Admittedly, Lancer was packed with ambitious, intelligent folk. Given the years in flight, social diversions had undoubtedly been on from the start. But this … No, something rang wrong. Something beyond his curmudgeon’s distrust. Ted Landon and the rest could tune down this sort of thing if they desired. But a crew distracted was a crew easily misled, easily manipulated. And from such a muddle, a strong leader often eventually emerged when a crisis finally came.

He watched Carlotta stirring the orange ice shards in her noisy drink. He thought of Magellan, voyaging with thin hopes and not enough oranges to stave off scurvy. And of the Titantic, which sailed with absolute certainty and oranges galore.

“—wouldn’t they?” Carlotta was asking him a question.

“I don’t catch the drift,” he said to cover his day-dreaming.

“I mean, what’s going to force them to evolve higher intelligence?”

“Self-replicating machines can forage for raw materials anywhere. Lord knows they work better in space than we do—we’re hopeless, messy sods. But resources always run out. That will ensure competition.”

“It takes so long to exhaust a whole solar system,” Nikka said.

“Um. Yes. Hard for us to think on that time scale, isn’t it? Perhaps a reasonably bright machine needn’t wait around for evolution to do its work, though. It can augment its intelligence by adding on units, remember. Manufacturing, then delegating tasks to its new subsystems. Boosts the thinking speed, which is at least a step in the right direction. Simpler than willing yourself to have more brain cells, which is what we’d have to do.”

“Look, I’m the computer hack here,” Carlotta said. “I say artificial intelligence isn’t that easy. Earthside’s huge machines are sharp, sure, but it’s not just a question of adding more capacity.”

“Granted. But we’re talking about millions of years of evolution here—perhaps billions.”

“That’s a big, glossy generalization you’re making,” Carlotta said.

“So it is. I suppose I ought to think matters through better.”

“Listen,” Carlotta pressed him, “this is science. You’ve got to make a prediction if you want people to listen.”

“Right. Here it is. A Watcher will appear around every world where technology is possible. Or where it once was and might come again. They’re cops, you see. But they only police spots where technology might come from a naturally arising species. An organic one.”

Carlotta frowned. “Let’s see … That fits—”

Nigel broke in eagerly, “The robots which were shuttling ice at Wolf 359, for example. No Watcher there, because those patient little fellows are an early form of a machine society. Give ’em a few million years of exposure to cosmic rays, a shortage of materials—they’ll evolve. Become a member of the club.”

“Club?” Nikka asked.

“A network of ancient machine civilizations. They sent the Watchers.”

“I still don’t understand why the concentration on machines versus us,” Nikka said.

“Partly I’m relying on what the Snark said, and events afterward.”

“Well, Nigel,” Carlotta said diplomatically, “most people think you were, you know, off the deep end back then… .”

“I never claimed to be a conservative Republican. But there’s good reason to believe machines left over from a nuclear Armageddon won’t be friendly as lap dogs.”

“Why?”

“They started off with a genocide. One we caused. They’ll remember that.”

He wrote up his theory and duly gave a seminar for ExoBio and Theory sections. It was politely received.

The Watcher around Epsilon Eridani, he said, was there to be certain that no organic form arose again (or returned from nearby stars—there might be colonies). Something—the Watcher?—had destroyed the native organic civilization. It had incinerated the planet in such a way that the Skyhook remained.

Why leave the Skyhook? Most likely, because the Watcher wanted an economical way to send expeditions to the surface, where remnants could be sought out and exterminated.

He reviewed the observations of the oil haulers of Pro-cyon. At highest magnification the machines looked well-designed, sprouting antennas and hatches. Nigel deduced that they were perhaps a bit further advanced beyond the Wolf 359 ice luggers. Still carrying out mechanical tasks, but not running on instructions left over from a long-dead society. Instead, they seemed to be integrated into some interstellar economic scheme. An ocean of oil was a great boon, of course—but not merely for making energy. Anything that could cross between stars would not be hobbled by a chemical-energy economy. They might well need plentiful lubricants, though.

Isis was harder to explain. The EMs had engineered themselves to use radio as their basic sense. Was this to deceive the two Watchers into considering them a protomachine society?

That would imply a certain rigidity and literal-mindedness in those Watchers. Maybe they were old, decaying? Or else biding their time, studying the EMs. The fact that one Watcher attacked any attempt to inspect it tended to support the second point of view.

Nigel used all the data he could muster. He compared spectra and diagnostics of the various Watchers, estimated their ages (all gave billion-year upper bounds), and correlated as many variables as he could plausibly justify. There was no clean way to show a common origin for the Watchers. On the other hand, he pointed out, there was no reason to believe the Watchers had been constructed at the same place or time.

His theory did not muster much support. He had not expected it to.

The prevailing notion in Theory Section was the simplest—Occam’s razor triumphant. All these worlds, Theory said, were the husks of war-obliterated cultures. They proved that intelligent life was plentiful but suicidal. The Watchers were simply a common form of weapon, reinvented again and again in separately evolving societies. Battle stations. By the time a race developed one, it was close to annihilation.

As for Isis—the specifics of the great war that doomed that world were now mired in the EM legends. And legends were notoriously unreliable sources of hard facts. The EMs had modified their own bodies to survive, pure and simple, in the ruin they had made.

Neither side could explain the Swarmers and Skimmers. Nigel stood before the audience and countered arguments as best he could. He had a vague sense that the Skimmers and the EMs were somehow similar, but knew enough not to venture such an idea without an underpinning of hard explanation.

Someone from ExoBio pointed out that the Swarmers atleast demonstrated the prevalence of violence and warfare in other life-forms. There was applause after this remark. Nigel stood silent, not knowing how to counter it.

He saw the polite, well-concealed disbelief in their faces and accepted it. He merely hammered home again his prediction: Whatever they found ahead at Ross 128, if a world could possibly bring forth organic life—or had—it would have a circling Watcher. Walmsley’s Rule, someone called it.

His point made, he sat down to moderate applause. The seminar turned on to other topics in astrophysics and biology. No one, he noted, brought up the obvious exception to Walmsley’s Rule: Earth.

Five

Nigel stayed in their apartment much of the time. Nikka was quite fit, and did a variety of jobs around the ship. He participated in seminars and helped with assembly nets, all done over the apartment flatscreen. He liked the isolation and peace, but in fact it was forced on him by the need to tie into the blood filter four times daily. He and Nikka had put the rig together using gear from ship’s surplus; medical engineering was as easy as auto repair, most of it modular and plug-in. Still, they were tinkering with his life; Nikka checked the flow patterns every day. Of course, bypassing the medmons was a violation of shipregs, but that didn’t cause them any fretting.