The studio could have been a lush living room. The Black Cat logo was centered on the wall directly behind Jack. Satin curtains hung at the windows, framed photos of major political celebrities decorated the walls, and the armchairs and coffee table would have fit perfectly in Jack’s Nantucket vacation home. No camera was visible. Hutch’s instructions were to talk directly to Jack, to keep focused on him, but be aware viewers would see her looking at them. Behind him, a green light on the wall would shut down when they went off camera. “Just relax and say whatever comes to mind,” one of the staff people had told her. “Don’t worry about where the lens is.”

“Well, it’s a pleasure to be here, Jack,” she said. “Thanks for having me.”

He smiled, and his eyes focused on her, somehow inducing a sense of being at home. Relax, he was suggesting. You’re among friends. “You’ve seen the waterfall, of course? The one in the intercepted transmission from the supertelescopes? What’s your reaction?”

“It’s beautiful. And the music was right out of a Broadway concert.”

“It was striking, wasn’t it? So, are there any plans to go out and take a look? They’re saying the source is pretty far. That the signal would have needed more than seven thousand years to get here.”

“I haven’t heard a word, Jack. They’re pretty much closing everything down. We’ve been going in the wrong direction for years. My best guess is that the trend will continue and we’ll never find out about the waterfall.”

He nodded, and for a moment Hutch saw that it wasn’t the answer he would have preferred. So he changed the subject. “What’s it feel like out there, Priscilla? Am I using the right name? Your colleagues all call you Hutch, right?”

“Priscilla works fine.”

“Okay. So, how’s it feel when you get so far from home? When you’re in territory nobody’s ever been near before?”

“Mostly, it just feels empty.”

“Is it the empty space? Or the planets where there’s nothing alive?”

“Both, I guess. When you stop to look at individual worlds, places that are orbiting at just the right distance from their sun, where the temperatures are perfect, and they have oceans and a thick atmosphere, but there’s no one there, it’s kind of creepy. Some of them have molecular life, so if we go back in a billion years or so, we’ll probably see forests and squirrels and maybe even someone in a motorboat. But that doesn’t seem to matter. There’s almost never anybody there.”

“But isn’t that a good thing?”

“How do you mean?”

“A substantial number of scientists, most recently Halley and Brackton and Margaret Evans, are saying that the safest situation for us would be if the universe was completely empty.”