"Because you wouldn't have gone," said the Wyman Virtual -- mentally I started calling him "sWyman."

"Of course not. No matter what the fee. -- And what about my fee? Have you paid it over yet?"

sWyman hesitated. "I'd be happy to, Michael. But... do you have an estate? Dependents?"

"You know I don't. Damn you."

"Look, Michael, I'm sorry if you feel tricked. But I had to make sure you'd take the trip. We have to put the interests of the race first, don't we?..."

After that my courage began to fail once more. sWyman had the decency to shut up.

We popped out of Susy-space, sparkling with selectrons and neutralinos.

My time in that metal box had seemed a lot longer than ten days. I don't remember a lot of it. I'd been locked inside my head, looking for a place to hide from the oppression of distance, from the burden of looming death.

Now I breathed deeply; even the canned air of the pod seemed sweet out of Susy-space.

I checked my status. I'd have four days' life support at the lithium-7 site. It would expire -- with me -- just when the Ghosts arrived. Wyman had given me the bare bones.

I de-opaqued my window and looked out. I was spinning lazily in an ordinary sky. There was a powdering of stars, a pale band that marked a galactic plane, smudges that were distant galaxies.

Earth was impossibly far away, somewhere over the horizon of the Universe. I shivered. Damn it, this place felt old.

There was something odd about one patch of sky. It looked the size of a dinner plate at arm's length. There were no stars in the patch. And it was growing slowly.

I set up the monitors. "sWyman -- what is it?"

"All I see is a dull infra-red glow... But that's where the lithium object is hiding, so that's the way we're headed."

The patch grew until it hid half the sky.

I started to make out a speckled effect. The speckles spread apart; it was as if we were falling into a swarm of bees. Soon we reached the outskirts of the swarm. A hail of huge objects shot past us and began to hide the stars behind us--

"They're ships."

"What?"

I straightened up from my monitor. "Ships. Millions of ships, sWyman."

I swung the focus around the sky. I picked out a little family of cylinders, tumbling over each other like baby mice. There was a crumpled sphere not much bigger than the pod; it orbited a treelike structure of branches and sparkling leaves. Beyond that I made out bundles of spheroids and tetrahedra, pencils of rods and wands -- my gaze roved over a speckling of shape and color.

I was at the heart of a hailstorm of ships. They filled the sky, misting into the distance.

But there was no life, no purposeful movement. It was a desolate place; I felt utterly alone.