Enjoy your time with a friend. You will not have him forever.
I sent a message to Alex suggesting he run a search on Heli Tokata and informing him where I’d seen her picture. A response came back within a few hours. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s her. I can’t believe I missed it.”
And finally we arrived in the search area. The Capella was due in a little over four days. I informed the Dauntless that we were on station and checked in with the squadron commanders who were assigned to me. Six were there; four were presumably still en route.
There was no sign of movement in the sky, of course. We were too far from each other to see anything with the naked eye. I invested my time by going back over Alex’s research material. He’d added not only a few books to Belle’s library but also probably a thousand essays, reports, journals, and diaries. Belle offered to help, but Alex had already put her through the more obvious searches. I didn’t see any familiar names among the authors, so I picked a book titled Golden Vistas. It was a history written by Marcia Hadron. She was a contemporary, living on Toxicon. The fact that I wasn’t familiar with her name shouldn’t be interpreted as implying that she was an obscure voice in the field. To begin with, despite my job, I’m not nearly as well-read as I should be. Hadron had won several major prizes for her research.
The title referred to archeological missions aimed at recovering artifacts from the early space age. The Golden Age. Baylee got an entire chapter. But Hadron barely mentioned the Prairie House or Dmitri Zorbas. Nevertheless, I read through the chapter, and in the process found my respect for Baylee continuing to grow. He was described as a man who inspired others, who accomplished a great deal during his career, but who consistently gave the credit to his colleagues. “They loved him,” Hadron says. “He was remarkably selfless in a profession that traditionally attracted giant egos.”
“You know,” I told Belle, “you tend to hear the same thing about physicists, writers, lawyers, and actors. You never hear it said about physicians, though.”
“Maybe,” Belle said, “it’s because physicians are in a position to inflict serious damage on a patient who criticizes them.”
Baylee was mentioned a few times elsewhere in the book, but I couldn’t find anything relating to the hunt for the Apollo artifacts other than the author’s regret that they had never been recovered. Hadron dismissed the Dakota “myth,” as she called it. The artifacts, she believed, had almost certainly been taken out of Huntsville by thieves.
“I have something you might be interested in,” said Belle. “It does not relate to the artifacts, but it is nevertheless intriguing.”
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s from a doctoral dissertation by a young woman who cites Luciana Moretti as her source. Apparently Baylee and Southwick did an excavation at Tyuratam.”
“Where?”
“It was a Russian launch site. The Baikonur Cosmodome. It sent the first satellite into orbit in the 1950s. The exact date has been lost. Anyhow, according to the account, he and Southwick led an expedition there twenty years ago. Well, technically Southwick led the expedition. He was the guy with the money. A few of them went out rafting on a nearby river, the Syr Darya. And something in the water attacked them. No indication what it was. Anyway, one guy was killed. But Baylee emerged as the hero. He fought the thing off with a pole. Saved Southwick’s life. And two other people.”
“I’m surprised,” I said, “Southwick never mentioned that to us.”
“I am surprised as well.”
“It might be a male thing. You don’t look very good floundering around in the water while somebody else tackles the alligator. Do they have alligators at Tyuratam?”
“I have no data on that.”
“Most guys,” I said, “would probably claim that they used an oar or something to help.” Whatever the truth was, Baylee kept looking better.
I found something else. It showed up in Trevor Nakada’s memoir, Life in the Ruins. Nakada was an archeologist who’d spent most of his career working in Asia. But he’d gotten his start with Baylee and Southwick in an underwater expedition that had brought back artifacts from the White House. The book had a substantial number of photos from the mission, most with Nakada on eminent display. One shows him standing between two young women, using a cloth to hold a tray. One of the young women has just removed her swim fins; the other has a broad-brimmed cap pulled down over her head. The caption reads: The author holds a nine-thousand-year-old platter which he has just recovered. Margaret Woods stands to his left, with an unidentified colleague.
The unidentified colleague was Madeleine again.
Belle’s light blinked. “Transmission coming in,” she said. “From the Dauntless.”
It was John. “A few vehicles are not going to make it out here. So we’re doing some minor changes in positioning.” We acknowledged receipt and relayed it to the squadron commanders, all of whom had by then arrived. We were, however, still missing three ships.
With about forty hours remaining before the Capella’s expected arrival, the last two ships in my unit checked in.
I rarely spend time alone in the Belle-Marie. Belle is company of sorts, but it’s not really quite the same as actually having a living person on board. On that flight, I did more workout sessions than usual. Took most of my meals on the bridge. After the first night, I slept in the passenger cabin. Anything to break up the routine.
I couldn’t help thinking about the first time I’d boarded the Belle-Marie. I’d been with my mom, back in the days when she’d been Gabe’s pilot. Gabe had just bought the yacht, replacing the Tracker, which he’d had for years. They’d brought me aboard for the maiden voyage, which had only been a short flight to Lara. I was twenty at the time. That was when I decided I wanted the same career my mother was enjoying. A couple of years later, when Mom decided to go home and live a normal life, Gabe hired me, reluctantly, to replace her. I’m pretty sure he did it to make her happy, expecting he’d have to get rid of me pretty quickly. But everything worked out, and I spent a year and a half with him before he climbed on board the Capella. Ordinarily, he’d have used the Belle-Marie, but he was looking at a long flight and wanted to turn it into a vacation. So he’d gotten on the cruise ship and gone into oblivion. I’d wondered if his decision had something to do with maybe not trusting me on an extended mission. But Mom told me he’d liked the big cruise ships, and there’d been nothing unusual in his decision.
When he and the other passengers and crew were all declared dead a year later, Alex inherited the Belle-Marie, and it became officially the means of transport for Rainbow Enterprises.
I’d enjoyed my time with Gabe. This should not be read as a criticism of Alex in any way, but he was easier to talk to. More amiable. There was no subject that didn’t interest him. He loved to talk about history and politics and religion. He was passionate about everything but never in the sense that he’d get angry if you disagreed with him. In fact, he seemed to enjoy contrary opinions and was always willing to listen. Once or twice, I thought I even succeeded in changing his mind. He thought, or pretended to, that the human race would have been better off if everyone were kept just slightly inebriated. “People are much friendlier, much more empathic,” he told me, “when they’ve had a couple of light drinks. But not when they get much beyond that. And there’s the problem. You can’t control intake.”
There’d been a lot of girlfriends. He even took them on his archeological missions occasionally. At first I felt a little uncomfortable, alone in an interstellar with a guy who seemed to be a makeout artist, but he never got out of line. I was the pilot, and if he wanted a woman along on a trip, he brought one. My mom just smiled when I asked her about it. “Some things never change,” she said. “But you don’t have to worry about him.”
I’d have trusted him with my life. I had trouble once with a technician on the Dellacondan space station. He was a big guy, and I can’t say he really intended anything serious, but he mouthed off about my looking “delicious.” He was with a couple of oversized friends. All of them were considerably bigger than Gabe, but he stepped in immediately and made it clear that he’d do whatever it took.
I slept late into that final morning before the Capella’s expected arrival time.
I couldn’t help thinking about him as I showered and had breakfast and took my seat in the passenger cabin. I remembered his disappointment on the return flight from a mission to the City on the Crag. I don’t recall any longer precisely what it was he’d been looking for, but it’d had something to do with a two-thousand-year-old civilization that had collapsed with no apparent explanation. Whatever he’d been looking for specifically, he hadn’t found it. There were five members of his archeological team coming back with him, all annoyed, all convinced they’d missed something. But in the end, the gloom had gone away, and it had turned into a party. Sometimes, Alex partied, but it always carried with it a sense of dutiful behavior. Alex did social stuff because whatever he wanted to accomplish required it. Gabe loved having a good time. It was hard to believe that, if we could get him off the Capella, Gabe would be only a few days older than the last time I’d seen him, eleven years before. I was sitting there thinking what a crazy universe we live in but how we wouldn’t be able to get around much if time and space weren’t so counterintuitive. It was hard to understand how the structure of the universe could come about naturally. Why wasn’t there just hydrogen drifting around? It was a question physicists had struggled to answer since Isaac Newton’s time. There were theories, of course. But they were always hidden in equations. There was never anything you could visualize.
“Chase.” Belle’s voice. “Transmission coming from the Dauntless.”
“Okay.”
“Good afternoon, all. Be advised the Capella could now appear at any time.” It was John. “Those of you who are able, pick up passengers: After they’re on board, they’ll probably be asking questions. Be honest with them. No point trying to hide the truth. We’d like to prevent their communicating with people on the Capella, but I don’t see any way to block that other than to ask them to refrain. I suggest you not let them know about the time differential unless specifically asked. Don’t lie about it, but try to avoid the issue.”
I remember thinking that, if we were successful, and the passengers and crew were actually rescued, that someone would make a movie of the experience. And I had a title: Waiting for the Capella.