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woman with black hair, but he couldn't quite focus on any part of her except for her penetrating green eyes.
    "Do not give up hope, Timothy Gibbs,” said the woman. “You have a legacy."
    The room swirled in front of his eyes and he dropped to his knees then fell over sideways.
    * * * *
    The next morning, Timothy Gibbs awoke with a hangover and stared at the hepler lying in the corner of the room. He wondered if the woman he had seen had been real or some kind of alcohol-induced hallucination. Putting on clean clothes, he stepped outside into a strangely quiet morning.
    A rank odor like an outhouse assailed his nostrils. He looked down at his feet and saw a man with half his head gone; the dead fist clenched a hepler similar to the one he had purchased the day before. The man's bowels had released upon death. Bile rose in Gibbs’ mouth and he struggled not to vomit. He looked up and stepped purposefully around the corner where he saw a hover crashed into the base of the building. The driver was a pulpy mess. Gibbs wasn't able to control his stomach any more. He fell to his knees and vomited onto the sidewalk. His abdominal muscles kept contracting and releasing well after his stomach was empty and he had to struggle to stop the dry heaves.
    When he did stop, he stood up and forced himself to look up and down the eerily silent street. Bodies were strewn everywhere, as though there had been a plague, except it looked as though absolutely everyone had taken their own life.
    In a daze, he walked the familiar path to work. Once there, he was surprised to find the doors locked. He sat down in front of the doors and put his face in his hands. He didn't know how long he sat there like that before Jerry Lawrence stepped up and knelt down in front of him. “How are you doing?"
    "What the hell happened?” asked Gibbs, looking up with tear-stained cheeks.
    "I don't know.” Jerry's voice was hollow, haunted. “They're saying the Cluster did this."
    "How?” Gibbs snorted, then wiped his nose on his uniform sleeve, not caring that he left a trail of mucous.
    "I don't know.” Lawrence took a long, deep breath. “When no one showed up to work this morning, I went looking for some of the people. I found Louise Sinclair drowned in her bathtub. When the cops arrived they said she overdosed on Dracan Love Crystals."
    "What is this, the end of the world?” asked Gibbs. “Is this doomsday?"
    "I don't know, Tim,” said Jerry. He stood and held out his hand. “All I know is that I'm still alive and I'm not going down without a fight."
    Timothy Gibbs reached out and took Jerry's hand.
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    POLITICIANS
    A small, egg-shaped craft accelerated from Alpha Coma Bereneces toward the jump point for the planet Rd'dyggia. G'Liat reclined against the rounded back wall of the control cabin and stared at the holographic projection of space that hovered over the central console. Unlike most human vessels, Rd'dyggian ships were not equipped with graviton generators or any other means of providing simulated gravity. To the pragmatic Rd'dyggians such devices were a wasteful extravagance. Of course, Rd'dyggian skeletons did not deteriorate in null gravity as human skeletons did. Even so, G'Liat took advantage of the ship's acceleration to leave his own chair at the control console and recline without restraint, breathing in the comforting aromas of sulfur and ammonia. Though Rd'dyggians could survive in the same atmosphere as humans, it was not pleasant. To G'Liat, the air aboard the Nicholas Sanson had been dry and foul, like a tomb deep underneath a desert where no life could flourish.
    A young Rd'dyggian named Rizonex remained strapped in at the central control console. Like G'Liat, he was orange-skinned and hairless with a purple mustache-like growth over his mouth and large, black eyes. He was shorter than G'Liat—only about seven feet tall. His six-fingered hands rested on the console; his mind controlled the ship