THE BENJAMIN L. Martin, the Benny to its captain and passengers, was at the extreme limit of its survey territory, orbiting a neutron star, catalog number VV651107, when it cruised into the history books.

Its captain was Michael Langley, married six times, father of three, reformed drug addict, onetime theology student, amateur actor, amateur musician, disbarred lawyer. Langley seemed to have led at least a half dozen separate lives, but it was of course not too difficult to do that when vitality into a second century, and even sometimes into a third, was not uncommon.

The onboard survey team consisted of eleven specialists of one kind and another, physicists, geologists, planetologists, climatologists, and masters of a few more arcane fields. Like all the Academy people, they treated their work very seriously, measuring, poking, and taking the temperature of every available world, satellite, star, and dust cloud. And of course they loved anomalies, when they could find one. It was a fool’s game, Langley knew, and if any of them had spent as much time on the frontier as he had, she’d be aware that everything they thought to be odd, remarkable, or “worth noting,” was repeated a thousand times within a few dozen light-years. The universe was endlessly repetitive. There were no anomalies.

Take for example this neutron star. It resembled a gray billiard ball, or would have if they’d been able to light it up. It was only a few kilometers across, barely the size of Manhattan, but it was several times more massive than the sun. An enormous deadweight, so dense that it was twisting time and space, diverting light from surrounding stars into a halo. Playing havoc with the Benny’s clocks and systems, even occasionally running them backward. Its surface gravity was so high that Langley, could he have reached the ground, would have weighed eight billion tons.