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"What new people?" He waved his arm at the Earth. "If everybody's dead-"

"We have the frozen cells," Tanya said. "We can grow new people."

Nobody heard her. We were all looking out at the dead moonscape. The dome stood high between the rock-spattered desert and the ink-black shadow that filled the crater pit. Looking down, I felt giddy for an instant, and Arne backed away.

"Fraidy cat!" Tanya jeered him. "You're grey as a ghost."

Retreating farther, he flushed red and looked up at the Earth. It hung high and huge, capped white at the poles and swirled with great white storms. Beneath the clouds, the seas were streaked brown and yellow and red where rivers ran off the dark continents.

"It was so beautiful," Dian whispered. "All blue and white and green in the old pictures."

"Before the impact," my father said. "Your job is to make it beautiful again."

Arne squinted at it and shook his head. "I don't see how—" "Just listen," Tanya said. "Please." My robot-father's face was not designed to smile, but his voice could reflect a tolerant amusement. "Let me tell you what you are." "I know," Arne said. "Clones—" "Shut up," Tanya told him. "Clones," my robot-father nodded. "Genetic copies of the humans who got here alive after the impact."

"I know all that," Arne said. "I saw it on my monitor. We were born down in the maternity lab, from the frozen cells our real parents left. And I know how the asteroid killed the Earth. I saw the simulation on my monitor."

"I didn't," Tanya said. "I want to know."

"Let's begin with Calvin DeFalco." Our robot-parents were all shaped just alike, but each with a breastplate of a different color. Mine was bright blue. He had cared for me as long as I remembered, and I loved him as much as my beagle. "Cal was the man who built the station and got us here. He died for your chance to go back—"

Stubbornly, Arne pushed out his fat lower lip. "I like it better here."

"You're a dummy," Tanya told him. "Dummies don't talk."

He stuck his tongue out at her, but we all stood close around my robot-father, listening.

"Calvin DeFalco was born in an old city called Chicago. He was as young as you are when his aunt took him to a museum where he saw the skeletons of the great dinosaurs that used to rule the Earth. The bones were so big that they frightened him. He asked her if they could ever come back.

"She tried to tell him he was safe. They were truly dead, she said, killed by a giant asteroid that struck the coast of Mexico. That frightened him more. She told him not to worry. Big impacts came millions of years apart. But he did worry about how anybody could survive another impact.

"His first idea was a colony on Mars. He trained to be an astronaut and led the only expedition that ever got there.

It turned out to be unfriendly, unfit for any self-sustaining colony. Most of the crew was lost, but Cal returned so famous he was able to persuade the world governments to set up Tycho Station.

"Live men and women worked here to build it, but they went home when the humanform robots were perfected. They left the robots to run the observatory and relay observations. If they ever saw trouble coming they were to call a warning to Earth—"

"But the killer did hit!" Arne broke in. "Why didn't they stop it?"

"Shhh!" Tanya scolded him. "Just listen."

He rolled his eyes at her.

"Everything went dreadfully wrong." My robot-father's voice fell with my real father's sadness. "The asteroid was mostly iron and bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. It came fast, on an orbit close around the Sun that hid it from the telescopes. Nobody saw it till there was no time to steer it away. But still they had a little luck."

"Luck?" Arne made a snarly face. "When the whole world was killed?"

"Luck for you," my robot-father told him. "Your father wasn't on what Cal called his survival squad. That was the little handful of people picked for essential skills and chosen to form a sturdy gene pool. He was Arne Linder, a geologist who had written