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as if we were insects."
Benjamin nodded and suddenly felt Kingsley as a fellow soldier in arms, worn
by the same incessant pressures.
"Crazy, you said?" Kingsley said distantly. "From the long times it has spent
between the stars?
Remember, it has been alone all its life. Do not think of it as a social
being."
"But it asks for social things, our culture."
Kingsley mused silently, watching the orange signature on the screen creep
toward the rim of the gas giant planet, and then said suddenly, "Crazy? I
would rather use an Americanism, spooky
!'
Benjamin wondered if their speculations had any less foundation than what the
semiotics and social science teams said. "I heard a biologist talking at the
coffee machine the other day. He pointed out that it may be the only member of
its species."
'That makes no sense. We still have no idea how it came to be."
"Something tells me we're going to find out."
"From it?"
201
"It may not even know."
"Find out from experience, then?"
"Yeah."
The next several hours were as unsettling as anything Benjamin had ever
encountered.
The black hole and its attendant blossom of magnetic flux swooped in toward
the banded crescent. An air of anxious foreboding settled over the viewers at
this meeting between Jupiter  the solar system's great gas giant, a world
that had claimed the bulk of all the mass that orbited its star 
and a hole in space-time that had the mass of a moon packed into a core the
size of a table.
Its trajectory arced down into the vast atmosphere.
And in a long, luminous moment, the Eater drank in a thick slice of the upper
layers, gulping in hydrogen with glowing magnetic talons.
The audience around Benjamin came to life.
Gasps and murmurs filled the room. There were few words and he caught an
undertone of uneasy dread.
The image shifted as the bristling glow followed a long, looping flyby. To
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study life-forms that do exist there, it said. It even sent short spurts of
lectures on the forms it found. One of Kingsley's new aides brought word of
these messages, printed out from the translators, as they came in.
202
"Look at the detail," Benjamin read at Kingsley's shoulder. "Balloon life, a
thousand kilometers deep into the cloud deck."
"It is teaching us about our own neighborhood,"
Kingsley said.
"Yeah, along with a few remarks about our being unable to do it."
"Well, that is one rather human trait," Kingsley remarked sardonically.
"Plainly it loves having an audience."
"It's been alone for longer than we've had a civilization."
In the next hour, it compared its findings with similar dives into other
massive worlds it had known.
Data swarmed in. Sliding sheets of information filled screens throughout the
Center. Sighing, Kingsley remarked, "Data is not knowledge, and certainly it
is not wisdom. What does this mean
?'
As they watched through a long, laboring afternoon, the swelling magnetic
blossom dove and gained mass  three times. An enormous, luminous accretion
disk spread out like a circle around it.
Arno appeared before them, gray and shaken. "We have just registered fresh
jets of high-energy emission from it. The atmospheric entries are over.
We have a preliminary determination of its trajectory."
203
They all waited through a confused silence. Arno did not seem able to speak.
Then he said, "The&
intruder& it has again picked up speed  and is headed for Earth."
Benjamin bowed his head and realized he had known it all along. He turned
toward Kingsley and in narrowed, apprehensive eyes he saw the same knowledge.
204
PART FOUR
                    
THE MAGNETIC HOURGLASS
205
MAY
She had hoped it was Benjamin, home early with the latest news, but instead
the thrumming in the driveway was a package delivery woman. She opened the
package to discover  oh, joy!  that the Right to Die Society had targeted
her with an offer of a do-it-yourself home suicide kit. The four-color glossy
foldout was lovingly detailed.
Their primary product was the Exit Bag, with its
"sturdy clear plastic sack the size of a garbage bag, a soft elastic neckband,
and Velcro fasteners to ensure a snug fit, plus detailed instructions for
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