“You want us to hide within rings? But we’re already doing that,” the young man protested. “What’s the difference?”

“It will be much harder to find us between the stars, even if they suspect that’s where we’ve gone. And we’re not going into the rings. We’re going down to the star itself.”

“Impossible!”

“Not impossible,” said a young engineer named Frank. “We’ve worked it out. With fusion ramjets we can orbit indefinitely in the star’s atmosphere, breaking not a single natural law. And because this particular star sustains low-level fusion deep within its core, our own neutrino glow will be masked from the moment we turn the jets on.”

Carlos whistled, and Joshua could almost read his thoughts. This was just too fantastic, the young man was saying to himself. A brown dwarf. Who would have believed such an adventure? Not even the aliens, perhaps; and that was the whole point. It was a galactic haystack out there. Where better to hide and begin stockpiling the building blocks of a new civilization? Brown dwarfs were a thousand times more populous than stars like the Sun, so plentiful as to be the likely identity of the so-called “dark matter” that bound the galaxies in gravitational clusters and would eventually pull the whole universe into something akin to a replay of the Big Bang.

“A brown dwarf,” Carlos said aloud. “Who would have believed it?”

“And how soon can we get there?” demanded another voice.

“Maybe in a few decades,” said Justin, “if we can get past a hundred kilometers a second after we leave Saturn’s orbit. The exact numbers are not clear yet.”

Frank lifted a hand. “What I propose is that we lasso one of the shepherd moons,” the engineer said, “using the Cat’s whiskers. Since the shepherd’s mass is much greater than ours, it will really, in effect, lasso us. We’ll have to batten down for some impressive gee forces and make sure our Bardo shield is ready for the one or two rocks we’re likely to slam through—but I think we can set up a terrific slingshot effect.”

“How high a velocity will that give us?” Carlos asked.

“Not high enough. After we’re out of the rings, we must pick up an added slingshot effect from Saturn itself. Now, what we’re proposing is a very complicated game of billiards, hopefully without hitting any big balls. The plan is to aim just outside the atmosphere, to come as close as we can to Saturn without slinging ourselves into the cloud tops. If we can manage this, then the planet will give us a nice gravitational kickoff.”

“And how high a velocity will that produce?”

“Still not quite enough,” Frank replied. “We’ll have to load on some extra mass before we start, and when we’re a few light-hours out, fire it away like icy gullets, using magnetic rail guns to give us that extra little kick, and also to make minor course corrections.”

“Why risk smashing into Saturn or risk having the whiskers break while we’re slinging around the shepherd?” asked an elderly woman. “Why not just use the rail gun to leave orbit?”