...Behind my shoulders are months spent on expeditions, hundreds of light years traveled across the galaxy. And the first deafening failure in the track record. Because on Kiallan, the seventh planet of the Enif Pegasus system, there is no life. Nine years ago, monitoring was installed over the planet and dozens of reconnaissance bots and satellites were deployed, whose tasks included confirming (or refuting) the calculated data - Kiallan is suitable for settlement. Remote sensing picked up signals of mental activity, indicating the presence of intelligent life on the planet. Five years ago, the monitoring group was folded, and the materials were transferred to the Office of Experimental Cosmogation: sensors recorded focal mental activity on Kiallan. Confirmation of the presence of intelligent life on Kiallan was supposed to be the last, most convincing argument in favor of the hypothesis that dozens of Earth scientists had been working on for years.