At breakfast, Max reports no success communicating with either Cradle or Earth. "Cradle just didn't come back up - no response, so there was either a receiver failure, or more likely the transmitter crapped out. And the Earth uplink just wasn't there. It wasn't a matter of being lost in the noise - we're moving out of conjunction now and we should at least be able to see it. They just weren't transmitting. Must have given us up for lost after they got our last message."

"Did you start a downlink?" Andra asks.

"Of course. Put a repeating message on engineering low rate."

"Did you say anything about 'Mister President'?" Charles asks.

"Nope. I think we ought to say as little as possible until we figure out what's going on. What do you think, granddad?"

Logan laughs. "Fine with me, Junior. In this instance, silence is the better part of wisdom. You might develop a big credibility gap otherwise."

After breakfast, Charles and Max tackle the really dirty job - cleaning out the storm cellar - while Andra and I run equipment and computer diagnostics in OPS-1. Logan keeps us company while we work.

My grandfather is a lady's man. Not in the dandyish sense, but he likes women and enjoys their company. He makes me feel special while radiating a sense of giving rather than taking. I can't help loving him, even being attracted to him, and if we weren't related I'd be tempted to have a fling. I suspect from the way Andra is reacting that she's already thinking about it.

He isn't what you'd call sexy. The face isn't handsome; it's rugged and weather-beaten as if he'd spent a lot of time in the sun. His glasses are a little more than average thickness, so that the eyes are slightly owlish. And the body isn't spectacular, although he does have a large, muscular chest.

But oh! the voice. Pure gravel. It has a rough, textured physical presence, vibrating like a bass organ pipe, setting up sympathetic resonances all around. It augments his air of almost sensuous authoritarianism, and I normally don't even like people who have no sense of self doubt. Charles is the only other exception.

Charles and Max gather up the loose crud in the cellar, including the "afterbirth", which has dried, blackened, and withered. It has shrunk by about a third in volume, and looks like an enormous dead frog that's been out in the sun for days. The only thing missing is the ants.

They wrap the thing in plastic sheeting, wind it with tape, and haul it through the playroom and end-cone into the northeast node. They have to jockey it through the hatch - it's a tight squeeze - and there's just enough room in the node for it and Charles together. Max goes down through the south node and comes up from the outside so he'll be able to pull while Charles pushes.

We come up to the galley to watch through the window. Across the way Max is floating up to the node, while Charles's moon face smiles out through his visor through the hatch window.

Suddenly my husband screams and says the thing is moving! It's alive, and it's started to spread out and surround him, and now it has his legs and is beginning to engulf him like an amoeba, and he goes into spasms and makes horrible gurgling noises.

Except that he can't suppress a giggle amongst the gurgles.

He gets a round of applause for the performance, and they go back to work wrestling the blob out of the hatch. It steams and outgasses terrifically through the folds of the plastic. They wind more tape around it to attach an inertial thruster pack to the broad side. They program the pack for a set of turns and burns that guarantee it won't be back this way.

"What do you think they want with us?" Andra asks, after we've returned to OPS-1 to continue the diagnostics. "Is this an experiment? Do they do their product testing on us? Are they going to inject us with alien cancer and watch our reactions?"

"They wouldn't tell me, Andra," my grandfather replies. "But aside from the fact of being totally noncommittal about what they have in mind, they were - heh - exceptionally swell folks. Can't think of anyone I'd rather chat with on the way to the gallows."

"You trust them?"

"I trust a lion to be a lion. They seemed sincere and honest. And sensitive to my needs, even though I wasn't really there to have any needs." He smiles. "Whatever the intentions of these people, they're not likely to be trivial."

"Where do you fit in?" I ask. "If they'd intended for you to be a messenger, wouldn't they have -"

"Given me a message?"

"Yes. But they didn't even send a note. Instead, they generated a major miracle by re-creating a human being. Wouldn't a minor miracle have sufficed?"

His pained expression is for our amusement. "Why, they sent me for moral leadership and good influence, of course. Thought I could larn you a thing or two; get you civilized."

Andra turns a backwards somersault. "I'm civilized," she giggles.

"I wonder," Logan says, eyeing her. "But no doubt I'll have to look after your morals."

"Morals, Sir? Why, I know all about them. That's what everybody wishes everybody else had. How are your morals, Sir? Maybe you could instruct us?"

She's flirting and it makes me uncomfortable. I change the subject. "Just how is it they put you together? Didn't several laws of physics get violated - like conservation of energy for instance?"

"Just one that I know of. Thermodynamics. The law about entropy -"

"The Second," Andra states.

"Exactly. They violated the shit out of that one. Raped it. Of course it's only a statistical law to begin with, not a physical one. Heh - we all know better than to put our faith in statistics, don't we. It's a losing proposition, statistically speaking.

"Anyhow, ladies, not an erg, not a mosquito's breath worth of energy was gained or lost in the operation. Do you recall how cold it was when you first moved around the other day, Laura? Colder than it had any right to be. Well, the energy that drove the process of putting me together came partly from the heat energy of this station.

"Don't look shocked, it may sound impossible, but there's nothing magic about it except that entropy got the b'Jesus kicked out of it. People are always getting uptight about entropy decreasing, they say 'Why no, that ain't possible, entropy always increases in a closed system'. They even assign the arrow of time to it. 'Which way is time going today?' you ask. 'Why, look at entropy,' they say, 'it's increasing, time must be going forwards. Check again tomorrow.'"

Logan chuckles. "The Thermodynamics folks never consider that the existence of the Universe itself is a godawful violation of their Second law. It's an impossible statistical fluctuation, an entropy reset on a mind boggling scale. But despite that impossibility, you'll notice, here we are.

"Entropy has something to do with our friend's mastery of this corner of the universe. Because, ladies, they explained that they are what you would call 'probability engineers'. They don't address nature from the energy point of view like we do. They've learned to directly affect the probability of random events, down to the quantum level - or maybe even below.

"For example, suppose you have one of two events that can happen - not necessarily with equal probability but with identical energy requirements - then they can cause either one to occur as desired, not in a direct physical way, but by manipulating probabilities. Hell, I know that's no explanation, but if I understood it I'd be like one of them. It's got nothing to do with the spiritual or psychic world or any of that crap. It's perfectly physical, perfectly legit, but a few levels beyond our cognition. They go down to a fundamental level. They twiddle with underlying laws - natural laws.

"You shouldn't mess with Mother Nature," Andra giggles, wagging a finger.

"Well, it might look like they're screwing with nature, and breaking the laws, and that's what makes it seem magic to us. But to them, the Second law isn't a law - it has a lower status. It's sort of ... the Second rule. Made to be bent or broken or evaded or loopholed. The aliens are like lawyers. I hate to make that analogy - nobody wants to be compared to a lower life-form - but they know the ins and outs of the physical rules and how to subvert them to their own uses.

"Here's an analogy to what happened to us. Imagine someone diving into a swimming pool. You ever see a film of that played backwards? You see a reasonably calm pool, these little choppy wavelets on the surface, and then you notice them starting to arrange themselves in a pattern - a circular, concentric, contracting pattern, of waves getting bigger and more defined all the time. They're rushing towards a center for no apparent reason, until suddenly - FOOOOOSHH - it all comes together, and there's an explosion and a body comes flying out of the water backwards. As soon as it's cleared the water, the surface becomes glassy calm, and this body - let's just say it's a female one for explicitness - arcs through the air graceful as you please and lands like a ballerina on the diving board, neat and nimble and bone dry.

"Now, analyze that. Is it impossible? It may seem so, but it ain't. Improbable as all get-out, granted, but not impossible. Physics works perfectly well back'ards as well as for'ards.

"In this example a great number of things happen coincidentally. In the water, molecule bumps molecule bumps molecule - ten trillion times repeated - in exactly the right order and sequence to converge upon this innocently swimming buxom young lass and ejaculate her out into dry air. The process started minutes - maybe even hours or days or weeks before the culminating event - call it the climax."

Logan sips thoughtfully at his coffee.

"So once in the age of the universe something like that could happen," Andra mutters, fingernails clattering over the keyboard of her console.

"Probably not even that often," he answers. "To say that the odds against it are astronomical would be an underestimation by an astronomical amount. But that's where the aliens come in. That's what they're good at; changing the odds. They turn improbable events into probable ones. I think that's what they did to you and me."

"Put you together? Resurrected us and repaired the powercan?" I provide the straight questions.

"Yeah. And the oddball things - the anomalies you said happened beforehand; the food packets exploding, the problem with your thrusters, and so on; I'd guess those events were like the concentric ripples converging on that buxom lass innocently swimming in the pool. Little did she know, and little did you, what was about to happen."

"Why did they do it?"

"Don't know. But maybe the process ain't over yet. Maybe we're still in the concentric ripple stage and the main event is out in front of us."

He smiles. "So that, ladies, is the first lesson in probability engineering. Expect a graded quiz tomorrow."

"Hullo." Charles pokes his head through the hatch.

"What goes?" I ask.

"No problems. The backup powercan seems to have been repaired by the same people who brought us granddad here." He grins at Logan. "I wonder what happens next?"