(In 2075 a deep probe assembles sensor data, beams murky images, and builds a story from intelligence, no longer artificial.) It began in the village of Dover where a pier extends, called London. A species of ground squirrels, plentiful in the region, lent fleas to the local rats. As for the rats, they subsisted, in houses along the shore, in and out of schooners along the quay. not often seen by day— “The cats kill them,” said the sailors, “or the rat-catcher does,” and the schooners sailed rat-free. But by night, along the wharf, rats waited, gamboled in the warehouses, perched on pilings, watching. When the Poor Anchor came from San Jose and moored at the London pier, a thousand small, glinty eyes glowed among the shore. As a matter of routine, and to impress the locals, the crew put shields along the hawsers, but did not take up the gang plank at night, and now and then a rat slithered on to find a glutton’s fare. The rats were glad aboard the ship, each female birthing a hundred, maybe more, offspring every year. Having fired the rat-catcher, a year and a half before, the Poor Anchor sailed amiably from Dover for home, and from the broad Pacific came a cable announcing members of the crew had died, had died of plague. And to the world of seamen the curt message spread with bone-scorching fire, “Beware the Poor Anchor, wantonly childish, doomed.” Even her crew abandoned ship, fled to shore or safer craft. So drifting alone, Poor Anchor sank, while fatted rats gasped in the open sea.