They all wanted to know how he’d reached his conclusion, mostly in the hope of proving him wrong. Maybe Adam Zimmerman, Christine Caine, and I were better able to take it on board than the emortals, just as we’d been better able to believe in the alien invaders, simply because we’d already been so utterly overwhelmed by marvels that our minds were wide open. In any case — to me, at least — it all made too much sense.Nobody had been able to decide whether the event that had finally started the calendar over had been a mechanical malfunction or an act of war, perhaps because they were making a false distinction. Nobody had been able to figure out how Child of Fortune had been hijacked, perhaps because it was the ultimate inside job. And Lowenthal had missed out one tiny detail regarding the nine-day wonder of 2999: the fact that what Emily Marchant had insisted on broadcasting to the world while her rescue attempt was in progress was a gritty discussion of some elementary existential questions, conducted by Mortimer Gray and the AI operating system of his stricken snowmobile.
