The old man and companion in his dream smiled. Fly high, little David, but don't loose sight of your nest, he said, and acquiesced to the sound of a persistent whir.

"Yes..."

Dave Chickbrow, ex-astronaut for the past five years, looked more Sicilian than Sioux. He had a Roman nose and his brows were more like a falcon's than a chick's. His jagged face, sun-blanched and weathered, had the tan color and contours of honed redwood. His eyes were ebony deep pools of coal.

"...be there in forty minutes."

He put the cell-phone down, pulled the covers off and rummaged in the dark for his slippers. The voice on the other end had a tensile timbre to it.

A glimpse at the clock atop the night table showed one-twenty. He switched the light on and a copy of Fiery Particles by C. E. Montague dropped to the floor. He retrieved it, creased the page corner, and laid it back on the table next to the bonsai tree. In his boxer shorts, gangly and lean as a switch, he moseyed to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee brewing, then headed for the shower.

Special Projects tracking sector resembled a hybrid of the Wall Street Exchange at peak hour and the Strategic Air Command at drill-time.

Chickbrow left the vault door behind--an orchestration of whines and clicks commenced when electronic locks and hydraulic tumblers secured it.

NASA was never like this. He felt entombed within Tutankhamen's Pyramid.

Several familiar faces scurried by hardly aware of his presence.

Knitted brows straightened and the frown lines on his forehead smoothed out. His stride quickened. On the way to the complex center he unbuttoned his collar.

The place reeked of sweat and souring coffee.

The double, glass doors whooshed shut when he crossed the threshold and entered the glazed island cutting off the noise asunder.

"What's up?"

"Sorry to get you up, Dave," Jeremy said, his back to him, his eyes darting over three monitors. "We got a winner here." He shot a glance at a digital read-out then back to the monitors.

Chickbrow propped himself against one of the modules.

Mike Stromberg's raspy voice gruffed next to him, "Take a look." He handed him a pad and scooted to his console.

Chickbrow pinched his ear. "Give me relative course shift."

"Twenty-eight degrees, eight minutes..."

"Just rough stuff, Mike."

"...and accelerating."

"What's pulling our little mascot?" Chickbrow's black looked into Jeremy's blue eyes.

"Gravity." Jeremy tried to remain calm. He knew better than to antagonize that falcon gaze. Something about that look gave Jeremy the spooky feeling that he was on trial for his life. The feeling may have been incited by his boss's rather gaunt face, his spearing fixed look and withdrawn smile. Still...Jeremy had been with him all through the five years, attending him as if Chickbrow's edict was a mark on Jeremy's performance. Jeremy weighed painstakingly before he spoke again. "Came out of the jump to reconnoiter..." eye pressure, "...as per standard procedure..." an acrid burning scalded his empty stomach, "...and got locked in a gravity well."

"Did you try rocketing loose?"

"We'd waste precious fuel--"

"More precious than risking a twenty-two billion dollar project?" The lean man walked to a stack of print-outs.

Nothing--nothing recorded but interstellar vacuum.

As if reading his thoughts Mike returned, "Vacuum doesn't have an attraction field," for an instant their eyes locked, the voice went flat, "equal to a small sun."

"A dense core meteor--no, no that can't be," Chickbrow murmured.

Mike Stromberg, short and stocky, got up and headed for the door. It was time to make his rounds and initiate the countdown Chickbrow was so set on, pump ship too. The two glass blades hissed open at his approach. In streamed the buzz and din beyond. He paused a slight, "The jump pods are kaput. Lucky we got coms," the door hissed behind him.

That'll rattle him up some, he jostled, and bolted for the head.

The two men inside the transparent shell remained silent. Through the thick glass of the control center Chickbrow saw a hundred hustling figures, all toiling to save SEPTOR.

Three years ago the launched probe hurdled into space to chart a course for the Orion Castellation. The follow-up was to be a manned mission, the first of its kind. If SEPTOR was aborted it would mean a big black 'X' for Special Projects, his group, and Dr. Krell.

"Dave, thrust countdown program instated...scheduled for one minute fifty seconds. Three five-second shots. Anything over--"

"I know," Chickbrow said putting aside his concerns. They had measured the attitude jets' and retro's fuel with an eye dropper.

He turned to Jeremy, "Give me spherical electronic and visual scan -- maximum range."

In three strides he was over the other's shoulders scrutinising the computer display.

"One minute thirty-five..." Jeremy began sequence confirmation.

Overhead a square three-by-three meter screen erupted to life. Glittering specks of brisk, brilliant lights swelled upon it. Heads from the outside turned to it.

"Instrument scan still nugatory."

Chickbrow looked up--and gasped. It happened every time the huge, veritable definition projector burst on. A familiar falling sensation emptied his lungs, like dropping in deep space. Into eternity.

He peered into the firmament: countless stars and clusters of stars and a quadrant of the Milky Way--an amethyst of dazzle that wanned all else.

"Sixty seconds..." Jeremy's voice dithered. Harmony and chaos, creation unlimited, gloried before them. He had swivelled around to face the screen too. He upped his head, "What you see is what you get."

"Magnify," Chickbrow was deaf.

"Dave, it's empty out there--nothing but faraway stars and black space."

It must have been Jeremy's tone that made Chickbrow hear the words.

"Normalize image."

"Forty seconds."

The astral plane rushed away leaving a tangled weave of tracers. The blurred blitz quickly stabilized, bloomed, and began a lethargic rotation.

"What did you say was out there?"

"...stars, space, the Milky Way..."

"Something else."

Jeremy rolled his eyes, "Uhm, 'Nothing but faraway stars and empty space'?"

"No, you said, black space."

"I did?"

"Freeze it!"

The firmament's motion halted.

"Automatic countdown in twenty seconds--mark!" Jeremy wedged-in between ticking seconds.

"See it?" Chickbrow squinted, his eyes tacked on the screen towering above them.

"Yeah, Urania the muse of astronomy," Jeremy vied for humor. " It's the Orion spiral of the Milky Way, Dave. That's all we've been staring at, nothing there we haven't looked at before."

"Looked at, but didn't see--" Chickbrow's face, the next instant, was flush with Jeremy O'Brien's, his mouth practically chewing on the other's headmike. "Autocount! Acknowledge new sequence. Ten minutes...mark!"

Chickbrow got his own head-rig on, "Mike, tell somebody to get Professor Krell on the secure line, and beat feet back here."

Mike Stromberg puffed and grappled with the throng of scuttling bodies that jammed the aisles. He halted, sputtered a few words to one of the crew, then shuffled and shimmied his way through the rest of the beehive.

No good firing those pip-squeak rockets, he disputed silently, the pull on the puny craft is five times their top output.

"No way, Chickbrow!" he declared to the throng, sticky with sweat.

The cold knifed through his furs and cut to the bone. So cold and dry was it that the snow dried and gritted in graupels. The air was tight and thick, and each breath he sucked scoured his throat like razzor shards of ice. His own breathing moisture had crystallized the hairs in his nostrils and encrusted his white bushy beard forming a niveous cornice that jutted from the gnarled, broad face. The beeper, aloof to his efforts, sounded again.

"All right, all right," he gruffed, "hold your horses."

He removed the gloves upon entering the greenhouse and adjusted the thermostat and the humidifier. There was plenty of energy converted by the photoelectric cells to charge a couple dozen wet batteries and keep the vivarium running plus the cabin through the long Yukon nights. He got enough vegetables and fruit growing to provide for and balance an otherwise fish diet.

Alaska claimed to be as isolated as a place can be, not considering the Poles and deserts.

The distracting city throngs, "Bah!" and those academia coops called universities. People pressed together, smelling and breathing each other's closeness--vulgar, intrusive, gagging! He had to suffer through it all so many times, the lectures in stuffy classrooms, the symposiums, deliberations and ceremonies. What an accolade of pomposity and touching.

Besides, his work did not require the amenities of collectivism. On the contrary, noise and confusion only short-circuited his otherwise orderly synopses. It distracted from the job at hand: to colonize planets...and get the hell out! Still, even at this distant and obscure cranny, there were those that passed by, dropped in uninvited and pestered him with every nature of slight sliver and petty anxiety. Maybe Tibet would tender what he looked for. But too high to breath. And then there was the beeper. There's no getting away from that little runt.

He shut the door of his cabin and threw two of the logs he brought with him into the wanning amber and burgundy spews of the fireplace. After shifting the ash he settled next to the radio-phone and injected the thumb-size beeper into the inset.

"Dave Chickbrow please...what?...yes, yes, the Chief." Saddle tramp, he glowered at the machine. Don't give a hoot if he's chief or warrior. Redman, chinaman, blackman, batman--as long as they all keep away.

Professor Aristides Krell, slight and Neanderthal-looking, a man in his early fifties, was the recipient of two Nobel Prizes. One Nobel boasted that the brusque physiognomy had a slight but determining edge over Hawking, Mettropoulos, and Lovesigh involving The Unification Theory.

While they endeavoured at snail-pace, restricted by the implements of customary science, he bounded steps beyond utilizing his own unorthodox theorems and radical observation procedures. His paradigm did not go unrewarded, for he had, intentionaly or not, unensconced a locality in the Cosmos where miracles abide: the place where electrons go to when they disappear; the venue from where virtual particles pop into conventional space-time; that vicinity of Creation which instantaneously informs one of a pair of photons, across the Universe, that its mate has not changed spin. Fun-space he called it, because it produced funny outcomes.

The second Nobel came for implementing his observations. SEPTOR vaunted instant communications. More important, SEPTOR used its unique communication pods (the funny part) to jump through myriads of parsecs of space. Instantaneously. Once a destination point was mapped--Ppfeuoot!--SEPTOR was there by the touch of a sense-plate.

Project SEPTOR (SEarch for Planets of Terrestrial Organic Reliability) was Dr. Krell' brainchild. He fostered and reared it from concept to send-off. He was anxiously bent on exploring for colonizable worlds.

Besides his ochlophobic temperament, Dr. Krell was partial to a rumour that spread around contending that Earth was tapped dry and would soon cease to subsist and harbor first, the human race, then, progressively, all of life.

In three centuries, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the consummation it scourged, the oil wells were running dry, the coal mines scraped clean, and the few remaining rain forests were guarded round the clock to keep axe-toters and poachers out.

If that wasn't presage enough, over the past fifty years the world ocean level had crept up two meters. The Dutch and the Italians were being crowded in, and the first to scream. But it was quickly and balmily hushed by other floods consisting of billions in E.C.U. and dollar relief. For it would have been easier to arrest an avalanche than to curtail the impetus of the snow-balling Titan called 'progress'.

No matter. The sequestered man that was Dr. Krell in one of his more eloquent and remarkable poetic moods was noted for his flippant but colourful flair, "Spin me into a fun-beam and I shall fetch thee today the Earths of tomorrow."

He expelled a blue puff of smoke from his straight-stem pipe, "Yea, I'll hold." Caller verification took a while. Silly rules. Made for mobs.

Chickbrow pointed to the screen, "the source of our problem." He waited a while. The others studied the heavens in front of them.

Mike shrugged, "Can't say I follow."

Jeremy nodded in unanimity.

"Space is colorless, Mike, empty space that is. It's not totally black. There is background always--direct, reflected or refracted light, gamma and cosmic rays, and a variorum of energy fields. The Universe does not stop because it cannot be seen.

"Yet, there," he indicated by enclosing an area in a dotted red window, "the Universe--as we know it--does in fact stop." He pointed to the broad-spectrum meters lining the screen's bottom. All were pegged at zero radiation--and then some.

"That," he pointed to the gossamer of sparkling dust, "is the Orion spiral as SEPTOR sees it. Twenty-eight degrees longitudinally, the highlighted area, is the source to which our craft is being diverted. So strong is the interference that it disrupts our tachyon reception even."

"That spiral arm is thousands of light years from SEPTOR," Mike countered.

"It is, but," Chickbrow shrank two arrow-head cursors on a small segment of the window, "it doesn't quite fit, does it? Black emptiness in the middle of an otherwise densely populated spiral?"

"Debris cloud, dark matter," Mike contended.

"Having such an intense gravetic field?"

Jeremy angled his head to one side. "Too regular shaped for debris. Can't help visualizing something close, something between the Orion spiral and us. A planet maybe." His head now leaned the other way.

"A meteor or a planet reflects. Debris too. Even a neutron star nucleus. That," he pointed, "radiates nothing. Like it's hollow."

"A hole!"

"All the fuel in the world wouldn't pry us loose. Wrong I was, Mike."

"Yea, but you got them sharp eyes of a falcon," Mike snorted.

Chickbrow loosened.

"Never told us how you came by that name," Jeremy briefly took his stare off the monitors.

"Baptismal mischance."

Chickbrow half-remembered the night's dream, but the sensations were fully present, feelings of protection and security. He was glad his grandfather's spirit decided to make amends for the minor oversights, and looked over him now. He hedged a spell, then, "I was a month-old papoose when my mother left me with gramps at the pueblo so she could go and get some grubs from the Post store. Gramps kept a chicken coop behind the hogan. Supplied him fresh eggs and poultry meat. But it didn't have any door to it, gramps was sachem, tribal chief, and partial to autonomy, so the fowl roamed like steer over an open pampas. Mother returned to find me being pecked by a flock of newly-hatched chicks. Nothing catastrophic, but my eyebrows gone and...the name."

A high-pitched whine from Mike's console intruded.

"Dr. Krell on the line," a nondescript voice called out.

"Put him through." Chickbrow hunched his shoulders and flipped the com switch. Then to Jeremy, "Tell countdown to keep us posted every minute on the minute. The last minute, every ten seconds."

Seven minutes remaining, the speaker echoed.

"That sums it up, Professor."

A long silence followed.

"Dr. Krell," Chickbrow called into the communicator, "are you still there?"

"Yes."

"Sir?"

A sigh, "I'm only sorry I'm not at the center."

Four minutes remaining.

"I heard, Dave."

"Shall I stop the countdown?"

"No."

Chickbrow glanced at the other two.

"No, not now. Too late for anything, but--"

"We're accelerating. Reception is breaking down," Chickbrow reported. All three stared at the intermittent and erratic rips and wavering stars on the crackling screen above them.

"It's slowing down our tachyons. Unbelievable!" Dr. Krell cried. A few seconds of silence hung like stale air. "No wonder SEPTOR cant jump, tachyons can't function at light-speed, or below it."

Chickbrow rubbed his aching temples.

Two years' work and hope lost to an anomaly, the prima materia, of the Universe. A singularity. A black hole. A rent in the fabric of space-time. Hundreds of millions of man-hours, sweat and diligence all flushed down a fathomless pitch-dark toilet.

He raked through the bristles of his crow hair.

Mike and Jeremy grimaced.

It was hurt.

They were hurting. He cringed with their pain, and his.

It wasn't the space budget, or the big black X, or that an Indian had failed, or the lay-offs. They could all live with those.

It was their faith being betrayed.

Three minutes remaining.

This whole undertaking was an act of faith. Trust in the synergy of man. He wanted to believed that a cooperative humanity of separate agencies could have a far greater total effect than the sum of the effects taken independently.

It was to be a peaceful, long-awaited interface with the Universe; a communion of mankind and the 'great beyond', with the infinite rolling pastures of the Cosmos. The liberation of Earth from humankind's abrasive sway.

"Damn! Professor. So--so sorry."

"We're not gods, Dave." The voice came slow and low now. "Only children playing gods." After the initial exhilaration of actually confronting a black hole wore off, the old sage sounded drawn and spent--

"Patch your terminal output to my line," Dr. Krell's voice sprang through, "and let's take a look at SEPTOR's specifications."

Chickbrow engaged a set of electronic links from the main memory banks. A whirring synchopated with a whizzing somewhere along the metallic frames encompassing them. Patters of buffered snapping and popping overspilled their enclosures to carry over to him.

"What are we looking for?" Chickbrow asked, riddled at the other's impromptu request.

"A miracle."

Just then three sets of brows pranced.

"Excuse my Laconic vain," the voice held a vestige of intensity, "but it is sometimes wise to cater to the paradox. I'll shortly explain. Look at sheet EE-40."

Two minutes remaining.

They read.

"SPECTOR is slick as a bullet, or a jumbo cannon shell. Its jacket--the outside layer--is glass steel, designed to withstand nominal micrometeor impacts and permit minimum conductance to extraneous fields. Its durable, solid, and, I believe, it will cushion near-relativistic accelleration stresses."

Chickbrow scanned the spec sheet a second time. His eye caught in the text all that the Professor talked about.

Mike and Jeremy nodded.

"I'm with you so far," Chickbrow said.

"Good. Because here's the miracle...."

The tracking sector complex of Special Projects was quiet as a church on Monday. For the past few hours there had been not much more than murmurs and whispers. Technicians with pencils stuck over their ears and scientists with calculators clenched in their fists huddled in pensive, scattered clusters.

Behind the enveloping glass panes of the control center Jeremy, assailed by the mulligrubs, lackadaisically massaged the sides of his head with his thumbs. Mike, himself hounded by blue devils, slumped in his chair chewing on a pencil.

Chickbrow was considering.

Dr. Krell had explained very simply a very complex supposition. The essence was, that SEPTOR use its retro and attitude rockets to accelerate towards the black hole. Then, at a critical point, when its drift equalled that of the surrounding flux heading for the hole, jump into the hole. He explained, of course, that since the direction of the jump was not in opposition to the pull of the singularity the tachyon generator pods would work.

They did. SEPTOR had been saved.

The craft was in orbit around Earth. Its telescopes and biosphere-sensing apparatus were sending in a flood of crisp, intelligible data.

The data was checked and re-checked, but the results did not vary by much: the Poles were missing, the seas too, and the atmosphere, and life.

"All those jumps," Chickbrow could still hear the Professor's matter of fact and lulling articulation, "were so much time stored."

"How much time do we have, Dr. Krell?" the Top Executive had asked on the direct line.

"Oh, the black hole devoured most of it, and, let's see, there's the return trip--we managed to do that in three jumps, so we saved some time there. My calculations say two-hundred-and-fifty years, plus/minus five, Mr. President."

Chickbrow had left the public announcement system on and the commendations followed (probably a third Nobel was in the making somewhere in Sweden for the Professor).

Special Projects was now The Special Projects Group and funds restrictions were immediately lifted. While SEPTOR circled the Earth of a quarter of a century into the future, somehow relaying images of a dreadful prophecy, a new perspective involving the planet seemed to be in the making.

But people, Chickbrow reflected, dodn't really want to migrate to the stars because their home was condemned. They'd want to go there, sure, but they'd want a home to return to. Just then words from an old, twentieth century song came to mind, 'You don't know whatcha got / until you loose it / You gave me all your love / but I misused it'.

In the twenty-third century folk worked together to save SEPTOR, and it proved to them that this oneness had also achieved to warn and prepare humanity; to show the yield that was man's folly.

"Professor," he spoke cheerlessly into the unbroken link, "can't Earth be saved? If there was an all out effort, couldn't we change the future?"

"In a finite universe there are finite possibilities, and our Universe is finite, Dave. Then again, there are finite choices--but by no means are these few."

"Then there is a possibility since choices exist?"

"Existed." There was sternness now in the professor's tone. "There is trend along with choice, and man's overall tendency has been to consistantly make the wrong choices. We, ourselves, have elected to stray to the edge of the cliff. Millions upon millions, a history of choices are now proving themselves fallacious."

Chickbrow frowned. "Then we'll drag it all with us to wherever we go." There were moments in his life, few in all, that measured forever. In these moments it seemed that every spirit of his ancestors, every brave and squaw that has ever been or that would ever be, was bemoaning its inmost misery at him. "We'll land on a new world with great expectations and pent up longing, but carry all the old vices and failings." He glared around him like a snared lynx.

Jeremy and Mike listened, apparently in no mood to contribute.

"Dave," the Professor, sensing the other's distress, inverted to a fatherly tone, "man learns from his mistakes."

"But not quick enough."

"Quick enough?"

"Quick enough to save man with respect and honor," he lashed out. "To survive without decimating and ravaging first. Quick enough to quit being arrogant adolescents, get our act together, and start strutting faith in ourselves and some trace of propriety and pride--dignity too."

"Dignity?"

"Have we outgrown that word, Dr. Krell?" he dampened a pinch. "Or have we elbowed it aside?"

"I didn't know indian people had so much romance in them, Dave. You so elegantly just pointed out one of my fallacies! Ignorances, really. That's what the world is, ignorant, not arrogant, Dave.

"No, I don't think dignity has been outcasted. It's a brittle word and needs to be protected. So we lodge it somewhere deep inside of us, and forget it, like honor. Ill-used so often."

The communicator went silent for a moment. "You want to hear of another, second miracle? This line is coded, isn't it? Nobody can listen in?"

"Yes."

"This has to be kept privy. Otherwise, it won't work."

Chickbrow looked at Mike and Jeremy.

"Indian's word."

"Good enough."

Chickbrow detected a kind of puckish fun-lovingness there. The Professor's composed bearing and phlegmatic diction hastily turned puerile.

"Our Universe may be finite, Dave, but I've got a hunch its not the only one around. That black 'pit' of a hole slung SEPTOR way out. I think we've manoeuvred SEPTOR in another space-time continuum, altogether. Anchored it to an Earth of another, but analogous, universe."

The two men slowly stood up and walked to the communicator.

Chickbrow quailed, "You mean that's not our Earth?"

"It doesn't have to be. Tachions can't propagate through time alone; that's like someone siting in a chair here on Earth and waiting for the passage of time to transport them to Alpha Centaury. There has to be spacial displacement involved, too!"

"If I copy," Chickbrow broke in, " you're saying those pictures we're getting from SEPTOR are not of our future? But the future of an ersatz--a proxy Earth?"

"May not, Chickbrow, may not be our own future. The Uncertainty Principle says it, not me.

"On the other hand, it might be our Earth at that. Time, you see, stops inside a black hole. There is no present there, only a future. Things outside a singularity, if they could be observed (an impossibility of course), would dash about with ungodly speed, many times that of light. Within a blink of our black-hole-observer billions of years would have elapsed--galaxies born, matured and died--all in this instant. So, in transpiring through the hole, even by a spontaneous jump, who can say that SEPTOR was not delayed an infinitesimal of a blink? But still to emerge in our Universe, with merely a mite detainment of a quarter century."

"But the space/time factor, aren't you ignoring it now?" Chickbrow rebounded.

"I don't know, Dave. That's the funny part. Paradoxes work within their own very esoteric, awfully private laws. So ethereal and touchy are these that if we were to intrude upon them, upon this other, second, miracle by conventional scientific analysis, or simply locution, we'd be ruffling the very time-space fabric or, worse, cause the miracle to fail." There was a pause.

"Just by talking about it!" Chickbrow's voice pitched tenor-high.

"Yeap."

"That's why he didn't tell the President," Mike broke in.

"What's that?" Dr. Krell blared over the line.

"Mike and Jeremy are here with me," Chickbrow appended, somewhat disturbed.

"Oh, Chickbrow," the voice groaned, "you had given me your word!"

The three looked bewildered.

"Sir, I didn't realize the gravity--it's only two more people who know--"

"Only two. Here I grappled in dilemma whether to tell you and just you alone. Kept back information from the President. And you say only two!"

"Dr. Krell," Jeremy tried to mollify the afflicted scientist, "I'm not going to talk about it--to anyone, not to my wife even."

Mike, puzzled at the turn of things, snorted. We realy need guys like you, he said under his bulky orange mustache, with all this joy breaking out all over. Then more loudly, "Professor, I'm not going to talk about this thing--even at confession. And I'm Catholic!"

"No, no--it's the knowledge of it," Dr. Krell bellowed, "the knowing itself that effects the outcome. This new modicum of erudition now vacillating in two additional brains--your brains Mike and Jeremy--brings into play a uniquely separate causality. Even mere thinking can warp the quantum mechanisms." Then, as though to himself, "People are timid creatures, they won't want to stick around to find out if Earth will end up like that. They'd want OUT!"

"You want them to believe that that's our Earth?" Chickbrow pointed to the screen unaware that the other could not see it.

"Don't you? If it is our Earth we're getting those signals from, how else will we change its future? Save it? But to get people involved building space arks instead of more Earth-sapping, air-choking industries and people-cluttering institutions and plants. Now's the chance to channel industry not to industries, and to this mad and frenetic proliferation that's suffocating us, but direct it to charting other voyages, for other new Americas--but out there this time. Trundle humanity from its blissful hari-kari. Jiggle people out of their stupor so they neglect to go on killing this planet. "

"It's a decoy, Professor," Chickbrow's tone sombred, "to say the least."

"An honorable decoy, wouldn't you say? Or do you endorse that cinder upon your screen? 99.999 percent of Earth's population, Chickbrow, is ignorant that a Universe exists. Ask'em, 'What's that thing sparkling up in the sky?' They say, 'A Star.' And you ask, 'What is a star?' 'A thing that comes out at night.' And that's where most people's tuition ends concerning the magnitude of what surrounds us."

" 'Man learns' your own words, Professor. And, Professor, don't dignity and honor infer truth? Hoodwinking mankind, is it really the solution? There's a Chinese saying by Lao-tzu, 'A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.' Can't this be that one, first, and significant step/choice that is not fallacious, out of the history of choices? Wouldn't we be only burgeoning the world's ignorance by withholding this knowledge?"

"If you tell the world," the professor parried, "that that may not be Earth, our future, do you think the world would benefit from the doubt? Trend, Chickbrow, has a robustly frightful and protracted impetus in our case--thousands of years of lowly, dishonouring, and contemptful choices.

"Only if the charred site of Earth blares bluntly at them, like a tombstone epitaph, will people get the message. Authority, someone said, rarely survives in face of doupt. We need autority, here and now, not doubt. Man is lazy, Dave. All else he'll humour away--all but raw consternations like fear, alarm, shock. These proved to function in the past. Got the ball rolling..."

Mike had noticed it first.

A slow undulation of colors on the globe depicted overhead. Every time Chickbrow spoke the sphere's surface texture seemed changed by a bit--the hews appeared less parched-reds and desert-ambers, and more fertile-browns; even small specks of greens dabbed the Earth here and there.

He nudged Jeremy and both observed these pigments fade as Dr. Krell finished rebutting.

"Duress, Dr. Krell, works ephemerally, not enduringly. In the long run that which survives is that which humankind has sustained by its freedom to choose, may that even be its very end. It's called responsibility and consequence. If men and women are inept it is not because they are inapt, but because the attitude as such has been fixated into them and misled them..."

Not only were the greens and browns spreading now, but there were smidgens of resonant cyans emanating from vast, deep-seated canyons while pearly, frosty whites glimmered at the Poles.

Mike looked at Jeremy, and Jeremy returned Mike's look and buoyed up.

Mike next put a hand on Chickbrow's shoulder giving a heartening clasp. Jeremy patted him behind the other shoulder, esprit de corps fashion.

Chickbrow, cheered by his aimcriers, drove on, cleaving through Dr. Krell's tenuous grounds and despondent argumentation, motives and goals.

Every once in a while the two would glimpse over their shoulder, and when the professor happened to speak they would cough and belch and Mike would let out air in loud raucous fits.

The introspective faces from those outside turned to the screen one-by-one. As each pair of eyes beheld the metamorphosis, a maelstrom began to brew over the Earth. A pandemonium of blooming wrought forth more pasture-greens, azure-blues, and feathery drifts of whites. The shrill of cheers and applause infiltrated the sound-proofing.

"What's all that noise, Chickbrow?"

When Chickbrow turned, a new Earth confronted him. One he had seen many times and was so familiar with.

"It's only another miracle," he said. Then, the ebony eyes wise and smiling, "Professor, about doubt, Roosevelt, I think, said, 'The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.'"

Mike grunted with pleasure and graciously flipped the com switch off. Uninterupted now, they all watched their bonhomie future-nest forge anew before them, by them.