It wasn't long before Alex's prophecy became reality. Shortly after they had gotten dressed again, the phone rang. It was a middle-aged male who identified himself as a member of a ‘concerned group of professionals' asking if Ash could meet them at a restaurant to discuss a critically important matter they weren't at liberty to disclose over the phone. Ash pretended not to have any idea what they wanted, and after asking a few expected questions so as not to raise suspicions he'd been tipped off, he accepted, provided he could bring Melody with him. The caller wasn't thrilled about this request, but reluctantly agreed when Ash made it clear that his cooperation was contingent upon Melody's inclusion.

As they drove to the restaurant, Melody was a little uneasy.

"What are you going to tell them if they want to use your rig to transport a bomb, as Alex said?"

"Well, first of all, I'm going to ask them the question Alex asked us," Ash replied, "if they can't provide a satisfactory answer, the meeting is over."

"What if they do have a satisfactory answer?"

"Then I'll just have to wing it. I'm not going to rush into anything, no matter what transpires. They'll have to do a better job of convincing us than Alex did, which isn't going to be easy. At least we have tangible proof of part of Alex's story: he obviously does have some sort of envelope generator."

Ash circled the restaurant parking lot once slowly, just for general reconnaissance purposes. He didn't notice anything odd, so he parked the car and they went in.

He gave his name to the reservations hostess and she led him to a corner table where three men in expensive tailored suits were waiting. After a few formalities, they got down to business.

"Mr. Dunleavey," began one of the men, who looked to be in his late 50s, "we are here to enlist your aid in a most critical project, without a doubt the single greatest threat the planet Earth has ever faced."

"You guys aren't trying to get me to donate money to Greenpeace or something, are you?" Ash thought he would play the naive rube right up to the hilt.

The men looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

"No, Mr. Dunleavey, we're not. We have reason to believe you have in your possession a quantum envelope generator. We need very desperately to have use of that mechanism for the transport of an item to a specific place several billion miles in space."

"Let me get this straight. You guys think I have some sort of teleporter? Where did you get that idea? Are you sure you have the right person?"

"Mr. Dunleavey, there's no need to be evasive. We're not from the government, and we don't want to do, and nor do we want you to do, anything illegal. We've been following your progress for some time, and we're convinced you have the capability to perform the task we need performed.

"Well, you're going to have give me some reasons before we can negotiate any further."

"In a nutshell, a thousand-mile wide planetoid will impact the Earth centered on the Malay Archipelago in the year 2157. This impact will completely fragment the planet and kill every living creature on it. For four months prior to this catastrophe, impacts from debris resulting from an earlier collision between the planetoid and a small asteroid will cause untold devastation and suffering. Our mission is to prevent that from happening by nudging the planetoid into a different orbit with an explosive charge such that it is deflected away from Earth and, in the process, from the asteroid with which it is set to collide first."

"That certainly sounds like a noble aspiration. Let me ask you, though, why you came all the way back here to me? Why not later on, when the Bellatrix technology is more sophisticated? My rig is quite primitive."

"The window of opportunity for deflection is quite small. We've only got a few days during which the attempt can be successful. It just so happens that your time is the era in which that window falls."

"So what?" Melody interjected, "you're time traveling. Why should it matter what era it is when you start out?"

Good question, Ash thought.

A different man, who seemed a little younger than the original speaker, replied.

"In order to negate any chance of inducing a frame shift. When you're trying to solve a complex problem, it's best to treat with one variable at a time. Starting from here we only have to move along the spatial axis, which reduces the odds of too drastic a frame shift. If we're very careful, the only consequence our actions will have is to save the Earth from a catastrophic collision. We can't avoid a frame shift, since the events we're talking about have already happened, from our perspective. We just want the new frame to be one of our choosing; that is, one in which the only differences are that the planetoid and its ejecta do not strike the Earth."

"What would you have done if the ‘window of opportunity' had fallen prior to the existence of Bellatrix?" Melody persisted.

"We would then have been forced to evaluate the least interruptive alternative starting point." His answer was immediate and sounded almost rehearsed to Melody.

Ash drummed his fingers on the table in staccato bursts, the way he frequently did when he was annoyed or suspicious.

"If the Earth has already been destroyed, how did you survive that destruction to come back here?"

"We were on an orbiting platform at the time that escaped damage. As soon as the full extent of the disaster became apparent, we used our envelope generator to return to the surface a few weeks prior to the first impact, to give ourselves time to prepare for this mission."

"Instead of relying on my primitive quantum rig, why not just use your own to move the bomb?" Ash asked, sitting back in his chair and sipping some iced tea.

They seemed to be taking turns answering. This time it was the third and youngest-appearing man's turn to speak. "The nature of the envelope generator is such that it cannot be transported through quantum space without certain undesirable side effects that render it inoperative."

"Uh huh," Ash responded doubtfully, "What sort of ‘side effects?'"

"Mr. Dunleavey, while we commend you on your remarkable pioneering achievement of constructing an operational envelope generator in a time when such devices are unknown, we must point out that a great deal more information about the physics and engineering of these units is available in our era. Elucidating the details underlining the incompatibility of quantum displacement devices with intraframe travel is outside the scope of our mission at this juncture. Our reasons are sound, and quite complex, and we ask you to accept this without further discussion."

"In other words, you want me to take whatever you say on faith and shut up."

Evading my question and calling me stupid, Ash thought, is not a good strategy when you want something from me.

"In a word, yes."

"Well gentlemen," Ash said, pushing back his chair, "I wish you the best of luck on your mission to save the planet, but without further evidence of your intentions I'm not prepared to be a party to them. Come along, my dear."

The three suited men rose in unison.

"Now, now, Mr. Dunleavey, do not be hasty. We are not withholding information from you, we're simply trying to expedite the process to the extent possible. As we've mentioned before, we're on something of a tight schedule here, and the more time we must expend explaining an extremely complex issue that is not, in reality, germane to the mission, the smaller our buffer for unexpected complications becomes. If you absolutely insist on a quantum engineering tutorial, we will do our best to accommodate you, however."

This guy was good. He must have been a sales director or public relations guru in his own time. Despite himself, Ash felt rather abashed.

"No, that won't be necessary," he said, sitting down again, "I would like to know more about the explosive device you propose to use. Specifically, I'm worried about the safety issues involved."

The others sat down again, as well, and Melody thought she saw a fleeting expression of smugness on the face of the junior most member of the panel.

"The device is a quantum coupled antimatter implosion warhead. Essentially it operates by collapsing a quantity of high density carbon-iron composite to the atomic level, at which point it momentarily becomes a point source gravity well–what you call a ‘black hole.' Gravity wells below a threshold diameter are inherently unstable without a large aggregate debris field, however, so a few nanoseconds after its formation, sufficient antimatter has been inducted from the negative terminus of the well to balance the matter used to create it. The resultant matter-antimatter annihilation converts all the matter in the device to energy with almost 100% efficiency–essentially a micro-scale ‘big bang.' In practical terms, this means that a 30 kilogram device can produce a 1.67 Venrell Scale detonation–equivalent to approximately 2 gigatons of early 21st century-grade TNT."

"Two gigatons?" Ash had gone a bit pale, " That's incomprehensible. Isn't that going a bit overboard?"

"Well, remember that we're trying to deflect an iron-cored object with a mass in the neighborhood of 7 x 1021 kilograms moving at 40 kilometers per second. That's a lot of inertia, and we've got to deflect it by at least one and a half degrees of arc with a single blast."

"Wouldn't an explosion of that size blow the planetoid apart?" asked Melody.

"Under certain conditions it might," admitted one of the men, "but we propose to detonate the device ahead of and to one side of the approaching object in order to generate a shock wave of sufficient magnitude to deflect its path without fragmentation."

"OK, so you want me to use my largely untested, knocked-together-in-the-basement quantum rig to transport the most catastrophically powerful bomb currently in existence to an exact spot billions of miles away in deep space, despite the fact that I don't really know how to navigate. Is that an accurate summation of the plan?" Ash was experiencing some mild trepidation at this daunting prospect.

"Fortunately for that plan, we know how to improve your navigational system to an accuracy adequate for our purposes."

"What, have you got a small white cube that will do the trick?" Ash asked, flippantly.

All three of the men looked at him sharply with the same expression of surprise. Melody looked at him sharply, too, but her expression was more akin to watch what you're saying, boy genius.

"Yes, that's exactly what we have. How did you know that?"

"Uh...," stammered Ash, mentally kicking himself for being so careless, "just a lucky guess...I guess."

"Indeed it was," replied the senior man, "extremely lucky."

None of them spoke further of the incident, but Ash knew he had raised a red flag. He would have to be much more careful in the future.

"All right, gentlemen, you've made a strong case. However, I would like to think through the implications before I give you final approval to use my equipment. If you'll give me a way to contact you, I'll do so as soon as I reach a decision."

The men stood up in unison. The senior handed him a business card with nothing on it but a phone number.

"We'll be waiting for your call. Please do not delay more than 72 hours; time is our enemy here."

Ash nodded, and he and Melody left the restaurant.

"What did you think of them?" Ash asked her as they were driving away.

"They sort of made my flesh crawl, if you really want to know," she replied, hugging her arms, "there was something...I don't know...not human about them."

"Bingo," Ash said, "I felt the same way. Also, something about their whole story didn't ring quite true, although I haven't figured out what it is yet."

"So what are we going to do?"

"Haven't figured that out yet, either. I'm sorta worried about what they're going to do if I say no."

"If you say no? Have you been considering saying yes?

"Well, that thought had crossed my mind. I mean, if they are telling the truth, then we could end up being responsible for not preventing, or rather, I suppose, not postponing, doomsday. Wouldn't want the negative karma from that hanging around my spiritual neck, would you?"

"Maybe not, but we've got to figure out exactly what's going on here before we commit to anything." Melody was staring straight ahead, curling her hair around the fingers of her left hand. That, Ash had already come to understand, meant she was nervous and uncertain.

"Agreed. Perhaps I'll try to contact Alex and see what he has to say about the latest developments."

"Do you think we can trust him?" Melody asked.

"Maybe, maybe not. But I'll take potentially untrustworthy information over no information at all. Nature abhors a vacuum, and I'm with her all the way on that."