"MacLeod! We aren't necessarily going to die here. But we will, if you slam this plane into a hilltop and the fuel tank explodes!"

"Sorry." MacLeod imagined he felt himself sweating. He really had pulled the nose of the plane up with only seconds to spare. "I could barely see it through all the smoke, and I didn't think we were anywhere near hills this high."

"Err on the safe side," Methos said grimly. "And don't make guesses about things we can't see! We can't trust any instrument readings."

MacLeod took brief comfort in the thought At least he knows me well enough to be sure I wasn't on the verge of crashing deliberately. He wouldn't have done that with any other person aboard - nor would Methos. But he suspected either of them, if he'd been alone, might have made a snap decision to end it all.

There were moments when MacLeod thought he didn't want to survive the horrific end of Earth. But moments after having that thought, he'd find himself wanting desperately to go on living, to see again all the people he cared for. He'd never had a chance to say goodbyes!

He knew he should be glad Richie and his son Dare were working on a terraforming project, so far away that they wouldn't even have learned of this crisis yet, let alone received the message he'd sent. Glad that when he and Methos had stopped off on the newly-settled planet Nineveh to ask Nick Wolfe to take temporary custody of Marcellus, Nick had been incommunicado, conducting some kind of research in a diving bell on the ocean floor. They'd had to leave Marc with his wife Merith.

He knew those men. If they'd learned what was going on, all three would have wanted to join the volunteers - Nick, despite the fact that he and Merith were raising a child of their own. If he'd been unable to talk them out of it, all of them might be stranded on the dying Earth.

But I so wish I could see them, hear their voices, one last time!

It was true that he and Methos weren't "necessarily" going to die. But they both knew the odds were against their surviving.

Their ship had left, bound for that faraway wormhole, with its child passengers in "suspended animation." They were sure there were no more Ever-Youngs in the region they'd covered; but they didn't know the fate of other ships, the success rate in other regions. By now, a series of coronal mass ejections - "solar flares" - had made communication among the volunteer groups impossible.

But before that happened, a rumor had spread: that the scientists who'd sent out the SOS were still on the planet, didn't have a ship, and presumably expected to be picked up by the colleagues who'd brought them there. Volunteers had conceived the notion that if any of them were stranded, they might be able to make it to the scientists' compound and "hitch a ride" with them. The compound, specially designed - if hastily constructed - to provide maximum protection from heat, was said to be on the east coast of North America, with markings that would make it visible from the air.

There was no proof of any of that. And if it ever had been a viable option, MacLeod and Methos knew they might be too late. The scientists might already have left. They might be dead - or if they weren't, their colleagues might have lost contact with them and mistakenly written them off as dead. Or the scientists, fretting over the children, might have waited too long to request their pick-up - in which case they, and anyone with them, would perish before help arrived.

But it was better to try something than to try nothing.

MacLeod narrowly missed another hilltop.

Before Methos could protest, he spat out, "Sorry! The continent's one big forest fire - I didn't know Earth still had this many trees."

"We need to get over the ocean," Methos said gently. "Or the ocean bed, if the whole thing's evaporated. We should still be able to see where the coastline was, and follow it. So we have to pick a direction, hope it's east, and stick with it till we're sure, one way or the other.

"You've been at this long enough. Let me take the controls."

"We agreed, an hour for each of us -"

"And by now, our timepieces aren't any more accurate than our frigging compass. I can see you're fatigued - that's all that matters. Come on, switch it over!"

Sighing, MacLeod complied.

Fortunately, switching the controls didn't necessitate their actually changing places. Wearing ultra-protective garments with built-in waste recycling and a week's supply of oxygen and nutrients, they barely had room to move in the cramped cockpit.

And if the temperature soared much above what they'd encountered thus far, they still wouldn't be protected.

"You should rest," Methos said firmly. "Close your eyes! You need to rest them for a while, so you'll be able to scan the coast for the scientists' compound."

"All right, all right." MacLeod really was too fatigued to argue.

Sleep was out of the question, buffeted as they were by solar winds. But he closed his eyes, tried to relax...and in a way, to prepare himself for death. By recalling, and appreciating, all the wonders he'd been able to experience during his incredibly long life...

x

x

x

When humanity had made its leap into space, old feuds had been forgotten, and the United Nations had become a true world government.

Humans had learned to create, stabilize, and navigate wormholes. They'd terraformed and populated a dozen exoplanets, and were at work terraforming a dozen more. They hadn't encountered living members of another species with humanlike intelligence. But they'd found fossils and artifacts of three "candidate" species - gone extinct, due to abrupt climate change, before they got past the Stone Age. A grim suggestion that very few worlds might have been as lucky as Earth.

Early on, scientists had made enough progress in genetic engineering that they could prevent further evolutionary changes in the species' appearance. Any possible future environments were to be adapted to humans, not vice versa! That had been a boon for Immortals: if evolution had proceeded in its undirected way, a five-million-year-old Immortal might have looked as out of place as homo erectus.

Then they'd engineered a complete separation of sexual intercourse (still, arguably, humans' favorite pastime) and procreation. All human embryos came to be produced through cloning techniques (with one to four biological "parents"), and gestated in uterine replicators. But they were still born as infants, complete with navels and vestigial organs, and lovingly raised by one or more of their parents - most often by an old-fashioned "couple," opposite-sex or same-sex.

Finally, scientists had made the greatest breakthrough of all...extreme life extension. Through genetic engineering, they'd transformed the next generation into a new species, homo sapiens longivivax (meaning "long-lived"). In a nutshell: the new humans were exactly like "Immortals"! Evidently, that was the only way life extension could be achieved. The "first death" was euphemistically called "Transition," and would come to be, in most cases, planned: a ceremony involving a quick, painless "lethal injection," followed by a family celebration. At a time of the young person's choosing - usually, age thirty. A "Quickening" was called a "Transfer." But no one expected deliberate beheadings. It was assumed deaths would only be caused by accidental decapitation, or by explosions.

No one expected to live forever, either. They knew that if they didn't die in "run-of-the-mill" explosions, they might someday be within range of a catastrophic explosion: a supernova. Or perish in some other kind of cosmic disaster, in which their bodies would be either crushed or torn apart. But however long they lived, they'd enjoy perfect health and youthful vigor. And any given individual could hope, realistically, to live for millions of years.

Everyone was (or was at least thought to be), in the old-fashioned sense, sterile. But that wasn't a problem, because they'd been reproducing via cloning for a thousand years. Most adults loved babies and children, and communicated that attitude to their offspring; so there was no chance they'd ever stop reproducing.

Some humans had chosen not to have genetically engineered "long-lived" children. So old-style humans (homo sapiens brevivivax) still existed, living by choice on their own bountiful planet, Primordia. They seemingly weren't jealous of those with lengthened life spans, since - while conventional "religions" had died out - almost everyone had come to believe in reincarnation. Besides, even Primordials enjoyed life expectancies of one hundred fifty healthy years, and painless production of offspring.

As far as the bemused "Original Immortals" knew, their secret had never become public knowledge. But now almost everyone was just like them! They'd happily blended in, no longer having to conceal anything but their actual birth dates. (There was no problem with someone like Richie Ryan looking like a perpetual twenty-year-old: he just pretended he'd had an unplanned, accidental Transition - fortunately, when he was already a young adult. No one doubted his mental maturity.) Some theorized that one or more of the scientists who made the breakthrough had known about Immortals. But most believed that since a mutation had undoubtedly produced them, it wasn't surprising that an "obvious" tweaking of the genome had produced the same result.

The Watchers had disbanded. But they'd presented a complete, unabridged copy of their still-secret Chronicles to the man they'd considered the best of the Immortals: Duncan MacLeod. On his death, it would pass to his son. (Though he himself privately thought his friend Nick was the "best" of them. He'd never ceased fighting crime and injustice. Yet after Joe Dawson initially misled the Watchers, they'd never learned Nick Wolfe or any of his aliases was an Immortal - in large part because he'd kept his vow, never taken a Quickening.)

For MacLeod, the era of swordfights, Quickenings, the "Game," and the dreaded "Gathering" (that had actually involved only Connor's subspecies) sometimes seemed so remote that it might have been a fantasy. He needed to dip into the Chronicles, to convince himself it had all been real!

He'd learned some things that chilled him to the bone, even after the passage of millions of years. For example, that the Watchers had originally hoped to capture Methos and Darius, and force them into the Sanctuary.

He'd mentioned that to Methos. And Methos had recalled that he - as Watcher "Adam Pierson" - had uncovered details of the failed plot a thousand years later, and tried to find and delete every mention of it. Obviously, he hadn't succeeded.

It was mere "ancient history" now, of course.

But MacLeod had never forgotten the people he'd cherished in those olden days. He could still picture Tessa, and "hear" her voice, as clearly as he had on their happiest day together. Nor had he let his skills wither. Swordsmanship and martial arts might have become "hobbies," but they'd always been hobbies at which he excelled.

Had his life become less exciting? Far from it. The new Age of Exploration had held thrills galore, for everyone.

On balance, MacLeod thought, his time on Earth - and other worlds - had been happy. And younger "long-lifers" had known far fewer traumas than he.

But even now, when most of us can hope to live for millions of years, humans are always in a hurry. Rush, rush, rush. And in trying to save people a little time, scientists made the greatest blunder of all time. Destroyed our home world!

The first wormhole that had been created in the Solar System was located between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Travelers could make near-instantaneous jumps between it and, eventually, any of a dozen wormholes in the vicinity of other stars.

Travelers' most frequent destinations within the Solar System, aside from Earth itself, had been Mars, the large asteroid Ceres, Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus. There were mining operations on Mars and Ceres, and those distant moons had ecosystems (one methane-based, three in water oceans far below their surface ice) that held endless fascination for scientists. For travel within the Solar System - and elsewhere, after exiting wormholes - ships had long been powered by nuclear fusion.

But a few decades back, some authority had decided to cut travel times between Earth and the outer moons - and, of course, the existing wormhole itself - by creating another wormhole, to be located between the orbits of Earth and Venus. Travel between Earth and Mars or Ceres would still be direct. But to go farther, travelers would make the relatively short trip to the Inner System Wormhole and jump to its only outlet, the Outer System Wormhole.

Why was it to be located between Earth and Venus, not between Earth and Mars? Supposedly, because there was too much space travel - and, as a consequence, debris - between Earth and Mars.

But it turned out, after the Inner System Wormhole had seen heavy use for years, that it was too near the Sun. Single-outlet wormholes at a comparable distance from other stars hadn't caused problems; but they'd seen much less use. This one had irreversibly damaged the Sun, destabilized space-time in its vicinity, and thrown it completely off the Main Sequence. The Sun, and its planets, were doomed.

Earth should have been habitable, as the Sun grew gradually hotter, for another billion years. And if nothing out of the ordinary had befallen it, the Sun shouldn't have entered its red giant phase for more than five billion years.

Actually, scientists expected the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies to collide before then, so no star's fate could be predicted with confidence beyond two billion years. But now, nothing could be predicted for the Sun in terms of its remaining life-span...except that things would never get better, only worse.

And for humans, it didn't much matter whether Earth would wind up as a dry, dead world with Venuslike temperatures or be engulfed by the swollen star. Either way, it would never again support life.

But humans were a resilient bunch. Their original purpose in colonizing had been threefold: to prevent overpopulation of Earth or any other single planet; to gain access to other star systems' mineral resources; and to assure the survival of the species if any segment of it was wiped out by a catastrophe. They'd anticipated only natural disasters; but they had at least envisioned the possibility of losing Earth. And now that it was actually happening, the horror would be mitigated by the low death toll.

MacLeod knew they'd absorb this tragedy, learn valuable lessons, and move on.

Still, if I'm destined to die now, maybe I would have preferred to die a little sooner, without knowing what was going to happen...

No. Every moment, of every life, is precious!

My greatest regret about dying now, in this way, is that my father will die with me.

x

x

x

But at that moment, his father let out a yelp. Then: "MacLeod! I see it - I actually see it!"

MacLeod opened his eyes and snapped to attention. "Wh-what? The coastline?"

"No. The scientists' compound!"