In the end it comes down to the same thing. They’re gone, and we’re just picking up the pieces.
Schneider grinned. “You think I’m nuts, don’t you? Living something out of a kid’s holo?”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, well just hear me out.” He was smoking in short, fast drags that let the smoke dribble out of his mouth as he talked. “See, what everyone assumes is that the Martians were like us, not like us physically, I mean we assume their civilisation had the same cultural basics as ours.”
Cultural bases? This didn’t sound like Schneider talking. This was something he’d been told. My interest sharpened fractionally.
“That means, we map out a world like this one, everyone creams themselves when we find centres of habitation. Cities, they figure. We’re nearly two light years out from the main Latimer system, that’s two habitable biospheres and three that need a bit of work, all of them with at least a handful of ruins, but as soon as the probes get here and register what look like cities, everyone drops what they’re going and comes rushing across.”
“I’d say rushing was an exaggeration.”
At sub-light speeds, it would have taken even the most souped-up colony barge the best part of three years to cross the gap from Latimer’s binary suns to this unimaginatively named baby brother of a star. Nothing happens fast in interstellar space.