“We won’t have the probe too much longer,” Vespasian said, with a hint of sadness.
Dr. Raphael remembered how much pride Vespasian had taken in naming the probe, how attached to it he felt. “Good Saint Anthony has already done the most important job,” Raphael said in as comforting a voice as he could manage. “He found Earth for us again. That should be some comfort if all else is lost.”
The skies were full of fire.
Marcia looked up into the Martian night, to where the stars had been replaced by terror. To the southeast, the closest jet of matter was being blasted into space. It was a glowing pillar of flame, air friction, ionization effects, electrical discharges, and whatever strange side effects the Charonian gravity beam caused, all combining to set the matter jet flickering and shimmering with power. Out on the surface, there was a constant splashing of dust jets as random bits of debris fell back from the central matter jet and slammed into the ground. Pieces of debris, some of them boulder-size or larger, were also falling in the city.
The sky itself was glowing, sheets and plumes of dust and rubble streaming off the matter jets, spreading across space, far out enough to be free of the planet’s shadow, free to catch the glow of the hidden Sun. Another dust storm suddenly snapped into being, ruddy sands swept up into the lower atmosphere by the chaos to the south, shrouding the world in blood.
“Do you honestly think they mean us no harm?” Marcia whispered to herself, remembering Larry’s question, the memory of his recorded voice echoing in her mind. He had asked that of Raphael, somewhere in the hours and hours of records that she had played back. But the horrifying answer to the question was that they had no intentions at all toward humans. Nothing so small and insignificant ever entered into the Charonians’ calculations. Marcia had a sudden strange image of herself as a microbe looking up from its glass slide, suddenly realizing the cleaning solution is about to splash down, cascading down onto her world, wiping her away, clearing her away to make room for something new.
She glanced back toward the research library, where Sondra worked the communications console, desperately searching the radio spectrum for any word from anywhere.
But there was nothing to hear. All contact with the outside universe had been lost. Never, in all her life, had all the lines been so utterly cut. The lines to Earth, to her husband, to her work at VISOR, to her whole life. All of it was gone.
So what happened now? she wondered.
There was a new series of flashing explosions in the southern sky. Marcia looked out the windows, past the terrible sights plain to the eye. She tried to see the future, the days still coming. Even Port Viking could not hold together if these storms continued. The dome had taken a year’s worth of punctures in the last day. The air would leak out. Power would fail as the dust blew in, as the Charonian onslaught smashed equipment and threw it into the sky. The Charonians would work their will. Humanity would be wiped clean off Mars.
And then the same on all the other worlds of the Solar System. That would be the end of the human future in the Solar System. And then… her throat choked up, and she began to cry, watching the flaming sky through tear-fogged eyes.
And then, the rest was silence.
Sondra awoke slumped over the comm console. She must have dozed off mere. There was a beeping noise coming from somewhere. She blinked, still half-asleep, and looked around. There was Marcia, collapsed on one of the couches. But what the hell was that beeping? Suddenly she realized it was coming from the comm system. The status board was flashing a message, “COMM CHANNEL CLEAR, TEXT MESSAGE INCOMING FROM LUNAR TRANSMITTER,” it read.
Sondra snapped awake. The jamming had cleared, at least for the moment. The signal’s status-coding sideband showed that the incoming message had been repeating for over an hour.
Wait a second. If one signal could get in, then another could get out. They had written up a long text message the night before, asking for a tap on the Moonpoint Ring, and had prepared it for transmission. Now Sondra reached for the controls and sent it off toward the Moon, setting it to repeat over and over again. With luck, their idea on tapping the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem would still get through in time.
But what about the incoming message? She punched a few keys and it began scrolling across the screen, too fast for her to catch more than a word or two of it. But that was enough.
“Oh my God,” she said. She jumped up and rushed to the couch. “Marcia! Marcia! My God, Marcia. Wake up.” She grabbed Marcia by the shoulder and shook her hard. “Your husband, Marcia.”
Marcia opened her eyes and sat bolt upright. “My husband? Gerald? What about him?”
“We’re getting a message from him,” Sondra said. “Some kind of technical report he wrote and relayed through the Saint Anthony. It’s coming in now.”
But Marcia was already seating herself at the comm unit, printing out a hard copy. She grabbed the first page as it scrolled from the printer. “Oh sweet Jesus, he is alive!” she said. “He’s okay.”
Sondra stepped back a bit, unwilling to intrude on such a private moment. She watched Marcia as she eagerly read through the pages. What was it like to love someone that much? Sondra wondered.
“It’s a tech report,” Marcia said. “Very official. But he managed to work in that he had read our reports on the Landers.” She looked up at Sondra and her eyes were shining. “That’s for me. He’s telling me that he knows I’m alive.” She kept reading, her eyes running eagerly down the page.
But then Marcia’s expression changed, turned to something other than delight. To shock, and surprise. She let her hands drop, still holding the papers. “He’s figured it out,” she said at last, her voice small and still. “Or at least a big part of it. At least he’s got a theory.”
“Figured out what?” Sondra asked. “A theory about what?”
“About what the Charonians are,” she said. “They’re von Neumanns. That’s it. That’s got to be it.”
“That’s what?”
“The answer, the explanation. The key to it all. Not all by itself, but it’s a start.” Marcia stood up, still holding the pages of the message, and stared off into space, carefully thinking it all out. “It makes sense,” she said. “They’ve got to be von Neumanns.”
“Will you please quit saying ‘von Neumanns’ and explain what they are?” Sondra demanded.
“It’s very simple,” Marcia said. “How did we miss it? A von Neumann machine is any device that can exactly duplicate itself out of locally available raw materials. A toaster that could not only toast bread but build more toasters out of things found in the kitchen would be a von Neumann toaster. It’s a very old concept, named for the scientist who dreamed it up.
“But von Neumann’s real idea was to build a von Neumann starship,” Marcia said. “A robot explorer that could fly from one star system to another, explore the system—and then duplicate itself a few dozen times, maybe mining asteroids for materials. It would send out new von Neumanns, duplicates of itself, from there. Then each new exploration robot would travel on to a nearby star, duplicate itself, and start the cycle again. Each machine would report back to the home planet on what it found. Even given a fairly slow transit speed between stars, you could explore a huge volume of space in just a few hundred years. Traveling, exploring, reproducing, over and over again.”