'Well,' he said, moving to stand at the fore of the group. 'I suppose first we should tell you something of ourselves.' And without the wasted words of diplomacy, he did. 'You see before you the surviving crew members of Virgo II, the manned exploration of Mars. Two years into the flight, and not yet two-thirds of the way there, we received a delayed signal from earth, and at an undesignated interval. The bloody butchers who called themselves our leaders had finally done it: missiles and satellite stations vomiting their nuclear death, and pounding the cities flat. The emotions of those conscious---most of us were in a suspended state, so as not to age unnecessarily during the voyage---I can't imagine. But Stenmark, and the Doc, and poor dead Rene' Christian, well, they had to do something. 'So they turned the ship about, and upon returning to Earth engaged in a high orbit around it, and tried to make contact, with anybody. No one there. Even the orbiting agri-colonies and Moon bases hadn't been spared. The latter might have been construed as some kind of military threat, to the sick and paranoid, but to kill innocent civilians, farmers for Christ's sake, just to be sure all was ended..... The worst you can think of us isn't bad enough, Kalus, if you look at what we did to each other in the end. Maybe we ‘common people' of the superpowers didn't take an active part in the destruction; but we sure as hell sat on our asses, and let the presidents and the generals make it inevitable.' He subdued, or at least restrained, his rising passion. 'But that's neither here nor there. Or anywhere, now. That world is gone, and will never return.' He sighed bitterly. 'Back on the ship, Christian lost her mind when she saw the devastation, and knew that her husband and son were dead, like all the others. She couldn't live without them, and so she killed herself. That left only Stenmark and Doc McIntyre to try and decide our fate. The best they could do, under the circumstances, was to re-rig the entire ship---computer, cryogenics, life-support, everything---for a vastly different purpose than what they'd been designed for. Their new function was, simply, to hold us all in suspension, retain the high orbit, and wake us all when, hopefully, it was safe to return to the surface. 'It's no coincidence that you, Sylviana, and William---you haven't met him yet---came out of suspension at approximately the same time we did. A German scientist named Krause had been advocating a common de-suspension date, in the event such a travesty ever occurred. He was considered a black pessimist at the time, and partly insane. But your father, and Sten, and possibly others, took his advice, and set the ‘wake up call' for exactly ten thousand years from the first day of Armageddon, hoping that would give the planet enough time to heal itself, and support recognizable life-forms once more.