It still took a moment for Noxon to be sure what Ram meant. Not anthropes. Not from Earth. “What do we do?”

“Get back into the past right now.”

“This radiation exposure,” said Noxon. “You know we took a lot of it while we were time-slicing, too. Only a small fraction of what it could have been, but it looks like we weren’t all that far from the center of the blast.”

“So we’re probably dying already,” said Ram.

“Any cures?” asked Noxon. “Any effective treatments?”

“Well, if your facemask can’t cure it, I doubt anything my body can do will be of much help.”

“So we need to go back and warn ourselves in person,” said Noxon.

Ram understood at once. “Which will duplicate us.”

“If you and I are going to die,” said Noxon, “our copies need to go on. At the moment, I think we’re more indispensable to the survival of the human race than ever.”

“And if we don’t die?” asked Ram.

“The more the merrier.”

They could learn nothing. The next time they reached that point in time, at least they were out of town, well to the south. They had communications equipment, but there were no signals to pick up.

The third time, Ram and Noxon visited one of Ram’s friends from the space program. They made their explanations and demonstrations and were given a connection so they could look in on the communications of the international space exploration authority. This time there was a little warning. A ship of some kind spotted just outside the orbit of Jupiter. And then a complete loss of control over all computers and communications for only a few minutes, and a near-simultaneous launch of all missiles from all nations.

Armed with this data, Ram and Noxon visited the same friend, played the recordings and showed the data from the near future. With a lot of “never mind how I got it,” this data provoked some serious alerts and this time the spacecraft was tracked. It seemed to have come from a direction similar to the route taken by one of the exploratory drones sent out prior to Ram Odin’s colonizing mission, when the space authority was searching for planets likely to be habitable. And this time, given some warning, some of the communications systems were uncoupled from the worldwide networks, so they remained under human control.

What Noxon and Ram took back with them this last time was a much clearer picture. The best guess was that the drone sent out more than two decades before had discovered, not just a habitable world, but an inhabited one. A world with space travel and a keen sense of umbrage, or paranoia about what a follow-up visit from humans might bring.