Isak now set about the task of transmitting final orders, trying to work methodically at his pad, trying to ignore the quaking sounds in the cavern roof and the slight tremble that resounded through the frame of his house. One little mistake, one last regret: the very system of phone lines he had hoped would keep the Intruders from finding Ceres Station was actually helping the template to transmit its chain of molecular recoil to all points of the compass. It had shot out of Bishop’s tent like a poison dart, and was now crisscrossing the entire network of the colony, into every ranch, every office, every room that contained a phone.

Such a little mistake: but now all the poison had spilled out and was penetrating Isak’s world with such swift precision that he was even inclined to believe that the Intruders had anticipated his strategy of stealthing Ceres with phone lines.

Crushed, he sat back and took a deep breath, then glanced over at Sargenti.

She did not look at him but said, “There’s only one last thing we can do, if we still can.”

She touched her pad, and he saw that she was concentrating vast amounts of power into the station’s transmitter and opening as many wavelengths as the equipment could handle.

“There’s nothing more they can do to us,” she said, “so we might as well get out what we know.”

She leaned forward slightly and Isak watched her as if in a dream.

“This is Ceres Station,” she said, “broadcasting on radio carrier wave. We’re about all done here. Warning to survivors: the enemy knows how to reprogram your computers if they are linked to listening devices. Receivers must be totally disconnected from computer systems—especially robots. There is great danger in listening to or trying to interpret enemy transmissions. Regret we’ve learned that the hard way. Regret no further communications from Ceres will be possible.”

She went on repeating the message five times, and when she was through she called, “Death cry,” into her pad, and in simple binary code the music went out to the light-years, with stereoscopic pairs of Tutankhamen’s golden mask, van Gogh’s Starry Night; the collected works of Shakespeare, Poe, H. G. Wells, Clarke, Lord, Stanislaw Lem, and Guilder; the films of Kubrick, Spielberg, and Limardo; and Henry Roth’s great American novel, Call It Sleep. She instructed the transmitter to repeat the message over and over again, for as long as the power lasted. Like the old Jackson message, it shone hundreds of times brighter than the Sun on certain wavelengths. Decades from now—perhaps millennia from now, Sargenti guessed—some alien civilization would receive the music and art of her people and, beginning with the collection of children’s talking books she had included, might be able to understand or to at least develop some small appreciation for her civilization’s accumulated beauty, if not its wisdom.

She suspected, however, that fearing exactly the situation she now found herself in, they might not have sufficient computer power connected to their receivers. If anyone were listening, they would probably record only part of her death cry and rightly conclude that only an exceedingly foolish civilization—or a people who knew they were dying and had nothing to lose—would be so heedless of detection as to deliberately send such a powerful message starward.