Good-bye, bedroom, good-bye, office, good-bye, kitchen. Refrigerator still full of food. Good-bye, knotty-pine paneling, elevated porch, backyard, and wild plum tree. Good-bye, smooth and singing river. He passed Gauge’s wicker bed in the service porch and felt a lump in his throat.

“Good-bye, books,” he whispered, looking at the shelves in the living room. He locked the front door, but did not turn the dead bolt.

52

Trevor Hicks, his work finished in Washington, D.C., had taken a train to Boston, single suitcase and computer in hand. At the station, he had been met by a middle-aged, brown-haired scattered-looking woman dressed in a black wool skirt and old flower-print blouse. She had taken him to her home in Quincy in a battered Toyota sedan.

There he had rested for two days, watched owlishly by the woman’s five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. The woman had been husbandless for three years, and the old wood-frame house was in severe disrepair — leaky pipes, decrepit wallboard, broken stairs. The children seemed surprised that he did not share her bedroom, which led him to believe she had not lacked for male company. None of this mattered much to Hicks, who had never been judgmental even before his possession. He spent much of his time sitting on the broken-down living room couch, thinking or interacting with the network, helping a dozen other people in the Northeast compile lists of people to be contacted, and/or prepared for removal from the Earth.

All of his life, Hicks had worked with high-powered personalities — bright, knowledgeable, contentious, and often cantankerous men and women. Most of the people he now communicated with in the network fit this description. To his surprise, whatever maintained and governed the network did not discourage high-powered behavior among the network’s members. There was considerable debate, even acrimony, as first the categories of contactees and “saved” were decided, then specific communities, and finally specific individuals.

The Bosses (or Overlords or Secret Masters, all titles applied at one time or another to the anonymous organizers) had apparently decided that humans, with broad supervision, knew best how to choose and plan for their own rescue. Hicks sometimes had Ms doubts.

Over a dinner of macaroni and cheese served on a bare oak table, as the children listened, Hicks asked his hostess about her role in the rescue.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “They got to me about six weeks ago. I took in three people about a week after that, and they stayed here for a few days and then left. Some more people after that, and now you. Maybe I’m a den mother.”

The daughter giggled.

They could have chosen more hospitable lodgings. But he kept that thought to himself.

“What about you?” she asked. “What are you doing?”

“Making up a list,” he said.

“Who’s going, who’s not?”

He hesitated, then nodded. “Actually, we’re concentrating more on a list of others to recruit. There’s a lot of work left to be done, and not nearly enough people to do it.”

“I don’t think my kids and I are going,” the woman said. She stared at the table, her face slack, then slowly lifted her eyebrows and stood. “Jenny,” she said, “let’s clear the table.”

“Where ain’t we going, Mama?” the boy asked.

“Hush up, Jason,” the daughter ordered.

“Mama?” Jason persisted.

“Nowhere, and you pay attention to your sister, what she says.”

They had to start somewhere, Hicks thought. She was one of the first. They didn’t know where to begin. The suspicion of her inadequacy — if that was the right word — of her inability to qualify for the migration, did not prevent her from seeing the good they were doing, or the necessity of their work.

If we have any free will at all now.

That question was still unanswerable. Hicks preferred to think they did have free will, which implied that this woman demonstrated a truly admirable human quality: selfless courage.

Two days later, she drove him to the airport, and he boarded an airliner for San Francisco. Only on board the aircraft did he realize that he had heard the names of the woman’s children, but not her own.

High above the Earth, over the deck of obscuring clouds, Hicks napped and typed notes into his computer and realized he was not, for the moment, on call. The network had released him for these few hours and he was not privy to the ordered flow of voices and information. He had time to think, and to ask questions. How did the spiders get through airport security? That seemed easy enough. They had departed his luggage in the scanners, crawled through the mechanisms, and reentered the luggage beyond the sensors’ range. Or they had means of altering their X-ray shadows. Human sensory apparatus had failed completely from the beginning; if the bogeys could land on Earth without being detected, what was so amazing about a spider passing through airport security?

He mused about these things behind his closed eyes, relishing the temporary privacy. Then, on impulse, he inserted a CD carrying the texts of his complete works into the computer and called up Starhome. Scrolling through page after page, he skimmed the long sections of characterization (reasonably adept and no more) and intrigue and politics and read in more detail the passages of speculations and extrapolations. It’s not a bad book, he thought. Even now, two years after I finished it, it engages my interest, at least.

But the pride was largely masked by a sadness. The book dealt with a future. What future was there? Certainly not the one he had envisaged — a future of humans and extraterrestrials interacting on a vast mission of adventure and discovery. In some respects, that now seemed pitifully naive.

Life on Earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization…

And yet…

Somebody out there was thinking altruistically.

Or perhaps not.

Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.

He had written that once in an unpublished article on third-world development. The developed nations could serve their interests best by fostering the growth and development of less privileged, weaker nations…

And perhaps that was what was happening here.

But many experts on strategy had read his article and criticized it severely, citing many historical examples to prove him wrong. “Whose interests does the Soviet Union serve?” one reader had asked him. The Soviet Union, he had acknowledged, was stronger than ever — apparently — but faced enormous problems coordinating the nations and peoples it had absorbed, problems that others thought might prove fatal in the long run. “But not yet — and how many nations last for more than centuries?” the critic had responded.

Now apply the theory of necessary altruism to groups of intelligent beings that have survived tens of thousands of years. If only one of them launches planet-eating, civilization-destroying probes, and none of them respond by launching probe-killers—

Who wins?

Probe-killers, then, were definitely launched in self-interest. But why attempt to preserve possibly competing civilizations? Why not just destroy the planet-eaters and be done with it?

The network was not available to him; all he had were implanted memories, information he was not always able to access without the help of the network.

He often spurred thought by letting his fingers speak. Now he opened a file and began to type. The first few sentences came out as gibberish and he erased them. There is an answer here, inside me. I know it.