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“Hey, Nash,” she said, trying to sound encouraging. “If we don’t get out there into space and get our arms and heads around whatever dangers might be waiting for us out there, then whatever Big Bad we might be hiding from now will eventually come to us.”

She glanced at her own wrist chronometer. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a hopper to catch and an interview to conduct.”

As she exited Nash McEvoy’s office, she wondered if her editor’s vivid imagination and worrywart tendencies might inflict far more terror upon him than anything she was likely to encounter out on the far fringes of human habitation.

But somehow she tended to doubt it.

TWELVE

Gordon Cooper Interplanetary Spaceport

Upham (Sierra County), New Mexico, Earth

MARTIAN REPRESENTATIVE QALETAQU already knew how Chief Katowa was going to react to the news he was about to bring them from Earth, the land of his tribe’s ancestors. But he didn’t feel quite prepared to share that knowledge candidly with the woman who sat facing him in the next row of chairs in one of the private spaceport’s small transit lounges.

Gannet Brooks, the journalist with whom he had agreed to speak while he awaited the arrival of his interplanetary transport, adjusted the controls on her ear-mounted cam as she finger-combed her long brown hair. Despite the noisy presence of the dozen-plus other travelers in the lounge—many of them parents shepherding young children—the female journalist remained focused on Qaletaqu like the rubidium lasers on a Martian mohole-borer.

“Representative Qaletaqu, I would like to assess the Martian take on today’s news,” Brooks said. “How do you expect the Martian Colonies to react as a whole?”

Trying to maintain his best media “game face,” Qaletaqu sighed thoughtfully, stroked his smooth chin, and gazed out the broad, curving windows that faced the vast expanse of spaceport tarmac, upon which a pair of shuttlepods sat. A silver dot cleaved the clear sky above a flat desert beyond the landing field, a landscape that reminded him of the Sinai Planum just southwest of his tribe’s settlement, nestled deep in the Valles Marineris.

“What news are you talking about specifically?” he asked at length.

Her brow striated slightly into a gently scolding frown, as if to indicate that she hadn’t followed him all the way here on the continent-hopper from San Francisco just to quiz him about the number of fouls called during yesterday’s football match in Buenos Aires.

“I am referring to the news that the Vulcans may have just decided to throw us collectively to the wolves,” Brooks said. “Or to the Romulans, take your pick.”

Who have these journalists been talking to, anyway? Qaletaqu wondered, though he decided asking her that would be an exercise in futility. Like spies, newsfolk usually developed their own informal anonymous intelligence networks, some of which included people with access to classified information, and perhaps even to a covert record that someone had made of a supposedly secret closed-door meeting.

As he watched the silver dot grow steadily larger and lower until it resolved itself into a gleaming, squarish transport vessel on its landing approach, he wished he could choose the wolf over the Romulans, just as Brooks had suggested. After all, he could at least imagine the prospect of understanding the wolf, with whom the human race might stand a chance of coming to some sort of accommodation. But the Great Spirit only knew whether or not the faceless aliens known as the Romulans reasoned the way human beings did, assuming that such a thing was even knowable. After all, during his forty-one years Qaletaqu had known more than a few human beings who had not been particularly good at reasoning.

Turning away from the window, Qaletaqu smiled at Brooks, practicing the manner in which he planned to deliver his formal report to his father and the assembled members of the tribal council once he got back to Mars. “I think you might be overstating matters