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a few weeks, but nothing much worse than that.”
    â€œAnd the Intruder hasn’t tried to correct his course?” Du Bellay asked quietly.
    Mahendra’s expression was both sad and grim. “No, Doctor.”
    Puzzled, Chandra glanced between her father, Mahendra, and Du Bellay, all of whom wore the same look. Even Goode’s face was starting to change … and suddenly she understood. “You mean … the impact killed all of them?”
    Carey put his arm around her shoulders. “We had no choice, Chandra. It was a matter of survival. You understand, don’t you?”
    She sighed and, reluctantly, nodded. Goode took her arm and led her to a nearby chair. Sitting there, holding tightly to his hand, she watched with the rest of the Situation Room as the computer plot of the Intruder’s position skimmed the sun’s surface and shot out once more toward deep space. What had they been like, she wondered numbly … and how many of them had she killed so that Earth could live?
    She knew she would never know.
    Behind the Dawnsent, the star receded toward negative infinity, its light red-shifted to invisibility. With mixed feelings Orofan watched its shrinking image on the screen. Beside him, Pliij looked up from the helmboard. “We’re all set, Shipmaster. The deviation’s been calculated; we can correct course anytime in the next hundred aarns .”He paused, and in a more personal tone said, “You did what was necessary, Orofan. Your honor is unblemished.”
    Orofan signed agreement, but it was an automatic gesture. The assault gun, he noticed, was still in his tentacle, and he slipped it back into its sheath.
    A tentacle touched his. “Pliij is right,” Lassarr said gently. “Whatever craft that was, its inhabitants had almost certainly been killed by our scoop before we detected it. You could have done nothing to help them. Refusing to accept the ship’s mass at that point would have been dishonorable. You did well; your decisions and judgments have been proved correct.”
    â€œI know,” Orofan sighed. It was true; fate had combined with his decisions to save the system from destruction without adding appreciable time to the Dawnsent’s own journey. He should be satisfied.
    And yet … the analyzers reported significant numbers of silicon, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms among the metals of the spacecraft the Dawnsent had unintentionally run down. Which of those atoms had once belonged to living creatures? … And how many of those beings had died so that the Sk’cee might reach their new home?
    He knew he would never know.

The Giftie Gie Us
    The sun was barely up as I left the cabin that morning, but it was already promising to be a beautiful day. Some freak of nature had blown away the usual cloud cover and was treating the world—or at least the middle Appalachians—to an absolutely clear blue sky, the first I’d seen in months. I admired the sky and the budding April greenery around me as I made my way down the wooded slope, long practice enabling me to avoid trees and other obstructions with minimal effort. It was finally spring, I decided, smiling my half-smile at the blazing sun which was already starting to drive the chill from the morning air. Had it not been for the oppressive silence in the forest, it would almost be possible to convince myself that the Last War had been only a bad dream. But the absence of birds, which for some reason had been particularly hard hit by the Soviet nuke bac barrage, was a continual reminder to me. I had hoped that, by now, nearly five years after the holocaust, they would have made a comeback. Clearly, they had not, and I could only hope that enough had survived the missiles to eventually repopulate the continent. Somehow, it seemed the height of injustice for birds to die in a war over oil.
    The sun was barely up as I left the cabin that morning, but it was