Spring was still a few weeks away. But the Woodbridge area seldom got cold that time of year. Nevertheless, on that day, despite plenty of sunlight and only a scattering of clouds, it was frigid. A cluster of cars and vans was waiting when the car pulled up at her house. She tugged her jacket around her and opened the door. Reporters crowded around, taking pictures and asking questions. “What do you think is out there, Priscilla?”

“How do you feel about this flight? Is it scary?”

“Are you worried?”

“You guys have any idea what that waterfall is all about?”

“How can you be sure they won’t follow you home?”

That one needed a reply. She wished she had one. “As far as we know, you can’t track anything in transdimensional space. It’s not possible.”

“ ‘As far as we know.’ ”

“That’s correct.” Hutch raised her left hand, trying to suppress the noise. Finally, they grew quiet. “Thank you. Look, guys, I’m just a pilot. But for what it’s worth, we’ve spent the last hundred years traveling all over the Orion Arm. And we’ve been to the center of the galaxy. We have yet to find anybody anywhere who constitutes a threat to us. The only issue we’ve had was with the omega clouds, and that had nothing whatever to do with our missions.”

A man with an ID indicating he was from CBS put up his hand. “But that’s all past history, Priscilla. This is the first time we’ve seen something that we think is a high-tech civilization. And there are millions of places we haven’t been to.”

Hutch wanted to point out that there are never any guarantees, but she knew that would be the segment that would be on every news show an hour later. “That’s all I’ve got,” she said. “Listen, I have to go.”

She tried to push through the crowd, but more questions came.

“If it were your call, Priscilla, would you send this mission out?”

“What do you think about the president’s comment?”

She had no idea what the president had said, but it didn’t sound good.

“How about Dale Foxworth?” Dale was a retired pilot. “He says going out there looking for inhabited worlds is crazy.”

“What do you think, Priscilla?”

“Above my pay grade, guys. But you want my gut instincts?” The microphones moved closer. “We’ll arrive at Calliope, the lights will have gone out, and that’ll be the end of the show. In the long run, we’ll be safer if we look around. If there are any threats out there, better we find them than the reverse.”

“Why will the lights have gone out?”

“Because, whatever they are, we saw what that area looked like seven thousand years ago. Somebody, by this time, will have shut down the TV station.”