Imperial Earth

And I believe I have, he told himself, to at least one of them. His most penetrating questioner was certainly one of Terra’s top radio astronomers.

He would understand, and only a few allies at that level were necessary.

Duncan was certain that someday they would meet again, this time eye to eye, and with a pointed lack of reference to any prior encounter.

“As to why it’s important, Bob, I’ll tell you something that I didn’t mention to the Committee, and which I’m sure Karl never considered, because he was too engrossed in his own affairs. Do you realize what a project like

Argus would do to the Titan economy? It would bring us billions and make us the scientific hub of the Solar System. It might even go a long way to solve our financial problems, when the demand for hydrogen

starts to drop in the ‘80’s.” 282 “I appreciate that,” Farrell answered dryly, “especially as my taxes will go toward it. But let nothing interfere with the March of Science.”

Duncan laughed sympathetically. He liked Bob Farrell, and he had been extremely helpful. But he was less and less sure of the Ambassador’s loyalties, and it might soon be time to find a replacement. Unfortunately, it would again have to be a Terran, because of this infernal gravity; but that was a problem Titan would always have to live with.

He could certainly never tell his own ambassador, still less the Argus

Committee, why Karl’s brainchild might be so vital to the human race. There were speculations in that Minisec-luckily, there was no hint of them in the sketchbook-which had best not be published for many years, until the project had proved itself.

Karl had been right so often in the past, seizing on truths beyond all bounds of logic and reason, that Duncan felt sure that this last awesome intuition was also correct. Or if it was not, the truth was even stranger; in any event, it was a truth that must be learned. Though the knowledge might be overwhelming, the price of ignorance could be-extinction.

Here on the streets of this beautiful city, steeped in sunlight and in history, it was hard to take Karl’s final comments seriously, as he speculated about the origin of those mysterious waves. And surely even Karl did not really believe all the thoughts he had spoken into the secret memory of his Minisec, during the long voyage to Earth…. But he was diabolically persuasive, and his arguments had an irresistible logic and momentum of their own. Even if he did not believe all his own conjectures, he might still be right.

“Item one,” he had murmured to himself (it must have been hard to get privacy on that freighter, and Duncan could sometimes bear the noises of the ship, the movements of the other crew members), “these kilohertz waves have a limited range because of interstellar absorption. They would not normally be able to pass from one star to another, unless

plasma clouds act as waveguides, cha

“My calculations all point to a source-or sources -at about a tenth of a light-year from the Sun. Only a fortieth of the way to Alpha Centauri, but two hundred times the distance of Pluto… No man’s land-the edge of the wilderness between the stars. But that’s exactly where the comets are born, in a great, invisible shell surrounding the Solar System. There’s enough material out there for a trillion of those strange objects, orbiting in a cosmic freezer.

“What’s going on, in those huge clouds of hydrogen and helium and all the other elements? There’s not much energy-but, there may be enough. And where there’s matter and energy-and Time-sooner or later there’s organization.

“Call them Star Beasts. Would they be alive No -that word doesn’t apply.

Let’s just say-“Organized systems.” They’d be hundreds or thousands of kilometers across, and they might live-I mean, maintain their individual identity-for millions of years.

“That’s a thought. The comets that we observe are they the corpses of Star

Beasts, sent sunward for cremation? Or executed criminals? I’m being ridiculously anthropomorphic-but what else can I be?

“And are they intelligent? What does that word mean? Are ants intelligent-are the cells of the human body intelligent? Do all the Star

Beasts surrounding the Solar System make a single entity-and does It know about us? Or does It care?

“Perhaps the Sun keeps them at bay, as in ancient times the campfire kept off the wolves and saber-toothed tigers. But we are already a long way from the Sun, and sooner or later we will meet them. The more we learn, the better.

“And there’s one question I’m almost afraid to think about. Are they gods?

OR ARE THEY EATERS OF GO DST

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Extract from the Congressional Record for 2276 July 4. Address by the

Honorable Duncan Makenzie, Special Assistant to the Chief Administrator,

Republic of Titan.

Mr. Speaker, Members of Congress, Distinguished Guests-let me first express my deep gratitude to the Cente

Five hundred years ago this land was also a frontier-not only geographically but politically. Your ancestors, less than twenty generations in the past, created the first democratic constitution that really worked-and that still works today, on worlds that they could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.

During these celebrations, many have spoken of the legacy that the founders of the Republic left us on that day, half a thousand years ago. But there have been four Cente

At the first, in 1876, the United States was still recovering from a disastrous Civil War. Yet it was also laying the foundations of the technological revolution that would soon transform the Earth. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the very year of the first Cente

For in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first practical telephone.

We take electronic communications so utterly for granted that we ca

A century later, in 1976, that process had almost finished-and the conquest of interplanetary space was about to begin. By that time, the first man had already reached the Moon, using techniques which today seem unbelievably primitive. Although all historians now agree that the Apollo Project marked the United States’s supreme achievement, and its greatest moment of triumph, it was inspired by political motives that seem ludicrous-indeed, incomprehensible -to our modern minds. And it is no reflection on those first engineers and astronauts that their brilliant pioneering effort was a technological dead end, and that serious space travel did not begin for several decades, with much more advanced vehicles and propulsion systems.

A century later, in 2076, all the tools needed to open up the planets were ready to hand. Longduration life-support systems had been perfected; after the initial disasters, the fusion drive had been tamed. But humanity was exhausted by the effort of global rebuilding following the Time of

Troubles, and in the aftermath of the Population Crash there was little enthusiasm for the colonization of new worlds.

Despite these problems, mankind had set its feet irrevocably on the road to the stars. During the twenty-first century, the Lunar Base became self supporting the Mars Colony was established, and we had secured a bridgehead on Mercury. Venus and the Gas Giants defied us-as indeed they still do but we had visited all the larger moons and asteroids of the Solar