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graffiti, Dorothy thought, painted in the deserts of America and Africa and Asia and Australia and even, illegally, on the Antarctic ice cap, its creators wistfully hoping to catch the eye of the anonymous, toiling strangers out in the belt.
    Others were even less subtle. Right here before her now there was a circle of people, hands open and faces raised to the desert sky, all steadily praying. She knew there had been similar gatherings, some in continuous session, at many of the world's key religious and mystic sites: Jerusalem, Mecca, the pyramids, the European stone circles. Take me! Take me!
    Meanwhile, the catastrophists believed that the aliens represented terrible danger.
    Much of their fear and anger was directed at the aliens themselves, of course, and there were elaborate schemes for military assaults on their supposed asteroid bases -- justified, in some cases, by appeal to the evident malice of most of the aliens reported in UFO abduction cases of the past. There was even one impressive presentation -- complete with animation and sound effects, emanating from softscreen posters draped over Bootstrap's link fence -- from a major aerospace cartel. The military-industrial-complex types were as always seeking to turn the new situation into lucrative new contracts, and how better than to be asked to build giant asteroid-belt battle cruisers?
    But the catastrophists had plenty of rage left over to be directed at other targets, healthily fueled by conspiracy theorists. There were still some who held that the U.S. government had been collaborating with the aliens since Roswell, 1947. "I wish they had been," Frank had once said tiredly. "It would make life a lot easier."
    And there were protests aimed at government agencies at all levels, the United Nations, scientific bodies, and anybody thought to be involved in the general cover-up. The most spectacular of the related assaults had been the grenade attack that had caused the destruction of the decrepit, never-flown Saturn V Moon rocket that had lain for decades as a monument outside NASA's Johnson Space Center.
    It kept the Bootstrap guards watchful.
    "Intriguing," Dorothy murmured. "Disturbing."
    "But places like this always concentrate the noise," Xenia said gently. "The vast majority of people out there in the real world are simply indifferent to the whole thing. When the news about the Gaijin first broke it was an immediate sensation, taking over every media outlet -- for a day or two, perhaps a week. I was already working with Frank at the time. He was electrified -- well, we both were; we thought the news the most significant of our lifetimes. And the business opportunities it might open up sent Frank running around in circles."
    Dorothy smiled. "That sounds like the Frank Paulis I've read about."
    "But then there was no more fresh news..."
    After a couple of weeks, the Gaijin had been crowded off the front pages. Politics had assumed its usual course, and all the funds hastily promised in that first startling morning after the Nemoto-Malenfant discovery -- for deeper investigations and robot probes and manned missions and the rest -- had soon evaporated.
    "But the news was too... lofty," Dorothy murmured. "Inhuman. It changed everything. Suddenly the universe swiveled around us; suddenly we knew we weren't alone, and how we felt about ourselves, about the universe and our place in it, could never be the same again.
    "And yet, nothing changed. After all the Gaijin didn't do anything but crawl around their asteroids. They didn't respond to any of the signals they were sent, whether by governments or churches or ham-radio crackpots."
    Frank had gotten involved in some of that, in fact; the early messages had been framed using a universal-language methodology that dated back to the 1960s, called Lincos: lots of redundancy and framing to make the message patterns clear, a simple primer that worked up from basic mathematical concepts through physics, chemistry,