Infinity Beach

9

The big push at the Institute was to lay out a strategy for exploiting interest in Beacon. Matt had already arranged interviews with the crew of the Trent. It was awkward because the hypercomm signals required time to make the round-trip. Journalists had, in effect, to submit their questions and come back the next day for the answers. So much for spontaneity, or for playing off a scientist’s response and letting it lead naturally to the next question.

Consequently nobody really wanted to talk to the Trent crew. No one from the media had accompanied the mission, because travel time was excessive and it just wasn’t perceived as that big a story. It was too far away. And nobody took celestials seriously anymore. The interest was not generated by the reason for the experiment, but by the fact that we had demonstrated we could trigger a nova.

Consequently, the Institute’s public information group decided to concentrate on that aspect of the story, and the benefits the human race might eventually derive from the capability. Unfortunately no one could think of any. Improvements in magnetic bottle design, maybe. We were getting better at antimatter containment. And maybe gravity deflection systems, which allowed electronic devices to function in ever-more-concentrated gravity fields.

Cray Elliott, a public relations specialist who was a junior member of the team, nodded and wrote it all down. Kim showed her disquiet. “We are forever trying to sell science because somebody somewhere will get a better toothbrush,” she grumbled. “Whatever happened to sheer curiosity?”

“You have to be practical,” Cray said. He was bright, ebullient, cheerful. She really didn’t want to have to deal with cheerful.

Nevertheless it was all there if one wanted to look: long-range star travel was rendered more efficient, the cells that provided fuel to heating and lighting systems for entire cities would increase their capacity, and safety would be enhanced.

“But,” said Kim, “star travel is being cut back everywhere, we’ve already got more power than we can possibly use, and there hasn’t been any kind of accident, that I know of, involving fuel cells. Ever.” Other than Mount Hope, probably.

“It doesn’t matter,” Matt said. “Those are just details. Nobody notices details”

Maybe he was right. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d stretched things a bit. Two years before, the Institute had not challenged rumors that a breakthrough in antigravity was imminent, even though no such thing was in the works, and in fact every physicist that Kim knew of thought antigravity an impossibility. The story retained credence because people believed that if you could induce artificial gravity, you could surely nullify its effects. But it was a different matter altogether. One didn’t need to bend time and space, but only to establish magnetic fields, to create the condition that allowed people to walk about in starships.

Kim thought that the public relations division might even have started the rumor. When she’d mentioned it to Matt, he had piously denied everything. Piety was always how you knew Matt was lying.

Now she listened to his instructions and wondered why she didn’t just walk out. The money was good, the Institute was a decent cause, and the truth was she got a lot of satisfaction simply from the fact that she was so talented at what she did. But as long as she stayed here, the career she’d wanted, dreamed about, prepared for, would not happen.

She recalled the defensiveness with which she’d told Sheyel what she was doing. “It’s not the field I’d have chosen.”

And he’d been embarrassed for her. “One never knows how things will turn out.”

It was always like that. She was among those who never went to reunions.

Back in her office she found a communication from Shepard. “There’s a response to your message to St. Johns,” he said.

“Onscreen, please, Shep.”

“Yes, Kim. Please note I have adjusted all dates to Greenway Central Time.”

The entire mission was to have lasted fifteen months. Kim pressed Solly’s key.

“Hi, Kim.” His image brightened the screen. “How’d the meeting go?”

“As usual. Got a question for you.”

“Go ahead.”

“I should have asked this before: When the Hunter left St. Johns, would they have inspected the jump engines?”

“You mean the station?”

“Yes.”

“Only if asked. The engines should have been looked at by the Foundation’s own people before leaving Sky Harbor. If you’re asking me whether a breakdown is likely early in a voyage that was going way out into the deeps, I’d think not. But it happened. And to be honest, jump engines take a beating. It doesn’t take much of an oversight to cause a problem.”

“What happens if the engines die while they’re in hyperspace?”

“Bye-bye, baby,” he said. “Unless they can make repairs.”

“What about communications?”

“They won’t have any. The ship has to make the jump back into realspace first before they can talk to anybody.”

“That doesn’t show a great deal of foresight.”

He shrugged. “Realities of basic physics, m’dear.”

“Has it ever happened?”

“Don’t know. We’ve lost a ship from time to time.” He watched for a reaction, but she didn’t provide one. “Why? What have you got?”

“Not a thing,” she said.

She put the projected route on her screen, drawing a line between St. Johns and the 187 target star. Somewhere along that line, the engines had shut down and they’d come out of hyperspace, made temporary repairs, and returned to Greenway. So they’d gotten nowhere close to the Golden Pitcher. In fact, since it was approximately a forty-day flight back to Sky Harbor from the closest points along that line, they couldn’t have been much more than a week out of St. Johns when the problem developed.

A week.

That was still a long distance. A starship would cover about 270 light-years in a week.

She marked off the line at that point. Somewhere between the mark and St. Johns, the engines had brought them out of hyper.

“So what?” said Solly, who seemed to be reading her mind. “I mean, we’ve known all along they broke down. What difference does it make where it happened?”

“Let’s go back to square one,” she said.

“What’s square one?”

“‘We struck gold.’ Sheyel’s convinced there was a contact of some kind. Let’s assume he’s right. That the Hunter saw something out there. So the question becomes, where were they when it happened?”

“You tell me: Where were they?”

“Near a star.”

“How do we know that?” asked Solly.

“Has to be. If contact was made either with a ground entity or with an orbiter of some kind, we have ipso facto a star system. If it was made with a vessel, you’d have to ask yourself whether the vessel was in a star system or whether it was out in the void. If it was in the void, what could it have been doing out there?”

“Repairing its engines?” suggested Solly, seeing the point.

“Right. What are the odds against two ships suffering breakdowns and showing up at the same empty place? No, whatever happened, it had to be close to a star.”

She looked at the Hunter’s course. “I count seven stars within a reasonable range along their course line. If they ran into something, it would have been in the neighborhood of one of those seven.”

Solly shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “Suppose you’re right. Suppose there was an encounter of some kind. It was twenty-seven years ago. You think the celestials are still going to be hanging around out there?”

“It doesn’t have to have been another ship” she said. “They may have discovered a living world.”

He sat down on the edge of his desk and considered the possibility. “Yeah,” he said. “That could be.”

“There are only seven stars,” she said again. “Seven.”

“I hope you’re not telling me you’re going to ask for a mission.”

“No.”

“Good,” he said.

“Matt would think I’d gone over the edge.”

“That’s right. And I’m not sure he’d be far wrong. Look, Kim, this is all guesswork, and you don’t have anything more persuasive than a shoe and a crew member who calls home with a cryptic message that may not mean anything at all. That may have been misunderstood for that matter. By the way, did it occur to you that Yoshi might have been talking about the Golden Pitcher?”

“They didn’t get to the Golden Pitcher. They didn’t get anywhere close.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. “I mean, if they found, say, a tree out there, or a city, why not say that? What’s the big secret?”

She had no answer.

He looked at the time. “Got to go. I have some reports due.”

She could see he felt relieved. He’d expected her to go in and make a fool of herself trying to persuade Matt that the Institute should send out a survey team. “Solly,” she said, “when a ship’s logs get sent to the Archives, does anyone actually review them?”

“Under normal circumstances I can’t imagine why they would. But if you’re asking whether anyone has seen the Hunter’s logs from the Golden Pitcher flight, I’d say almost certainly.”

“Because of the disappearances.”

“Right. The police would have looked for any indication that something unusual had happened on the mission. The fact that there doesn’t seem to have been a follow-up, that no one searched Tripley’s place, seems to indicate they didn’t find anything.”

“They might have been bought off.”

“It’s possible.” A long silence drew out between them. “Kim,” he said, “Matt’s right. Why don’t you give this a rest?”

She’d have liked to. Kim had no appetite for challenging her boss, for taking on Tripley, for encouraging Solly to think she had become obsessed. But Emily was lost out there somewhere, and somehow it all seemed to be connected. “I can’t just walk away from it,” she said. “I want to know what happened. And I don’t care who gets offended, or who gets sued.”

Solly looked at her for a long minute, and nodded. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said.

“There is. How can we get a look at those logs?”

He took a deep breath. “We’d have to bribe somebody,” he said.

Bribe? “Isn’t there a way to do it without breaking the law?”

“None that I know of. So I think where we are is this: You need to decide whether you’re as serious as you say. If so—” He shrugged.

Kim had never knowingly violated the law. “We can’t do that,” she said.

“I didn’t think so.” Solly looked out of the screen at her, trying to suggest everything would be all right. “Gotta go,” he said.

The screen blanked. She sat staring at it, pushed back in her chair, activated it again and brought up the Autumn. Emily with those wistful eyes looked back at her.

Where are you?

She thought about the terrible days after her disappearance while they waited for news. Her parents had tried to protect her, to reassure her that Emily was coming home, that she’d taken a trip somewhere and they’d be hearing from her at any time. But Kim had seen the hollowness in their eyes, detected the strained voices. She’d known.

They must have assumed from the beginning that she would not be found alive. Murders were extremely rare in Equatoria, seldom exceeding more than a half dozen annually, in a population of six million. Homicides were usually domestic, but there was still the occasional maniac. The St. Luke killer, so named because of his penchant for leaving biblical verses pinned to the bodies of victims, had rampaged through the northwest during a two-year spree in which he’d murdered seven people. He had been the worst of modern times.

What must have surprised her folks was that the mystery was never solved. No body was ever found.

Set against that, what was a little bribery?

She punched in Solly’s code and he appeared onscreen, not looking as surprised as she’d expected.

“Can we arrange it?” she asked.

He looked at her disapprovingly. “Is my lovely associate running amok?”

“Yes,” she said. “If that’s what it takes. Can we do it?”

“I know somebody,” he said.

“How much will it cost?”

“I don’t know. Probably a couple of hundred. Let me make some calls, and I’ll get back to you.”

Kim was scheduled to have lunch with a representative of the Theosophical Society, a Brother Kendrick. This time, her objective was not to solicit contributions, but to reassure the Society that there would be no long-term deleterious effects from Beacon, thereby persuading them, she hoped, to remove their outspoken opposition to the Institute.

They ate at Kashmir’s, which specialized in cuisine from the Sebastian Island chain. Brother Kendrick expressed the Society’s concern that the series of novas would make an area of approximately eight million cubic light-years permanently uninhabitable.

Kim pointed out there were no human habitations anywhere close to what the technicians called the target box.

“What about nonhuman habitations?” he asked.

The question stopped her cold.

Brother Kendrick, like almost everyone else on Greenway, was of indeterminate age. But he was inclined to lecture rather than talk. His attitude embodied a barely concealed condescension, his eyes never left her, and it was clear he was speaking through a controlled anger. He wore a neatly trimmed black beard and his hair was cut long. The Theosophists were not among those who adhered to trends.

“There are none in the region,” she said. “We did an extensive survey to assure ourselves—”

“—How many star systems are in the affected area?”

“Several hundred,” she said.

“Several hundred.” He made the number sound as if it bordered on sacrilege. “And we examined the worlds in all these systems?”

“Not in all,” she admitted. “Most of the systems have multiple stars and can’t maintain planetary bodies in stable orbits. Others don’t have worlds in the biozone—”

“Dr. Brandywine.” He drew himself up until he seemed all beard, eyes, and backbone. “The truth is we still don’t know very much about the origin of life, so it would seem to me somewhat presumptuous to pretend we can state with any degree of certainty what the required conditions are. The only thing we can be sure of is that several hundred systems will receive an extensive radiation bath over the next century or so. We might destroy the very thing we say we’re looking for.”

The waiter appeared. Kim settled for a salad. She had little appetite for these confrontations. Her companion ordered a dish of steamed rice and cabana eel.

“Brother Kendrick,” she said, “we were aware of the danger from the beginning, and we worked extensively over fourteen years to assure ourselves that nothing would be harmed.”

His voice softened. “I know you would like to do the right thing, Dr. Brandywine. But it seems to us that we’re far too cavalier with these efforts.” The waiter brought calder wine and Kim offered, as a toast, the Theosophical Society. Brother Kendrick hesitated. “Under these circumstances, I think that might be inappropriate. Let us drink instead to your health, Dr. Brandywine.”

The wine tasted flat. “I can assure you we did everything within reason,” she insisted.

“Except stop the event.” Kendrick wore a white shirt with a gray ribbon tie and a gray jacket. His eyes were of the same hue, and there was in fact a general grayness about the man that suggested he’d given up on human nature and was now beyond being shocked. Kim felt the full weight of his moral judgment. “When they tested the first hydrogen bomb,” he said, “there was some concern that the explosion would set off a chain reaction. Blow up the entire planet. Scientists felt the chance of such an occurrence was slight, so they took it. Risked everything we ever were, everything we might ever become.” He examined his drink, and then downed it in a swallow. “Dr. Brandywine,” he said, “how is that action different from what the Institute has done?”

“There’s no one in the area,” she said again. “No one we could possibly harm.”

Bars of sunlight fell across his stern features. “Let us hope you are right.”

She was glad to get back to her office. When Matt asked her how the luncheon had gone, she complained that Brother Kendrick had been immovable. No amount of argument about the conditions that had to exist before organic molecules could appear had any effect on him. “He said that anything short of a physical search, everywhere, was inadequate.”

“I’m sorry,” said Matt. “But we had to make the effort.”

“You can have him next time.”

“I had him last time.” He tapped his desktop. “I thought maybe he’d be receptive to feminine charm.”

“You owe me,” said Kim.

He nodded. “I’ll treat for lunch tomorrow. By the way, Solly was trying to get hold of you.”

Solly was in a seminar at the moment, and she had to wait till the end of the afternoon to speak with him. His image appeared in her office as she was getting ready to go home. “No luck,” he said.

“With the Archives? I thought you knew somebody.”

“They’ve got a big integrity push now. Apparently caught one of their people diverting the Archives’s funds into her own account.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

She had dinner that evening on Calico Island with a young man she’d met through the Sea Knights. He was of the class of persons who neither pursued a career nor dedicated themselves to a life of unbridled leisure. A substantial number of people were taking that middle route now, staying away from anything that put routine demands on their time, and instead indulging in a range of academic or other interests. They spent their lives engaged in drama, or chess, or wallball. They toured the world’s beaches, if their resources permitted. Life was short, her date argued, although it was now longer than it had ever been. He had dedicated himself to locating the Marmora, a maglev brig lost somewhere in the middle northern latitudes on the far side of the world.

“Find the Marmora,” he said, “and my life will have counted for something.”

He sounded like Kile Tripley.

Like Emily, now that she thought of it.

Maybe like herself.