Hutch watched as the lead character discovered his highly touted blind date turned out to be his sister. The room stayed silent. “I’m reluctant to mention this,” she said, “but this is only Wednesday.” The first day.

She normally read herself to sleep every night. She’d been saving Anthony Pagden’s classic analysis, The Enlightenment: and why it still matters, for the mission. She easily lost herself in it.

•  •  •

In the morning, Derek showed no sign of getting past his confrontation with Anna Capleton. “She’s been on both sides of this issue from the beginning,” he said. “She has a ton of political connections. Everybody’s scared of her.” Including, apparently, Derek. But he didn’t seem worried for himself. Rather, he was concerned about Hutch and Wally.

“The truth is,” he continued, “that she doesn’t really care about anything except her career. She was all for going to Calliope when we first saw the waterfall. In fact, I think it was the music that actually got her curiosity aroused. But then some of the heavyweights jumped into it, and the president. She developed cold feet and started talking out of both sides of her mouth. The last few days she’s been telling people she tried to warn everybody right from the start that sending a mission out was a bad idea.”

Wally jumped in. “I’m not so sure she doesn’t have a point. There’s really no way to know what kind of technology somebody out there might have.”

“I know,” said Derek. “Maybe if they’d turned us loose, we might have been able to take some of that advanced tech home. Assuming we found some.”

•  •  •

Early on, Ken became entranced by a book he’d brought with him. Hutch wandered into the mess area Sunday morning, where he sat alone with his notebook propped up in front of an empty plate. “What are you reading?”

“The Evolution of the Rational Mind. By Hal Carter.”

“You say that as if you know him.”

“I do. We went to school together.”

“How is it? The book?”

“It’s good.”

“So, who gets the credit?”

“Probably Plato and Aristotle. Hal tends to wonder how they would react to the modern world. That they are in large degree responsible for. He loves to think about how enjoyable it would be to go back in a time machine, bring them forward, and take them to the moon.”

“That’s in the book?”

“Oh, no. I’m talking about private moments. Before we left home, I had a chance to talk with him, and I asked where he thought those guys would come down on the starship debate.”

“What did he say?”

“That they both thought that curiosity is what life is all about. They would both have cringed at the thought of a society that had an interstellar and didn’t use it.”

“They’d have accepted the risk?”