“ ‘I had a dream which was not all a dream.’ ” Drake muttered the words as they welled up in his mind. ” ‘The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.’ ”

“Sorry?” Tom’s voice was puzzled. “I don’t quite grasp what you’re getting at.”

“Not my thoughts. Those of a writer dead before we were born. Don’t worry about me, Tom, I’m not losing it. Let’s keep going.”

“Axe you sure? I don’t want to overload you again. Remember, this is only our first session.”

“I can take it. Go ahead.”

“If you say so. I wanted to start close to home, give you the local perspective, so to speak, then move us out bit by bit. So here we go again.”

Sol began to shrink. The room that Drake was sitting in backed away into space and lifted high above the ecliptic. Sol became a tiny disk. The highlighted flicker of the outer planets moved in to merge with it and become a single point.

The apparent distance to Sol was increasing. In another half minute the inner region of the diffuse globe of the Oort Cloud was visible. Billions of separate and faint points of light were smeared by distance to a glowing haze. “Every one has been highlighted for the display,” Tom said casually. “Have to do it that way, or you wouldn’t see a thing. Not much sunlight so far out. And of course we’ve been showing just the inhabited bodies. What you might call the ‘old’ solar system colonies, before the spread outward really began. Wanted you to see that, but now if you don’t mind, I’m going to pick up the pace a bit. Don’t want to take all day.”

The outward movement accelerated, accompanied by Tom Lambert’s apparently offhand commentary (Drake realized that the composite speaking through Tom was actually anything but casual; it was his own needs, structuring the form of the input). The whole Oort Cloud was seen briefly, then in turn it shrank rapidly with distance from huge globe to small disk to tiny point of light. Other stars with inhabited planets, or planet-sized free space habitats, appeared as fiery sparks of blue-white and magenta.

At last the whole galactic spiral arm came into view. It was filled with the flashing lights of occupied worlds. The

interarm gaps showed no more than a sparse scattering of points, but across those gulfs the Sagittarius and Perseus arms were as densely populated as the local Orion arm. Finally the whole disk of the Galaxy was visible. The colored flecks of light were everywhere, from the dense galactic center to its wispy outer fringes. Humans and their creations spanned the Galaxy.

The display froze at last.

“In all our forms,” Tom said, “we endured. More than endured: prospered. That’s the way things stood, just one-tenth of a galactic revolution ago — twenty-five million years, in the old terms of time. Development, by organic, inorganic, and composite forms, had been steady and peaceful through thirty full revolutions of the Sun about the galactic center. Pretty impressive, eh?”

Very impressive. Drake recalled that one galactic revolution took about two hundred million years. Humans had survived and prospered for more than six billion years.

“But it’s not like that anymore,” Tom added. “I’m going to show you a recent time evolution — in terms familiar to you, I will display what has been happening in the past few tens of millions of Earth years.”

Again there was a tremor in his voice, a hint of uncounted minds quivering beyond the gate and walls imposed by Drake. The static view outside the picture window began to change.

At first it was no more than a hint of asymmetry in the great pattern of spirals, one side of the Galaxy showing a shade less full than the other. After a few moments the differences became more pronounced and more specific. A dark sector was appearing on one side of the disk. On the outermost spiral arm, far across the Galaxy from Sol, the bright points of light were snuffed out one by one. Drake thought at first of an eclipse, as though some unimaginably big and dark sphere was occulting the whole galactic plane. Then he realized that the analogy was no good. The blackness at the edge of the Galaxy was not of constant diameter. It was increasing in size. Some outside influence was moving in to invade the galactic disk, and growing constantly as it did so.

“And now you see it as it is today,” Tom said quietly. The lights had come on again within the room, dimming the display outside. Drake did not know if that was under his control or Tom’s, as Tom continued, “Except, of course, that it has not ended. The change continues, faster than ever.”

A crescent wedge had been carved from the Galaxy, cutting out a substantial fraction of the whole disk.

“Colonies vanish. Without a signal, without a sign.” Tom sounded bewildered. “If we assume that all the composites in the vanished zone have been destroyed, as the silence would suggest, then billions of sentient beings are dying from moment to moment even while we are speaking.”

It was a tragedy beyond all tragedies. Drake had become used to the tours of a changing solar system, provided on each resurrection until overstimulation led to numbness; but death was different.

He had been touched by death just five times in his own life: his parents, Ana’s parents, and the death of Ana herself. Those single incidents loomed enormous, but they sat within a century of larger disasters — of war and famine and disease. Thirty million had been killed in two world wars, twenty million dead of influenza in a single year, twenty million starved to death by the deliberate act of one powerful man.

Those were huge, unthinkable numbers, but still they were millions, not billions. They were nothing, compared with what he was facing now.

Tom said softly, “Our galaxy is being invaded by something from outside. We are being destroyed, faster than we can escape.”

Drake knew that. He also knew he did not want to face it. “Your problem is terrible, but it has nothing to do with me. More than that, there is nothing that I can do about it.”

“You do not know, unless you try.”

“Try what? You are being ridiculous.”

“If we knew what to try, we would long since have tried it. Drake, we did not rouse you from dormancy on a whim, or without prior thought. You are from an earlier age, more familiar with aggression. If anyone can suggest a way to protect us, you can do so.”

“Why me? There were fifty thousand others in the cryotanks, all from my era. They were resurrected, every one of

them. I assume that some at least are still conscious entities.”

“Most are. But they no longer exist as isolated intelligences. All, except you, form part of composites. The result lacks — please do not misunderstand me — your primitive drive and aggression.”

“You need me because I’m a barbarian!”

“Exactly.”

“To try and do what you refuse to do.”

“No. What we are unable to do. As I said, you are our last hope, and it is a desperate hope indeed. Drake, let me suggest that you have no choice. If you want Ana to return to you, ever, you must help us.”

“Blackmail.”

“Not at all. Consider. If you fail to help, and if human civilization falls, so too do the electronic data banks. You will then cease to exist, and so will any possibility of resurrecting Ana. This is not, in the language of game theory, a two-person zero-sum game between you and the rest of humanity. Only if humanity wins can you possibly win. In order for that maximum benefit to be reached, by you and by humanity, it is necessary for you yourself to suffer a period of great effort, with no guarantee of return on that effort. No guarantee, indeed, that your effort is even needed. It is conceivable that, without you, we might come up with an answer to our problem tomorrow. But I do not think so. We have tried everything that we know. Well, Drake?”