Its mind reached out. Success! Connection! I give a small part of myself to you!

A sudden and violent bump, a wrenching jar—its container had been struck head on! An asteroid, small yet effective, had slammed into the container, altering its trajectory. It began to move quickly away, toward the still-distant inner gas giant. The Kraang relaxed and understood. Control was correcting. At this speed and trajectory the Kraang would rush headlong toward the giant world beyond, well away from the active matrix, and the giant’s great gravity would slingshot the container around, accelerate it to tremendous speed, sufficient to generate a space-time ripple, to take it out of this system, perhaps out of this entire galaxy.

But it would take two years, as time was counted here, for it to reach the giant and the better part of a third to achieve the desired effect. Out here, in the real universe. Control was constrained by its own laws and the basic laws of physics. Corruption of the system had now occurred; the experiment was now invalidated. It would have no choice but to use whatever mechanism it created to call the Watchman, down there, somewhere, on the experiment itself, the blue and white world third from the sun…

“Lori, could you step into my office for a minute?”

It was symptomatic of the problems in her professional life and of her feelings of hitting brick walls. Whiz kid Roger Samms, Ph.D. at twenty-four, was always “Dr. Samms,” but Lori Sutton, Ph.D., age thirty-six, was almost always “Lori” to Professor George Virdon Hicks, the department head and her boss. Hicks was basically a nice guy, but he belonged to a far older generation and was beyond even comprehending the problem.