He paused, and gestured up dramatically at the starry night sky, and again looked at the crowd with contempt. "Yes there are many worlds out there which are peaceful, productive and cooperative. But there are also worlds which are dead and shrunken cinders where there had been green planets and thriving races of people who could not give up war. For your sake I hope that you will be able to change your path, but I think that you do not have the ability, and that at last you will reach the end of the path you are on, and destroy each other and perhaps your world also. Each nova that you see in the sky marks the suicide of a race. Our knowledge of these matters is certain: there is never a nova caused simply by accident; power sources cannot fail this way. Each nova tells us of a war, of the death of a culture which probably thought of itself as civilized, and yet could not subdue its innate savagery."
The reporters scribbled and the cameras whirred. McCann closed his notepad, bored, and gazed at the sky, prepared to suffer through the rest of the speech. His paper could get the words of the speech from the TV. McCann had no comment to add; he had heard such ideas before. To the east in the sky was the distant glare of the landing lights of an oncoming aircraft.... No. Not a plane, a star. A star almost fantastically brilliant, brighter than the others, brighter than Mars.
"Mr. V'gu!" a young reporter said excitedly. "Isn't that a nova, there?" He pointed and everyone looked.
V'gu turned, his hand on the gangway rail. They waited and fidgeted as he stood without moving, looking up. After a time long enough for him to have memorized the entire star region, his eyes came down again, and he looked at them blankly, as if he had forgotten why they were there.
McCann felt a sudden electric thrill of recognition. He had seen a similar paralyzed lack of expression on the faces of men who had just learned that they had made some terrible mistake. He turned abruptly and pushed through the crowd, heading for a phone.
The other reporters didn't understand. Not yet.
"This nova," one of them said. "What was it from?"
V'gu looked up at it. "A sun blew up," he muttered. "Five years ago. The light took five years to get here." The microphones barely picked up his voice.
"Do you know anything about the people who lived there, Mr. V'gu?"