Drake suspected they had already seen all they were going to. Whatever the Shiva had done to this planet, they had not destroyed it or made it uninhabitable for humans. Changes had taken place in Argentil, particularly an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, but those could be the result of natural long-term climatic changes. They could just as well be the work of humans. Either way, the planet was still comfortably habitable.

They were hovering far off on the sunward side. As the world turned slowly beneath the ship, Drake suddenly imagined himself with Ana, restored to human body form, strolling unsuited and bareheaded among the dark-green forest lands of Argentil.

The thought came as a shock. Ana had been absent from his mind for a long time. Once he would have sworn that could not happen, that no hour could pass in which he did not think about her.

“All right, Tom.” Drake had to act. His mind felt oddly unbalanced. Maybe he had watched Argentil for too long. “Let’s go. Take us closer. Take us all the way down to a landing.”

How could he not be thinking constantly about Ana, when she was the whole reason that he was wandering here on the outer rim of the Galaxy?

He heard Tom screaming, but his own mind was far away. He was not seeing Argentil as the ship closed in for its final approach pattern. When the fusion fires rose from the surface to vaporize the descending ship, he saw only Ana. She was standing before him, telling him not to worry: they would still enjoy the future together, when all these events were nothing but a remote blip on the distant horizon of time.

The ship’s communications unit was not controlled by Drake’s wandering consciousness. A brief final message, triggered by the attack, went as an S-wave signal back to headquarters: it said that this ship, like so many others, was being destroyed — by a system sent to Argentil to defend the planet from the Shiva.

One more attempt. After how many?

Drake had lost count.

He studied the screens. It was information of a sort, even though it only confirmed what he already knew.

Where a giant artificial colony had once floated in free space, the sensors now showed nothing at all. However, the outer layers of the nearest star, only four light-minutes away, revealed subtle changes in its spectrum. There were more metal absorption lines than had been shown in the old records. And a nearby planet, which had once supported a human colony, was silent but apparently untouched.

It seemed as though the Shiva destroyed free-space colonies, while leaving the planets that they conquered able to support life. Drake pondered that fact as his lead ship turned cautiously toward the planet. Instead of Tom Lambert accompanying him, Drake had been downloaded to both ships. His two electronic versions had decided on a strategy on the way out from headquarters. Ship combinations had been sent out before, without success. After a million failed attempts he no longer hoped for definitive answers. He would settle for some small additional scrap of information.

When the first ship was within a few light-seconds of the planet, the second one released a tiny pod. It lacked a propulsion system, but it contained miniature sensors, an uploaded copy of Drake, and a low-data-rate transmitter.

The pod hung silent and motionless in space, while Drake on board it watched the approach of the two main ships to the planet. The first one vanished in a haze of high-energy particles and radiation. The second turned to flee, but a rolling torus of fire arrowed to it from the place where the other ship had been destroyed.

Drake reached a conclusion: the transmission link was an Achilles’ heel. The second ship should have been at a safe distance, but after the Shiva had killed the first ship they had been able to follow the tiny pulses of communication between the two.

It was another crumb of information about the Shiva. It told him that he had to be ultracautious in his own transmission. He began to send data out, warily and slowly, varying the strength and direction of the signal. Thousands of receiving stations, all over the Galaxy, would each receive a disconnected nugget of information. When he was finished, headquarters would face the task of time-ordering the sequence of weak signals, allowing for travel times, and collating everything to a single message.

Drake sent the pulses out a thousand times, varying the order of the signal destinations. By the time that he was finished, twelve thousand years had passed and he had drifted far from the star where the ships had died.

He had no propulsion system. Even now, he dared not risk a rescue signal.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

He waited. For another one hundred and forty thousand interminable years, he waited. The pod contained minimal computing facilities and no other distractions. There was nothing for him to do.

At last he gave the internal command to turn off all systems within the pod.

“All systems?” The pod’s intelligence was limited, but sufficient to follow the implications of the command.

“That is my instruction.”

“I am sorry, but I am unable to perform that command.”

“I see. Very well. Give me override.”

“That is permitted.”

Final authority for pod operations was turned over to Drake.

He switched off all systems; was erased; became nothing.

Chapter 22

“Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold;

Her skin was white as leprosy,

The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,

Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”

It wasn’t working. Drake decided that a smarter man than he would have realized the truth long ago. With all their efforts, they had learned very little.

The most tangible piece of information had been provided by Mel Bradley: the rate of spread of the Shiva zone of influence was between one-half and three kilometers a second. In other words, the Shiva domain expanded across one light-year of space in between one hundred thousand and six hundred thousand Earth years. That had its own implications. The firebreak that Mel had made with the help of the caesuras was forty light-years thick. It had taken four million years before a world was lost on the “safe” side of it; twenty-five million years later, every world along the whole great arc of the firebreak was gone.

The other thing, pointed out by Cass Leemu, was more peculiar: the Shiva apparently spread faster through regions where humans had colonies. Logic said it ought to be the other way round, that the resistance of a colony ought to slow the Shiva. Instead, it speeded them up. A policy of flight, leaving a world before the Shiva were predicted to arrive, had proved the best defense for other colonies.

And that was it; the sum total of what they had learned, in fifty million years of effort and millions of star systems lost. The good news, if that was the word for it, was that it would take a few billion more years before the entire galaxy became part of the Silent Zone.

Drake wondered what to suggest next to the composites. That humanity, in all its forms, should flee to another galaxy?

Universal flight didn’t seem feasible, even if it was psychologically acceptable.

He turned his total attention to a single question: Was there anything, anything at all, that they had not tried? He could think of just one thing. They had sent specially trained colonies to worlds that in the next centuries or millennia were candidates to fall to the Shiva. It had been done with single organic entities, with inorganics, and with composites, and always with the same results: the colonies reported that everything was all right, that they were doing fine, no problems. Then one day they fell silent.