“No, Captain. I would need to find it a second time to do that.”

He gazed at Ava. “It’s just a screwup somewhere. Stuff like this happens sometimes. It’s a glitch in the system.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Bill, run a diagnostic. See if you can find any kind of internal problem that might account for the intercept.”

“I’ve already done that, Captain. Everything seems to be in order.”

Ava’s lids had gone to half-staff. She was peering inside somewhere. “Let’s run it by Pete.” That was Pete Damon, the project director. Pete was the best-known physicist in the world, largely because of his tenure as host of Universe, an extraordinarily popular science series that had done much to win public support for organizations like the Academy, but which had also spurred the jealousy of many of his colleagues.

Langley could hear voices in back, where his passengers were conducting temporal experiments. Although 1107 was only two hundred million years old, it had actually been here well over two billion years. When Ava had tried to explain how that happened, how time moved at a far slower rate at the bottom of the object’s gravity well than it did out here in a less constrained part of the universe, his mind had refused to close around the idea. He knew it was correct, of course, but it gave him a headache to think about it.

Ava brought Pete up on one of the auxiliary screens and conducted a hurried conversation. Pete frowned and shook his head and looked at his own displays. “Can’t be,” he said.

“You want to ignore it?” asked Ava.

More glances at displays. Whispered conversations with shadowy figures off to one side. Fingertips tapping on a console. “No,” he said. “I’m on my way up.”

Hatches opened and closed. Langley heard footsteps and excited voices. “Sounds as if you stirred up the natives, Ava,” he said.

She looked happy. “I’m not surprised.”