“They haven’t moved this thing in ages,” he said, disappointed.

Jill bit back a plea for him to come out from there. She didn’t like seeing him poised under the giant machine like a bug under a giant’s foot.

“Wow!” Nate reached up as high as he could to touch the side of the craft.

“Let’s go inside,” Jill said. A fingernail found its way into her mouth to be chewed. She looked around, feeling exposed on this vast open field, to the rays of the sun, if nothing else.

“Inside the ship?” Nate sounded excited.

“Inside the building, Nate, the spaceport.”

“But, Jill…” He backed up to get a better look, tennis shoes shuffling on the landing field. “This is, like, a spaceship.”

“Yeah, maybe later, Dr. Who. Come on.”

Up close, the round dome was like the shell of some thick-plated insect. There was an alcove into which the main doors were set, and the depth of this alcove—a good ten feet—was the actual width of the spaceport walls. The doors were metal and heavy and had long vertical handles. There were no windows at all.

Nate looked at Jill, eyebrow cocked, and tugged on a handle. The door gave easily—it had been made for a light touch. With a throaty suction noise it opened. Inside was a heavy rubber seal two feet thick.

Nate whistled. “Interesting. I don’t suppose that’s for air-conditioning, do you?”

Jill shook her head. She felt a tingling excitement in her belly, but she wasn’t ready to discuss the idea she’d had on the rooftop with Nate. Not yet.

The power appeared to be out in the building, but as they stepped inside the lights came on. There was the sound of machinery kicking in.

“Could be worse,” Jill said. “Power could be off completely.”

Nate said nothing, but he looked worried.

The spaceport was nothing like an airport back home. There were no gates, no chairs for waiting relations, no boards announcing departures and arrivals—and certainly there were no travelers. The halls were not all that large, either, as though the building never had been intended to accommodate crowds.

“Next flight to Milwaukee, ten minutes,” Nate mocked with a staticky voice spoken through his hand. He looked at Jill with a fake astonished expression: Did you hear that? Let’s go! She rolled her eyes.

They followed the hallway to the center of the building. There the corridor opened up into a gigantic empty hangar. There was a fifty-foot-wide ledge all around the cavernous dock, and this ledge ended abruptly in a plummeting drop. The space was large enough to accommodate several dozen ships the size of the one on the landing field, but there were no ships at all.

“Where are they?” Nate sounded seriously bummed.

Jill didn’t answer. Things were looking worse all the time. The spaceport appeared to be completely defunct.

“Shit, Jill, this place is a tomb.”

“There ought to be aliens here. The City isn’t completely uninhabited.”

“I guess when your world is dying it’s not a big priority to explore space,” he answered bitterly.

“We don’t know that their world is dying. Besides, they still have to get around this planet.”

“Who says? What if this city is all there is?”

Jill tapped a shoulder blade with her fingers, frowning in thought.

“There’s still that ship outside,” Nate said, with as much doubt as hope. “It might be operational.”

“The control room’s over there. Come on. Let’s see what they’ve got.”

The control room powered up when they walked in the door, the screens going from black to green readouts in seconds. Nate’s mood perked up a bit at the sight of all those computers. He pulled two of the narrow chairs over to a table and sat in both of them. There was no keyboard. He passed his fingers over the screen experimentally. The alien text shifted under his touch.

“I’m working an alien computer,” he said to her in a voice that a boy might use while displaying a prizewinning toad to his mother.

“Yes, I see that, Nate,” Jill answered, smiling.

Jill watched him work for a few minutes, then pulled up two chairs of her own. It was time to come clean about what she’d been thinking, but it felt so momentous to say it out loud that a sudden awkwardness gripped her.

“Nate… you know those seals we saw just now, on the spaceport door?”

He glanced at her. “Yeah.”

“What did they remind you of?”

He stopped messing with the screen and turned to look at her, waiting.

“Like the rubber curtain we had in our lab, Nate! It’s insulation. Wave technology.”

He didn’t look surprised. “Yeah?”

“Well… we have to find out! We have to find out if they’re using wave technology. Because if they are…” She drummed her fingers on the table. It was so important that she explain it well. She made herself take a breath and slow down. “Nate, what if Copernicus had had the opportunity to be rocketed three hundred years into the future, to see the full implications of his ideas?”

Nate lifted an eyebrow, but his face was still guarded. “That would be very cool. Assuming he could understand it.”

“Well, that’s exactly what we’ve been given! We have a chance to see what the one-minus-one can really do—if it’s really as important as we think and how and in what ways it can be used. Think of the possibilities! Kobinski’s manuscript—I mean, the manuscript is nothing. We’re being offered a look at the future—our future! We can move our research forward by several hundred years—maybe even more!”

She forced herself to stop, though she could have gone on. Her father had been such a huckster that she, by inclination, hated the very idea of a sales pitch. She waited for Nate to latch on to the concept on his own, had no doubt that he would. After all, hadn’t he been by her side for the past two years? Wasn’t the one-minus-one as much his baby as hers? But his dark eyes looked troubled. She couldn’t read him.

“What we want to know,” she said, nodding toward the computers, “is if their space technology uses the one-minus-one wave. Any suggestions on how we do that?”

Nate turned slowly back to the monitor. “Maybe we can find some math.”

“Nope. I thought about that. We’re used to math being a cross-language tool because most cultures on Earth use the Greek math symbols. But of course, that wouldn’t apply here.”

“No. You’re right. Who knows how they represent the number four?”

“Exactly. But diagrams might be helpful. Think you can get into the guts of this thing?”

He was staring blankly at the screen.

“Nate?”

He blinked, sat up straighter. “I can try.” His fingers moved over the screen. “I’m pretty blind without knowing the language; all I can do is poke around. But something might come up.” Even as distracted as he seemed to be, he couldn’t let a line like that go by without comment. He looked at her and waggled his eyebrows. “Heh heh heh.”

She let out a snort that was part laughter, part embarrassment. Nate proceeded to poke around for a good long time. Mostly the screens made absolutely no sense to them. After about twenty minutes a diagram appeared.

“What’s that?” Jill asked, studying it.

“Looks like a diagram of the spaceport.” Nate pointed out the shape of the dome. “It’s marked one of the rooms. See? It’s blinking.”

“Umm,” Jill said, not very interested. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

They found a few other diagrams but nothing that looked like physics, nothing that provided any insight. The day dragged on. Jill was starting to get deeply frustrated, realizing the depth of their ignorance. Here she was with the most amazing technology at her fingertips and she couldn’t read a damn word. It was a Twilight Zone nightmare, like the episode where the guy who loves to read is left alone at the end of the world with all the books and endless time to read them—but his glasses break.