Should he confront Pepe with what he knew? Or just leave well enough alone. Curiosity versus gratitude, with a sprinkling of fear.

When he came back into the dining room, they were clearing away dessert.

"He didn't need the string?" Dove Slidell asked.

"What?" Norman was still holding his prop. "Oh, no—he'd found one by the time I got there. We just tuned up and went through a few difficult passages."

"Is he going to be all right?" Rory asked, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

"He'll be fine. I think he can go the rest of the way alone."

She nodded slowly, her eyes on his. "We're going to pick up some coffee at Nick's and go check the observatory. I won't even ask. You need your beauty sleep."

"Actually, I have to work for a bit. Started a new direction on the second partita."

"Well ... party away." They said their good-byes.

Aurora

She told the car to go to Nick's place. "He'll probably be sawing away at the cello if I get home at three."

"Hard to live with an artiste?"Dove said.

"Hard to live with somebody who doesn't keep regular hours. As if Idid!" She turned around in the driver's seat. "But Norm's really odd. He never sleeps more than a few hours at a time. Naps now and then, no particular schedule."

"Like Edison," Lamar said.

"No lightbulbs or phonograph. But he's a heck of a good cook."

They murmured assent. "You'll be glad when this thing's over?" Dove said. "Get back to doing actual research."

"Not as much of that as I'd like. "This 'thing' has kindled a new interest in astronomy in the young. I've bowed to pressure and agreed to take on two sections of elementary."

"That's a lot of kids."

"Fifty apiece. But I get two new grad assistants, so I just have to lecture."

"The rest of your load stays the same?" Lamar asked.

"Yeah, but it's not bad. A graduate seminar and a small class on nonthermal sources. And I'm getting a good bonus for the two extra sections.

"I've always enjoyed elementary. I just don't look forward to being spontaneous with the same lecture, three days a week."

Dove nodded. "I had to do two sections a couple of years back, when that boy genius from Princeton jumped ship. It's a strange sensation."

The car pulled up in front of Nick's, and the three went in for their coffee: burned, sweet, and rich.

Nick waved at Rory. "Just a second, Professor." She'd phoned in the order, not sure how late he stayed open.

She said hello to the only other customer, not certain whether she knew him. She'd seen him before, writing by hand in a bound journal.

The historian

He nodded back at Professor Bell. She would be in the last chapter.

He returned his attention to the book, up to the 1990s now.

In August 1990, Gainesville had a week of horrid fame, all over the world. Over the space of forty-eight hours, a madman captured, tortured, mutilated, and killed five students.

The bodies were rent with sixty-one slashes and stab wounds.

He carefully cleaned them up afterward— even the girl whose head he sawed off and placed at eye level on a bookshelf, for the police. Then he arranged the bodies into obscene positions.

The perversion eventually proved his undoing: he left semen at the scene, and its DNA identified him with no doubt.

He'd been free for months, before being arrested on another charge. A quarter of the student body had left in fear, or in response to parents' fears. The town was haunted by terror: gun sales skyrocketed while real estate plummeted. It was a good time to buy property in the student ghetto; a bad time to live there.

In November

Alarming hair growth had continued in young white males since August, when a musical mime group, the Epileptics, had been briefly popular. What caught on was not their semirandom twitching, now admired and imitated only by the very young, but their odd facial hair: each of them had a braided rope of beard growing from one cheek, and were otherwise clean-shaven. Of course it would take years to achieve a really long rope, but many adherents had managed four to six inches. They dyed it odd colors and some waxed it with a heavy pomade, so it lolled from the cheek like a spare penis, much to the delight of their parents.

Two movies inspired by the Coming appeared. Second Comingwas aimed at the Christian audience, and succeeded; To Serve Man,blatantly stolen from a century-old "first contact" story, did not do quite as well, once the joke of the title became common knowledge.

Europe treaded further down the path to open war. Every member present in the German parliament died on 17 November, victims of a swift bioagent that turned their bones to jelly. No one claimed responsibility for the massacre. The next day the Eiffel Tower came down, four people freighted with high explosives sacrificing themselves simultaneously, at the monument's four corners.

No one took credit for that, either. Official denials were discounted by most German and French citizens, as was the sober assertion that a third party was likely responsible for both atrocities; someone who would benefit from the two countries destroying one another.

Both armies massed along the border, doing maneuvers.

Insect restaurants opened all over California, Oregon, and Washington State. One chain, Eat More Bugs, was openly xenophobic, relating bugs with the Coming—cows and pigs and chickens are your relatives; eat something alien.

Most of the survival stores were failing. People who stocked up on water and bullets and nitrogen-preserved beans only went to the store once. So it was one month of huge profits followed by bankruptcy. Some of them hung on grimly, hoping for bad news. But there was no news from space; just the unchanging signal.

Norman told Aurora a version of the truth that did not include Pepe or weapons of incredible ferocity. The police investigation of the murder/arson did not publicly acknowledge that the bodies had been burned beyond even molecular recognition. The station scuttlebutt was that Willy Joe had arranged the arson to make it look as if he had died, a cover for disappearing out of sight. That was consistent with Rabin's fantastic testimony and the absolute lack of organic residue: the "men" who were holding him hostage were just convincing dummy robots, loaded with something like thermite. It would have been an expensive masquerade, but well within Willy Joe's budget, or at least the budget of his bosses.

Rabin had one more clandestine meeting with Norm, where they discussed the unlikelihood of that explanation. Of course, Rabin had gone along with it during the investigation, because it turned the spotlight away from him: Willy Joe had only picked up a cop so he would have an unimpeachable witness to his dramatic "demise."

Norm and Rabin stropped Occam's razor and concluded it must have been some clandestine military device that had fallen into the hands of an enemy of Willy Joe's. Norm was still thinking privately about gamma-ray bursters, but he left well enough alone there.

(An aspect of it that no one else was privy to was that the chief of police had a cousin in Washington who was high up in U.S. Army weapons research. He said there was nothing in the arsenal, or even on the drawing boards, that would do what Rabin had described. So it must have been fake.)

1 December

Aurora