Chindi

Chapter 4

GEORGE HOCKELMANN GOT off to an unpromising start in life. He was the son of unambitious Memphis suburbanites who were content to lounge their way through the years, sipping cold beer and watching themselves performing heroically or romantically in simulated adventures in distant places and more rousing times. George had been a clumsy kid, both physically and socially. He didn’t engage in athletics, didn’t make friends easily, and in later life, he came to suspect he’d spent the better part of his first fifteen years sitting in his room building models of starships.

His classes didn’t go well either. He must have had a vacuous stare or something because his teachers didn’t expect much from him, and consequently he didn’t produce much. That was probably just as well, because he was already an inviting target for bullies.

But he survived, often with the help of Herman Culp, a tough little kid from Hurst Avenue. Although most of his grades remained indifferent, he discovered a talent for math that translated itself, by the time he was twenty-three, into a sheer genius for predicting financial trends. At twenty-four, he launched The Main Street Observer, an investment newsletter that became so successful that he was twice investigated by the SXC on suspicion of manipulation.

By twenty-six, he’d joined Nussbaum’s Golden Hundred, the richest entrepreneurs in the North American Union. Six years later, he concluded he’d earned all the money he could possibly spend, he had no real interest in wielding influence, and so he began to look for something else to do with his life.

He bought the Memphis Rebels of the United League and set out to bring a world championship to his hometown. It never quite happened, and now, more than two decades later, he regarded it as his single serious failure.

He’d remained close to Herman. They went hunting each year in the fall, usually in Manitoba. But there’d been a year when Herman had been offered the use of a cousin’s lodge. It was north of Montreal along the St. Maurice River, picturesque country, loaded with moose and deer. The lodge was situated near Dolbeau, a legendary spot where a UFO was supposed to have set down almost a half century earlier. They’d wandered around town, visited its museum, talked to the inhabitants, gone out to the place where everybody said it actually landed. They’d looked at broken trees and scorched rock, the graves of three unfortunate hunters who had, with their dogs, apparently stumbled onto the visitors. (Little had been found of the hunters other than charred smears, said the townspeople. So George had wondered what was buried, but he didn’t pursue the issue.)

Had it really happened?

The locals swore it had.

Pieces of evidence had been found at the scene, but the army had arrived, collected everything, and then denied everything.

George understood that it was to the benefit of the citizens of Dolbeau to keep the story alive. The town had become a major tourist center. There were five motels, a museum, a theater dedicated to endless restagings of the event, souvenir shops, and a collection of restaurants serving sandwiches with names like the ET, the Coverup, the FTL, the Anti-Grav. All appeared to be prospering.

George was a skeptic both by training and by inclination. Yet there was something about the Dolbeau phenomenon that left him wanting to believe it had happened. He would remember for the rest of his life standing on the ridge overlooking the sacred spot, listening to the wind moving among the trees, and thinking, yes, it might have come in from over there, big and iron gray with lights blinking, and it would have set down there, mashing those trees. It was disk-shaped. You could still see the bowl formed in the vegetation, maybe thirty meters across.

And he believed. From that moment, his life changed. Not a small change, like the day you discover you like asparagus after all, or when you stop wearing white socks. This was life-altering stuff. This was casting off the religious beliefs of a lifetime and signing on for something new. Not that the UFO itself took him over, but in later years he’d realize it was the first time he had ever looked at the stars. Really looked at them, and seen the sky as a four-dimensional marvel rather than simply a canopy over his head.

There might not have been Visitors along the St. Maurice, he knew, but there should have been. There should be somebody out there that humans could talk to, could compare notes with. Could go hunting with.

He’d hired people to look into the Dolbeau story. There was no evidence that the government had actually found anything at the site. And George knew quite well that the Canadian bureaucracy could not possibly have kept a secret of that magnitude for fifty years.

Witnesses could still be found who swore they had seen the vessel. Yet even contemporary media reports were self-contradictory and skeptical. Nobody had any pictures of the UFO.

Yet three people had died. Hunters from Indiana, who had been staying at Albert’s Motel. If they weren’t in the graves, they’d gone missing. And no one had ever heard from them again.

A dozen or more townspeople had recorded statements, showing the cameras pieces of burnt metal said to be from the intruder. Within the first twenty-four hours, the army had come and made off with the evidence. And according to townspeople, the ship itself.

And that was it.

FOR GEORGE, IT became a quest.

Specialists at the Academy of Science and Technology in Arlington assured him nothing had happened at Dolbeau. The Indiana hunters were a fable, they said. When Academy investigators looked into it and reported that there was no record they’d even existed, they in turn were accused of a cover-up. We’re out in the neighborhood now, they’d told him, meaning that they had actually set foot in hundreds of local star systems. And there was nothing remotely resembling intelligent beings.

But ten years later they’d found ruins on Quraqua. And less than six months after that, they’d found the Noks.

The Noks weren’t going to go visiting anybody soon. They were in an early industrialization phase, but they’d been up and down several times and had all but exhausted their natural resources. Furthermore, they did not seem to be bright enough to sort out their internal problems. They came in several sizes and shapes, they held strong political and religious opinions, and they seemed to have no talent for compromise.

Nevertheless, he was hooked by the Great Unknown. George Hockelmann became a familiar visitor at the Academy. He organized the Friends of the Academy and set them to supplementing the meager funds provided by the government and by private contributors.

It became his overriding ambition to find an intelligent alien, to establish communication, to create a common language, to make it possible one day to sit down with him, or her, perhaps beside a blazing fire, and talk about God, the universe, and how it had all come to be.

He’d heard the rumors about 1107 before Pete Damon got back, the mysterious signals in a remote place and the fruitless effort to hunt them down. When he’d inquired at the Academy, Sylvia Virgil had pointed out that there was no conceivable reason to believe anyone would have placed a transmitter out at the neutron star. It simply made no sense, she had insisted. A second mission would be expensive, would almost certainly produce no result, and would lead to charges that the Academy was squandering its money on wild-eyed projects.

But who knew what might make sense to a different kind of intelligence?

What had Pete thought?

Pete had declined to speak freely over the link, but had insisted on coming instead to see George personally. George had wondered if he feared being monitored by someone.

George had him over to his Bracken Valley retreat, and they went outside onto the upper deck to drink lime coolers and watch the sun set. “Nobody really cares about it,” Pete complained.

And George understood why he’d stayed off the link. It was too important to trust to long-distance communications. Pete had wanted to make his point in person, to force George to feel the intensity of the situation.

It was a late-summer evening, with a storm approaching and the wind beginning to pick up.

“Sylvia doesn’t think it’s anything other than an anomaly. A glitch in the computers,” said George. “Nearly as I can make out, neither does anybody else.”

“They weren’t there.”

“They’ve seen the evidence.”

“George, they don’t want to accept the implications. They’re too worried about their reputations.”

George took a long pull from his drink. “You really think they’d hide something like this?”

“No. They’re not hiding anything. They’ve convinced themselves there’s nothing to it because it entails risks if they don’t. They know if they put together an expedition, a lot of people will laugh. There’s a good chance they won’t find anything, and then the laughter will get louder, the politicians will start asking questions, and the board will start looking for a new commissioner. That would mean the end of Sylvia too.”

“So what really do you think? Is there anything out there?”

He leaned forward, his eyebrows drawing together. “George, she’s right: It might have been a glitch. We can’t deny that. But it’s not the point. There might really be something there. That’s the possibility we should be considering.”

“Somebody to talk to?”

“Maybe.”

Two nights later, George made a deal with Virgil. The Contact Society would fund a mission to investigate the anomaly, and it would even supply the ship. In fact, it would supply the investigators. All that would be asked was the Academy’s blessing, and a pilot.

FOR PETE DAMON, the evening with George had marked the culmination of a weary struggle.

There was no longer a future in scientific research, for the simple reason there was nothing much left to research. We knew in general how stars were born and how they died. We knew how black holes formed and what their neighborhoods were like. We knew the details of galactic formation, we understood the structure of space, and we had finally figured out, just a few years before, the nature of gravity. Quantum effects were no longer quite so uncertain, and dark matter had long since been brought into the light.

Newton and Einstein and McElroy had been fortunate: They’d lived in eras when much about the nature of things remained mysterious. But in Pete Damon’s age, no true mysteries remained. Other than creation itself, and the anthropic principle. What had started the universe? And why were all the myriad settings, gravity and the strong force and the tendency of water to freeze from the top down, why was all that tuned precisely in such a way to make possible the development of life-forms? Those two great questions had not been answered, but the consensus was that they would remain forever beyond the reach of science.

Pete agreed. Consequently, for an ambitious young researcher determined to make a contribution, what remained?

He’d met George Hockelmann at an Academy dinner years before he went out to 1107. It had been given to celebrate the success of an archeological team that had uncovered a vast storehouse of data on Beta Pac III, home of a race that had conquered the stars, left evidence of their presence throughout the Orion Arm, and then effectively vanished, leaving only a few near-savage descendants with no memory of their glory days. George, big and garrulous and enthusiastic and maybe a bit naive, had bought him a drink, and had argued that “they” were still out there somewhere, the Monument-Makers, somewhere among the stars. There was in fact evidence to support that notion, that there had been an exodus. Maybe it was true. Nobody knew.

Pete had demurred when George suggested he join the Contact Society. The group’s members were treated by the administration with the utmost respect, because they were a major source of funds. But behind their backs, they were spoken of openly as kooks, loonies, and nutcases. People with too much money and not enough to do. Having one’s name appear on the Society’s rolls was to ensure not being taken seriously by the scientific community as anything more than a cheerleader.

So it happened that, over glasses of brandy, Pete and George Hockelmann discovered they were kindred souls. It was natural then that, during the voyage back, when operations people at the Academy were already smiling politely and informing him there was surely a logical explanation for the transmission, let’s not go off half-cocked, how did the experiments turn out, he made up his mind to talk to George. And it was maybe even more natural that, before he arrived, George was already sending inquiries about the find.

The day after he’d gone to George’s Bracken Valley estate, he’d attended a party thrown by members of the Benny’s research team. That had been in Manhattan at Cleo’s. Most were going back to their normal work assignments. Ava was returning to the Indiana Center, Hal was headed for Berlin, Cliff Stockard for the University of Toronto. Mike Langley, their captain, was near the end of his two weeks’ leave, and would be getting his new assignment in a couple of days. He didn’t know where yet. And he didn’t care, thought Pete. Mike was bright enough, but he really had no interest in what lay over the horizon. He was strictly transport. Carry people to Outpost or Serenity, pick up a load of artifacts or samples, and bring everything back. It struck Pete that a million-year-old artifact would be perfectly safe in Mike’s hands. It would never occur to him to break into the package to see what it looked like.

When, during the course of the evening, he brought up the subject of the anomaly, he was greeted with blank stares. The anomaly? What anomaly was that? Only Langley, who didn’t give a damn what anybody thought, was prepared to talk seriously about it.

That was the night Cliff had introduced him to Miranda Kohler. Miranda was director of Phoenix Labs. She was all angles and sharp edges, a woman made from crystal, completely out of place in her clinging black off-the-shoulder gown.

“Pete,” she’d told him when they’d contrived to get off to a corner where they could be alone, “I came tonight because I knew you’d be here.”

He’d not hidden his surprise.

“I’m moving on,” she continued. “Outward bound on the Tasman Shuttle.” Interstellar lab. Doing work on galaxy formation. Her voice and her eyes suggested it was important stuff, but Pete knew better. It was all details now. Nevertheless he nodded appreciatively and congratulated her.

“The reason I wanted to see you,” she said, “is that we’re looking for a replacement. At Phoenix.” She tossed off her drink. There was no reserve about this one. She liked her rum. “We’ve done a lot of good work there over the last few years. Mostly on quantum energy development. I want to be sure it doesn’t get put on a back burner. Doesn’t get pushed aside by somebody else’s priorities.”

“You wanted me to recommend somebody?” said Pete.

She leaned toward him, and her eyes were like daggers. “I wanted you, Pete. You’re just the guy they need out there.”

Well, it wasn’t as if Pete hadn’t been able to see where Miranda was going. But he was still surprised when she actually made the offer. After all, they’d never even met.

“Your record speaks for itself,” she said. “The money’s good. They’ll guarantee you half again as much as you make at Cambridge. The work’s challenging. And there’s a substantial range of benefits.”

Pete looked past her, at Ava and Mike deep in conversation, at Miriam cruising past the goodies and trying not to eat too much, at Tora Cavalla, who’d got home to an assignment on Outpost and would be going right back out.

Director at Phoenix. Responsible for personnel. For allocation of funds. For dealing with the board of directors. He’d be buried. Still, it was advancement. It was what he was supposed to be doing. “Can I call you?” he asked.

She nodded. “Sure. Take some time to think about it.” She smiled, suggesting she understood he didn’t want to seem too anxious.

By the time he arrived home, he had decided. He’d take the offer. How could he not do so? Tomorrow he’d call her, nail it down, and then he’d submit a resignation at Cambridge. Sorry to be leaving, but I’ve received an offer too good to refuse. That would irritate Cardwell, the department chairman, who thought that Pete was overrated, that his assignments, like the one at 1107, were a result of political connections. And Universe.

And yet…

He hated to think he was going to spend the rest of his life ordering priorities, choosing among medical and insurance plans for the help, and overseeing hiring practices. He wished, not for the first time, that he’d been alive during the twenty-first century. When there were still discoveries to be made.

When he got home, he found a message waiting from George. “Want to go back to 1107?”

ALYX BALLINGER HAD loved the theater as far back as she could remember. Her father had been a high school theater coach and when they needed a little girl to play in Borneo Station, she’d gotten the assignment. Just walk on, deliver one line, “Are we in Exeter yet, Daddy?”, and walk off.

It wasn’t much, but it had been a beginning and it lit a fire that had burned brightly ever since. She’d gone to Gillespie from high school, done well, and had won a small role in Red River Blues on her first try at the big time. Les Covington, already celebrated although it was still early in his career, had encouraged her, assured her she had a brilliant future, and reminded her, when she made an unfortunate remark, that there was no such thing as a small role.

She’d starred in Heat, Lost in Paradise, and a dozen other sims, but was best known for her Cassel-winning performance as the murderous Stephanie in Affair of the Heart. It was during the publicity run-up to Affair that she’d arranged to meet her husband-du-jour, Edward Prescott, at the Wheel.

Sandy (as he was known to his inner circle) was then at the height of his career. He’d become famous portraying the archeologist-adventurer, Jack Hancock. And he had succumbed to the tiresome notion that he was Jack Hancock. So he’d gone out to Pinnacle and gotten his picture taken standing around with the real archeologists. And when he’d come home, the studio had thought it would be a good idea if Alyx, with her newest epic about to open around the world, showed up to greet him.

She’d done all that could reasonably be expected, looking tearfully ecstatic as the Linda Callista slipped into dock, throwing her arms around him when he emerged from the exit tube, and standing admiringly by his side as he blathered on about the Temple of Kalu or whatever it had been. Her passion for Sandy had gone a long way toward collapse by then, but on that occasion she replaced it with another love affair, one that had never cooled.

The Callista.

The superluminal.

It lay there, tethered fore and aft, drawn against the dock, straining to get free and head back out among the stars. It was as if the silly season had arrived, as if she was six years old again. But she’d never really gotten beyond the Earth before. Always she’d been half-absorbed in the glare of her own celebrity. She’d stood there that day, her stomach queasy because she only weighed about thirty pounds and had not yet gotten used to it. The imagers had been taking their pictures, and Sandy wrapped one arm protectively around her and squared his shoulders and flashed that boyish smile, and she’d obligingly kissed his cheek, keeping her eye the whole time on the Callista, which lay beckoning just beyond the observation port that stretched the entire length of the wall until it curved out of sight in both directions.

It was an awkward, drab gray vessel, with all kinds of antennas and dishes sticking out of it. It was divided into segments so that it looked like a pregnant beetle. Linda Callista was drawn in dark blue script on the bow, and a row of soft lights spilled out of the bridge.

Later, she’d cornered the captain. “Where does it go?”

He’d been a short, slightly overweight man. Not particularly good-looking. Not at all the romantic type she’d visualized piloting a starship. She’d seen enough sims to know what they were supposed to look like. Hell, she’d made one, several years earlier, in which Carmichael Conn had played the captain. Well, Conn hadn’t been much of a romantic, either, now that she thought about it. But he looked the part. This one—his name was Captain Crook, so even that didn’t work—struck her as having all the drive of an insurance statistician.

“It goes out to Pinnacle, mostly,” Captain Crook had explained. “And to the stations. And sometimes to Quraqua and Beta Pac.”

“Does it ever go anywhere nobody’s been before?” She’d felt like a child, especially when he smiled paternally at her.

“No,” he said. “The Callista has a routine schedule, Ms. Ballinger. It doesn’t go anywhere that doesn’t already have a hotel and restaurant on hand.”

He’d thought that was just impossibly funny, and his face broke up into a grin that made her think of a bulldog with a feather up its rear.

SHE’D GONE DOWN in the shuttle with a horde of other people, but there was no help for it because the damned thing only ran once an hour or something like that. But it had a bar and the studio people had managed to clear an area for her and Sandy.

Sandy gabbled all the way to the bottom. If she’d ever retained any of what he’d said, it was long gone. She knew only that she wanted to go back up and get on board the Callisto and ride it out to the stars. But not to Harvey’s Steak house and the Lynn-Wyatt. No, ma’am. Give me the wide open, get me out of the trolley lanes, and let’s go where it’s dark and strange and anything can happen.

She mentioned it to Sandy, with whom she seldom talked about anything that was important. He’d patted her on the head in that infuriating you’re-my-little-puppy way of his and told her sure, we can do that, we’ll get to it as soon as our schedule permits. Which meant, of course, that they would never do it.

But it didn’t matter because Sandy came up for renewal less than a year later, and she jettisoned him.

NEVERTHELESS, SHE DIDN’T go. Life has a way of getting busy and keeping people on the run. Her career branched out. She starting directing, and when that went well she formed a production company. The production company made some highly successful musical sims. She negotiated an invitation to take a unit on tour for live shows. They’d gone to London and New York, Berlin and Toronto. And in a sense they never went home.

But Alyx never quite got the Callisto out of her head. Sometimes it showed up at night as her last conscious thought, and sometimes it arrived with the morning alarm, when she began to reassemble what needed to be done that day. It became a kind of lost lover.

But there was a problem with the Callisto. It was chained, locked into a schedule much like the airbus that flew between Churchill and the London theater district. Back and forth. When she conjured up the great ship she understood that it wasn’t intended to run back and forth between familiar places. It was designed to go out into the night. To see what was there. And to bring stuff back.

What kind of stuff?

Something.

News of cloud cities. Of electrical intelligences. Of incorporeal beings.

Some of these ideas even found their way into her shows. She did two interstellar fantasies, Here for the Weekend and Starstruck, and both had been successful. She’d even done a cameo in the latter, as a ship’s doctor trying to deal with a plague that kills inhibitions.

She met George during the cast party to celebrate the opening of Here for the Weekend. They were in New York, and her lighting director, Freddy Chubb, knew George, had been aware he’d be in the audience, and had invited him up to the bash. The party was being held in a suite rented for the purpose in the Solomon Loft, just a couple of blocks from the Empress, where the show was running.

George was a bit rough around the edges, but she’d liked him, and it didn’t take much time for them to uncover mutual interests. Starships. Mysterious places beyond the circle of exploration. Voices that called from the vast dark wilderness. The trouble with Callisto.

“What they need,” Alyx told him, “is a playwright or a choreographer, or somebody like her, to go out with the survey teams. Somebody who’d take time, when the ships drifted through the ring systems of worlds never seen before, to consider what was being accomplished. To measure the significance of it all. And to find a way to get it onstage.”

George had nodded knowingly, in complete agreement. “Something else we need,” he said, “is to build a fleet of Callistos. Did you know we’re doing very little survey work?” George was big, in the sense that he had presence. He simply walked into a room, and people came to attention. He was already drawing interested glances. “The Academy’s resources,” he said, “are concentrated now on terraforming, and on examining the ruins at a handful of worlds. And on doing some astrophysical research. But the survey vessels are down to fewer than a dozen.”

They were standing near a window, looking out at an overcast sky. Alyx was, of course, aware of the effect she had on men, of the effect she had on everybody. Since reaching adulthood, she could not recall ever failing to get her way. She knew that, and she liked to believe it hadn’t spoiled her. That under the glamour and the power she was just the girl next door. Except maybe a bit prettier and a lot smarter. “I wish there were something I could do,” she said.

It was how Alyx became the public face of the Contact Society. And why, five years later, George invited her along on the Memphis mission.

HERMAN CULP, WHO had defended the young George Hockelmann at the Richard Dover Elementary School and later at Southwest High, graduated into a decent government job, not much challenge, and not much money, but the pay came regularly, and it was enough to afford a comfortable existence. He had a problem picking wives though, and went through three of them by the time he reached thirty. Each filed for divorce within a year of the wedding.

Emma was different. She loved him, and she didn’t expect him to be anything other than what he was. And Herman knew he wasn’t the quickest horse in the barn. But she worked hard and added her income to his, so they got by. She tolerated his Saturdays with his old gang, even when he limped home after a day of tag football. She didn’t even mind his heading off with George on their annual hunting trips to Canada. “Have a good time,” she’d tell them as they pulled away in the hauler. “Don’t shoot one another.”

He knew that she genuinely worried about the guns, that she didn’t entirely trust them, and he wished there were a way to reassure her, to convince her that they knew what they were doing, that they were safer in the woods in each other’s company than she was at home.

When George founded the Contact Society, it was more or less natural that Herman would become a charter member. Actually, Herman lacked the imagination, or the naiveté, to take aliens seriously, and he would never have gotten involved on his own. He saw it, in fact, as not much different from one of those ghost-hunter groups that ran around using sensors in haunted houses. But they needed someone to do the administrative work, and George depended on him.

When the invitation had come to go out to 1107, Herman had thought of it as a kind of extended hunting trip. “Sure,” he said, confident that Emma wouldn’t object.

And she didn’t. But after he began to understand where they were going, and what they were looking for, he almost wished she had.