“Nooo …” said Tam.

“Yes! I remember trying to explain Aquila away as some sort of physical phenomenon, but now the lesson is a bit simpler: if you really want to search the Galaxy for signs of intelligent life, look first for signs of massive stupidity.”

Captain Tam smiled and shivered at the same time. She had an appreciation of wit and irony; but this time beads of sweat appeared on her forehead, and in the zero gravity they stayed exactly where they formed. The silence in the cold, cramped room seemed absolute, until Tam shrugged and broke it.

“If I may add to Susan’s observation, in a universe where people are blowing up each other’s suns, the civilization that hit us with relativistic bombs could be the good news. The really bad news hasn’t got out of Aquila yet.

“I don’t know where we go from here. All I can offer are these three options, and each breaks down to much the same end. I’ll leave you scientists and military types to mull it over, but I’m not sure we have very much time in which to decide.”

Two days later, it was voted to complete the absorbic trigger, and then to gamble on some island of human civilization still existing elsewhere in the solar system and on the even longer shot of Sargenti-Peterson’s survival: but in the event of a decisive attack, the ship-comet would destroy itself and everything else that lived between the Sim and the Oort Disk.

21

Descent

To those unfamiliar with the Lunarian sense of humor, it would have been difficult to understand why the owners and builders had named this ship Gaius. The mad emperor Gaius Caligula had bankrupted the Roman treasury, appointed a horse to the Senate, and devoured his son in public; and while it could truly be said that Hitler was Gaius with good table manners, no one had challenged the Roman emperor’s authority until he began to wage war against the god of the sea.

One morning Caligula had ordered the imperial guards to humiliate Neptune by beating the tide back with their swords, and when swords inevitably proved futile against the power of Earth and Moon, he began killing the very men who were assigned to protect him. When even larger groups of soldiers failed to keep the tide from rising, Gaius retaliated with more death sentences and firmed his resolve to defeat Neptune, to his ultimate ruin.

The Lunarians’ challenge against Neptune seemed to be going a lot smoother. Even before the last of the tanks were jettisoned, even before Gaius reached the ionosphere, Sharon and Robyn had watched the air pressure exerted by atoms of hydrogen and helium climb from the normal interplanetary level of 10-20 atmospheres.

“The planet keeps a tight hold on its gases,” Robyn observed.

Sharon had a talent for putting her observations into more human perspective. To her, one hundred thousandth of an atmosphere was the pressure of a water strider’s foot on the surface of a pond. The pressure was already rising above one atmosphere— the pressure of prerelativistic bombardment air at sea level on Earth—by the time they descended into the outer reaches of the stratosphere. Gaius was dropping like a dart. There was nothing to see outside except by the aid of sonoscans; and even then, there was very little to see. At this altitude, in the relatively calm air of the north pole, the tiniest snowflake was far too heavy to remain suspended in the cloud tops and immediately began falling toward the planet’s surface. As a result, even the cloud decks, as they scrolled upward past Gaius’s nightscopes and sonoscans, lacked detail.