lined, making multiple organ transplants routine. But what the banker really had in mind was time travel. He knew that all the books, newspapers, and films available to historians would fail to preserve the personal prejudices and the real flavor of a century that had opened with the ascent of kitelike aircraft and ended with the exploration of the planets. He also knew that some of the most important questions about his time could be asked only by future historians, because he and his fellow travelers were simply too close to the subject matter.

Each of the thirty biotimers had to be willing to spend approximately fifty years in suspension, followed by two months of walking around and providing information to historians, followed by twenty-seven additional fifty-year time jumps. They would begin their fourteen-hundred-year journey in the role of historic artifacts, increasing in value as they went forward, until at last they became living, breathing archeological databases.

What surprised the banker was that, even after all the wrinkles had been ironed out and the safety of the biotime procedure proven, he had found it almost impossible to get volunteers. James Powell, Richard Tuna, and Arthur C. Clarke had been the first to decline, followed by the historian Walter Lord, along with almost everyone else he had assumed would jump at the opportunity to explore futurity.

But not Ed Bishop. Like Powell and Tuna, he had designed machines so advanced that he could never hope to see them built during his lifetime. His colleagues had resigned themselves to the fact that they were not meant to see starships and selfreplicating robots any more than Moses had been meant to cross over to Canaan with his people. They did not need to see the Valkyries burning in the sky; it was enough for them to know they were waiting out there in the new millennium.