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all-purpose “Screw it.” In late-night jokes in a bar, you could really see something hilarious in punting a small dog, preferably a poodle. You didn’t give a rat’s ass whether anybody heeded your new haircut. Thank God, they never noticed if you’d lost or gained weight. Men had some things so easy! With the Other Side, flowers fixed anything. And as the years closed in, gray hair and wrinkles would add character. Hell, you could dine out on that alone. Lean over the bar, belch originally, and declaim about the old days when rocket boosters kicked you in the ass so hard you thought you had a prostate problem. And what the hell, you could always look forward to being a dirty old man.

5
    He had expected the next day to be hours of more muddling along, with data trickling in and more idea-bashing with Kingsley and Amy. Instead, it proved decisive.
    The Very Large Baseline Interferometer reported in promptly, to everyone’s surprise. This network had grown from a few stations strewn around the world into an intricate system that now included radio telescopes orbiting farther away than the moon. Its “baseline” then made it effectively an instrument of enormous equivalent resolution, like having a dim eye of astronomical size. Getting a measurement quickly was pure luck. The distant SpaceWeb satellites had been looking in roughly the right portion of the sky, and Benjamin’s request came in at the very end of a rather tedious job. Instrument tenders were human, too, and the mystery had caught their attention.
    The radio plume was thin, bright—and moving. Comparison with the earlier map showed definite changes in the filaments making up the thin image. Now they had two maps at different times show changing luminosity and position.
    “But these were taken only a day or so apart!” Kingsley jabbed at the differences between the maps with a bony finger.
    “So?” Benjamin gave him a slight smile.
    “Must be wrong.”
    Benjamin said, “No, it means this object is local—very local.”
    “You took the rate of change of these features and worked it into a distance estimate?” Amy asked.
    “Nothing moves faster than light—so I used that to set a bound. I came in early, had a chance to work through the numbers, and checked them by e-mail with the guys in Socorro.” The site of the now-outdated Very Large Array, Socorro, New Mexico, still had a practiced set of house theorists and observers, and Benjamin knew several of them well. “Jean Ellik, an old hand there, agrees: this thing can’t be much farther away than the Oort cloud.”
    “But it’s a radio object.”
    The Oort cloud was a huge spherical swarm of icy fragments orbiting beyond the orbit of Pluto. Objects there were frigid and unenergetic, exceptionally difficult to detect.
    “Something has found a way to light itself up, out there in the cold and dark,” Benjamin said happily. The look of consternation on Kingsley’s face was all he had been hoping for. He could not resist rubbing it in. “That added hypothesis you were asking for yesterday—here it is.”
    They quickly went to the head of the Center, Victoria Martinez, and got permission for added resources. “Get everybody on it,” she said intently. Martinez was a good astronomer who had been deflected into administration. Benjamin worried that he would drift along the same path, getting more disconnected from the science all the while. He was happy that she saw the implications immediately.
    They wrote a carefully phrased alert for the IAU Notices, asking for any and all observations of the object, in all frequency bands, because in Kingsley’s phrase, “inasmuch as this is a wholly unanticipated finding, no data is irrelevant.” “Let’s keep the media out of it for the moment,” Martinez said carefully, and they all agreed. Everyone remembered past embarrassments: mistaken reports of asteroids that might hit Earth, misidentified massive stars, spurious discovered planets around