Pills or telephone?

Both, presumably, in Soziere’s multiverse.

I answered the phone.

It was Deirdre. “He’s dead,” she told me. “Ziegler. I thought you should know.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m taking care of the arrangements. He was so alone… no family, no friends, just nothing.”

“Will there be a service?”

“He wanted to be cremated. You’re welcome to come. It might be nice if somebody besides me showed up.”

“I will. What about the store?”

“That’s the crazy part. According to the bank, he left it to me.” Her voice was choked with emotion. “Can you imagine that? I never even called him by his first name! To be honest—oh, God, I didn’t even like him! Now he leaves me this tumbledown business of his!”

I told her I’d see her at the mortuary.

I paid no attention to the news that night, save to register the lead stories, which were ominous and strange.

We live, Ziegler had said, in the science fiction of our youth.

The “ET signals” NASA scientists had discovered were, it turned out, a simple star map, at the center of which was—not the putative aliens’ home world—but a previously undiscovered binary neutron star in the constellation Orion.

The message, one astronomer speculated, might be a warning. Neutron-star pairs are unstable. When they eventually collide, drawn together by their enormous gravity, the collision produces a black hole—and in the process a burst of gamma rays and cosmic radiation, strong enough to scour the Earth of life if the event occurs within some two or three thousand light-years of us.

The freshly discovered neutron stars were well within that range. As for the collision, it might happen in ten years, a thousand, ten thousand—none of the quoted authorities would commit to a date, though estimates had been shrinking daily.

Nice of our neighbors to warn us, I thought.