'Doing everything on manual override – really a fantastic performance! – Bowman managed to get Discovery into orbit round Jupiter. And there he encountered what the Second Expedition called Big Brother – an apparent twin of the Tycho Monolith, but hundreds of times larger.'

'And that's where we lost him. He left Discovery in the remaining space-pod, and made a rendezvous with Big Brother. For almost a thousand years, we've been haunted by his last message: "By Deus – it's full of stars!"

(Here we go again! Poole told himself. No way Dave could have said that... Must have been 'My God – it's full of stars!')

'Apparently the pod was drawn into the Monolith by some kind of inertial field, because it – and presumably Bowman – survived an acceleration which should have crushed them instantly. And that was the last information anyone had, for almost ten years, until the joint US-Russian Leonov mission...'

'Which made a rendezvous with the abandoned Discovery so that Dr Chandra could go aboard and reactivate Hal. Yes, I know that.'

Dr Kim looked slightly embarrassed.

'Sorry – I wasn't sure how much you'd been told already Anyway, that's when even stranger things started to happen.'

'Apparently the arrival of Leonov triggered something inside Big Brother. If we did not have these recordings, no one would have believed what happened. Let me show you... here's Dr Heywood Floyd keeping the midnight watch aboard Discovery, after power had been restored. Of course you'll recognize everything.'

(Indeed I do: and how strange to see the long-dead Heywood Floyd, sitting in my old seat with Hal's unblinking red eye surveying everything in sight. And even stranger to think that Hal and I have both shared the same experience of resurrection from the dead...)

A message was coining up on one of the monitors, and Floyd answered lazily, 'OK, Hal. Who is calling?'