“Because rail guns are less efficient than slings,” said the engineer. “We’d need to stockpile a mountain of mass bigger than the Cat itself. And we’re probably alive today only because we’re too small to be noticed. I’d rather not do anything to alter that condition.”

“Besides,” Joshua said, “we’re probably the only basket of human eggs left. That’s our misfortune and our responsibility. If we can just stay small and inconspicuous long enough, that may become the aliens’ misfortune.”

“Power consumption is going to be very tight,” Justin added. “For at least the first year of our outbound voyage we’re going to be depending on batteries. According to our chief engineer, most of our battery supply should be of the throwaway kind. As they die, we’ll simply grind them down to dust, scavenge whatever substances are useful to us, and shoot the rest away on rail guns for whatever extra velocity that will give us. There will be one very special bank of batteries designed for recharging by the slow decay of uranium salts; but we dare not power up even with those lowest level nukes until we are far enough away not to be outshining the galactic background radiation. We can’t afford to leak any unnatural neutrino glow.”

“At the brown dwarf,” Father John McQuitty said, “what kind of life can we expect to have there?”

“No worse than right here,” Joshua answered, looking directly at the old Biotimer.

“Yes, but here we still believe that one day we might go home, walk under an open sky. Here was never supposed to be forever.”

“Who said that? I didn’t say that. Tactics will dictate that we can never go back to living on a planet. Ever again. We must build a new civilization in the dwarf star—unlike anything our kind has known.”

“Is it worth it?” MacQuitty asked wearily.

“You mean, why not just stay here and die?” Justin asked.

“Better to die here than in that outer horror,” MacQuitty answered, sitting up straighter in his chair. “Be honest—what are the chances of accomplishing anything out there, or of ever reaching the brown dwarf? And even if we succeed, what kind of life awaits us? To live as clever rats?”

“Whatever chances we’ll have we’ll make for ourselves,” Justin said calmly. “But first we have to escape, to get out of harm’s way. Think of it one step at a time.”

“We have to make good,” Joshua added, trying to sound strong and convincing, “for all the dead. If we can save ourselves, that will be saving all of humanity.”

As he spoke Joshua noticed that the older man was weeping. His wife was comforting him, but it didn’t seem to do any good. And Joshua realized that there were levels of understanding that were reached by the oppressed and sinned against, clarities born of atrocity, that seemed insane when considered in peaceful times. Such were the clarities being bom in him now, and he knew that he had to communicate them to each and every inhabitant of the Cat.