Danchekker tossed the pen aside, gazed up and concluded:

"And somehow, Vic, I don't think that we will let them down. The worst is over now."

Epilogue

The signal transmitted by the huge radio dish at the observatory on Lunar Farside streaked outward from the fringe of the Solar System and into the vast gulfs of empty space beyond. Its whisper brushed the sensors of a sentinel that had been maintaining an unbroken vigil for a long, long time. The circuits inside the robot understood and responded to the Ganymean code that had been used to assemble the signal.

Other equipment inside the robot transformed the signal into vibrations of forces and fields that obeyed laws of physics unknown to Man, and dispatched it into a realm of existence of which the universe of space and time were mere shadowy projections. In another part of the shadow universe, on a warm, bright planet that orbited a cheerful star, other machines received and interpreted the message.

The builders of the machines were informed and were at once filled with wonder at the things that were reported to them.

The sentinel extracted their reply from the superstructure of space, transformed it back into electromagnetic waves, and beamed it back toward the satellite of the third planet from the Sun.

The astronomers at the Lunar Farside observatory were completely at a loss to explain the information coming from the instruments connected to their receivers; there was nothing within light-years of them from which a reply could have been evoked, but a reply was coming in hours after they had commenced transmitting. The officials at UNSA were equally bemused and time went by while scientists used the information that had been transferred from ZORAC's data banks to translate the message from Ganymean communications code into the Ganymean language. But still it meant nothing to anybody.

Then somebody thought of involving Dr. Victor Hunt of Navcomms Division. Hunt immediately remembered Don Maddson's study of the Ganymean language and sent the text down to Linguistics to see what they could make of it. Forty-eight hours passed by while Maddson and his assistant worked. The task was not one that they had practiced and, without ZORAC on tap to guide them, not one that could be accomplished readily. But the message was concise and eventually a red-eyed but triumphant Maddson presented Hunt with a single sheet of paper on which was typed:

The story of those who went to Iscaris long ago has been told through the generations since our ancestors came from Minerva. However you got there and however you found us, come home. There is a new Minerva now. We, your sons and daughters, are waiting to welcome you.

There were also some numbers and mathematical symbols that others in Navcomms had decoded, and which identified The Giants' Star as the source of the message by confirming its spectral type and its geometric position with respect to readily locatable pulsars in the neighboring regions of the Galaxy.

What physical processes might have been instrumental was something that Hunt could not even begin to guess at, but there was no time for academic speculation on such matters. The Ganymeans had to be told about what had happened and the Shapieron could not be contacted by ordinary means while it was in flight and under main drive. The only chance was to catch it at Ganymede.

The message from The Giant's Star was hastily transmitted to UNSA Operational Command Headquarters at Galveston, beamed up to an orbiting communications station and relayed out over the laser link to Jupiter Five. Hours passed while Hunt, Danchekker, Maddson, Caldwell and everyone else at Houston waited anxiously for something to come in through the open channel to Galveston. At last the screen came to life. The message on it read:

Shapieron left here seventeen minutes before your transmission came in. Last seen accelerating flat-out for deep space. All contact now broken. Sorry.

There was nothing more that anybody could do.

"At least," Hunt said as he turned wearily from the screen toward the circle of dejected faces in Caldwell's office, "it's nice to know that it will all have been worth it when they get there. At least they won't have any nasty surprises waiting at the end of this voyage." He turned back and gazed wistfully at the screen once more, then added: "I suppose it would have been even nicer if they knew it too."