Odyssey

chapter 16

Certain types of decisions can be safely ignored. Some issues will go away with the passage of time, others will be so slow developing that the decision-makers will depart before the results of their neglect become manifest. Which brings us to the environment.

— Gregory MacAllister, “No Rain Again Tomorrow”

MacAllister told Wolfie to take over while he was gone on what he called his “grand tour.” His last official act before leaving was to write an editorial arguing that the Origins Project be shut down. Primarily he cited the cost. In addition, he noted, we are not going to get a better can opener from it. He tried to work in the danger that lay in the project, but no matter how he phrased things, the notion that a facility nineteen light-years away could be a hazard to people living in South Jersey just didn’t make the cut for serious commentary.

He’d made a few calls to physicists with whom he’d come in contact over the years, but they all took the same tack Ellen Backus had. There was just enough of an admission to raise the hair on the back of his neck. But nobody was willing to speak for the record. The idea was just too far-out.

So he’d let the editorial go without bringing in the Armageddon feature. If it turned out he was right, and everything blew up, he wouldn’t be able to take much satisfaction in it anyhow.

Several major stories were developing. A best-selling novel, it appeared, had been written by an AI. A group of fanatics claimed to have found an ark halfway up Ararat. MacAllister had been having a good time all his life at the expense of the pious; but if indeed there was only one universe, and all the parameters had been set exactly right to permit the birth and development of living things, then it was hard to see how else it could have happened save by deliberate intent. He wondered whether he would spend his twilight years in a monastery.

The president was caught in an influence scandal that was sapping his ability to govern, and the American Catholic Church was talking about reuniting with the Vatican. Another cloning bill had surfaced. (The technology had gone worldwide, but was still banned in the North American Union.) Almost 75 percent of kids grew up missing at least one parent. Crime rates were down, but violent crime — murder, rape, and assault — was up sharply. It had been climbing for almost ten years. Why was that?

As the date for departure neared, he grew less enthusiastic about the project. For one thing, he’d discovered the pilot would be the overbearing Greek he’d had to deal with on Up Front. For another, he began to feel he’d been carried away by the emotion of the moment. He tried to persuade himself he’d enjoy the tour, would get to places he’d never see otherwise, but he was going to be sealed up alone with Valentina Whoever; Eric Samuels, who was an idiot; and a fifteen-year-old girl. He’d committed to it, so there was no getting out. But after this, he and Hutch were even.

Other than delivering a few snickers, the media had paid no immediate attention to the announcement that the Academy was undertaking a mission to look for moonriders. It was “simply an assessment of the situation,” according to the Academy’s press handout. “An effort to determine whether there’s a factual basis for reported sightings.” Magnificently noncommittal. The fact that he would be on board was leaked later, suggesting there was more to the story than the Academy was prepared to admit. As a result, a few barbs had come his way. The Hartford Courant considered itself surprised that any serious journalist would be party to a moonrider hunt. Moscow Forever wondered whether he’d “finally gone over the horizon.”

The deviousness left MacAllister feeling compromised. He’d complained to Hutch, who’d assured him everything would be fine, and advised that he “just ride it out.” “You’re bulletproof,” she’d added later, when the media began suspecting the government was keeping some sort of terrible secret and MacAllister was in on it.

He’d responded by issuing a statement that the media were right, that there was something MacAllister knew that the world was not yet ready to hear. “We’ve been analyzing moonrider activities,” he said. “It looks as if the aliens are every bit as dumb as we are.” He took to calling them UCMs. Unidentified Cruising Morons.

There was a popular fantasy series at the time, Quantum Street, which had a distinctive musical theme, and people began warbling it in his presence. The two women he was seeing socially couldn’t resist knowing smiles. And he even started getting requests for interviews on the subject, all of which he turned down.

MACALLISTER WAS PROUD of his reputation as a major-league crank. People who didn’t know him assumed he was the same way socially, cantankerous with friends, and generally hard to get along with. None of that was true. Susan Landry, who was the closest thing to a romantic interest in his life, was fond of describing him to friends as a pussycat. He knew Hutch thought him a soft touch.

The lesson to be gleaned from all this was that he needed to start behaving seriously like the crank whose image he so assiduously cultivated.

A small group of friends threw a party for him the night before departure. During the course of the evening, they smiled and drank to the moonriders and wished him luck. It was almost as if he were going on a one-way mission. He understood the implication: Make a flight like this and expect never to be taken seriously again. At least not as a journalist.

Susan assured him she’d love him no matter what.

One of his reporters gave him a complete bound Shakespeare and talked as if MacAllister was not coming back. Another observed how good it had been to work with him all these years, and that he would never forget him. The guy was actually close to tears.

When it was finally over — thank God — they stumbled out into an unseasonably chilly night, shaking his hand as they went. Geli Goldman gave him a wet kiss. Geli had tried once to get him into her bedroom. She was forty years younger than he was, just becoming an adult at the time, and it would have been unspeakable to take advantage of her. Especially in light of the fact she was a talented writer who would undoubtedly have recalled the incident in some future memoir. He kept reminding himself of that possibility. It was the linchpin of his virtue.

SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN, he took a last look around the apartment, went up to the roof, and climbed into a taxi. It was warm and muggy, with no stars. Occasional flashes of lightning played along the western horizon. But the ride was smooth and quick.

At Reagan he checked his bags, had breakfast, paged through the Post, and, just after six, boarded the shuttle.

The vehicle, which had a capacity for twenty-eight, was half-empty. Among the other passengers he saw two families, both with kids, obviously heading for a vacation. He checked to see whether one of the big cruise liners was scheduled out. But there was nothing currently in port. So they were probably just treating the kids to the space station. See what the world looks like from orbit. Well, in that way, at least, there was profit to be had. Nobody could look down at the planet, green and blue, with no borders in evidence and no sign of human habitation, and not get his perspective forever altered.

Twelve years earlier, MacAllister had walked the ground of Maleiva III, a world as large as the Earth, during the last few days before it plunged into the clouds of a gas giant. Aside from the fact that the experience had terrified him, his perception of planetary stability had changed radically. He’d returned home with a heightened awareness of how delicate the seemingly indestructible Earth really was. It had made him a dedicated Greenie. Now he had only contempt for people who thought the world was forever and it was all cyclical and human beings were too puny to cause any lasting damage.

An hour and a half after his departure from Reagan, the shuttle docked at the orbiter, and his harness released. MacAllister was off-world for the second time. He told himself to straighten up, that he’d enjoy the flight and catch up on his reading if nothing else. In fact he needed a break. This would be his first vacation in nearly nine years. (He prided himself on telling people he hated vacations.) But it would be good to get away from the routine for a while. He let the other passengers get off before he rose and headed casually for the exit.

As he emerged from the boarding tube, he was surprised to find Hutch waiting. As always, she looked good. Crisp white blouse, dark blue slacks. There was a teenage girl with her. That would be Amy. “Good to see you, Mac,” she said. “Hope you had a good flight.”

“Yes, indeed,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”

“Good. I suspect you’ll enjoy yourself. Amy, this is Mr. MacAllister.”

The girl was almost as tall as Hutch. She looked bright enough, but he could see a resemblance to her father. That was a problem since he didn’t like her father. Taylor’s politics were sensible; but he made too many speeches and clearly thought well of himself.

Despite the resemblance, she was pretty. She extended her hand, and bracelets jingled while she told him she’d read The Quotable MacAllister. “I enjoyed it,” she said. “You have a marvelous sense of humor.”

The book had been put together by a pair of maverick journalists. MacAllister hadn’t gotten a cent out of it. “Thank you, Amy,” he said. He was impressed. The girl obviously had a brain.

“You’ll be leaving in four hours,” Hutch said. “I’ve arranged to have your bags delivered directly to the Salvator. I hope you don’t mind.”

Hutch never seemed to change physically. But she’d become more subdued over the past two or three years. The devil-may-care attitude he remembered from the Deepsix rescue was gone. Maybe it was motherhood; more likely it was watching the decline of the Academy. He wished there were something he could do to ease that particular trauma.

They stopped at a place called All-Night Charlie’s for coffee. “They’ve been servicing the ship,” she said. “But it should be ready for boarding in an hour or so.”

“Wish you were coming?” he asked.

“Part of me does.” She glanced at Amy, who was hanging on the answer. “One day, when the kids are on their own, I’d like to take one of the ships out and go deep again.”

“‘When the kids are on their own.’ You have another one coming?”

“Yes,” she said. “A boy.”

“When’s it due?”

“September.” She looked radiant.

“Congratulations.”

Amy squeezed her hand. “When it happens,” she said, “I’d like to be your pilot.” Hutch smiled.

“You know,” said MacAllister, “you sound as if you don’t really expect it to happen. The flight. The deep one.”

Hutch considered it. “Tor’s not like you, Mac. He’s not much of an adventurer.” That was her little joke, but she didn’t crack a smile. “He’s been off-world just enough to know he prefers life in Virginia.”

“You don’t think he’d go?”

“He might. To keep me happy. But he wouldn’t enjoy himself. And that would pretty much take the pleasure out of it.”

The coffee came. They had a good view of the moon through one of the ports. MacAllister marveled at the mountains and craters. They were spectacularly bleak.

VALENTINA WAS WAITING on the ship, seated in the cramped cockpit they call the bridge. She was busy talking to the AI, raised a hand to say hello, but never really broke off the conversation. She’d apparently already met Amy, who had spent the night on the station. MacAllister backed away, mildly irritated, and retreated to a larger room just off the bridge. This was, Amy explained, the common room. “It’s where everybody hangs out,” she said.

Moments later, Valentina joined them. Her eyes fastened on MacAllister, and she broke into a smile that was almost mischievous. “Sorry,” she said, “I was in the middle of something. Hutch, the monitors are loaded and ready to go.”

“Okay.” Hutch was visibly amused at the interplay between the pilot and her passenger. “I guess you’re all set then.”

She nodded. “How’ve you been, Mr. MacAllister?”

“Good,” he said. “Done any more shows?”

The smile widened. “No. I’m not much of a debater.”

“On the contrary, you can be quite argumentative. By the way, since we’re going to be in pretty close quarters for a while, you might want to call me Gregory. Or Mac.”

“I think I prefer Mac.” She offered her hand. “I’m Valya.”

He shook it and turned to Hutch. “Is the mission purely hit-or-miss? Are we really just going out there and hoping for the best?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “All you’re doing is planting monitors. Think of it as time off. Read, relax, and enjoy yourself.”

“Okay.”

“For what it’s worth, there’s been another sighting along Orion’s Blue Tour, at 61 Cygni. It’s your first stop, so who knows? You might get lucky and come home with the story of the century.”

“I’m sure.”

“Valya says,” said Amy, “that even if we see some moonriders, we might not be fast enough to catch them.”

MacAllister smiled at her enthusiasm. In fact, it hadn’t occurred to him he might become part of a pursuit. “I assume,” he said, “if we were to see something, we’d try to talk to them.”

“If you can,” said Hutch.

“Well, we’ll see what happens.”

Someone else was coming on board.

“It’s getting close to time,” said Valya.

Eric Samuels strolled through the airlock. “Hello, all,” he said, with that phony cheerfulness he always exuded in public. “Are we ready to go hunting for moonriders?”

It was going to be a long trip.

THE SALVATOR WASN’T exactly the Evening Star. It was cramped, uncomfortable, everything squeezed together. Its carrying capacity was a pilot and seven passengers. The walls were paneled, there was a carpet, and pseudoleather furniture. MacAllister chose a compartment toward the forward part of the vehicle. He’d read somewhere that the farther you were from the power plant, the safer you were. The compartment would be big enough provided he didn’t try to stand up. It contained a basin, but other facilities were located in twin washrooms. Only a contortionist, he saw, would be able to manage the toilet.

Samuels took a compartment in the middle of the ship, and Amy picked one at the rear. Their luggage arrived. They hauled everything inside and got settled.

Hutch got up to go. Good luck, everybody. Happy hunting. “We’ll try to bring something back,” Valya said.

“It would be nice,” said Hutch. “You guys have everything you need?”

MacAllister knew it would turn out he’d forgotten something. He always did. But he ran a quick mental check of the essentials. Unsure what the ship’s library would hold, he’d brought a generous supply of novels in his notebook. “I’m all set,” he said.

So were the others. “I’ve talked with Union Ops,” said Valya. “We’ve got launch in twenty.”

“Then I’m out of here, folks. See you when you get back.” Hutch shook their hands, embraced Amy, pressed her lips to MacAllister’s cheek, and strode out through the main hatch.

Valya closed it behind her. “We’ll be accelerating during the first thirty minutes or so,” she said, “which means we’ll all be locked down. You guys have anything you need to do, this would be a good time.”

ROBOT RUNS LOOSE; TERRORIZES TASMANIA

2 Dead, 7 Injured after Rampage

IS THERE AN UPPER LIMIT TO INTELLIGENCE?

Study Suggests Few Meet Their Potential

Social Conditions Get in Way

Beliefs Block Mental Processes

Trick Is to Keep Open Mind, According to Experts

PATENT GRANTED TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“Bob White” Gets Groundbreaking Authorization

MIT Project Develops New Sensing System

Next: Are AIs Sentient? James Watson Parker: “They Have No Souls”

LONGEVITY BREAKTHROUGH IMMINENT?

Today’s Infants May Get Indefinite Life Span

World Council Debates “Talis” Research “Where Will We Put Everybody?”

MIDDLE EAST TURMOIL UNLIKELY TO END SOON

DODGERS TRADE FOR BAXTER

HURRICANE SEASON WILL START

EARLIER THIS YEAR, LAST LONGER

Storm Intensity Likely to Continue to Grow

Atmosphere Seeding Helps, “But Probably Too Little Too Late”

STOCKS MOVE TO RECORD HIGHS

LITERACY RATE IN NAU CONTINUES TO DROP

AI Might Write New War and Peace, But Will Anybody Read It?

BEEMER CLAIMS HARM FROM RELIGIOUS TEACHING

Anti-Christ Loose in North Carolina?

chapter 17

Intelligence is like pornography. I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Keeper of the Keys”

One of the things MacAllister disliked about the Salvator was that, unless you were on the bridge, you had no windows. On the Evening Star, the walls of the dining area had been transparent, and even his compartment had provided a view of the stars. The Salvator was oppressive. The outside world was limited to what you could see on a set of display screens. It wasn’t at all the same thing.

Hutch had explained to him once that windows, viewports in the vernacular, needed special reinforcement because they didn’t withstand air pressure well, and it was simply safer not to have them, to use monitors instead. Nevertheless, he didn’t like it very much. He wondered what the Orion tour ships were like.

They were seated in the common room. The ship was still accelerating away from Earth, preparing to make its jump into the foggy morass they called hyperspace. Amy couldn’t take her eyes off the displays, and he could hear Valya on the bridge talking to the AI again. MacAllister was trying to manage a conversation with Eric. But the guy’s enthusiasm for the flight was almost beyond bearing. “Something I’ve wanted to do all my life, Mac,” he said. “I can hardly believe I’m here.” And: “Look at that moon. Isn’t that incredible?” And: “A lot of people don’t like to admit it, but in the end this is the way we’ll define ourselves. Make the stars our own, or sit home.” He’d attempted a piercing look, in case MacAllister missed the implied criticism. The guy was as subtle as an avalanche.

Amy Taylor was also awed by the experience. But she was fifteen, so it was tolerable. She’d opened a book, Norma Rollins’s The Nearby Stars, but she was too absorbed in the receding Earth-moon system to pay much attention to it. She told MacAllister she knew about his exploits on Deepsix and asked him to describe the experience. That was the way she’d put it. Exploits. In fact all he’d done was try to stay alive for a few days while Hutch figured out a way to save all their asses.

Amy seemed to have done surprisingly well for herself, considering she was growing up under the care of a full-time politician. The mother had run off years before with the senator’s campaign manager, abandoning both her husband and Amy. That must have been hard to take, and he wondered whether her desire to follow in Hutch’s footsteps didn’t really mask a desire to get away from her life at home.

Eventually the acceleration eased off, and Valya came back to join them. She inquired whether everybody was feeling all right, then told them they’d be jumping in about six hours.

“We’re headed where first?” asked MacAllister. “Something-or-other Cygnus?”

“61 Cygni,” she said. “It’s eleven light-years out. Takes about a day to get there.” She was wearing a white jumpsuit. Her red hair, cut shorter than it had been in Tampa, looked more military.

The furniture wasn’t especially comfortable. MacAllister grumbled at the prospect of having to deal with it for the next few weeks. “How long have you been doing this?” he asked Valya. “Piloting Academy ships?”

“Almost fifteen years,” she said.

“You don’t get bored?”

“Never.”

He recalled Hutch’s talking about how tiresome it could get, how pilots often made the same flights back and forth. How it could go on for months. Or the long flights. The mission to Lookout had taken the better part of a year one way. He tried to imagine being cooped up inside these bulkheads until next January.

Amy must have read his expression. “I wouldn’t want that either,” she said. “But you can get pretty cooped up groundside, too.” She’d come aboard prepared to talk like a pilot. Groundside. Bulkheads. I’m going aft for a minute when she was talking about the washroom. The kid was right at home. But talk was cheap. MacAllister was prepared to give her a couple days before the idealism came crashing down. “If my father had his way,” she continued, “I’d be stuck the rest of my life in courtrooms and offices.”

“And on beaches and at parties,” said MacAllister. “You won’t find many of those out here.” As a rule, he didn’t approve of adolescents. They were rarely smart enough to understand the depths of their inexperience. To be aware they really didn’t know anything. The few he encountered invariably behaved as if their opinions were as valid as his. Amy was no exception. But there was a degree of shyness about the child and an intellectual openness that engaged his sympathy. She thought the world a friendly and well-lighted place, where people really cared about each other, and all the stories had happy endings.

“Mac,” she said, “I was surprised when I heard you were coming.”

“Why was that?”

“You don’t like the Academy.”

MacAllister tried to explain his position. It was hard to do with Eric sitting there casting disapproving glances his way and Valya rolling her eyes.

When he’d finished, she looked at him a long time. Finally, she said quietly, “It’s wrong, Mac. We went over the greenhouse thing in school. It’s not just a matter of money. Ms. Harkin says it’s people’s attitudes that have to change.”

“Ms. Harkin’s your teacher?”

“In Current Events, yes.”

“She’s right. But that doesn’t justify wasting money somewhere else.”

Amy’s eyes got very round. “It’s not a waste, Mac.”

Valya smiled. “As long as we have people like you, Amy, we’ll be okay.”

“They’ll never shut it down,” said Eric, his eyes locked on the receding moon. “They could no more do that than the Europeans could have turned their backs on America after Columbus.”

“Or we could have gone to the moon,” said MacAllister, “then forgotten how to do it.”

Eric was one of those people who would spend his life reaching for something better than he had because he wasn’t smart enough to realize what really mattered. MacAllister thought how much better the world would be if there were fewer people like Eric and more like himself. Pragmatists. People who kept open minds. Who were content to live their lives, enjoy the sunrise, make the moment count.

THEY HAD AN uneasy dinner. MacAllister understood he was the cause of that. Eric and Amy both wanted to talk about where they were going, how exciting it all was, but he loomed over the general enthusiasm like a dark cloud. He couldn’t help it. Couldn’t pretend to get excited because they were going somewhere to look at a star up close. You’ve seen one burning gasbag, you’ve seen them all. But he tried. While they dined on roast beef he made occasional comments about how he’d never been to 61 Cygni, or 63 Cygni, or whatever it was, and wasn’t that where the alien monument was? He knew damned well it was, but it sounded self-effacing. Even if he wasn’t a good enough actor to ask the question as if he really cared.

They finished dinner in a gloomy mood, while the other three united against him. No one said anything, and everybody was unfailingly polite, but there it was. He was odd man out. After years of playing the VIP everywhere he went, it was annoying to be excluded.

Twenty minutes after they’d cleared the dishes they belted down, the Hazeltines took over, and the Salvator adjusted course for 61 Cygni and slipped between the dimensions. MacAllister was aware of the brief change in lighting when the moment came. When the jump was complete, Amy and Eric congratulated each other.

Valya returned from the bridge, announced they were on their way, and proposed a toast. Poor Amy, who was underage, got grape juice. “Here’s to us,” Valya said.

WHEN HE’D BEEN on the Evening Star, the passengers had spent their time at parties scattered throughout six or seven decks. You could stand before the see-through bulkheads and look out at the void, or at the quiescent mists of hyperspace. But despite its proximity, the world outside had seemed far away. Distant. Something seen but not really experienced. You were inside a warm, comfortable cocoon composed of soft bunks, dining areas, game rooms, and dance floors.

It was different on the Salvator, where the vast outside could only be seen directly from the bridge, where it pressed against the hull. Where his heart beat slightly faster, and he could feel the empty light-years stretching away in all directions. It became even more unsettling after the jump, because hyperspace theoretically had no boundary, and no physical features of any kind except the mist.

It intrigued Amy. “What would we do,” she asked, “if lights appeared out there?”

Valya looked up at the screen. “If we see lights out there,” she said, “we’d clear out in a hurry.”

They laughed at the idea. Eric said the notion gave him a chill, and MacAllister, pretending to be buried in a manuscript, was inclined to agree.

Amy and Valya challenged each other to a role-playing game. Eric watched for a while, but finally declared it had been a long day and drifted off to his compartment. MacAllister tried to look interested. It had something to do with a quest in a medieval land. There were wizards and dragons and elves and magical artifacts that had gotten lost and other such nonsense. Had he been alone, MacAllister might have run the old Bogart vehicle Casablanca with himself as Rick. He’d done it at home any number of times and never grew tired. Play it, Sam.

Eventually, Valya also retired for the evening. Amy, left to herself, wandered over and asked what he was reading. It was Bleak Angel, by Wendy Moran. A classic from the previous century. Amy looked bored when she heard the title. Like most kids, she automatically ruled out anything older than she was. “It’s about things that get lost,” he said. “Things we care about.”

She nodded, smiled, excused herself, and headed for the bridge.

He wondered briefly if she could get into trouble up there, then dismissed the idea. Or tried to. She didn’t come back, and eventually he left Bleak Angel and brought up a proof copy of a first novel. The editor had sent it to him hoping he’d review it, or possibly find something kind to say about it. He paged through and quickly concluded the writer had talent but insufficient discipline. There were too many adjectives and adverbs. Plotting, characterization, conflict, everything worked, but you couldn’t get the guy to write a simple sentence.

When Amy came back, her eyes were shining. “I love being here,” she said.

IT FELT GOOD to climb into the bunk, turn out the lights, and slide down into the sheets. There was no sense whatever of movement. In the darkness, MacAllister could hear the murmur of power in the walls and the occasional whisper of a fan. Once, he heard bare feet in the corridor and, probably, the sound of a washroom door. He remembered nothing else before he awoke and looked at the time. It was almost seven o’clock.

He climbed into his robe and looked out into the corridor. The lights had come up, and the others were having breakfast.

Amy called out a hello, and he padded down to the common room. “Good morning,” he said.

Eric raised his orange juice, and Valya inquired whether he’d slept okay. “Sometimes the first night aboard can be difficult,” she said. Bill, the ship’s AI, asked what he’d like for breakfast.

He showered, dressed, and returned to a plate of pancakes and bacon.

AMY AND ERIC played a game that involved corporate empire building. Valya found things to do on the bridge. MacAllister went back to Bleak Angel for a while, but eventually put it down and joined her. She invited him to take the right-hand seat. “How’d you manage to get invited on Margie’s show?” he asked.

She smiled. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

“You can be a tough cookie.”

“I’d been on a couple of their science programs before. I guess the arrangement whereby you showed up was more or less a last-minute thing — ”

“It was — ”

“So they called the first person they could think of. And I thought, holy cats, I get to go up against Gregory MacAllister himself.”

“That’s odd,” he said.

“What is?”

“I had the impression you had no idea who I was.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

She looked amused. “I guess you caught me. I looked you up before I went down there.”

“Oh.”

“You have a major-league reputation. The Insider Report described you as ‘not the biggest curmudgeon of the age, but among the top five.’”

“I thought you held up your end of things pretty well.”

“You were actually far more polite than I’d expected you to be.”

“I’m sorry I was a disappointment.”

She laughed. “Mac,” she said, “I doubt you’re capable of disappointing anybody.”

He understood she was trying to reel him in, but that was okay. He couldn’t resist being pleased with the compliment. “We’ll be leaving monitors at each site,” she said. “Would you be interested in taking a look at them?”

He could hardly have cared less what the monitors looked like, but she seemed interested in showing them off. “Sure,” he said.

“Good.” She seemed almost surprised at his answer. Had she expected him to grumble and pass? She got up and led the way to the rear. “We have eight units altogether. Four of them are secured outside to the hull. The others are in cargo.” They went down the zero-gee tube to the lower deck.

He was disappointed to see they were simply black boxes. Big ones, big enough to pack an armchair inside. But there was no sign of an antenna or a telescope.

“Everything pops up once it’s been activated,” she said. “They have sensors and a scope. And a collector, so it’ll continue to draw power from the sun as long as it’s on-station. And it has a hypercomm system.” MacAllister understood that meant it was capable of sending and receiving FTL transmissions. “We’ll be leaving one close to the Origins Project. There’s no sun there, so they’ve added a dark-energy unit. That one cost three times what the others did.”

“Do we think the moonriders are likely to show up near Origins?”

“They’ve been seen in the area.”

The casings were covered with spindles, brackets, jacks, and coils. She pointed at a slot. “This is the reader, where it gets its instructions.” She produced a chip.

“Does it have a thruster? Can it move on its own?”

“You mean, if it sees a moonrider, can it take off and follow it?”

“Yes.”

“No. Once we put it in orbit, it’ll stay there. It’ll report to us and to Mission Operations. After that, I guess if there’s any chasing to be done, we’d do it.”

LATER HE FOUND himself with Eric while Valya read and Amy grabbed a nap. “I’ll admit to you,” Eric said, “I was a bit nervous about this flight.”

“Why’s that?”

“First time off-world. It’s kind of scary.” He flashed a nervous smile. “I’ll tell you the truth, Mac: I haven’t been sleeping well the last few nights.”

This was not a guy you’d want on board if things went wrong. “I’d never have known.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you here under orders, Eric?”

“No.”

“Then why —?”

He looked past MacAllister as if he could see something in the distance. “You’re not going to believe this, but I haven’t done much with my life.”

MacAllister fought hard not to smile. Oh, yes. It was hard to believe.

Eric walked over to the viewport and looked out. The navigation lights were off. There was no point running them in hyperspace. But the illumination from the bridge reflected against the mists. “I have a brother and a sister who envy me. They see me live doing the press conferences. So in their eyes, I’m famous. And they think I make big money. And I suppose, in a way they’re right. I’m doing a lot better than most of the people I grew up with. Better than I ever expected. But the truth is I haven’t really ever accomplished anything.”

“You seem to be doing pretty well. You’re the face of the Academy.”

“Mac, you’re a famous man. Everybody knows you. Everybody knows Hutch. She’s the big hero at the Academy. People are always asking me about her. What’s she like in person? Has it all gone to her head? They want to know whether they can meet her. I have a nephew who was heartbroken when Hutch got married.” His eyes came back to MacAllister. “You know what it’s like to work with somebody like that?”

“It can’t be that bad. She seems okay.”

“It’s bad, believe me. I mean, nothing against her. It isn’t her fault. But I’d like to be able to say I’ve done something, too. To know I’ve done something.”

“You’re not married, Eric, are you?”

“No. How’d you know?”

“Just a feeling.”

He looked momentarily wistful. “It shows, huh?”

“Not really.” MacAllister smiled. “And that’s why you’re coming? To try to do something more with your life?”

“That’s why. You know, you’re lucky. You were part of the Deepsix rescue — ”

“I was one of the people who needed rescuing — ”

“It doesn’t matter. You were there.” He sighed. “I wish I’d been there.”

“You wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

“Maybe not. But it would have been nice to be able to tell that story. Anyhow, now at least I’ll have something.”

MACALLISTER HAD PROMISED himself he would actually convert the flight into a vacation. Catch up on his reading, relax, watch some shows. And, of course, take in the sights. But by noon on the second day he was already thinking about future stories for The National. A new challenge to institutional marriage had risen: Men and women were getting involved in virtual affairs with avatars who represented their spouses at a younger age. Was it infidelity to spend a romantic evening with your wife as she had looked and behaved at twenty-two?

Then there was the Origins Project. Major breakthroughs coming. “Mac,” said Valya, “did you know it’s not fully operational yet?”

“It won’t be for years, apparently,” he said.

“I don’t know whether you actually want to stop at Origins or not. They’re not expecting us. We should probably just put our monitor over the side and keep going.”

“That might not be a bad idea. It’s nothing more than a giant physics lab.” He shook his head. “Never could stand physics.”

They’d caught Amy’s ear. “Valya,” she said, “Origins is the most exciting place on the flight. Let’s stop and take a look. Please.”

The space agencies have done what they can to sweep moonrider reports under the table. Various astrophysical phenomena have been advanced to explain the sightings. But lights moving in formation and throwing sharp turns do not lend themselves to credible natural explanations. Last week’s reports from the Serenity orbiter are especially startling, because the observers were not only ordinary travelers but also included a group of physicists.

If in fact there is even a reasonable possibility that we are being observed by alien intelligences, then the current notion that we should disband the interstellar program is both shortsighted and dangerous.

— The London Observer, Thursday, April 2

chapter 18

61 Cygni is a binary system located approximately eleven light-years from Earth. It is in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Both stars are visible in the terrestrial sky, but they are quite dim. They orbit each other at a range between 50 and 120 AUs. (The distance to Pluto is about 40 AUs.)

— The Star Register

As soon as the jump was complete, they all crowded onto the bridge to look out through the viewport. Nobody was happier than MacAllister to see the mists go away. The transdimensional fogscape reminded him that the real world was far stranger than anything humans had dreamed up, with its quantum effects, time running at different rates depending on whether you’re standing on the roof or in the basement, objects that aren’t there unless someone looks at them. Hamlet had been right.

It was good to see the stars again. And there was an orange-red sun. It looked far away. Or very small. It was difficult to know which. “That’s Cygni A,” said Valya. “It’s a main sequence dwarf. Weighs in at about seven-tenths solar mass, but it’s only about ten percent as bright as the sun.”

“Why?” asked Amy.

Valya passed the question to Bill who, surprisingly, didn’t know. “It just says here,” he said, “that it’s dimmer.”

“Where’s our sun?” asked Eric, who could barely restrain himself.

Valya glanced around the sky. “Can’t see it from this angle,” she said. She told Bill to put it on the display. “This is zero mag, and there’s Sol.” One of the stars momentarily brightened.

“That doesn’t look very bright either,” said Eric.

Amy was more interested in Cygni A. “It has six planets,” she said.

“Where’s the other star?” asked MacAllister, recalling that 61 Cygni was a binary.

Valya referred that question also to Bill, who did better this time. He highlighted Cygni B off to one side. It might have been nothing more than a bright star.

Amy obviously had been doing her homework. “They orbit around each other every 720 years.”

MacAllister simply stared. “The last time they were in their current positions respective to each other,” he said, “Columbus was poking around in the Americas.”

“That is correct,” said Bill, who seemed delighted to have passengers who cared about such things. “Cygni A, by the way,” he continued, “is a fairly old star. Considerably older than the sun.”

“Is there a green world in the system?” asked Eric. “In either system? I assume both suns have planets.”

“B has four,” said Amy. “But there’s no life anywhere.”

“Not in either system,” said Bill. “A is so cool that a planet would have to be right on top of it to have liquid water.”

“How close would that be?” asked MacAllister.

“Closer than Mercury is to the sun,” said Amy.

MacAllister loved listening to a know-it-all kid trying to outdo a know-it-all AI. He resisted saying anything, contenting himself with looking out at Cygni A. And at the firmament of stars surrounding it. “Where’s the monument?” he asked.

SITTING ON THEIR front porch in Baltimore, he and Jenny had contemplated how exhilarating it would be to do an interstellar tour. Jenny had talked of seeing the four stars at Capella. (Was that right, she’d asked? Was it four? Or five?) And she’d wanted to see a living world. The nearest was at 36 Ophiuchi. But she’d had something more dramatic in mind. She wanted Quraqua, where a civilization had once thrived. She’d talked about visiting the ruins. But there was no easy way to get there. The tour services didn’t exist then. Even now nobody went out that far.

Most of all she’d wanted to see the monuments, those magnificent works of art scattered through the Orion Arm ten thousand years ago by a race that had since gone out of existence, leaving only a few savage descendants who possessed no technology and had no memory of their great days.

The first monument had been found in the solar system, on Iapetus. It was a statue, a self-portrait of its creator. A lone female standing on that bleak moonscape, its eyes turned toward Saturn, which remained permanently fixed above a nearby ridge. It was, in fact, the discovery of the Iapetus statue at a time much like the present one, during which the space effort was losing momentum, that had led to the suspicion that somebody had FTL, that it was possible to build an interstellar drive.

He’d promised Jenny they would go to Iapetus. And they’d eventually visit two or three of the other monuments. (That was a time when there seemed no limit to what they could do together.) But the illness had struck shortly after, and they never got beyond Baltimore.

“The Cygni monument,” said Amy, apparently in answer to a question, “was discovered in 2195 by Shia Kanana.”

“It was a follow-up mission,” said Bill.

“The first mission missed it?” asked Eric.

“Passed right by it and never noticed.” Amy seemed delighted that adults could be such buffoons.

“Of course,” said Eric, “there was no Academy then.” MacAllister’s eyelids sagged. The guy was breathtakingly loyal. “The way they were operating in those days,” he continued, “everything was hit-or-miss. And the truth is, despite what they said, they were really only looking for two things: habitable worlds and aliens.”

“There’s something I never really understood,” said MacAllister.

“What? Habitable worlds? For settlement.”

“Right. I understand that. What I don’t understand is why? You know the damned places won’t be comfortable. What sort of idiot wants to live on a frontier? Would you, Amy?”

“Not really,” she said. “I just want to ride around out here.”

Eric smiled benignly. “There are a lot of people who’d like to get away from the cities,” he said. “Away from all the fuss at home.”

“Well, my God, Eric, move to the country.”

“You’re so narrow-minded, Mac. You know, eventually we’ll terraform a lot of these places, turn them into garden worlds.”

“That’s something else that could cost an arm and a leg. And it’s typical. We tried to terraform Quraqua, and all we did was destroy an archeological treasure house.”

“Mac, you’re a cynical cuss.”

“You can’t really deny that it’s true.” MacAllister sighed. “So where’s the monument?” he asked.

Bill responded: “The second planet. It’s just a large piece of ice and rock. There’s a moon, about a third the size of Luna. The monument’s in orbit around the moon.”

“The monuments were usually put in orbit,” said Amy.

Bill had the last word: “There are only four on the ground.”

TWO OF THE seventeen known monuments were images of their makers. Five others were depictions of creatures that might have been either biological or mythical. (One was known definitely to be mythical.) The rest were geometric designs.

The one at 61 Cygni fell into the latter category.

Valya was feeding images from the ship’s telescopes to the two displays mounted in the common room. One was centered on the sun; the other gave them a picture of the target world, Alpha II, and its moon. Alpha II constituted as sorry-looking a piece of real estate as MacAllister had ever seen. He knew there’d be no green areas. There were also no seas, no deserts, nothing but a gray-black mantle of what appeared to be solid rock. In some areas there’d been eruptions and lava flows. But the surface was, for the most part, smooth and featureless. No craters, no ridges, no mountains, no river valleys. It was as if the planet were simply one oversized boulder.

Its moon was a pale crescent, and lay at a considerable distance, half again as far as Luna was from Earth. It, too, seemed composed of the same featureless rock.

“They’ve seen moonriders out here?” asked Eric.

Valya nodded. “Three tour flights have reported them in the last month.”

“Where were they?” asked Amy. “Were they here? Near the monument?”

Valya needed a moment to consult her screen. “Yes,” she said. “This is the area.”

“Maybe,” Amy continued, “they were just sightseeing. I mean, they’ve been at all the places along the tour route, right?”

“It could also mean,” said MacAllister, “that they’re only seen close to the tour sights because that’s where the ships are. They could have an entire invasion fleet sitting over at the other star. What’s its name again?”

“Cygni B,” said Amy.

“Beta. Okay. There could be a fleet there, and we’d never know it because nobody ever goes there.”

Amy looked at him, not sure whether to laugh. “An invasion fleet? I’ve seen that in sims.”

MacAllister chuckled and did his best private eye impersonation. “Just kidding, Sweetheart. No, I don’t think we need to worry about invaders.”

“Why not, Mac?” she persisted. “Just for the sake of argument, how would we know? It’s possible.” He got the impression she would welcome an invasion.

“Sure it’s possible, Amy. Anything’s possible. But ask yourself why anybody would bother.”

“How do you mean?”

“We don’t have anything that anybody would want.”

“How about real estate?” asked Eric.

MacAllister shrugged. “Plenty of places out here if anybody wants one. Truth is, I think the one thing we can be sure of is that the moonriders, whatever they are, do not pose a threat.” He looked over at Valya. “By the way, are we watching out for them? Just in case?”

“Bill’s doing a complete sweep in all directions. He’ll give us a yell if he sees something.”

THE CYGNI MONUMENT was the largest known. It reminded MacAllister, from a distance, of a temple, complete with Doric columns. It stood (if that was the correct term for an object in orbit) atop a platform, and was accessible on all sides by stone steps. It was polished and graceful, unmarked by fluting, or sculpture, or triglyphs. It did not look like a structure that had been assembled so much as one that had been poured. It possessed a power and majesty that was stunning.

It was believed to be about eleven thousand years old, making it slightly older than the self-portrait on Iapetus. It had picked up a couple of dents where it had been hit by pieces of debris.

Temples all seemed to be alike, regardless of the culture from which they sprang, regardless of the sweep of the roof, or the general design of molding rings and parapets. Whether a temple was from one of the various terrestrial eras, or whether it had been built by Noks, or by the long-gone inhabitants of Quraqua, or by the Monument-Makers themselves: They were always large and spacious with high overheads, everything oversized to ensure that the visitor understood at the deepest levels how insignificant and utterly inconsequential he was, except that the powers that ran the universe gave him meaning by allowing him into their sanctuary.

Everybody’s psychology is going to turn out to be the same.

The monument was thirty-one and a half meters wide at the entrance, 126 meters front to rear. A factor of four. The same proportion could be found throughout. The columns were four times as high as they were wide. The roof was four times as thick as the base. (Ratios of one kind or another were found in almost all the monuments.)

There was a contradistinction of good order in the presence of those steps, out where there was no gravitational pull. He looked beyond them into the great gulf, toward the stars, and it seemed as if they were awaiting a visitor. That they’d been placed for a specific purpose. He wondered if anyone had ever walked on them.

Some people read the general design of the monument as a statement of defiance against a hostile and chaotic universe. Others saw it as a symbol of harmony, forever absorbed in the dance of worlds around 61 Cygni, and permanently afloat in the moonlight.

MacAllister had sat in his Baltimore apartment and taken the virtual tour, had ridden his armchair onto the platform. But this was different.

The Salvator was making its approach. Valya got on the link. “Everybody belt down.”

MacAllister punched a button and the harness slid over his shoulders. He checked to make sure Amy was secure. Found her doing the same for him.

Braking rockets fired. He was pushed forward against the harness.

The monument was on both displays. He watched it grow larger. Watched it move into the sunlight.

“Beautiful,” said Amy.

MacAllister agreed. If the race that put it there had never done anything else, it was sufficient.

“Okay,” said Valya. “We’re in business.” She shut the engines down.

“Valya,” he asked, “any chance of getting out onto it? Of going inside?”

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s illegal.”

Nobody would ever know. But it was just as well. He hadn’t really meant it. But it seemed like the thing he was supposed to say. He’d have liked very much to climb those steps, to go into the temple. But the prospect of exiting the ship out here was a little scary. Still, it was nice to have everybody — especially Valya — think he would do it if he could.

“If you folks would like to come forward and look out the viewport, you might find it worthwhile.”

Amy led the way. “Oh, yes,” she said, squeezing Valya’s shoulder. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Her voice was up a few decibels.

The temple floated in the night sky, bright with reflected light. MacAllister had been impressed by the architecture at Rheims and Chartres and Notre Dame, but here was a true seat for a deity.

“It was carved from an asteroid,” said Amy.

The moon, desolate and airless, lay below. The nearby planet, Alpha II, was a narrow gleaming crescent near the horizon. Valya saw him looking in its direction. “From here,” he said, “it looks magnificient.”

“Where do we put the monitor?” asked Amy.

“Our instructions are to leave it right where we are now. In orbit around the moon.”

“That’s sacrilege,” said MacAllister.

She allowed herself to look shocked. “That has an odd sound coming from you, Mac.”

“Kidding aside,” he said, “this place should be left exactly as it is. Why don’t we just nail it to the monument?”

“This is where the sightings have been concentrated,” said Eric. “I think we should follow the plan.”

MacAllister ran his hand through his hair. “The sightings have been concentrated here because this is where the tours come.” Idiot.

“If we have aliens,” said Valya, “this is likely to be one of the places they’d want to visit. It’s the logical place to put the thing.”

“Put it somewhere else,” said MacAllister.

Eric was unhappy. “You’re asking her,” he said, “to put her job at risk. She can’t just disobey the director’s instructions.”

MacAllister waved all concerns away. “I’ll take responsibility for it.”

Valya turned an amused glance in his direction. “Okay,” she said. “But first I need to know where you fit in the chain of command, Mac.”

“Hutchins is a close friend.”

“Well, I’m sure that’ll cover things.”

Eric laughed. “I suggest we just follow the instructions.” He produced a cup of coffee and took a long sip. “I wonder if anyone’s ever thought about bringing this one home? Think how nice it would look in Jersey.”

MacAllister needed a moment to realize he was joking.

“Okay,” said Valya. “If everybody’s seen enough, let’s go do what we came for.”

VALYA CHANGED COURSE. Amy stayed up front so she could watch through the viewport, or maybe simply to be close to the pilot. It was hard to know which. MacAllister liked the child, but her enthusiasm was wearing on him. It was a pity, really. She believed that people were intrinsically good, and that most knew what they were doing. He wondered what she’d be like after another twenty years. It had been his experience that the worst cynics all started out as idealists.

After a few minutes, the sense of acceleration went away.

MacAllister couldn’t remember a time of innocence in his own life. He’d always known civilization for what it was: an illusion. There was never a day he didn’t understand that institutions were out primarily to take care of themselves, and that only individuals were ever worthy of trust. And damned few of those.

He closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep. Bill’s voice woke him. “Launch in two minutes,” he said.

He checked the time, was surprised to discover he’d been out more than an hour.

Eric made a crack about his sleeping through the day and added that he wished time machines were possible. “I’d love to have been able to come here when the Monument-Makers were putting that thing in place.”

“You’d probably have found,” MacAllister said, “they were a lot like us.”

“How do you mean?”

“Unsure of themselves.”

“How can you say that, Mac? Honestly? They had an advanced civilization. They had FTL, for God’s sake. You don’t get that from people who are unsure of themselves.”

“Of course not. They had an occasional genius to show the way. Just like us. But they were trying to make a mark here. What is this other than something to let us know they were here. Admire us, it says. Remember us.”

“One minute,” said Bill.

The monument was on one display; the other provided a close-up of one of the monitors mounted on the hull. Presumably the one scheduled for launch.

MacAllister looked beyond the monitor and the monument, half expecting to see moving lights in the sky. There were countless stars, and like everybody else he wanted to believe that somewhere out there civilization lived and prospered. Civilization as it should be. With the day-to-day necessities taken care of, and intelligent creatures sitting around discussing philosophy. Or attending ball games.

“Thirty seconds.”

Then Valya’s voice, from the bridge. “When I tell you, Amy, press this.”

MacAllister sat up straight so he could get a better look at the display.

“Now,” said Valya.

Good for you, Valentina. But I hope we stop short of having the kid pilot the ship.

The monitor detached itself and began to drift away.

“Now this one, Amy.”

And a masculine voice: “Salvator One fully functional.”

Moments later Amy came into the common room and looked sternly at MacAllister. “If she gets in trouble for this, Mac,” she said, “it’s your fault.”

“My fault? For what?”

Valya appeared behind her. “We did a compromise positioning. The monitor will be orbiting Alpha II instead of the moon.”

How about that? The woman’s got something going for her after all.

ERIC ENVIED VALENTINA. The mere fact that she was a pilot earned his respect. Amy was delighted to be helping her. Even MacAllister took her seriously. He, on the other hand, did public relations. It was one of those professions that people always made jokes about and instinctively distrusted. And why would they not? His job, after all, had nothing to do with truth; it emphasized instead an ability to put the best possible face on things. Presumably on mediocrity.

The truth about Eric, the reality that he kept hidden even from himself, was that he had never committed a courageous act in his life. He’d never needed to. Nobody had ever challenged him, other than in the ordinary give-and-take relations with the media. He’d grown up sheltered and protected. Was given the best education. Got his start through his father’s influence. And coasted. When he entered a room, no one noticed. When he spoke, people’s eyes glazed over. (This in spite of the fact that he handled the spoken word quite well. Had in fact mastered the techniques of persuasion.)

But it was he himself, the person, who commanded no respect.

He saw how MacAllister was treated when he came to the Academy, how people’s voices changed in his presence, how they stood straighter. Literally came to attention when he walked in. The same was true with the pilots. And with Hutchins. She’d been a bureaucrat for a couple of years now, one of the most contemptible professions, but people still remembered who she was. Eric, though, was another Asquith. But without the authority.

Though they never said anything to him, he sensed how Valya and MacAllister felt. He was just extra baggage. A friend of Hutch’s, to be taken care of. But of no real consequence on his own merit.

To date we have not found a world with a high-tech functioning society. We have however seen remnants of nine technological civilizations. At least one of these, the so-called Monument-Makers, achieved interstellar flight. There is evidence of one other such species, the creatures who helped evacuate Maleiva III when it fell into a brutal ice age several thousand years ago. But we don’t know where they came from, or where they went.

The overall picture for long-range survival by a civilization is, therefore, historically, not bright.

Our most recent evidence indicates that many societies experience an industrial revolution, followed by exponential technological development, followed by rapid growth, followed by a general collapse. None that we know of, other than the Monument-Makers, seem to have lasted more than three hundred years beyond the development of the computer.

This is not to say there is a cause and effect relationship between technology and extinction. But Colm Manchester, in his monumental Study of Civilization, points out that societies with limited technology tend to be more durable and far harder to destabilize.

It is now more than three and a half centuries since we started using computers. Let us hope the trend does not apply to us.

— Tokyo Daily, Saturday, April 4

RHINE: HELLFIRE SERMONS AFFLICT MANY

“Constitute Child Abuse”

STUDY: RELIGIOUS EDUCATION MAY CLOSE MIND

“Hell Invented by Dante”

chapter 19

There’s not much to be said for sightseeing. You go somewhere that has a waterfall. You have a beer, watch the water go over the edge, and move on. Tours are all the same. In the end, the only thing that matters is the beer.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Endgame”

The monument needed a name. Something other than the Cygni Temple, which was how it was commonly known. When it had first been discovered, decades before, religious organizations had pointed to it proudly as proof that even alien societies recognized the Creator. It might have been true, but the reality was that nobody had any idea what the structure had meant to the creatures who’d put it into its lonely orbit.

MacAllister had begun to realize that, even if he did not get close to the moonriders, there was decent potential on this flight for a good story. He put aside his notes on Dark Mirror and was thinking instead that he might, in visiting these various sites, record his own insights and reactions. It was easy to wax philosophical about places like the temple. So he began a journal.

Before leaving the system, they took pictures. Of the captain and passengers gathered on the bridge, of Amy with the monument behind her, of Eric studying the monument while taking notes. Valya transposed images, so they had shots of Eric leaning against one of the columns, and Amy standing at the foot of the steps, inches from infinity. Even MacAllister allowed her a degree of latitude, and she superimposed his features over the monument, as if he were the resident deity.

“You’re sending me a message,” he said.

They were alone in the common room. “Not at all.” She had a smile that could penetrate his own inner darkness, and she used it, showing him, yes, of course it reflects you, the real you, the guy who thinks he knows everything. But she softened it somehow.

At home, MacAllister was a constant target for attack. Usually it was just people hitting back after he’d delivered a well-deserved criticism. He routinely accepted the reactions as part of the job. Fleabites from persons of no consequence. But when he saw reproach in Valya’s eyes, and for reasons he did not understand, it hurt. He wanted to explain to her that he wished the Academy well, wished her well. That he wasn’t the jerk she so plainly thought he was.

“Did you volunteer for this?” he asked.

“In a manner of speaking. I could have refused.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Is there a reason I should have?”

“I thought you might have preferred not to have me aboard.”

“To be honest,” she said, “I was reluctant when Hutch first told me you were coming. Look, Mac, since you ask, you’re not exactly one of my favorite people. It’s not personal; it’s political. But it’s okay. We can make it work while we’re out here.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”

She shrugged. “I know. But you’re on the other side. It’s not easy to be friendly with the enemy.”

“I’m not an enemy, Valya.”

“Sure you are.” She lowered her voice. “You and Amy’s father. And four or five other nitwits on the committee. No. Let me finish. I understand about the seas and the duck problem and all the rest of it. But you’re behaving as if this is an either-or situation. If we close down, if the Academy goes away, we won’t get serious starflight up and running again probably during my lifetime.

“And I know what you’re going to say. This isn’t about one person. And to be honest I’m not sure about that. Maybe it is me. I like to be out here, and if the day comes they shut us down, shut everybody down, Orion and Kosmik and everybody else, then my life is over. And if you think the human race is doing just fine sitting on its front porch, as long as the evenings are cool, then I think you need to ask yourself what goddam good we’ll be to ourselves or anybody else.”

Had she just called him a nitwit? “Valya, I never said we should shut down the Academy.”

“Sure you did. Not verbatim, maybe. But you’re aiding and abetting. Look, I can understand you don’t want to support us. But you owe Hutchins a lot. If it weren’t for her, you wouldn’t be walking around. The least you could do is stay out of the fight. Just don’t say anything.”

“I can’t do that, Valya. I’m an editor. The National has an obligation to its readers.”

“Do your readers agree with you? About the Academy?”

“Some do.” He hesitated. “Most do. We’ve taken a reasonable position. Head off the imminent danger first. Then put money into starflight. Anything else would be irresponsible.”

She changed the subject. Talked about 36 Ophiuchi, and the Origins Project beyond.

TIME TO GO.

When the warning came to buckle up, MacAllister was ready. So was Amy, who’d lost interest in the monument and was doing a history assignment with Bill. But as they were pressed back into their seats, and the temple began to recede, she took a last look and smiled at MacAllister. “I’ll be back,” she said.

Acceleration continued several minutes, then went away. The green lights came on. It was okay to release the restraints and walk around. The lights were intended for those so feeble-minded they couldn’t tell when it was possible to stand up without getting thrown against the aft bulkhead.

Valya asked MacAllister to come up front.

“No problems, I hope,” he said as he slid into the right-hand seat.

“We’re fine, Mac.” She released her own harness and rotated her shoulders. “I wanted to ask a favor.”

“Sure,” he said. “What do you need?”

“While we’re out here, I’d like to take Amy to see the supernova.”

The statement puzzled him. “How do you take somebody to see a supernova?” He looked at the quiet sky. “Where is it?”

“I’m talking about the supernova of 2216.”

That was nineteen years ago. A monster event. It had brightened the night sky for days. “How are you going to do that? We have a time machine?”

“Yes,” she said. “We can pass the light, then turn around and look at it.”

Yes. He knew that. Just hadn’t stopped to think. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Mac, it was before Amy’s time. We all got to see it, but Amy wasn’t born yet. I think she’d enjoy it, and we don’t really have to go out of our way. It’ll cost a day or so, but that’s all.”

“I keep forgetting we can do this stuff.”

“So what do you say? Is it okay? It’s on the way to our next site.”

“Sure,” he said. “No moonriders associated with it?”

“No. It’s part of the Blue Tour, but no lights have been seen near it.”

MacAllister shifted his position. “Did you ask Eric?”

“He’s all for it.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. I’d enjoy seeing it again.”

THEY CAME BACK together and Valya put the question to Amy. “Would you like to take a ride into the past?”

“Into the past?” she said. “How do you mean?”

“Do you know about the supernova of 2216?”

“Sure.”

“Would you like to see it?”

The child, apparently brighter than MacAllister, lit up. “Would you really do that for me?”

“If you want.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

They made the jump into the mists that evening. When it was done, MacAllister announced he’d had enough excitement for one day and headed for his compartment. Amy was doing homework, and Eric had hunched down in front of his notebook, reading.

He was glad to hit the rack, to get by himself for a few hours. That was another problem with the Salvator. Everybody needed time alone, MacAllister more than most. But he knew he couldn’t take to hanging out in his compartment for long stretches without exciting comment and resentment. You go on a trip like this, you have to be willing to socialize. So it felt especially good when night came and the ship’s lights dimmed, as they did at ten P.M., and he could justify retreating.

He settled in with Ferguson’s latest, Breakout, a history of the first twenty years of interstellar flight. But it turned out to be dreary stuff. The most rousing piece of writing in the entire book was the title. The author had done substantial research, and he wanted the reader to be impressed. Consequently he loaded every page with irrelevant dialogue and descriptions of engine thrust, even to the point of listing the supply inventories for several early flights. Nobody went to the washroom without Ferguson’s recording it.

MacAllister made a few notes and decided it deserved to be reviewed. It was his duty to warn an unsuspecting public.

AT MIDAFTERNOON THEY transited out of the mist and glided back under the stars.

“We’re about six light-years beyond 61 Cygni,” said Valya, “moving in the general direction of the galactic core. Out here, it’s not easy to be precise about distances. Can’t be sure exactly where we are.”

“Which one is it?” asked Amy, looking at the stars on the displays. “The one that’s going to explode?”

“It’s not visible to the naked eye,” said Valya. She used a marker to indicate its location. “It’s right here. Thirteen hundred light-years the other side of Sol. Out toward the rim. They figure it exploded in A.D. 946.”

The light from the event reached Earth in 2216. “I was at Princeton,” said Eric.

MacAllister had been in the second year of his marriage. He was with the Sun then, and Jenny had been teaching American history at a local high school.

The supernova had happened on a warm Tuesday evening, just after sunset. MacAllister was clearing away the dishes from dinner. Jenny had been outside talking with neighbors, and suddenly she was at the kitchen door, urging him to come out. Look at this, Mac.

He’d gone outside, expecting to discover that a flight of ducks had landed or some such thing — Jenny was forever feeding stray animals, and they came in swarms — but he was surprised to see her and his next-door neighbors staring at the sky.

Directly overhead, a star had appeared.

The sky was still much too light for stars.

The “star” got brighter as they watched.

He wondered whether it might be a comet. But there’d been no announcement to that effect.

“What is it, Mac?” she asked.

He checked with the Sun office. Nothing was happening that they knew of.

And it kept getting brighter.

The sky darkened, and other stars appeared, but none burned with the sheer intensity of whatever it was hanging over Eastern Avenue. People were coming out of their houses and standing on their lawns and in the street.

Eventually, he went back inside and made more calls. Air Transport said it was not in the atmosphere. The Wilkins Observatory seemed surprised to hear there was an anomaly. They told him they’d get back to him, but never did. He was about to call the Deep Space Lab in Kensington when the city editor at the Sun contacted him: They think it’s a nova.

By then the entire neighborhood was outside looking up. It was the only time in his entire life he’d seen something like that. Even the passing of Halley’s Comet, a couple of years earlier, had played to only a few people.

Eventually, the experts would decide it was a supernova.

EVEN AMY GOT bored while they waited. Valya showed them where the sun was; pointed out 61 Cygni, where they had been yesterday; and 36 Ophiuchi, where they would be tomorrow. Both were dim, even at close range.

They watched The London Follies that evening, leaving Bill to keep an eye open for the supernova. It came in the middle of the second act.

“It’s beginning,” he said.

Amy led the charge out of the common room onto the bridge. Valya had turned the Salvator around so it was facing back toward Cygni, toward Earth, and they could see everything through the viewport.

Valya had Bill rerun the event from the beginning. A star appeared where none had been before, and within moments it became the brightest object in the sky.

“It’s a rare sight,” said Valya. “Whole generations live and die without seeing one of those.”

He went up front and took his turn at the viewport. It chilled him to realize how far from Baltimore he was at that moment. “It was like that for three nights,” he said.

She nodded. “Seventy-nine hours before it began to fade.”

“I seem to recall they sent a mission.”

“The Perth. That was the Long Mission.”

Eric nodded. “At that time, it was the farthest we’d been from home. And the record stood a lot of years.”

“Wasn’t there something about aliens?” asked MacAllister.

“There was a theory,” said Eric, “that the supernova would attract anyone who could see it and who had an FTL capability. Just as it had drawn the Perth. So when they got to the system, they watched for a few weeks. Before they started back, they inserted a couple of monitors to say hello in case anyone showed up.”

“But nobody ever did,” said MacAllister.

Valya grinned. “Give it time. It’s early yet.”

“It’s been thirteen hundred years since the event. I suspect if anybody intended to go, they’d have been there by now.”

“But it’s only nineteen years since we left the satellites. There might have been visitors long before we got there. And most of the galaxy hasn’t seen the light yet. Doesn’t even know about the event.”

AMY HAD HEARD her father describe the night it had happened, how he and her mother had been on a flight somewhere, and they’d thought a meteor had exploded overhead. He’d told her how the sky had filled with light, and they’d all held their breath until the pilot got on the comm system and told them there was nothing wrong with the aircraft, that they were looking at some sort of astronomical phenomenon. “He didn’t have a clue what it was, any more than we did,” her father had explained. She’d heard him tell the story a hundred times. But until tonight she hadn’t really understood.

Her father still believed that she was destined for a life like his. Maybe put in some years as a prosecutor somewhere. Eventually go into politics. Her fascination with the cosmos was a phase, a childish inclination that would go away with the onset of adulthood, of maturity. She loved him, and she wished he could see the world as she did. But she’d make him proud, in time.

She thought how, one day, ten light-years closer to the galactic center, she’d park another ship in front of the wave and show her passengers this same supernova. In a way, it suggested that the future Amy Taylor already existed.

Bill broke into her thoughts: “On average, the Milky Way experiences two supernovas per century.”

“Were there any living worlds out there?” she asked. “Where the star exploded?”

“We don’t know,” said Bill. “The system was so thoroughly wrecked it was impossible to be sure.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be like,” she said, “to be in a place like that.”

“Where the sun was going to explode?” MacAllister shook his head. “It would raise hell with real estate values.”

Eric had seen so many reports of sterile systems that it had never really occurred to him there might have been anyone out there.

“What about our sun?” MacAllister asked. “It’s stable, right?”

Valya smiled at him. Amy thought the pilot liked him, although she never said anything. It was obvious that Valentina wanted to tell him no, the sun could blow up at any time, and you want to sink the space program. She could never bring herself to forget MacAllister’s opposition to the Academy. You could see it in the attitude of the two toward each other. It was a pity. They’d have made an interesting couple, though they were both kind of old. “It’s fine,” Valya said. “Good for a few billion years yet.”

“How many?” asked Amy, trying to sound worried.

“A few billion.”

“That’s a relief,” she said, wondering if anyone there had heard the old joke. “For a minute I thought you said million.”

MacAllister laughed and went on: “Just for argument, if the sun were going to go supernova, we’d know about it, right? Well in advance?”

Valya passed the question to Bill. “As I understand it,” he said, “the sun’s not sufficiently massive to go supernova. And I don’t think it can go nova either. But I’m not sure.”

“In either case, it blows up?” said MacAllister.

“Yes. But the explosion is much less violent.”

“I can see,” said Amy, “where that would make a difference.”

“Have no fear,” Eric said. “The sun’s in good shape.”

I don’t know how to record this. I watched that star erupt, watched it become the brightest thing in the sky. And all I could think of was the first time I saw it, nineteen years ago, with Jenny. And I would have liked to have been able to see the Earth again, to see Baltimore on that night, just off Eastern Avenue. To see Jenny again. Alive and well.

— Sunday, April 5

chapter 20

36 Ophiuchi is a multiple star system. It’s located slightly less than twenty light-years from Earth, in the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent Tamer. The system is composed of three stars, all orange-red dwarfs. Ophiuchi A and B orbit each other in a highly irregular pattern, approaching within a range of 7 AUs, retreating to 170 AUs. A complete orbit requires 574 years. Ophiuchi C orbits the inner pair at an average range of about 5000 AUs. It is a variable star.

— The Star Register

“This is what everybody comes to see,” said Valya, as they approached a blue-green world. It was orbiting Ophiuchi A at a distance of seventy-five million kilometers, placing it squarely in the biozone.

“Terranova,” said Amy. The new Earth.

It was the second world on which life had been found, the first whose living creatures had been visible to the naked eye. That was eighty-five years ago. It was an unlikely system in which to find a planet with a stable orbit, let alone a living world. But there it was.

In an odd bit of serendipity, Terranova numbered among its occupants the largest known land animal. That was the unhappily named groper, which maybe should not qualify because there was still an ongoing argument whether it was animal or plant or a hybrid. It spent most of its life squatting over nutrient sources. It fed on a variety of slugs, bugs, and grasses. And periodically, when it had exhausted the output in one location, it climbed onto about two hundred legs and rumbled elsewhere. It used photosynthesis as a secondary energy source. Seen in motion, the creature resembled nothing so much as a giant green slug.

Also growing on Terranova were the largest known trees, the titans.

“Can we go down and take a look?” asked Amy.

“If you want.” Valya glanced toward MacAllister and Eric to see if anyone wanted to join them. “It wouldn’t take long.”

“Be careful,” said MacAllister, who remembered his flight on the lander at Maleiva III.

“You don’t want to come, Mac?”

“Thanks. I’ll guard the fort.”

“How about you, Eric?”

Eric looked uncertain. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Yes. Sure. Why not?”

“Good.” Valya looked back at Amy. “You understand nobody leaves the lander.”

“No, no, that’s fine,” said Amy. There was, of course, no danger that Eric would want to get out and go for a stroll.

“Just as a precaution,” said MacAllister, “what do I do if something goes wrong?”

Valya looked amused. “What could go wrong?”

“You and the lander could get grabbed by a pterodactyl.”

That got a laugh from Amy. “Mac,” the girl said, “there aren’t any pterodactyls here. You’re always fooling around.”

Valya raised her voice a notch: “Bill.”

“Yes, Valya.”

“If you lose contact with me, you will take instruction from Mac.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked serenely at MacAllister. “Eric already functions as a backup, in case something were to happen to me. But since he’ll be with us in the lander, you’re in charge. It’s not likely there’ll be a problem. If there is, and for some reason we can’t get back to the ship, and can’t communicate with you, tell Bill to relay the situation to Mission Ops. They’ll send help.”

“Okay.”

“We’re at a substantial range, so it would take a few hours before you’d get an answer. But all you’d have to do is sit tight.”

“All right.” MacAllister didn’t like the idea of their going down, but he didn’t want to be a spoiler. Let the girl get a look at the walking slug, if that was what she wanted. She might not get another chance.

He accompanied them to the launch bay, which also doubled as a cargo hold. Valya broke out e-suits — electronic pressure suits — and gave them a quick course in their use. “We won’t be using them,” she said, “but we never go into hostile country without them. Just in case.”

“Air’s not breathable?” asked MacAllister.

“It has a bit too much methane,” she said. She opened the hatch and watched her charges climb in. “We’ll be back for dinner, Mac.”

THE SHIP SEEMED bigger with everyone gone. MacAllister tried reading, tried to sleep, tried doing some work. Valya had left the lander’s link active so he could listen to the conversation on the ground. Bill aimed the ship’s telescopes at the surface and picked up visuals, which he put on-screen. MacAllister saw continents and oceans and an enormous inland sea. Terranova had ice caps and mountain ranges and island groups. It was an odd experience, looking at a place so Earthlike, but with unfamiliar landmasses. With one exception: A continent sprawled across the equator did vaguely resemble Australia.

He asked Bill for close-ups and saw something that looked like a water spider charging across the ocean surface. Watched a pair of jaws seize one of its hind legs and drag it under. Saw hordes of animals that looked big, although he couldn’t be sure. And long-necked creatures with wings that did in fact resemble pterodactyls. He wondered what he’d say to Hiram Taylor if his daughter got snatched by something, and he went home alone. That would be an ugly scene.

A lot of the animals had armor. A few predators were up on their hind feet. He watched a plant — at least it looked like a plant — seize a four-legged creature that might have been a zebra with a long snout.

While MacAllister was admiring his good sense in staying behind, the lander settled onto a beach. There were huge shells in the surf, and a lot of birds.

“Valya,” said Amy, “could we get out and look? Just for a minute? I’ll be careful.”

The beach was rimmed by hills and wetland. MacAllister wanted to tell her no, stay where you are, you shouldn’t even be on the ground.

Something that was almost a blur swept across the sand, angling toward them and then away. It was a blue-green streak, moving so quickly he couldn’t even tell whether it was airborne.

“No,” said Valya. “Stay put.”

He asked Bill if he could replay the sequence and freeze the image. Bill complied. The thing looked like a giant eight-legged mantis. Big jaws. Sharp mandibles. Scary eyes.

He opened a channel to the lander. “Valya,” he told her, “be careful. You’ve got monsters in the neighborhood.”

“I know, Mac,” she said. “I saw it.”

Yeah, he thought. Great place for a stroll.

THEY WERE BACK three hours later, flushed and excited.

“I’d have loved to be there when they found this place,” said Eric. “They went through almost a hundred worlds that were in biozones before they found Genesis.” Genesis, of course, was the breakthrough world, the place where life had finally been found. It had been strictly unicellular, but nevertheless there it was. Those who’d been arguing that life on Earth was unique, that it took a combination of exceedingly unlikely conditions to get it started, or even a divine decree, had begun to look prescient. Then a sample of water from Alpha Cephei III, quickly named Genesis, had revealed cellular life. “You know,” he said, “they were getting ready to shut the program down then, too. People said it cost too much. And what was the point?”

“It’s still a fair question,” said MacAllister.

Valya interceded to head off a debate. Amy told MacAllister she liked him, and she hoped he wouldn’t take offense, but this was a good example why they should have an amendment barring old people from becoming president. “Not that you’re old,” she added, embarrassed by the slip.

MacAllister began to realize that, of his three fellow passengers, Amy might be the most formidable. She was a believer, and she wasn’t going to be swayed by economic arguments. In the end, of course, it was all a matter of what you cared about.

That evening, Valya took them into a higher orbit and released the monitor. “Moonriders have been seen close to Terranova,” she said. “We’ll see whether they show up again.”

MacAllister watched the black box drift away. “We still don’t really know how life got started, do we?”

“I think they have a pretty good idea,” she said. “But I don’t believe anybody can prove anything yet. There’s a world out in Majoris somewhere, a proto-Earth, that they’re studying. They think they’ve got the beginning of the chemical process. But who knows?”

Eric asked Bill to put the titan trees on the display. “Biggest living things in existence,” he said.

“Known so far,” added Amy.

So the biggest land animal and the biggest tree were both located on the same world. “Anybody know why?” asked MacAllister.

Nobody did. Even Bill didn’t know whether there was a theory to account for it.

Amy was staring at the titans. Bill superimposed a sequoia. It was about half as tall. “You know what I don’t understand,” she said. “What’s the point of being a tree? I mean, root system and chlorophyll and all the rest of it, what’s the point of being alive if you’re a tree?”

Mouths of babes, thought MacAllister. “What’s next?” he asked.

“Origins,” said Valya.

STATE OF THE PLANET DIGEST (April 2235)

CONTENTS

Effort to Regenerate Polar Bears Under Way

3

Price of Drinking Water Spikes

7

NAU Has Lost 150,000 Sq Miles to Flooding

11

Changing Rain Patterns: Mosquitoes Are Doing Fine

14

Health Problems Rise with Temperature

19

Dry Wood: New Proposals to Head Off Forest Fires

25

Baseball Moving North: Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg Get Teams from South

28

Climatic Instability Confuses Migration Patterns

31

Still No Snow in Moscow: Seventh Straight Year

35

EVANGELICALS PREPARE FOR “HELLFIRE” TRIAL

Derby Police Chief Warns Demonstrators to Stay Away

chapter 21

The rationale for the Origins Project is that we will be able to push the creation event back a few more microseconds. To do this, we have spent vast sums, and will spend considerably more. We are talking here about blue-sky science. The search for knowledge that doesn’t necessarily do anyone any practical good but allows us to sit back and feel smug. I suppose there’s something to be said for that. On the other hand, a few billion would also make me feel pretty smug.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Science on the Couch”

Beyond 36 Ophiuchi lies a void, a vast dark gulf roughly sixteen light-years across. It is as empty of dust and particles as can be found within reasonable range of Earth. It is empty in the truest sense of the word, a place where the distance between occasional passing atoms is measured in hundreds of kilometers. It is the home of the Origins Project.

The facility housing the project was designed to be as stationary as possible. Billed as “an exploration of the universe before there was light,” it would, when completed, constitute by several orders of magnitude the largest engineering effort in history. It would be approximately six hundred thousand kilometers long. Positioned as it was in a starless gulf, it consisted of a tube constructed primarily of wire strands, connecting two terminals, the East and West Towers. Only the towers were readily visible. These were platforms, two enormous spheres, housing staff, equipment, supplies, and operating personnel.

Origins was, of course, a collider. A device for smashing particles together. The tube used a series of artificial gravity rings, installed at intervals of 150 kilometers, to drive the acceleration. The rings were dipoles. One side attracted, while the other side repelled. Forces were always equal and opposite at equal distances on either side of the ring. The effect, of course, fell off with distance.

It was by far the largest device of any kind to use artificial gravity technology, and the only accelerator above the class of training prototypes. Because it used shaped gravitational rather than electric or magnetic fields, it could accelerate anything: charged particles, neutral beams, pebbles, anything at all with mass.

Construction had begun fourteen years earlier. The project was still in its early stages. When the Salvator arrived in its neighborhood, it was barely ten thousand kilometers long. But the platforms were moving apart by ten kilometers daily, using spools of wire brought in by a fleet of automated government-owned haulers. An additional ring was installed every two weeks.

The labs containing the beam sources were nestled in the towers, centered in large spinnerets. The target area, located midway in the tube, was necessarily an ultraclean environment. Only spike-powered (antigravity) vehicles, specially scrubbed to prevent outgassing, were allowed near it. These vehicles had no maneuvering jets. Instead, they operated with clutched gyros or, in an emergency, with mass-driver reaction motors that launched trackable missiles the size of tennis balls. (It was considered a disgrace to get into a situation in which it was necessary to use the mass drivers. That was muddying the waters. Flights from the tower to scoop up expended missiles — the mud — were invariably accompanied by a wave of laughter.)

As with other legendary projects, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, the Golden Gate, the Apollo missions, the level of technology at the outset was not quite adequate to the task. We were learning as we went.

THEY RELEASED THEIR monitor millions of kilometers away, then Valya got clearance, locked in her course, fired the engines, then shut them down for the duration of the flight. Nobody was permitted to use engines anywhere in the vicinity of the accelerator. Hours later, when they drew sufficiently close to the facility, their approach and docking would be managed by Origins and its directed-gravity fields.

It was dark in the middle of the gulf. They were almost on top of the tower before they saw it. Lighting was sparse; there was little more than a gossamer glow. But as they drew near, they saw the outline of a massive sphere. A shaft emerged from it and extended into the night. MacAllister focused on the shaft. It appeared to be made of wire, glittering in a woven cross pattern. “The design,” Bill explained, “minimizes eddy currents.”

“Why?” asked Amy.

“Eddy currents would defocus a beam of charged particles.”

The response seemed to make sense to her.

A small ship, little more than an open cockpit with a cargo platform and thrusters, moved along the shaft, outward bound from the tower. Carrying construction materials, apparently.

MacAllister was able to read lettering on the sphere. He needed a minute as they passed to make out INTERNATIONAL SCIENCE AGENCY.

“This is the East Tower,” said Valya.

Amy was glued to the portal. “East of what?” she asked.

“Your imagination, kid,” said MacAllister.

“Funny,” she said. Then: “I wish we could see a bit better.”

“By the way,” said MacAllister, “this place costs several times what they’re paying to keep the Academy running.”

Valya sighed and let it go.

EVEN THOUGH ORIGINS was operated by the European Deep Space Commission, the Academy was involved in transporting supplies and personnel. Consequently, questions about the program had frequently surfaced during the press conferences, and Eric considered it his special field of expertise. Except he couldn’t answer the big question: What actually might they find out? Nobody knew. But it was asked regularly anyhow, and when it was Eric kicked it around as best he could.

It would be enormously helpful, when he got back, to be able to throw in comments like, “When I was out there last year, I asked precisely that question. What they had to say…”

This was something he should have done ages ago. Talked his way on board one of the mission flights. He’d been a staff assistant when Hutch had gone out with the Contact Society to investigate odd radio transmissions and they’d found that automated alien vessel. That had been his opportunity. He could have arranged to go along, but he’d been too placid. Too uninvolved. Too something.

He had since allowed friends and associates to believe that he had tried to get passage but that his boss denied permission. His boss probably would have denied permission. So it wasn’t really such a stretch.

But there was another reason it was good to be here. You didn’t really feel the enormity of the effort, what we were really doing, sitting in an office back in Arlington. When people talked about a structure that was currently ten thousand kilometers long, getting longer every day, it sounded big, but not that big.

When he looked out through Valya’s viewport and saw the thing, saw the sphere that formed what they called the East Tower, saw the gulf that was its home, and knew that the connecting tube between East and West started over there where the sphere was and extended into the night seemingly forever, he was able to grasp the magnitude of the project. No wonder it generated such passion. It wasn’t simply about elucidating the Big Bang. It was also a demonstration of what we could do.

AS FAR AS MacAllister was concerned, Origins was another oversized boondoggle. It had gotten its start as part of a global deal to get a trade package approved. Originally, it was to have been of modest proportions and reasonable cost. Then the concept had caught fire, and now they were looking at a massively expensive project. The Europeans, always a bit on the ethereal side, were delighted. So it had gone through with the usual high-level machinations and justifications delivered by NAU politicians who wouldn’t have known a quark from an aardvark. And there it was, a black hole for taxpayers, sitting out in the middle of nowhere, producing answers to questions nobody sensible would ever think to ask.

You weren’t permitted to run engines within several million kilometers of the facility. That had meant a low-velocity approach that went on for the better part of a day. As they closed in, Valya had everyone strap down. “They’re going to use gravity fields to bring us in,” Valya said. “It’s a bit unnerving if you haven’t done it before. Just try to relax.” Then, after a few moments: “Okay, here we go.”

The deck beneath him began to tilt. The rear of the ship started to tilt down. MacAllister gripped the arms of his chair.

Amy squealed with delight.

It felt as if the Salvator was turning over. The bridge moved steadily up until it was almost directly overhead.

“Don’t worry,” said Valya. “It’s a directed-gravity field. They’re slowing us down.”

THERE WAS A mild jar as they completed the docking maneuver. Then down was once again in the direction of the deck. “Okay, everybody,” said Valya. “They have quarters set aside for us. We’ll sleep in the tower and come back to the ship tomorrow.”

The outer hatch opened. A cheerful male voice said, “Hello. Welcome to Origins.”

He was middle-aged, with a high forehead and receding black hair, convivial green eyes, a thick mustache, and a casual manner. He wore a mud-colored sweater and a silver bracelet-style commlink. “This is a pleasant surprise,” he said, extending a hand to help Amy with her bag. “My name’s Lou Cassell. I’m on the director’s staff.”

Lou was amiable and sincere. The sort of individual who inevitably tried MacAllister’s patience. It was easy to picture him leading a church choir. He shook hands enthusiastically. Good to have you aboard. “Unfortunately, Dr. Stein will not be able to meet with you. He wanted me to convey his disappointment, but to ensure that you got everything you need.” He introduced them to a few other staff members, asked whether they needed anything, and escorted them to their quarters, which were, to MacAllister’s surprise, smaller and more spartan than those on the Salvator.

They took a few minutes to get organized. Then Lou suggested they might want something to eat.

It was early morning for Valya and her passengers, but the occupants of the tower, which ran on Greenwich Mean Time, were just settling in for lunch. They followed him into a large, crowded dining area. “How many people do you have here?” asked MacAllister.

Lou looked around, as if he needed to do a count. “I think we have seventy-seven on board at the moment,” he said. “And another ninety or so in the West Tower.” He passed the question to the AI, who confirmed the number at seventy-nine. “Plus yourselves, of course.”

Of course.

“You mentioned a director? Stein? Does he run the entire operation?”

“You mean the entire facility?”

“Yes.”

“More or less. He sets overall policy and whatnot. But the day-to-day operations in the West Tower are handled by his deputy.”

MacAllister was surprised there were so many people. “I understood Origins wouldn’t become operational for years.”

“Fully operational. We’ve been up and running for eighteen months. We don’t have anything like the capacity the system will have when it’s completely put together. But it’s still far and away the world’s best collider.

“It takes a lot of people to make this place go, Mac. It’s okay if I call you that? Good. About a third of them are engineering and construction types. Another third do technical support and administration. You know, supply, general maintenance, life support, and so on. The rest are scientific staff. The researchers. They rotate. They come on board in groups by project. And they compete for instrument time from the first day they get here.”

“What would they be doing on the instruments?” asked Amy, who couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.

MacAllister thought about her father trying to send her to law school and couldn’t suppress a smile.

“They’ll want one more run on the beam, or more time on the computers, or a little more bandwidth on the comm channels. We can’t possibly keep everybody happy.”

MacAllister was still thinking about DiLorenzo. “Is the place safe?” he asked.

“Absolutely. You couldn’t be in a safer place.”

“You’re not going to blow up this part of the galaxy?”

“I’ve heard those stories, too. I wouldn’t take them too seriously, Mac.” Lou allowed himself a polite smile. Didn’t want to offend anybody, but it was a dumb question.

Lou did a lot of introductions, including some to people whose names he had trouble remembering. Hardly any of them recognized MacAllister’s name.

He wasn’t used to people smiling, shaking hands, and turning away.

WHEN THEY’D FINISHED, Lou announced it was show-time, and led the way out into a corridor. “If you’ll allow me,” he said, “I’d like you to see what we’re about.”

They crossed into a dark room, and the lights came on.

It was a circular VR chamber. They took seats around the wall, and Lou brought up an image of a long narrow line, which stretched wire-thin from one side of the chamber to the other. “This is our basic structure as it is now constituted,” he said. “The East Terminal is on your right; the West to the left. Between, of course, is the tube.” He put up a silhouette of North America, and laid it over the line. Origins extended from Savannah, Georgia, to Los Angeles and out into the Pacific almost to the Hawaiian Islands.

“All one structure?” said Amy.

“All one. When it’s finished, it will be considerably larger.” The line lifted off the map. Hawaii and the Pacific and the NAU shrank and were seen to be on a curved surface. Then the Earth was dropping away. The line extended off-world, well past the moon.

And finally stopped.

“I know the wire’s thin,” said MacAllister, “but that’s still a lot of the stuff. Where’s it come from?”

“We mine it. Iron asteroids in the Ophiuchi system. We do everything over there, extract it, smelt it, whatever, put it on spools, and bring the spools here.”

“It’s enormous,” said Eric. “I don’t think I ever realized how big this place is. How big it will be.”

“In fact,” said Lou, “the collider, when it’s finished, will be too short.”

MacAllister stared at the line projecting out past the moon. “You’re not serious.”

“Oh, yes. Eventually we’ll have to build another one. When we have the resources.”

“And when you know more,” said MacAllister.

“That, too.”

The image rotated and gave them a close-up of the East Tower. “Accelerator beams are generated here,” he said. “And at the other end, of course.” The sphere opened up, and they were inside, looking at a round, polished disk. Lou launched into a standard lecture. Here was how the beam was aimed, here’s what the robots did, there’s how they kept even a few stray particles from getting into the tube.

MacAllister started getting bored. “Lou,” he said, breaking in, “what’s it for? What do you expect to learn?”

Lou inhaled. Looked simultaneously proud and cornered. “The easy answer,” he said, “is that we will be collecting accurate data that can’t be had any other way. The true reason, though, the one that gets to the heart of things, is that we don’t know what we might learn. Won’t know until we see it. It’s fair to say we’re looking for ultimate answers. Why is there a universe instead of nothing? Are there other universes? You might even say we’re looking for the right questions to ask.”

“Such as?”

He fumbled that one. “Nobody else would want to be quoted saying this, but there are a lot of people here who think the same way I do about this.” He paused. “It would be nice to know whether our existence has any meaning beyond the moment.”

That was a bit too spiritual for MacAllister. The taxpayers were spending enormous sums so Lou Cassel and his crowd could look for answers to questions that, by their nature, had no answers.

Lou finished finally, and the lights came on. “If you like,” he said, “we can walk over and take a look at the generators.”

But Valya had her link clasped to her ear. When she’d finished, MacAllister moved next to her. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Bill. The probe we left at Ophiuchi — ”

“Yes?”

“Has reported moonriders.”

Origins isn’t about physics. It’s not even mostly about physics, or anthropology, or art, or history. Or, God help us, engineering. It’s about bigger issues. It’s about faith as opposed to religion. Understanding rather than belief. The project will be a place where we are invited to ask any question. The only requirement will be a willingness to accept the answer. Even though we may not like it.

We can create the appearance of knowledge, the illusion of knowing how to grapple with a problem. Far too many educational systems have done exactly that. The result is generations of mouthpieces who can pour forth approved responses to programmed stimuli that contribute nothing to rational discussion. Dogma is for those who wish only to be comfortable. Catechisms are for cowards; commandments, for control freaks who have so little respect for their species that they are driven to appeal to a higher power to keep everyone in line.

If indeed we have a Maker, I suspect He is proudest of us when we ask the hard questions. And listen for the answers.

— Filippo Montreone, commenting on the proposal to build the hypercollider, 2193

chapter 22

We’re not enamored of truth. It is too often painful, discouraging, and it tends to undermine our self-image. We prefer comfort. Reassurance. Well-being. Good cheer. Naked optimism. Nobody wants to hear the facts when they clash with a happily imagined reality. It is, after all, a terrible thing to be the only person in town who can see what’s really happening. But I’ve gotten used to it.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Gone to Glory”

“Lou,” said Valya, “can we borrow one of your projectors?”

Lou was one of these people who seemed to enjoy bestowing favors. “Sure,” he said. “Did I hear something about moonriders?”

“At Ophiuchi.”

He lit up. “Are you serious?”

“Of course. There’s apparently something there.”

“Projectors.” He thought about it. “Follow me.” He led the way into a corridor, passed a few doors, and entered another VR chamber. “A few of our people have seen them.”

“So we heard.”

“You’ve got the feed?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I watch?”

“Not at all.” They grabbed seats while Valya tied into the system. “Go ahead, Bill,” she said. “Let’s see what we have.”

Bill adopted his professorial tone. “First images arrived three minutes ago,” he said. The room went dark, and the Ophiuchi sky appeared. A red star, a sensor image, was moving. Left to right, across the front of the chamber. It brightened as they watched.

Coming closer.

“It’s not responding to radio calls,” said Bill.

“Comet,” suggested MacAllister.

“It’s under power.”

“Is it one of ours?” asked Valya.

“Negative.”

MacAllister wasn’t buying it. “How do you know, Bill?” he asked.

“The electronic signature doesn’t match anything we have.” The object grew bigger. “Switching to the monitor’s onboard telescope.” The red glow went away, and they were looking at a black globe. “Mag two hundred,” said Bill.

The crosswise movement had stopped. But it continued to get larger. “It looks as if it’s coming right at us,” said Amy.

Valya nodded. “It’s closing on the monitor.”

“If that thing doesn’t belong to us,” demanded Lou, “what the hell is it?”

Question of the hour.

There had to be a rational explanation. “Can we try talking to it through the monitor?” MacAllister asked.

“The onboard AI’s been trying to say hello. Not getting an answer.”

“How about if we try it?” he persisted.

“Too much of a time lapse,” said Valya.

The object drifted in virtually nose to nose with the monitor. And stopped.

“Diameter of the globe,” said Bill, “is 61.7 meters. The monitor reports it is being probed.”

“I wish we could react to it in some way,” said Eric. “Wave a flag, do something.”

Amy was delighted. Overwhelmed. She raised both fists. “It’s scary.”

For a long time, no one else said anything. It felt almost as if the moonrider was in the chamber with them.

“So what do we do?” asked Eric. “Do we go back to Ophiuchi?”

Valya looked uncertain. “I doubt it would still be there when we showed up.”

“Still,” said Amy, “it’s why we’re out here. Shouldn’t we at least try?”

Eric nodded. Yes. Let’s go. Valya looked at Mac. “What do you think?”

“Let me ask a question first: If it’s still there when we arrive, would we be able to run it down?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “We don’t have a read on their acceleration capability. In any case, we don’t know that it would run from us.”

Or after us. There was a sobering thought. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find out what the damned thing is.”

Lou wished them good luck and said he was sorry to see them leave so soon. He reminded Valya that she was not permitted to start her engines until the facility gave her an all clear.

He escorted them back to the boarding area. Minutes later, while they strapped in for another gravity launch, the moonrider began to withdraw from the monitor. By the time they were ready to go, it had almost vanished.

The departure was more harrowing than the docking procedure had been, because the forward area went down, and the chair MacAllister was using faced the bridge, which rotated until it was straight down and he was hanging by the harness.

Gradually, the effect went away, and they were able to move around again. But it was a long, slow flight out to the point at which they received permission to ignite their engines.

VALYA INFORMED UNION Operations that the Salvator was on its way back to Ophiuchi. Five hours later she had a response from the watch officer: “Exercise caution. Keep us informed.”

The monitor passed along its analytical data, such as it was: Moonrider drive unit unknown. Light source unknown. Attitude thrusters detected. And sensing devices. Unintelligible symbols on the hull. “It appears to move by casting and manipulating gravitational fields.”

“That sounds a little bit like what we were doing,” said MacAllister.

Valya agreed. “Except we wouldn’t be able to do it from inside the ship. At least not if we wanted to pick up any velocity.”

Finally, they made their jump and began the long cruise through the fogbanks. Meantime the monitor stayed silent.

Previously, they had passed their time more or less as individuals. Eric enjoyed reading mysteries, and he’d already gone through three. Amy alternated between homework and games. MacAllister worked on his notes or read. Valya disappeared onto the bridge for long periods, during which they could hear the soft beat of Greek music.

There was an inclination now, perhaps in the presence of the moonrider, to draw together. They played a four-handed game of snatchem, talked about what they would do when they got home, broke for a meal, and decided to do a musical.

They let Amy make the call, and she chose Manhattan, the story of the fabled alcoholic song writer Jose Veblen, and his alternately inspirational and destructive romance with the singer Jeri Costikan. They apportioned the roles, with Eric playing Veblen and Valya as Jeri. Amy played Jeri’s best friend (and better self), while MacAllister portrayed Veblen’s long-suffering agent.

During the showstopper at the end of the first act, which featured Amy’s and Valya’s characters, accompanied by the cast at large, singing and dancing their way through “Y’ Gotta Let Go,” the monitor reported a second sighting at Ophiuchi.

Valya killed the show, and Bill provided a picture. “It’s moving across the monitor’s field of vision,” Bill said. “Range is eight hundred kilometers.”

“There’s nowhere to go in that system,” said Eric. “What’s the point? Are they just riding around?”

MacAllister laughed. “You’d think, if they were really intelligent aliens, they’d have something more important to do than hang around out there all day.”

“Apparently not,” said Valya. She looked at Amy. “What’s so funny?”

“Maybe they’re kids.”

“It’s braking,” said Bill.

MacAllister leaned forward and propped his chin on his hands. “Maybe it’s coming back to have another look at the monitor?”

“I don’t think so,” said Valya. “It’s not going in the right direction.”

Amy was completely oblivious to anything but the screen. She got in front of MacAllister and momentarily blocked his view. “There’s another one out there,” she said. “See? Beside it.”

There was indeed a second moving object. But it was star-like.

“That is odd,” said Bill. “If it’s another moonrider, the monitor hasn’t reported it as such.”

“It’s something else,” said Valya.

The monitor’s telescope belatedly focused on it.

“Asteroid,” said Amy.

Eric nodded. “No question about it.”

Bill appeared in the entry to the bridge. He reminded MacAllister of a physics professor, gray beard, rumpled jacket, distracted eyes. “The moonrider is shedding velocity,” he said.

Valya was seated beside MacAllister. She put a hand on his forearm. “It’s going to land on the thing.”

The monitor’s onboard AI apparently drew the same conclusion, and ratcheted up the magnification. The asteroid was misshapen, nondescript, doing a slow tumble. “It’s nickel-iron,” said Bill. At first the globe looked bigger than the rock, but as it moved closer it began to shrink until it was in fact minuscule in contrast. “The asteroid is approximately two kilometers in diameter.”

The moonrider settled like a dark insect onto the surface.

There was a series of ridges near one pole, and something had sliced a deep crevice through them. “What could it possibly want with that thing?” asked Amy.

Valya shook her head. Wait and see.

It snuggled into the crevice. And became imperceptible. Then it reddened, glowed, and faded. And again. Like a heartbeat. “This is where it would be helpful,” said MacAllister, “if the monitor had a drive unit of some sort.”

“Costs too much,” said Valya.

They waited for something to happen.

And waited.

The asteroid continued its slow tumble. The moonrider brightened and dimmed. The picture was becoming smaller, as the asteroid, with its cargo, moved farther from the monitor’s telescope.

MacAllister’s imagination ran wild. Maybe the asteroid was a base? The moonrider might be attached to a boarding tube.

“What would they be doing with a base in a godforsaken place like that?” said Eric.

MacAllister hadn’t realized he was thinking aloud.

“Maybe they use it for refueling,” Amy said. “Or recharging.” She turned to Valya. “Is that possible?”

“Anything’s possible,” she said. “We just don’t know enough yet.”

“Valya.” Bill sounded surprised. “The asteroid’s changing course.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s being diverted. Turning.”

“Turning where?” demanded MacAllister.

“Too soon to tell.”

Valya looked frustrated. “I wish we were a little closer.”

Eric stared at the images, at the constant red pulse inside the depression. At the sheer size of the asteroid. “It doesn’t look possible.” He turned toward Valya. “It’s too small to move something that big, isn’t it?”

“I would have thought so. But it looks as if it’s doing it.”

“Could we move it?” asked MacAllister.

“A little bit,” she said. “If we had a lot of time. And a way to lock on to it. But not like this.”

“Monitor reports the asteroid is accelerating.”

Valya looked puzzled. “Maybe it has a project of some sort. The wire weave at Origins was made from asteroids in this system.”

“Maybe that’s what it is,” said MacAllister. “That must be one of our ships.”

“Take my word for it, Mac. It isn’t — ”

“Uh-oh,” said Amy.

The moonrider had let go. It lifted from the surface. Began to move away from the rock.

“The moonrider is also accelerating,” said Bill.

“Bill,” said Valya, “will you be able to find it when we get there?”

“The moonrider? Or the asteroid?”

“The asteroid.”

“Sure,” he said. “If it doesn’t change course again.”

Amy looked entranced. The visitors, whoever they were, had actually shown up. Mac had not believed for a minute that anything like this could happen. It was all he could do not to cheer.

He watched the moonrider fade out among the stars. Listened to Bill’s report: “The asteroid remains in a solar orbit. It’s moving toward the sun, but I can’t see that it’s going anywhere in particular.”

“You’re sure?”

“Keep in mind this is a preliminary analysis. But yes, they’ve adjusted the orbit somewhat, but to what purpose I have no idea.”

THE ACTION APPEARED to be over for the night. MacAllister treated himself to a snack, went to bed, and slept peacefully. In the morning he woke with a fresh perspective. For decades, experts had been predicting that advanced aliens would be hard to understand. And they’d used the creators of the omega clouds as a case in point. The clouds had rolled through the galaxy, or at least the Orion Arm of it, causing mindless destruction with mathematical precision. Nobody knew why. Hutch had a harebrained theory about creating art, but MacAllister had drawn a different explanation. The aliens were game-playing. They sent out the clouds, sat back, and kept score. Whoever got the most explosions won.

Maybe the same sort of thing was happening with the moonriders. Or maybe they were conducting an exercise of some sort. Testing, for example, their capability to move asteroids around.

The hypothesis we would have serious problems communicating with alien civilizations was likely to prove true. But not necessarily because the aliens were subtle and sophisticated and simply products of a radically different culture. Rather it might be that the aliens, by any reasonable standard, were deranged. Dummies with big toys invented by somebody back home. Somebody who was too smart to get out and ride around between the stars himself. The idiots always rose to the top and made policy.

It explained a lot of things.

WHEN HE WANDERED into the common room, nothing had changed. There’d been no more moonriders, no visitations with other asteroids, no indication of anything out of the ordinary.

The asteroid had receded, and was now only a dim reflection at high mag.

The monitor, meantime, reported that the asteroid’s heading had been changed seventeen degrees laterally. And there’d been a very slight horizontal alteration. It was moving below the plane of its original orbit.

They also had a response from Hutch: “We won’t be able to get a ship out there for several days,” she said. “Take a look at the asteroid. There’s a possibility it’s a base. And I know how that sounds. Nevertheless, see what you can find out but approach with caution.”

A base. MacAllister had been ahead of the curve on that one.

Hutch continued: “Try to determine what they were doing. Again, keep your eyes open. Especially if the moonriders show up again. Do not assume they aren’t hostile. Avoid any close encounter.”

MacAllister laughed. “We’re the defense against a vanguard of alien invaders. If they actually are hostile, Valya, what sort of weapons have we to defend ourselves? Does this thing have any kind of gun? Or missile launcher?”

“We could throw stuff at them,” she said. “I think the assumption when the first interstellars left home, in the last century, was that we wouldn’t run into hostiles. Even after our experience with the clouds, nobody takes the possibility seriously. I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard the word used in an official directive.”

“You know,” Eric said, “Hutch tells us to maintain a safe distance. We’ve just watched that thing change the course of an asteroid that’s two kilometers long. You say we couldn’t do anything like that?”

“Not to that degree, and certainly not in that short a time.”

“Okay. That leads us to the next question.”

“‘What’s a safe distance?’” said Amy. She seemed restless. “I hate it that it takes so long to get there. I wouldn’t be surprised if, right after we arrived, we got a report of a sighting back at Origins.”

VALYA SPENT MUCH of the time teaching Amy how to play chess while MacAllister kibitzed. Eventually, Eric got into the chess game, and Valya sat down with MacAllister. At his urging, she talked about life in the Peloponnesus.

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “My folks had money. They sent me to the best schools. My father wanted me to be a physician, like him.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t like the sight of blood.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, really. And anyhow, I wasn’t interested. I was an only child, so I became something of a major disappointment to them.”

“I can’t believe that.”

Her eyes lit up. “That’s kind of you, Mac.”

“How’d you come by Valentina? That isn’t Greek, is it?”

“I was named for my grandmother. She was Russian.” Her eyes sparkled with the recollection.

“So you can relate to Amy.”

“Amy and law school? Oh, yes. I know the drill.”

“Your parents’ attitude must have changed when you became a pilot.”

“They pretended it had. But you know how it is. My father used to go on about how much good I might have done as a doctor. He doesn’t do that anymore. Just walks around looking as if he’s burdened with sorrow.” She glanced back toward the hatch. “How many siblings does Amy have?”

“I think she’s an only child, too.”

“Same situation. All the eggs in one basket.” She laughed. It was a sweet sound, but there was sadness in it. “I wish we could have brought her father along. He might have learned something about her. And about himself.”

“Do you get to see them much? Your parents?”

“Not as much as I should. Visits can be painful.” She looked at him. “How about you?”

“I see my mother once in a while. My father’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “He and I were never close. My folks used to pray for me all the time.”

“I don’t blame them.” The smile spread across her features.

“Amy gets to be a lawyer. You’re a doctor. My folks wanted me to be a preacher.”

“Really? What happened?”

He shrugged. “I got lucky.”

“You wandered pretty far from home.”

“Sometimes you have to. I can sympathize with Beemer.”

“Who?”

“Oh, he’s caught up in a court case in North Carolina. He objected to the church school he went to.”

“Is he the guy who bopped the preacher?”

“Yes. Nice to know that occasionally someone rebels.”

“How about your mother?”

“I shouldn’t sell her short. She encouraged me to read. She didn’t always like the books I brought home. But she looked the other way when she had to.”

“So you didn’t keep the faith.”

“No. I didn’t last long.”

She got involved in a short conversation with Bill. Something about fuel correlations, but MacAllister knew she was stalling while she decided how to react. “It can be a major loss, Mac,” she said, finally. “There are times when you need to be able to believe in a higher power, or you can’t make it through.”

“So far,” said MacAllister, “I’ve managed.”

“The day’ll come.”

“Maybe. But the notion that we need a higher power, that’s more a human failing than a reflection of reality. The universe pays no attention to what we need. Truth is what it is, and the inconveniences it might cause us don’t change anything.”

“How did it happen? When did you walk away? Do you remember?”

“Oh, yes. I was about seventeen. Trying to hang on, because I was still afraid of the penalty for getting things wrong. Lose your soul. That’s pretty serious stuff.”

“So what exactly happened?”

“I don’t know. Read too much Dostoevski maybe. Saw the aftereffects of one tidal wave too many. Saw too many kids die in the Carodyne epidemic.”

“They had the medications available, didn’t they?”

“Yes. But there were bureaucratic problems. Delays of all kinds. So people died by the tens of thousands.”

“Things like that happen,” she said.

“Then there was Milly.”

“Milly?”

“A kitten. A stray. Abandoned by her mother. We brought her into the house when I was a kid. But she had Brinkmann’s. A disease. Too far along so they euthanized her.”

“I can see that would be traumatic for a kid. How old were you?”

“Nine. And I remember thinking what was the point of having a deity looking after the planet if he doesn’t take care of kittens? He gets credit for the handful of survivors when a ship goes down; but nobody ever seems to notice that, for those who died, he didn’t carry his weight.”

She was silent for a time. “You must have been a severe disappointment to him. To your father.”

“He never made the adjustment. Never forgave me. He wasn’t big on forgiveness. Talked about it a lot but didn’t practice it.”

“How’s your mother now?”

“Still prays for me.”

Bill broke in: “Valya, I’m sorry to interrupt.”

“What is it, Bill?”

“The monitor’s gone silent.”

THEY GOT LUCKY. The Salvator emerged into normal space barely an hour away from the monitor. MacAllister’s first act was to rotate the view on the display to satisfy himself no moonriders were in the vicinity.

“Put the monitor on the scope,” Valya said, from the bridge.

It looked untouched.

“Everybody stay strapped down. Let’s go take a look.”

MacAllister had never lacked for courage to confront the assorted power mongers with whom he had to deal. He had, on one occasion, even faced down the president of the North American Union. But he didn’t like taking physical risks, and the knowledge that an unknown, and unpredictable, force was running around out there left him wondering whether they should take the hint and leave. The moonriders had probably disabled the monitor. And they might well be prepared to disable anyone who showed up in the area. But with two women present and apparently heedless of the risks, it was difficult to say anything.

Eric and Amy, on the other hand, were enjoying the experience. Amy, of course, wasn’t smart enough to recognize the danger. She had that same sense of indestructibility that everybody has at fifteen. Moreover, she wanted to be at the center of everything. One day, he knew, she would drive some poor guy crazy.

Eric’s problem was that he had seen too many action vids. He visualized himself as the free-swinging sim hero, Jack What’s-His-Name. And, of course, there was no point reminding him that, whatever the odds Jack faced, he always had the writers on his side.

Valya put them on course toward the monitor and began to accelerate. MacAllister sank back into his chair. “Do we see anything moving anywhere?” he asked.

“Nothing that’s not in a standard orbit, Mac. If we spot anything, I’ll let you know.”

Amy looked at him and grinned. “Glad you came, Mr. MacAllister?”

“Oh,” he said, “you bet, Amy. Wouldn’t have missed it.” He tried to deliver the line straight, but she picked something up and looked at him oddly.

“It’ll be okay,” she said. “We can run pretty fast if we have to.”

“No, no,” he said, as if personal safety were of no concern. “It’s not that.” He tried to think what it might be. “I was just anxious to get a look at the asteroid.”

NONE OF THE monitor’s status lamps worked. “General power failure, looks like,” said Valya.

“Could that happen naturally?” asked Eric, as they pulled alongside.

“Oh, sure.” Valya suited up and headed aft. Eric asked whether she wanted company.

“No,” she said. “Thanks anyhow. Nothing you can do.”

She disappeared below. Hatches opened and closed. They heard the whooshing sounds of decompression. The ship moved slightly and aligned itself more closely to the monitor, which floated just outside the cargo doors.

MacAllister remembered a favored theme in popular sims and cheap novels, in which a monster is brought aboard a ship inadvertently. Usually, a settlement had been wiped out, cause unknown. The rescue ship gathers evidence and starts home. And the thing creeps out of a canteen and, within twenty-four hours or so, is terrorizing the ship. While he thought about that, the cargo doors opened. Bill switched to zero gee, moved the Salvator slightly to starboard, and the instrument floated inside. Valya disconnected the monitor’s telescopes and sensors. He watched her work over the unit, poking and prodding and running tests.

“Nothing jumps out at me,” she said at last. “It has no power. But we pretty much knew that.” She began opening panels in the device.

“Can you tell why not?” asked Amy.

“Hang on a sec.”

“You think the moonriders did it?” Eric asked.

The future pilot shook her head. “I don’t think so. Wouldn’t the monitor have seen them coming?”

“Yes,” said MacAllister. “We would have had pictures.”

“It’s the calibrator.” She’d plugged a gauge into one of the slots. “It failed, we got a surge, and everything blew out.”

“Could the moonriders have done it?” persisted Eric.

“No. I’d say it’s just a routine breakdown.” Then she was talking to the monitor: “Let’s see now…. Should be one here somewhere…. There we go.” And to her passengers: “I’m going to install a replacement. It’ll only take a few minutes. Then we’ll relaunch and be on our way.”

Eric looked disappointed.

WHEN VALYA WAS finished, she ran more tests, reattached the monitor’s parts, put it back outside, and came back up to the common room. “All right,” she said, “let’s go take a look at the asteroid.”

Yes, thought MacAllister, there was the mystery. Why were the moonriders interested in a piece of iron? He tried to keep his imagination on a leash. But he found himself considering the possibility that it might contain an inner chamber, perhaps with a ghastly secret. Or maybe Amy was right, and the thing was a fuel depot. Or maybe it was a rest stop of some sort. On the other hand, if any of those explanations was valid, why adjust its orbit? “How long to catch it?” he asked Valya.

She finished climbing out of the e-suit harness and headed for the bridge. “A few hours.”

“And it’s still not going anywhere particular?”

“Not as far as I can see. It’s more or less inbound, toward the sun.”

MacAllister sat back and shook his head. How about that? I was right all the time. There are aliens, and they’re as incomprehensible as the folks in DC.

HE HADN’T APPRECIATED the size of the asteroid until the Salvator drew alongside. His perspective changed, and the long, battered wall outside the ship shifted and went underneath and became a rockscape. They were only a few meters above the surface, close enough that MacAllister could have reached down and touched the thing. Then the rockscape gave way, and they were looking into a gorge. “There’s the depression,” Valya said. Where the moonrider had gone.

She turned on the navigation lights and aimed them into the gorge. It was a long way down, maybe several hundred meters. “We’re not actually going down there, are we?” asked Eric.

“No need to,” she said. “We can see fine from here.”

MacAllister’s imagination was galloping. He half expected to find an airlock. Or, as Amy had suggested, fuel lines. But there was nothing unusual. Below them, the sides of the gorge drew gradually together. The moonrider must simply have wedged itself in, applied power, and proceeded to change the asteroid’s course. It just didn’t look possible. The asteroid was immense.

He looked across to the horizon. The asteroid was so small that all directions seemed sharply downhill.

Valya was still looking into the gorge. “How about that?”

“What do you see?” asked Eric.

“Not a thing.”

MacAllister nodded. “The dog in the night.”

Amy grinned. “It didn’t bark,” she said.

“Very good. I didn’t think kids today read Sherlock Holmes.”

“I saw the sim.”

“What are we talking about?” asked Eric.

“There aren’t any marks,” said Amy. “There should be marks if something wedged itself in here and shifted the asteroid onto a new course.”

“Ah,” said Eric. “You’re right. It does look pretty smooth out there.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Amy.

Valya pushed back her red hair with her fingertips. “Damned if I know. I don’t think there’s anything else to be done here. Unless we want to wait around a bit and see whether they come back.”

“Hide-and-seek,” said MacAllister. “We pull out, they show up. Maybe Amy’s right. Maybe they’re delinquents.”

Amy cleared her throat. Looked mock-offended. “I didn’t say that, Mac,” she said.

Valya sat with her head back, eyes closed. “Bill,” she said. “Where’s the asteroid headed?”

“Sunward, Valya.”

“We know that. Go beyond that. Several orbits if you have to.”

“Working.”

“It’s starting to look,” said Eric, “as if we’ll be going back with more questions than answers.”

“It will in time intersect with Terranova.”

Everyone stopped breathing. “When?”

“In seventeen years, five months. On its third orbit.”

“By ‘intersect,’” said MacAllister, “you mean collide?”

“That is correct, Gregory.”

Eric paled. “My God,” he said, “a rock this size — ”

Amy nodded. “Would cause mass extinctions.”

“Makes no sense,” said MacAllister. “There’s nothing down there except the wildlife. Why would anybody want to wipe them out?”

“Maybe they want to terraform the place,” said Amy.

Valya sat up straight. “Whatever they’re about, it looks as if we can assume they’re not friendly. Bill?”

“Yes, Valya?” “I want to talk to Union.”

The plan is to hang around Ophiuchi for another day or so, on the off chance the moonriders will come back. I’m not entirely sure that’s such a good idea since we have nothing with which to defend ourselves. But Valya suggested it, and of course Amy was all for it. Amy’s for everything. I’m pretty sure Eric had reservations, but he kept them to himself. I think it’s crazy.

Since we now know the moonriders are a potential threat, it’s the courageous thing to do. Right and noble and all that. Still, that doesn’t make it a good idea. The odd thing is I’d bet Valya, left to her own devices, would also not stick around. But nobody wants to look bad. Probably, if the Salvator were carrying four males, or four women, it would be sayonara, baby, we’re out of here.

— Friday, April 10

chapter 23

Solitude is only a good idea if you have the right people along to share it.

— Gregory MacAllister, “The World in the Sky”

Neither Eric nor Amy wanted to leave. “This is where the action is,” Amy said, after they’d watched a grim-faced Peter Arnold tell them to get well clear of 36 Ophiuchi. Put as much distance as you can between yourselves and the moonriders. Don’t talk to them. Don’t answer if they say hello. “How do we ever find out about them if we run?”

Valya put an arm around her shoulder. “No choice, glyka mou. We have to do what they tell us.”

When he was able to speak to MacAllister alone, Eric explained that the Academy was protecting Amy. “If she wasn’t on board,” he said, “nobody would really care about you and me.” He tried to make it into a joke, but MacAllister could see he believed it. The three adults were expendable.

That sort of perspective would never have occurred to MacAllister. And he readily dismissed it. Of course the Academy didn’t want to take any chances with Amy, but they also knew he was on board.

Valya kept her feelings to herself. She simply shrugged when the message ended and told them to buckle down. “Vega’s next,” she said. “We’ve backtracked a bit, so the jump will take longer than it would have from Origins.” A bit under two days, she added. Minutes later they were accelerating away from the asteroid.

Seventeen years.

How did these creatures think? Were they going to come back to watch the fireworks?

MacAllister disliked bullies. And people who were cruel to animals. Here were these malevolent sons of bitches, with all that technology, and they were like kids stomping on an anthill. Pathetic. He wondered whether they were related to the idiots who’d devised the omega clouds.

Whatever, he wasn’t unhappy to get away. The prospect of sitting around waiting for the moonriders to come back was not appealing. Who knew what they might be crazy enough to do? Still, with Valya on the scene, he tried to look dismayed that they were leaving. It was safe because he knew Valya, like a good captain, would listen seriously to the protests of her passengers but follow her instructions.

“What’s particularly annoying,” Eric said, “is that we came so close. If we’d stayed here the first time, we might have been able to wave them down. Say hello. Or tell them to go to hell. Something.”

Go to hell, MacAllister thought, would have made a great opening in a dialogue with another species. That would look inspirational in the schoolbooks. He immediately began thinking of other moving first lines. Stick it in your ear, you nitwits.

Get your sorry asses on the next train out of town.

Sorry, boys, but we don’t cotton to strangers here.

He sighed. Imagined himself as a sheriff in the long ago, standing quietly in the dusk with a six-gun on his hip, watching three horsemen slink away.

ERIC WAS GENUINELY frustrated. All his life he’d been watching other people come back on the Academy’s ships after scoring triumphs. We found an ancient city here. And a new type of bioform there. We rescued the Goompahs. We did this and we did that. And there’d always been a world of acclaim waiting. Eric had led the cheers. Now first contact with a technological species was, finally, within reach, the golden apple, the ultimate prize, and he was being pushed aside.

He thought about getting on the circuit to Hutch and demanding she change the directive. But he knew she would not. She wouldn’t risk the girl under any circumstances.

At this moment, they were scrambling at the Academy to staff another mission and get it out here. Somebody else, a bunch of overweight academics who had spent their lives in classrooms, would get the assignment, and they’d be the ones to say hello. And they’d come back afterward and everyone would shake their hands.

And once again, it would be left to Eric to ladle on the praise.

VEGA IS LOCATED in the Lyra constellation, twenty-five light-years from Earth. It’s a main sequence blue-white dwarf star, roughly three times Sol’s diameter, and almost sixty times as luminous. It’s much younger, only 350 million years old. But because of its size, and the rate at which it’s burning hydrogen, it will exhaust its supply in another 650 million years.

It has a pair of Jovians in distant orbits, both more remote than Pluto. There are several terrestrial worlds, including one in the biozone, which is seven times farther out than Sol’s, but it harbors no life.

Vega was a popular stop on the Blue Tour because of the presence of Romulus and Remus, a pair of terrestrials of almost identical dimensions, both with atmospheres, locked in a tight gravitational embrace. Technically, they, too, were in the biozone, but they barely qualified, out on the farther edge, where the winter never really went away.

Also lifeless, they were nevertheless beautiful worlds, only 160,000 kilometers apart, half the distance between Earth and the moon. Both had oceans and continents. Snow covered most of the land; the oceans were a concoction of ice and water, prevented by tidal action from freezing completely. The system had an ethereal, crystal quality, like a cosmic Christmas ornament.

The tour ships, in their souvenir shops, carried graphic displays, vids, and models of the system. It easily outsold everything else on the shelves.

Valya waited until she was close enough to get the full effect before putting the twin worlds on the displays. They were a compelling sight. Predictably, Amy squealed with delight, and MacAllister admitted she had a point.

“You know,” Eric said, “having Amy along has really added something to the trip.”

MacAllister smiled wearily. “Indeed it has.”

THEY WENT INTO orbit around Romulus. “The planets in this system,” Valya said, “are quite young. Like their sun. They’re still undergoing the formation process.”

“What does that actually entail?” asked MacAllister.

“Mostly, they get plunked by a lot of debris, Mac. There are no giants close in to clear out the rocks and pebbles, so it’ll go on for a long time.”

MacAllister saw one or two streaks in the atmosphere below.

“Anybody want to go down and look?” she asked.

That brought another burst of enthusiasm from Amy. Eric said yes, of course he would go.

“How about you, Mac?”

“You say there’s nothing alive down there?”

“Nope. Nothing at all. Not so much as a microbe.”

He wondered about earthquakes and volcanoes. The worlds were so close to each other, he suspected there were all kinds of disruptions. He was more cautious since his experience at Maleiva III. But he couldn’t back off again. “Okay,” he said. “Sure. Why not?”

Valya reviewed e-suit procedures, and they all put on the harnesses. They did a checkout routine, went below, and climbed into the lander.

Minutes later the launch doors rolled back and they looked out at the night sky. It was studded with stars and dominated by the two planets, both half in daylight. “You want to say the word, Mac?” she asked.

Amy nodded encouragement.

“I doubt I’m a very reliable pilot, Valya.”

“Bill will take care of the heavy lifting. Just tell him to go.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. Take us to the surface, Bill.”

“As you wish, Mac,” said the AI.

The vehicle lifted off and drifted gently through the doors. A million stars looked down on them. The center of the Milky Way lay off to their left, and the silver and blue planets floated, one below, one overhead. It was, for MacAllister, a good moment. He was glad he’d come.

THE LANDER SLIPPED into lower orbit and Remus dropped below the horizon. They crossed the terminator onto the night side, kept going for a long time, and finally eased into the atmosphere. Bill took them down through scattered clouds. The ground was dark. Mac couldn’t even tell whether they were over land until Valya switched on a display that relayed sensor images. Probably infrared. It was ocean, with scattered islands, and a storm to the south.

Valya took control from Bill and set down on one of the islands. She handed out oxygen tanks, and they ran another drill. How to breathe, for God’s sake. And be careful: Gravity is only 0.8.

MacAllister was seated in the rear, with Eric. He looked out across a stretch of sand. The surf was high, and the ocean moved gently beneath the starlight. The interior of the island was composed mostly of frozen mud. There were a few scattered hills.

“Okay,” Valya said, “activate the suit.”

MacAllister punched the big blue button on his belt and the Flickinger field formed around him. Air began to flow.

“Everybody okay?” Her voice was coming in over the commlink now.

They all checked in. Valya turned on a couple of the navigation lights so they’d be able to see. “Mac,” she said, “tell Bill to decompress the cabin.”

Feeling silly, but not wanting to make a fuss, he complied. “Bill,” he said, sounding as bored as he could, “decompress.”

He heard the hiss of air. Then the hatch opened and, with Amy in the lead, they climbed out and stood on the sand. It was hard as rock.

There was always something surreal in people wearing casual clothes standing around on the frozen surface of another world. He had gray slacks and a blue-and-gold Mariners hockey shirt with number seventeen and the name LEVINS on the back. The shirt had been a Christmas present from a cousin, intended as a joke because of his public stance that hockey was a game for idiots. Levins apparently played for the Mariners, who were one of the Canadian teams. He wasn’t sure which one. But it was comfortable and seemed to fit the mood of the evening’s jaunt.

Valya was in a Salvator jumpsuit. Eric wore workout clothes, with a top that read PROXMIRE ACCOUNTING. It was Amy who set the trend. She had a blue pullover, blue shorts, and loafers. The wind howled around her, and the temperature must have been thirty below. MacAllister felt cold just looking at her.

He increased the heat in his suit and wondered how long it would take to freeze if the electronics went down. The e-suits themselves were not visible, save for a brief shimmer around the wearer when the light hit them just right.

They started toward the water. The waves, probably energized by the mass and proximity of Remus, came pounding in. It was, in a bleak way, an extraordinarily beautiful place. This was his first visit to a sterile world. It was unsettling to look out at the ocean, which could have been the Atlantic, and know there was no shell along any of its beaches, no seaweed, not so much as a living cell anywhere.

The frozen sand crunched beneath his feet. They walked out into the surf, and MacAllister felt it break against his shins and try to suck him out. It was a pleasant sensation.

Valya pointed to a glow on the horizon, out over the water. “We timed it pretty well,” she said.

Eric went out until the waves were breaking past his hips. Remus was rising.

They stood for several minutes, talking about nothing in particular, watching the golden arc push out of the sea. It was magnificent.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” said Amy.

This was no small, barren moon rising above the ocean. It was a brilliant shimmering yellow world, with oceans and continents and rivers, surrounded by the soft haze of an atmosphere. “It looks different than it did from the ship,” Eric said.

Valya pushed out and stood beside him. “It’s all expectations. You’re on the ground, like back home, and you expect to see a moon. Instead, you get that.”

“You know,” said Amy, “my father thinks he’s seen this. He’s watched the sims. But you really have to be here.”

Eric nodded. The light caught his protective field, and it shimmered, providing a spectral effect. “Maybe,” he said, “you could bring him here eventually.”

“No. He wouldn’t want to get this far from Washington.” She shook her head. “I wonder how life on Earth might have been different if we’d had a moon like that, and if it had had cities that we could see.”

MacAllister made a mental note to keep an eye on the kid. If she didn’t become a pilot, he’d offer her a job with The National. Maybe —

“Look!” Eric was pointing in the opposite direction, back across the hills. A streak of light raced down the sky.

“More moonriders,” said Amy.

Valya put a hand on her shoulder as the object exploded into a shower of sparks. “I don’t think so, hryso mou. It’s just a meteor. They get a lot of them here.”

Government sources revealed today that an Academy ship experienced an encounter with a moonrider in the Ophiuchi system, about twenty light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, at a velocity of approximately 300,000 kilometers per second. The moonrider is reported to have diverted an asteroid onto a course that would bring it down on Terranova, the first living world found outside the solar system.* The intersection, however, is not expected to happen for almost two decades. Scientists close to the Academy say that a similar event on Earth would probably end civilization and would, in any case, cause mass extinctions. No one seems able to offer an explanation why the aliens would want to do this. Jasmine Allen, a prominent physicist attached to the Air and Space Museum, says that it sounds to her like pure vindictiveness. “If these things are really there,” she said, “and they actually did this, then I’d say we’ll want to stay as far from them as we can.”

— The Black Cat Network, Saturday, April 11

ARNSWORTH: BEEMER HAS REASON TO FEAR HELL

Announces Prayer Crusade on Assailant’s Behalf Pullman Helps Kick Off “Reclamation Effort”

chapter 24

Why is it that people want so desperately to shake hands with otherworldly beings? That people will even insist they have seen visitors from Spica hovering above their backyards? In other times it was ghosts and fairies and goblins, and voices in the night. Is the company of our own species so dull that we need to invent the Other? On the other hand, maybe that explains it.

— Gregory MacAllister, “The Galactic Coffee Shop”

The National consisted primarily of political and social commentary. It also carried book reviews, an occasional piece of short fiction, a science column, a column by a professional skeptic, and a few cartoons. At the present time, it was home to a family of correspondents, and a substantial number of periodic contributors. It bore the imprint of its editor. It didn’t trust government, didn’t trust people in authority generally, and carried as its maxim Ben Franklin’s warning: “…we have given you a republic — if you can keep it.”

The National’s causes were all over the place. It favored a health-care system for everybody on the planet. It championed efforts to strengthen the World Council. It wanted programs to see that nobody went hungry and everybody had a place to sleep. It also favored balanced budgets, reduction in the size of government, and the return of the death penalty. People across the political landscape insisted that there was no way to do all those things. MacAllister proudly responded that, once you make that decision, you’re necessarily right.

They did not come close to having the widest circulation in the field, but they liked to feel — and loudly proclaimed — that the people who made things happen, or those who might have but stalled around until the dam broke, all read The National. By and large they found a lot in it not to like. MacAllister and his legion routinely called into question the integrity of politicians, the good sense of academics, the single-mindedness of the religious establishment, and the taste of the general public.

Because The National limited itself to commentary, it wasn’t concerned with day-to-day topicality. Wolfie Esterhaus got the news about the moonriders at Ophiuchi from Mac bare minutes before it broke for the rest of the world. But he had an eyewitness account that had arrived just in time to plug into the upcoming issue. He’d want more than what the boss could give him. The real issue, aside from the nature of the moonriders themselves, was the reaction at high levels.

The question surfaced at several press conferences in the Americas and around the world. But everybody was brushing the story off. It sounded too much like previous sensationalist reports. Moonriders kidnap two people on remote Manitoba highway. Moonriders buzz private aircraft. Moonrider crashes into ocean.

Wolfie had a source at the White House. Roger Schubert was deputy assistant to the nation’s security advisor. It took two hours to get through.

“Wolfie, I was wondering when I’d hear from you.” Followed by a hearty laugh. Schubert was a little guy, with narrow shoulders and a pinched, nervous expression. But he sounded big. He had the voice of a professional wrestler. “You want to know about the moonriders?”

“Please. Do you guys have anything that hasn’t been made public?”

“Not a thing.”

“How is the president reacting?”

“The same way the rest of us are, Wolfie. He’s waiting for details. Right now it doesn’t sound like much.”

“You don’t think the asteroid thing sounds crazy?”

“That’s the whole point: It’s too crazy to believe. Let’s wait and see what the facts are. I’ll tell you this much: If there really are aliens out there, and if they’ve decided to drop a rock on a bunch of whales, or whatever they’ve got on Terranova, they’re going to have to deal with the Humane Society. And no, of course the president won’t like it. He’d probably condemn it. But that sort of thing is a long way from constituting a threat.”

Schubert was sitting on his desk, arms folded. “Look, Wolfie, I know it sounds spooky. But we don’t even know yet how accurate the projection is. Seventeen years is a long time. Maybe the numbers are wrong. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe they were just practicing landing procedures. But I can tell you this: If moonriders land on the White House lawn, the president will be ready to welcome them.”

WOLFIE WAS AN ideal number two for MacAllister. He bought into his boss’s philosophy, but was diplomatic and soft-spoken. Everybody liked him, and they saw him as a mollifying influence at The National, a voice of reason and restraint. Many questioned his motives in working for MacAllister, but they were glad for his presence on the editorial page. God knew what the magazine would have been like if it weren’t for him.

In fact Wolfie admired his editor. MacAllister wasn’t always right, but he was smart enough to know that. He was willing to change his mind when the evidence pointed in a different direction. That fact alone put MacAllister very nearly in a class by himself.

Wolfie had started life as a Coast Guard officer. He’d served eight years, had participated in any number of rescues of people not smart enough to stay out of the way of storms. A reporter from The Baltimore Sun had done a feature story on him. The story had been expanded into a book, on which Wolfie assisted. He discovered a talent for writing, did a series of stories on Coast Guard operations, and finally moved full-time into journalism, first with the Sun, and later with The Washington Post and DC After Dark, for which he still did occasional assignments.

But his heart and soul lay with The National. It was the publication the decision-makers read, and feared. You didn’t want to get caught in MacAllister’s sights.

Wolfie had just started blocking out the next issue when another transmission from the Salvator came in. The boss was in short sleeves, and he looked irritated. He had a few more details about the Ophiuchi sighting. A monitor had shut down at one point and had to be repaired. The Salvator had been ordered away from Ophiuchi. The original briefing provided by the Academy had left the impression the Salvator had simply moved on after inspecting the asteroid. But obviously the high-level folks at the Academy were taking things seriously.

He added something else: “Wolfie, we landed on the asteroid. It’s a mountain. I can’t imagine how anything as small as that moonrider looked could have moved that thing. If it did, their technology is way ahead of ours. Think about that, then consider the fact that they behave like kids who want to pull legs off grasshoppers. I don’t want to start a panic, so don’t quote me, but I’m not comfortable.”

Later that afternoon, the World Society for the Protection of Animals issued a statement, condemning the diversion of the asteroid by “whoever is responsible,” and demanding that the Academy be directed to intervene.

Wolfie called the Academy, identified himself, and asked to speak to Priscilla Hutchins. An AI told him, “Sorry, she’s not available.”

“I’m a friend of Gregory MacAllister,” he said. “I think she’d consent to talk to me.”

He was directed to wait. Seven or eight minutes later her voice came over the circuit. No picture. “What can I do for you, Mr. Esterhaus?” She sounded detached. Almost annoyed. Better things to do than talk to journalists.

“Ms. Hutchins, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m sure you’re busy at the moment.”

“Pretty much. What’s your question?”

Did he only get one? “How confident are you about the information that came out of Ophiuchi today?”

“How do you mean?”

“Are there aliens?”

“Mr. Esterhaus, Wolfgang, your guess is as good as mine. I’m sure the data passed to us by the Salvator is accurate. We haven’t drawn conclusions yet.”

“Ms. Hutchins, if the data are accurate, it seems clear that the aliens are deranged. Psychopathic. Is any other conclusion even possible?”

She thought about it. “I think we need to wait a bit before we’ll have a good read on what’s happening.”

“So the Academy thinks — ”

“Let’s give it a little time, Wolfgang.”

“All right, may I ask another question?”

“Sure.”

“What are you going to do about Terranova?”

“You mean are we going to divert the asteroid? Turn it off course?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“That’s not my call, Wolfgang. I don’t know what’s been decided.”

“You’re saying there’s a possibility we might just stand aside and let the thing go down?”

“I’m saying I haven’t received my instructions yet. You want to know more, you’ll have to go higher in the organization.”

WITHIN A FEW hours, the world’s attention had become focused on the object the media had begun calling the Terranova Rock. It was at the top of the news everywhere. Wolfie switched around and sampled several shows. The correspondents and their guests were alarmed. That was standard, of course. In an age of complete global media penetration, competition was fierce, and if you fell from a roof in Shanghai, people in Little Rock got the details. Shocking news from Shanghai, the anchors would proclaim. Life and death in the shadow of the Great Wall. Yes, it was not journalism’s finest hour. But, MacAllister often argued, it never had been. It was, however, the reason people appreciated Paris Watch and The Atlantic and The National. They were calm, analytical, serious.

Odd objects in the sky had been around for ages. Some enthusiasts claimed they’d been seen in biblical times, pointing to the first chapter of Ezechiel. There’d been other manifestations, but sightings became widespread during the Second World War when pilots in several air forces claimed to see objects they called foo fighters. In the mid twentieth century they became flying saucers, or UFOs. A hundred years later they were ghost lights. Now they were moonriders. The assumption always was that only delusional people encountered them, so it was easy enough to dismiss the reports. Anyone who claimed to have seen one could expect not to be taken seriously again during his or her lifetime.

When humans went to the stars, they continued to report strange objects. There were still occasional Earthbound sightings, for which no compelling evidence was ever brought forth. But when superluminals picked them up, it became a different story because there was usually a record. So the assumption became that the images reproduced by the AIs were gremlins in the software, manifestations of misaligned equations, or careless programming rather than actual objects. Or they might be reflections, or possibly even quantum fluctuations. But the Terranova Rock was changing all that. It was an intriguing story. The rock was there, and it was headed eventually for a living world.

…The rush to accept the notion that we have visitors, and that they constitute a threat to humanity, is not as premature as some would have us think. We should consider what our status will be if a technologically superior species arrives and begins making demands. Or worse yet, if they are overtly hostile. In the Terranova Incident, the evidence indicates a level of malice one would hope would have been bred out of beings with a high level of technological capability. If that is actually so, then what will our position be if they decide to amuse themselves at our expense as well? What defense have we? At the moment, no navy exists. An engagement would be a trifle one-sided. Let us hope either the World Council moves quickly to alleviate the risk, or that these neighbors, if they’re really there, don’t come this way.

— Jerusalem Post, Saturday, April 11

Accused Assailant Unrepentant in Interview

chapter 25

A surprising number of terrestrial worlds are in warm locations, with plenty of water, but no life. They are perceived as places where something went wrong. They are “sterile.” Maybe so. I tend to think of them as “clean.” If we’re at all honest with ourselves, we’ll recognize that life in fact is an infection. Cephei III has a pleasant climate and trillions of microscopic living things. Cephei IV also has a pleasant climate, and there’s nothing crawling around. Where would you rather spend your vacation?

— Gregory MacAllister, “On the Move”

When the robot flights went out from Earth during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they were looking for signs of life. Researchers, and indeed the general public, hoped something would be found on Mars. The imagined creatures of H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury were, of course, long off the table, but there was hope of finding fossilized bacteria. Or some other evidence that living things had once existed on the Red Planet.

But Mars was every bit as sterile as it had looked on July 20, 1976, when the Viking I lander set down in Chryse Planitia. It was dry, dusty, and a bitter disappointment to millions of people around the world who had hoped, and probably expected, to see at the very least a few shrubs.

The next best hope was Europa.

It had long been thought that life might be found in its ocean, which was sheltered beneath ice packs as much as twenty kilometers thick. There was liquid water, kept relatively warm by tidal effects.

An automated mission was dispatched during the third decade of the twenty-first century. It drilled through the ice but found no life or any indication it had ever existed.

There was talk for a while of life-seeding materials on comets, but that never provided a payoff either. So, as the century wore on, it became evident the solar system, save for Earth, was barren. Spectrographic analyses of planetary atmospheres in nearby star systems provided no evidence of an oxygen—carbon dioxide cycle. At that time, no one seriously believed humans would ever leave the solar system. So when, shortly after its eightieth anniversary, SETI shut down and was declared a failure, it looked as if the book had closed on the question of life elsewhere.

Then, on New Year’s Day 2079, a probe took pictures of a carved figure on the jagged surface of Saturn’s moon, Iapetus. At first, researchers thought it was, like the Martian face and the zigzag wall on Miranda, an illusion. But a manned mission brought the electrifying confirmation that someone had visited the Saturnian system. The figure was chilling, a nightmare creation of claws, surreal eyes, and muscular fluidity. Simultaneously humanoid and reptilian, it was a thing out of a horror show, and yet there was a kind of quiet placidity in its expression. Its age was established at about ten thousand years.

A set of prints in the dust suggested that the image was a self-portrait.

Its origin remained a mystery for the better part of a century. Until Ginny Hazeltine showed that FTL travel, despite the common wisdom, was possible. And went on to demonstrate how it could be done. Within two years, the first light-ships, as they were then called, headed out to Alpha Centauri and Lalande 8760 and Epsilon Eridani and Procyon. These voyages were magnificent achievements, but again the celebratory mood was dampened when word came back that no life had been found.

Most disappointing, at Lalande and Procyon, they saw terrestrial-style worlds, with broad water oceans and warm sunlight. And not so much as a blade of grass. For a time, the belief that humans had been the beneficiaries of a special creation made a comeback. The Iapetus figure became, in the minds of many, a hoax. Others thought it had been left by diabolical forces. And the idea that humans were alone in the universe gained credence.

The fifth expedition went to Alpha Cephei, where they found two terrestrial planets within the biozone. When seen from orbit, both looked sterile. And indeed, Cephei IV was without life. But its sister world was the gold card.

It was teeming with living creatures. They were single-celled, but they were there! Today, a half century later, scientists are still debating how it happens you can have two worlds in a biozone, with similar conditions on both. And life starts on one but not on the other.

When the Salvator arrived in that historic system, MacAllister was thinking about that first expedition and wondering precisely what drove the human effort to find life elsewhere. He had long ago dismissed this yearning for other life as infantile. His position was completely rational: We are better off if whatever neighbors there are stay at a distance. God had done things the right way, he’d once written, when He put such vast distances between technological civilizations. In both time and space.

“There it is,” said Valya, putting Alpha Cephei III on the display. It had the requisite big moon, which is apparently needed to produce tides and prevent a planetary wobble, plus two smaller ones. Oceans covered about 80 percent of the planet. It had a sixteen-degree tilt, and ice caps at both poles. The telescope zoomed in, and Mac saw rolling plains and rivers. But the place looked bleak. No forests. No grasslands. He could imagine the feelings of the crew in that first lightship.

What was its name?

“The Galileo,” said Amy, who was less impressed than MacAllister had expected. “It sure looks dead.” And with that she dismissed the discovery that, in its time, had been hailed as the greatest of all time. Well, kids are never much on history. Nor for that matter was anybody else. It had been MacAllister’s experience that most people think anything that happened before they were born didn’t count for a whole lot.

Happily, there was no sign of moonriders. It was curious how drastically MacAllister’s perspective had changed. When they’d started out, almost three weeks ago, he would have been delighted to see black globes in the sky. But not now. The critters were too unpredictable. He was anxious for it to be over. It meant he would go home with no answers, hardly a healthy attitude for a journalist. But at least he would go home.

Valya launched the monitor and, a few hours later, put them in orbit around Cephei III.

SHORTLY AFTER THE Galileo’s discovery, the World Space Authority had established a base on the western coastline of one of the continents. Biologists, delighted with the opportunity to study off-world life, had lined up for assignment, and Cephei III had continued to receive researchers ever since. The base was still there, expanded over the years into a major facility, home to teams of specialists who, MacAllister suspected, couldn’t find anything better to do with their time than freeload on government funds and university grants.

“Did you want to go down and say hello?” asked Valya. “I understand they do a tour.”

Amy announced that she’d rather stay with the ship and keep an eye open for moonriders. Eric agreed. MacAllister had no interest in single-celled creatures, nor in the people who studied them. “Have they ever reported anything out of the ordinary?” he asked.

“You mean biologically?”

“I mean moonriders.”

She checked her notebook. “A few times,” she said. “Most recent was last year. One of the researchers said she saw a formation pass overhead.”

“Is she still here?”

“Back in Rome.”

MacAllister had been looking at a history of sightings. There’d been none that couldn’t be explained as runaway imaginations or hoaxes until about twenty years ago, when they first started showing up on the superluminal routes.

The earliest deep-space sighting had occurred at Triassic II. A cargo ship, bringing supplies to a ground station, had spotted strange objects moving in formation through the clouds. The pictures, when relayed home, had created a sensation.

During those first few years, such sightings had been rare. But their frequency had begun to increase. In ’54 there’d been eleven, the most ever reported in a single year. They’d been distributed among the Blue Tour stars, as well as Sirius and Procyon. There were no sightings farther out, none from Betelgeuse or Achernar or Spica or Bellatrix. Of course those stars weren’t on any of the tours. So, were the moonriders only interested in the worlds close to Earth? Or were they everywhere?

THEY’D AGREED THAT each stop deserved some time. That if they just went in and unloaded the monitor and cleared out, they’d be neglecting an important aspect of their assignment: to conduct an active search. MacAllister wasn’t sure exactly when the mission changed, when it had gone from laying monitors and maybe if we got really lucky we’d see something, to prosecuting an aggressive hunt and dropping off the monitor more or less as a sideshow.

Valya reported their presence to the people at the ground station. When, at Amy’s urging, she asked whether they’d seen anything unusual in the skies, they laughed.

Meantime a transmission came in from Wolfie. He was going to expand the moonrider story in the coming issue, publishing not only MacAllister’s report, but covering the reaction at home as well. “People are getting stirred up,” he said. “I think it would be interesting to look at the political ramifications of this. The White House is trying to suggest everything’s business as usual, but I understand there are some behind-the-scenes concerns.” Did MacAllister concur? He included a bundle of news reports.

Hutchins had forwarded a digest of the media reaction, so he already knew the Terranova Rock had ignited a firestorm. Now the talking heads were wondering why the aliens would keep their presence secret if they did not have malicious intent. MacAllister dismissed that reasoning. The moonriders were certainly not keeping their presence secret. They were flying right out there for anyone to see. What he sensed on their part was contempt. They didn’t much care whether we saw them or not.

He told Wolfie to go ahead. “You’ve got it right,” he said. “The real story here isn’t the moonriders, but the overreaction of the media. Which means let’s show the public what they’re doing. Put it on the cover and play it for all it’s worth.”

He made the mistake of relaying the conversation to Amy and Eric. Eric looked doubtful. “It’s true,” MacAllister insisted. “The media are out of control. And it’s time somebody called them on it. All they want to do is sell advertising space. So they go with whatever that day’s big story is and push it until it’s exhausted or something else comes along. We’ve become an oversized tabloid. Scandal, murder, and moonriders. It’s all we care about.”

“Does that we include The National?” asked Eric. “I mean you’re complaining about media overreaction, but you put it on the cover.”

MacAllister laughed. “We’ll be talking about the state of the media, not moonriders. And that is serious business.”

“Don’t you think,” said Amy, “the media are broadcasting what people want to hear?”

MacAllister nodded. “Sure they are,” he said.

It wasn’t the response she’d expected. “Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?”

“No.” Don’t they teach anything in school anymore? “The media should be telling people what they need to hear. Not sex and scandal. But what their representatives are up to.”

THEY ORBITED ALPHA Cephei III for a full day, which was the minimum time they’d agreed to invest at each site. The most exciting thing that happened was a chess game between Eric and one of the researchers at the ground station. (The researcher won, as MacAllister would have predicted.)

Then they were on their way to Arcturus. He settled down to enjoy a biography that mercilessly attacked the previous president.

In the seventy-two hours since the Terranova Rock story broke, reports of flying objects across the NAU and around the world have risen dramatically….

Retired Col. Frank R. Bannister, founder and president of the Glimmerings Society, which investigates moonrider sightings and other paranormal events, warned yesterday that we were running out of time. Bannister maintains that the government has been hiding the truth for years. He will lead a demonstration outside the capitol building tomorrow.

Popper Industries will offer a line of moonrider T-shirts for sale, beginning Monday. The shirts depict a squadron of lights and mottos like WATCH YOUR ROCKS and INVASION TUESDAY.

A consortium of animal rights groups issued a series of wide-ranging protests yesterday demanding that the World Council intervene to turn aside the Terranova Rock. Friends of Animals, headquartered in Jamaica, said that standing by and doing nothing is “every bit as barbaric…”

Senator Hiram Taylor (G-GA) stated today that “we’re a long way from knowing what really happened at Ophiuchi,” and that the government should wait until the facts are in before deciding what action to take. “If any.”

“We don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish,” the former German president said today after a press luncheon. “If there really are aliens involved, they may be conducting an experiment of some sort. We just don’t know, and I would be cautious about interfering until we have more information. Whoever did this seems to be at least at our level of technology, and possibly considerably higher. We have everything to gain and nothing to lose by waiting until we are sure what’s happening. Certainly, with a lead time of seventeen years, there is ample opportunity for consideration.”

SIKONIS WILL BE JUDGE IN HELLFIRE CASE

“Maximum George” Has History of Handing Out Stiff Penalties

chapter 26

The development of faster-than-light technology expanded humanity’s psychological as well as physical boundaries. During the early years of the twenty-first century, human security could be challenged only by lunatics, fanatics, and crazed politicians. That is, by other humans. Beyond Pluto lay only unbroken silence. Nobody even thought about it, let alone worried about any deep-space threat. Even the occasional deranged author who wrote about such things took none of it seriously. But when the Centaurus tossed off its restraints in March of 2171 and engaged Ginjer Hazeltine’s new engine, the world changed more than anyone could have imagined.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Aliens in the Attic”

Hutch was lounging at home when Peter’s call came in from Union. He was in his office. Papers were scattered around, displays lit up, data chips piled in a candy box. “We picked up a transmission from Origins. I thought you’d want to hear it.” Origins operated under the auspices of the International Science Agency, headquartered in Paris. “The message was sent to their ops center. Union sent a copy to us a few minutes ago.”

All incoming messages passed through a central communications center at Union, where they were relayed to the appropriate addressees. And also were frequently lifted as “information copies” to other agencies that might be interested. The practice was officially denied, but it happened nonetheless. And because everybody benefited, no one complained or tried seriously to get it stopped.

“Okay, Peter,” she said. “Thank you.”

It was flat-screen traffic. First the Origins Project seal, God’s arm stretched out toward Adam’s as in the Michelangelo, followed by the director, Mahmoud Stein. Stein was reputed to be brilliant, but in Hutch’s view he was stiff, formal, self-important, scripted. Everything he said sounded rehearsed.

He was average size, in his sixties, with dark hair and deep-set eyes. He wore a permanent squint. “David,” he said, “we’ve got another sighting.” A banner at the base of the screen indicated the AI was interpreting from the French.

She didn’t know who David was, but suspected he might be David Clyde, one of the assistant directors at ISA in Paris. “We didn’t get this one on record, either. We’re just not equipped for that sort of thing. But three of our people saw it. They were working on the tracks, outside, when it showed up. Big black sphere. No lights.” He was seated, upright in his chair, looking grave. “When it got close, within a kilometer, it stopped. Hovered. Just sat out there for almost five minutes. Our people called in and we tried to get something on it, but it was well down the tube and we just didn’t have time.” His eyes revealed a touch of annoyance. He didn’t like having to deal with moonriders. They were an intrusion, something not provided for in the job specifications. “I’ve talked to everyone involved. Separately, as you suggested. They all tell the same story. David, there’s no question they saw something. It took off finally like a bat out of hell, unquote.

“The incident took place near Ring 66. If it happens again, I’ll get back to you.”

WHAT WAS GOING on? Hutch let the transmission run a second time. Whatever was happening, it was beginning to scare her. An hour later, Senator Taylor called. “Sorry to bother you at home, Hutch. I couldn’t reach the commissioner. Truth is, I’d rather talk to you anyhow.” He looked unhappy. “I keep hearing all these stories about moonriders. I’m worried about Amy.”

So was she, although there seemed no basis for it. “There shouldn’t be a problem, Senator. There’s no report of any hostile action being taken by these things. Ever.”

“Except throwing asteroids around.”

“We don’t really have a sense yet what that was about.”

“It sounds crazy.”

“I know.”

“And malicious.”

“Senator, Valentina’s one of the best people in the business. Nothing’s going to happen to them.”

He hunched down, as if to avoid being overheard. “Can you guarantee it?”

Hutch shook her head. “You know I can’t,” she said, finally. “I couldn’t guarantee Amy’s safety if she were sitting in my living room. But I don’t think there’s any need to worry.”

His eyes got a faraway look. “I’m sorry I let her go.”

“Senator, do you want me to bring the Salvator back? I can do it.” It probably didn’t matter at this point. The mission had become almost redundant.

That disconnected gaze turned inward. “If you did that, she’d know I was responsible.”

“I wouldn’t tell her.”

“It wouldn’t matter. She’d know.”

“Your call, Senator. We’ll handle it as you wish.”

“How much longer will they be out there?”

“They’re scheduled to go to three more places: Arcturus, Capella, and Berenices.”

“Okay,” he said. “Try to keep them out of harm’s way.”

TEN MINUTES LATER, Asquith called. “We’re putting together an impromptu conference,” he said. “I thought you might want to be part of it.” He was seated in an armchair in his living room, holding a glass of wine in one hand. A notebook rested against his knee.

Tor was watching a ballgame. She excused herself, retreated to her office, closed the door, and brought the commissioner and his armchair up on her desktop. Charlie Dryden appeared, seated behind a table. And two women and a man, none of whom she knew.

Asquith made the introductions. The strangers were Shandra Kolchevska from Kosmik, Arnold Prescott from Monogram Industries, and Miriam Klymer from MicroTech. “Hutch,” he said, “you should be aware that we’ve gotten clearance to divert the Terranova Rock.”

“Good.” Politically, it was a move that couldn’t lose. “Have we decided how we’re going to do it?”

He turned to Kolchevska. “Shandra, do you want to explain?”

She appeared to be an energetic, forceful woman. Middle-aged and blond, she’d have been reasonably attractive except for her eyes, which were unreservedly competitive. “Ms. Hutchins,” she said, “it’ll be a team operation. Kosmik will be diverting two freighters from salvage.” Nod to Prescott. “They’ll install drive units. MicroTech is doing the systems design for us, and they’ll provide the AIs.”

Klymer picked up the explanation. “The freighters will be taken out to Terranova — ”

“Piloted by the AIs?”

“Oh, yes. Of course. The ships wouldn’t be safe. But we’re pretty sure we can get them there. Once they arrive, we’ll put them in front of the asteroid. Same course and velocity.”

“And,” said Prescott, “gravity will do the rest. The ships have sufficient mass to accelerate the asteroid. It’ll miss Terranova by a substantial margin.”

“Very good,” Hutch said. “I’m impressed.”

“Ms. Hutchins,” said Prescott, “when a contribution needs to be made, we can come together.”

She looked over at Dryden, wondering what role Orion Tours was playing.

Asquith delivered a broad, satisfied smile. “Hutch,” he said, “we want to announce the project at a joint press conference in the morning. Can you set it up?”

“Sure, Michael. I can do that.”

He looked at the others. “Is nine o’clock okay?” Nobody had a problem. “We’ll want you there, too, Hutch,” he said.

She turned to Dryden. “Charlie, can I assume Orion will also be part of the effort?”

“Yes, indeed.” He gave her a broad smile. “We’re contributing an engineering team to restore the freighters so they can make the flight.”

Asquith beamed and went on about how it was a shining moment for all of them. “A lot of people, and I’m thinking here especially of professional cynics like your friend MacAllister, would deny that major corporations can collaborate in a public-spirited enterprise.” He smiled at each of them in turn. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I think we can all take a bow.”

SO MUCH FOR a quiet evening at home. She had one of Eric’s staff members send out notifications for the press conference, explaining that it was concerned with the “recent events at Ophiuchi.” It prompted a quick flood of inquiries, which he duly passed to her. Had there been additional developments? More sightings? Online Express wanted to know if it was true that aliens had landed in Arizona.

Her workload had declined considerably as the missions dropped off. She had time now to wander the corridors, stroll through the grounds, listen to the fountains. She wondered where she’d be in another year. Sitting on the front porch, maybe, writing her memoirs.

She missed piloting. The universe had gotten smaller, had narrowed down to a strip of Virginia and the DC area. Her big thrill consisted of going with Tor and Maureen to the seashore.

Occasionally, she wondered whether marrying had been a mistake. She loved her husband, and she adored Maureen, liked nothing better than playing tag with her, than running upstairs with the girl giggling behind her. She looked forward to the arrival of her second child. Still, her life had acquired a blandness that she could have endured easily enough had she been assured that one day it would end, and she could go back to the deep spaces between the stars.

She’d been more alive in those years. Or maybe alive in a different way. Her passions had been stronger, the sense of accomplishment greater. Soaring out across a world no one had ever seen before carried with it an exhilaration that life in a bureaucracy — or, if she dared admit it to herself, in a marriage — could never match.

She’d already bailed out of an administrative job once. A year or so after they’d discovered the chindi, she’d accepted a staff position, a promotion, partly because it was what you were supposed to do. They’d asked her if she wanted to spend the rest of her life in the fleet. The decision had been easy enough because she’d fallen in love with Tor, and no future with him seemed possible without a groundside job.

She’d lasted fourteen months, had tried to find something else that would interest her, had given up and — with his blessing — gone back to piloting for a year or so. Finally, she settled in as assistant to the director of operations. Not long after that she’d gotten the top job.

It paid well. It was challenging. Sometimes, like now, it was even exciting. But she would have given a great deal to have been out on the Salvator with Mac and the others. That was where she belonged.

“Hutch.” The AI’s voice. “Dr. Asquith is calling again.”

Twice in one night. She wondered if he was bored. “Everything okay?” she asked.

“Hutch, I want you to see something.” He told the AI to run a clip. “Rita sent this over. They just received it.” Rita was the duty officer at Union Control.

A man she’d never seen before blinked on. Standing by a viewport, through which she could see a star-strewn sky and a planetary rim. “Shanna,” he said. His voice was strained. “We’ve got a problem. There’s an asteroid coming this way. A big one.” He and the viewport blinked off and were replaced by the object itself. “It’s six hundred kilometers across.”

Asquith froze the image. “This is from the Galactic,” he said. The hotel that Orion was building at Capella. “My God, Hutch, it’s an attack.”

It wasn’t just another big rock. Think Boston to DC. It was a small planet this time. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” she said. “When’s it going to get there?”

“Don’t know.”

“Okay, look. It’s not what you think.”

“Why not?” He didn’t sound as if he was in a mood to dispute details.

“The hotel’s being built in orbit at Capella V?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a sterile world. Nobody’s going to bother bombing it.”

He shook his head. “I wish I understood what’s going on.”

The man at the viewport was back. “Got more,” he said. He was heavyset, black skin and beard, about forty, with features that suggested he enjoyed a good time. At the moment he looked scared. “It’s going to take out the hotel.” He was having a hard time keeping his voice calm. “The goddam thing is coming right at us. Dead on. They’re telling me it will miss the planet. But nail us. The bastards are shooting at us.” He stopped a moment. Tried to calm down. “We have a ship on-station, but it’s not anywhere near big enough to get everyone off. Shanna, you need to get us out of here. Quick. Please advise.”

The Orion Tours logo replaced the image.

“My God,” said Hutch. “When’s it going to happen?”

Asquith shrugged. “You know as much as I do. Judging from the way he sounds — ”

“How many people do they have out there? At the construction site?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Okay. I assume Dryden’s asked for help.”

“I haven’t heard from him yet.” He was on his feet, treading back and forth. “That asteroid that passed us a few weeks ago. I wonder if they were behind that, too?”

“It missed, Michael.”

He shrugged again. “So they screwed up that one.”

“Michael, we get Earth-crossers all the time. We just happened not to see it coming. But something with a six-hundred-klick diameter? If the moonriders could move something that massive, could aim it at a moving target as small as a hotel — ” What were they up against?

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“If they have the capability to push around a rock the size of Arizona, why would they bother?”

“What do you mean?”

“If they have that kind of technology, and they wanted to get rid of the hotel, surely they’d have a more sophisticated way of doing it than tossing a small moon at it. Why not just pull up and bomb it? Or use a particle beam? Why on Earth would you throw rocks?”

“I don’t know,” he said. There was a touch of hysteria in his voice. “Maybe when we get closer to them, you can ask.”

ASQUITH GOT DRYDEN on the circuit. Charlie just sat shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. Why would they do something like this? What’s wrong with these creatures?” His voice hardened, and he looked ready to kill.

The commissioner leaned forward. “When’s it going to get there?”

“We don’t know yet. Hartigan forgot to tell us when. We’re waiting to hear now.”

“How many people you have out there?” asked Hutch.

He consulted a display. “Thirty-three. We can put eleven of them on the Lin-Kao. But that’s all we have.” He looked away. “Wait a minute. We’re getting something now.”

Charlie relayed it for them. It was the man by the viewport again. Presumably Hartigan. “I’m going to start moving people over to the Surveyor,” he said. “The Lin-Kao will have time to make two flights. So I can get most of them off that way.”

The Surveyor was an historic ship, now maintained at Arcturus as a museum. It was, with luck, a day and a half away from the Galactic. “So we’ve got at least three days,” said Hutch.

Capella V struck her as an odd location for a vacation site. It would be about five days’ travel time from Earth, a bit far, she thought. She recalled that there’d originally been talk of constructing it at Romulus/Remus in the Vega system.

In any case the Salvator was in position to help. “Good thing,” Peter said when she contacted him. “Union doesn’t have anything ready to go.”

“That can’t be right,” said Hutch.

“It’s true. The place is empty. Usually we have seven or eight ships in port. I’ve called around. There are a couple coming in, but nothing close enough that they can help.”

“And nothing that can be diverted?”

“Negative.”

VALYA WAS FORTUITOUSLY on her way to the same Surveyor museum at Arcturus. She might even be there already. Hutch punched the ship’s name and location into her databank and transmitted to Asquith’s screen. He saw it, and nodded. “Charlie,” he said, “the Salvator is in range. You want us to send it over?”

“How many can they take on board?” asked Dryden.

Asquith looked toward Hutch. Silently, she said seven.

“Seven,” he said.

“Okay. Yes. Please do. I appreciate this, Michael.”

Asquith’s demeanor had changed. He’d begun to enjoy himself, playing the man of action. “Okay, Hutch,” he said. “Get in touch with Valya and get them started.”

An hour later, toward the end of the evening, she got still another call from the commissioner. “It’ll hit Thursday morning,” he said. “We’ve got almost five days.”

More like four and a half. “When Thursday morning?”

“Around ten, our time.”

The Salvator would have to make two flights. There’d be time, but not much to spare.

Do we have an obligation to protect a living world from arbitrary attacks? Probably not. What moral or legal code is applicable? Certainly none that I know of. Do we risk embroiling ourselves in a confrontation with a species whose capabilities may be far greater than our own? It would seem so. It forces us to the conclusion that the prudent action is to stand aside. Let the gremlins do what they want, while we collect as much information about them as we can.

But another question remains to be asked: If we allow these intruders to inflict heavy damage on a biosystem for no definable reason, to kill off whole species, will that not say a great deal about who we really are? And what matters to us? How would that match up with our image of ourselves? Would we be prepared to live with it?

— Charles Dryden, interview on the Black Cat Network, Saturday, April 25

MOTION TO MOVE HELLFIRE TRIAL QUASHED

Sikonis: Defendant Can Get Fair Trial in Derby

NEAR-MISS ASTEROID SPOTTED 80 YEARS AGO

Research Shows They Thought It Might Hit Earth

Warning Promulgated, Then Forgotten

“It Couldn’t Happen Today,” Says White House

chapter 27

The invention of the printing press probably marks the beginning of the decline of civilization. Once you have it, science follows close behind. Next thing you know the idiots have better weaponry. Then atom bombs. Meantime, social organization becomes increasingly dependent on technology, which becomes increasingly vulnerable to error or sabotage. If we can judge by our own experience, it looks as if you get the printing press, then about a thousand years. After that it’s back to the trees.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Fire in the Night”

Three brilliant stars illuminate Earth’s northern skies: Vega, Capella, and the brightest, Arcturus. It is the most distant of the three, thirty-seven light-years from Sol, an orange class-K giant. It became famous when its light was used to open the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. That light had left the star only a few years after the time of the previous Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. It is bright and it is big: 113 times as luminous as the sun. Twenty-six times as wide. It has exhausted its supply of hydrogen and is burning helium.

Its name comes from the Greek word arktos, for bear. Surface temperature is just under 4,300 degrees Kelvin. Evidence suggests that Arcturus originated in a small galaxy that merged with the Milky Way approximately seven billion years ago. Its planetary system consists of two gas giants and a terrestrial. The terrestrial lies in the center of the biozone. It has oceans and all the ingredients for life, but like so many other places, it remains barren.

That there are only three worlds lends credence to the galactic exchange theory. Also present in the system, and popular with Blue Tour travelers, was the Surveyor Historical Site.

More than a half century earlier, Emil Hightower, captain of the Surveyor, his three-person crew, and a team of researchers, had been in the act of departing the area when an engine blew. The ship quickly lost life support. Hightower ordered everyone off while he sent out a distress call to the Chan Ho Park, with whom they were working in tandem. (At that time, the policy was that ships always operated in pairs in case of just such an emergency.) All except Hightower survived.

The Surveyor was heavily damaged and could not be salvaged. It had drifted through the system more than thirty years, until the Hightower Commission formed and arranged to have it moved into a stable solar orbit, where it was restored and converted into a museum. It served as one of the highlights of the Blue Tour.

MacAllister would just as soon have skipped the museum and proceeded directly to Capella, where they were scheduled to spend a night at the Galactic. He had grown bored and was anxious to get home.

But Amy wanted to see the Surveyor. So, of course, that’s what they would do. The ship was a bona fide piece of history, and he could not justify making a fuss.

Eric was beginning to seem listless also. Maybe he missed the office. Or his rousing social life. “I don’t know what it is,” he confessed to MacAllister. “When I came, I thought I was going to be able to do something. Maybe help roll out the monitors. Stand watch. Do something.” He tried to laugh it away. “But everything’s automated. The ship watches for the moonriders. The ship serves the meals. The ship turns out the lights at night. If somebody gets blown through an airlock, I assume the ship will manage the rescue. There’s really not much for us to do except ride along.

“You’re lucky, Mac. You have stuff to write. The AIs can’t help. You have to do it. Even Amy: She wants to fly one of these things, so she’s getting a feel for it. Me, I’m just hanging around.”

As are we all, thought MacAllister. He wondered what Eric had hoped for in his life. What had his early dreams been? He doubted they’d had much to do with hawking for the Academy.

But the guy was right. MacAllister had been fortunate, and he knew it. He’d wanted to be a reporter, but he’d hoped for much more than that. He’d wanted to influence literature and politics. He’d wanted to become a force for common sense in a society that seemed lost most of the time. He’d also wanted at one point to become a professional football player. But he broke his nose in a high school game and discovered how much football could hurt. After that he concentrated on the journalism. He wondered what it must be like for people to move into their later years and realize that their lives hadn’t turned out the way they’d hoped. That the dreams went away. That, maybe worst of all, the lives they’d wanted had never materialized because they hadn’t really made the effort.

At home, few days passed during which MacAllister wasn’t approached by someone with a book idea. Usually it was a memoir, or maybe a novel, or a book of poetry, and he knew from the individual’s expression that it would constitute the capstone of his or her existence. Usually, the book had not yet been completed. There’d be eight or nine chapters, but it was always a project that had been running for years.

Inevitably they wanted MacAllister’s encouragement. Preferably his enthusiasm. Often they thought he was a book publisher and might opt for the idea, as if no one had ever before thought of writing a book about growing up in Mississippi, or doing peacekeeping operations in Africa.

Eric sat watching the unchanging stars on the twin displays. On the bridge, they could hear Valya talking to Bill. Then there was another voice. Probably a transmission from Union. When she came back she looked pleased. “They’re going to head off the Terranova Rock,” she said.

Amy raised a fist. “I knew we wouldn’t just sit around and let that happen.”

“That’s a pretty big rock,” said Eric. “How are they going to do it?”

“They’ll plant a couple of freighters in front of it. Their gravity will speed it up, and it’ll miss Terranova.”

“Ships have gravity?” asked Eric.

“Sure,” she said. “You have gravity, Eric.”

“More or less,” said MacAllister, keeping his voice low.

“It’ll take a long time, but it works.”

THE SURVEYOR WAS a huge ship by modern standards, more like a cargo carrier than a research vessel. It had big engines, big tubes, and a rounded prow. A few viewports were visible. EURO-CANADIAN ALLIANCE appeared in large black letters on the hull. (Hightower had set out one year before the U.S.-Canadian pact had merged the two countries.)

As they approached, lights came on, and the facility said hello. “Welcome to the Surveyor Historical Site.” The voice was female. Then she appeared, an avatar in the ship’s jumpsuit. “We’re delighted you’ve decided to visit us, and we will do all in our power to ensure a pleasant experience.” She was attractive, of course. Chestnut hair, blue eyes. “My name is Meredith,” she added.

“I think we’ll find an hour or two here worthwhile, Meredith,” Valya said over the commlink.

MacAllister watched a section of hull open to receive them. “Who pays for this thing?” he asked.

“Ever the tightwad,” said Valya, with a smile. “Orion operates the place, under Academy auspices. They provide the maintenance.”

“And take the profits,” he continued.

“Are you serious, Mac? There are no profits. The charge is nominal. What they get out of it is public relations. That’s all. This is officially a nonprofit operation, but they lose a nice chunk of change out here every year. If they weren’t doing it, by the way, the ship would just be adrift and forgotten.” There was an edge in her voice. MacAllister suspected he’d pushed a bit too far, had known before he said anything that it was a mistake, but something inside him ran on automatic at times like this. He simply couldn’t resist the impulse.

They drew alongside the giant ship. Its navigation lights came on, and Valya slipped the Salvator into the docking area. Forward motion stopped, something secured them to the dock, and the engines shut down. His harness released.

Valya walked back from the bridge and the airlock hatch swung wide.

Meredith stood just outside in a lighted passageway. “Glad to have you folks with us,” she said. “Please follow me to the welcome center.”

Amy was out and gone before MacAllister could get to his feet. “The Surveyor Historical Site is entirely automated,” said Valya.

“I’m not surprised,” MacAllister said, as he walked out into a receiving room. “It has artificial gravity.”

“Installed two years after it became available, Mac.” Her voice was still cool.

He tried to explain he meant no offense.

“I know,” she said. “It’s just — ” She shook her head. “Let’s just let it go, Mac. It’s who you are. No need to apologize.”

They followed Meredith up the corridor to the welcome center, which provided hot coffee, donuts, and a map of the museum. Chairs and tables were scattered haphazardly around the room, and a terminal provided a place where you could sign up to become a member of the International Surveyor Society and receive the latest news. A gift shop opened off one end, and a snack bar waited at the other. Double doors led back into the exhibits. “Restoration of the Surveyor,” she said, “was, in its inception, funded by the Emil Hightower Foundation. Work began, and was continued, off and on, over a twelve-year period. Today the project is financed by Orion Tours, which offers the most exciting interstellar excursions available to the general public.”

The ship was filled with artifacts from the previous century. Portraits of the captain, the three crew members, and the passengers — there’d been eleven of them — were posted along the walls. The captain’s cabin had been furnished so that it appeared “very much as it had been during the flight.” The furnishings included pictures of Hightower with his son and daughter, eight and seven years old respectively at the time.

They looked at the ship’s laboratory, which felt archaic although MacAllister couldn’t have said why. And the common room, four times the size of the one on the Salvator. And the workout area, where the avatar invited them to try the equipment. The VR worked, and they saw part of a travelogue tracing the early voyages of the Surveyor.

The engineering section had been ripped apart by the explosion. The damaged area had been sealed off with a viewport so visitors could see where the engine had blown, and could look out into the void. A VR presented an animated demonstration of what had gone wrong.

Unlike modern ships, the Surveyor had two working positions on its bridge. One belonged to the captain, of course. The other was occupied by a navigator/communications officer, who also served as a backup for the captain in the event of a mishap. Valya’s backup, of course, was Bill. AIs had come a long way since 2179.

The museum wasn’t exactly bright and cheerful but it was light-years ahead of the Salvator. MacAllister was delighted to be able to walk around someplace new. He stopped at every display and watched images of the Surveyor during test flights, of Hightower and his crew in preparation for the flight, of the various researchers, unable to hide their enthusiasm at traveling to another star. Only one of the eleven, a middle-aged climatologist from the University of Geneva, had made a prior flight. She reminded MacAllister of a high school English teacher who’d taken him under her wing.

He brought up her avatar and spoke with her. He listened to her discussing the extreme age of Arcturus and its family of worlds. “It’s so old,” she said, “that, had life developed, it would be billions of years older than we are. Imagine what such a civilization might be like.”

Dead, thought MacAllister. That’s what it would be like. The fact that no technologically advanced species had been found in all these years made it pretty clear that the damned things have no staying power. You could see it at home, where, starting with the Cold War, there’d already been a few close calls.

It explained the Fermi Paradox. Nobody visits us because they blow themselves up before they get that far.

Except maybe the moonriders.

VALYA WAS LISTENING to her commlink. And looking distressed. She saw him watching and shook her head. Problems somewhere.

He waited until she’d finished. “What’s wrong?”

“Our visitors again,” she said.

“What is it this time? Another of the monitors?”

“No.” She bit her lip. “There’s another asteroid.”

“What? Headed for the same world? For Terranova?”

“This one’s apparently zeroed in on the Galactic.”

“The Galactic? You mean the hotel? Where we’re going next?”

“That’s the one. Ops says it’s a monster. Makes the Terranova rock look like a pebble.”

“What the hell is it with these critters?”

“Don’t know. But they do seem to have maniacal tendencies.”

“It’s actually going to hit the hotel?” That was unbelievable.

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“When?”

“Thursday morning. At about ten.”

It was Saturday evening. Eric frowned. “Are they going to be able to get everybody off?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “I guess it’s going to be close.”

“We can help,” said Amy. “It’s nearby.”

Valya nodded. “We’re going to. But look, I’m going to have to make two trips. I’m going to bring them back here.”

“Is there time to do that?” asked Eric.

“Maybe. If I get going now.”

“If you get going,” said MacAllister. “We’re staying here?”

“I need the space, Mac.”

THERE WAS NO provision at the museum for overnight guests. The original living compartments for passengers and crew had virtual furniture. “We’ll get our gear from the ship,” said Amy. “We can camp right here.” In the welcome center.

“Are we sure,” said MacAllister, “there’s nobody else who can carry out this rescue?”

“We’re getting help. They have a ship at the hotel, which has probably already started over with some people.”

“Do they have to bring them here?” asked MacAllister.

“It’s the closest place. It’ll drop them off and go back for a second group.”

“This place is going to get crowded.”

“Can’t be helped, Mac. Meredith tells me there’s plenty of food here, so it should be okay. As soon as it’s able, Union will send a ship to pick everybody up.” She looked worried.

“Lucky we happened to be on the scene.” MacAllister had a difficult time masking a grumble.

“Talk later. We need to get moving. You guys will want to get your stuff off the ship.” She spun on her heel and headed for the exit.

Eric fell in line behind her. “I hope they bring their own blankets,” he said.

MACALLISTER BUNDLED HIS toiletries into a bag, grabbed extra clothes and towels, and looked around, trying to think what else he would need. Valya was at the airlock, talking on the commlink while they finished getting their gear. “…Leaving here now,” she said. “I’ll give you a TOA when I get into the area. I can carry nine. That’s pushing it a bit, but we’ll be okay for a short flight. Salvator out.”

“Valya,” MacAllister said, “they do have running water in this place, right?”

“Yes, Mac. That shouldn’t be a problem. And there are two washrooms off the welcome center.”

He scooped up a pillow and a blanket, his reader, a lamp, the clothes and toiletries, and hauled them out through the hatch. He wondered about hot water, but that was for another time.

Eric was already in the museum passageway with his bags. Amy came out, loaded down, and MacAllister gave her a hand. “You guys got everything?” Valya asked.

They hoped so. Eric remembered that he’d forgotten his notebook and hurried back inside.

“It won’t be the most comfortable sleeping in the world, Mac,” Valya said, “but look at the story you’re getting.”

“The story’s out at the hotel.”

“Okay. Let’s see how things stand after the first flight. If I can take you on the second one, I will.”

The comment surprised him. He didn’t think his feelings were that transparent.

Eric came out with his notebook, and they said good-bye to her.

“You have any questions,” Valya said, “just ask the avatar. I’ve told her to switch over to Eastern time, by the way, so the museum’s lights will be in the same zone you are. You can reach me if you have to. Meredith knows how to make the connection.” She stepped inside the airlock. “If all goes well, I’ll be back Tuesday night. With some people to keep you company.” She pulled the hatch shut behind her, and MacAllister felt suddenly alone.

HE JOINED THE others in the welcome center. They had no view of the outside, but felt the walls tremble as the Salvator pulled away. Then everything was quiet again. He listened to air flowing through the ducts.

“What are we going to do for the next few days?” asked Eric.

Amy looked around. “Did anybody bring the chess set?”

They looked at one another. Apparently no one had.

“The gift shop has some vids,” said Amy. “And a player.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said Eric. “Let’s find something we can watch.”

But all the vids were documentaries about interstellar exploration, or thrillers with deep-space monsters and black holes. They selected one more or less at random, Attack of the Heliotropes, dragged chairs into the gift shop, and settled in to watch. MacAllister had never been a fan of that sort of thing, but it seemed sporting to join them.

After twenty minutes he couldn’t stand it anymore. It was embarrassing because Amy and Eric were both caught up in the show. But he pretended he was tired, asked whether anyone would object if he dimmed the lights in the main room. Then he retreated from the Heliotropes, arranged his pillows, angled his lamp, and took care of the lighting. He looked through the reader index and picked Arthur Hallinan’s Rum, Rebels, and Red Giants: An Intellectual History of Western Civilization from the Desert Wars to the Beginning of the Interstellar Age.

MacAllister knew Hallinan personally. He was a cranky son of a bitch, a guy who didn’t allow disagreement, who gave no credit for sense to anybody else. It had galled MacAllister to be forced on three separate occasions to give positive reviews to his books. But he was good.

In the distance, as if from another world, he could hear the roar of engines and the hum of particle beam weapons as the united fleets of Earth fought it out with the Heliotropes.

AMY KNEW THE vid was childish, that it was over the top, that it was good versus evil and no room for complexity. But it was still fun. It was what she liked, and she hoped there would never come a day when she’d forget how much joy could be found in an alien invasion. Eric was into it, too. And when it was over and the good guys had won, especially the good guy with the brown eyes and the lovely rear end, she sat back with a sense of elation.

They walked out into the main area. It was dark, save for the glowstrips along the overhead and the designations over the exits and the washrooms, and Mac’s lamp. But Mac was asleep, snoring softly.

It was getting late. She arranged her own bedding while Eric wandered down to the snack shop. She hadn’t noticed earlier, but the place made a lot of echoes.

She found herself thinking about the Salvator, and how they were alone in the museum. The news about the second asteroid was unnerving, and she didn’t much like being out here with high-tech lunatics running around. She was having trouble sorting out her feelings. She was enjoying herself, would not have wanted to be anywhere else, but the elation had an edge to it.

She called up the museum’s AI. “I have a question for you, Meredith.”

“Yes, Amy?”

“If an asteroid were coming on a collision course with the museum, would you know about it?”

“The sensors would pick it up,” she said.

“How close would it be when they did?”

“That depends how big the asteroid is.”

“Two kilometers across.”

“We would detect it at a range of about three thousand kilometers.”

Eric returned with buns and fruit drinks. “How fast do they travel?” she asked him. “Asteroids?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea. Probably ten or twenty kilometers a second.”

“Make it ten,” she said. “A slow one. That would give us five minutes warning.”

“Not very much,” said Eric.

She looked over at Mac. “Nothing bothers him, does it?”

Eric grinned. “No, it doesn’t look as if it does.”

“You scared, Eric?”

He nodded. “A little.”

SHE RETREATED TO one of the restrooms. There was no shower, so she had to use the sink to wash up. When she was finished she slipped into her nightgown, pulled on a robe, and padded back outside. Eric had turned off Mac’s lamp.

He’d gone into the other washroom, where she could hear him splashing around. All the bedding they’d brought from the Salvator had been placed in the middle of the room. She thought about moving hers into the gift shop to get some privacy, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be that far away from the others. Anyway, they might take offense if she went off by herself.

She climbed onto the pillows, which didn’t work very well. She couldn’t move without sliding off onto the floor. Finally, she got things arranged, lay back, whispered good night to Mac, and closed her eyes. Moments later Eric arrived. “Not very comfortable,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“It’s okay.”

“You need anything, Amy?”

“I’m good,” she said.

“All right. See you in the morning.”

It was one of those places where, when the lights were out, you kept hearing whispers. Air running through ducts. Barely audible blips and chirps from the electronics. Squeaks and rustlings from the corridor that opened into the museum’s interior. The sound of moving water somewhere far off.

In response to the attack on the Galactic Hotel, Jeremy Wicker (G-OH) yesterday introduced a bill requiring that all interstellar vehicles be armed. In a related development, there is now bipartisan support for the Brockton-Schultz measure, which would demand that the World Council begin construction of a space navy.

— Oversight, Saturday, April 25

chapter 28

Courage is perhaps our most admirable trait. The man, or woman, who possesses it is able to plunge ahead, despite dangers, despite warnings, despite hazards of all kinds, to attack the task at hand. Often, it is indistinguishable from stupidity.

— Gregory MacAllister, “The Hero in the Attic”

Amy woke up twice during the night. The second time she thought she heard something in the outer corridor, the one that led back to the exhibition rooms. She lay for some minutes, barely breathing, but there were only the usual sounds of the museum, the creaking, the electronic whispers, the flow of air, the barely audible hum of the cleaning system keeping the dust off the exhibits. She felt the slight pressure toward the outer bulkhead generated by the Surveyor’s movement around its own axis. Then she heard it again.

A footstep.

In the passageway.

Mac and Eric were both asleep.

“Meredith?” She whispered the name, got no response. Not loud enough. She thought about waking one of the men, but it would turn out to be nothing, and in the end she’d feel foolish.

And there it was again.

She got up, pulled on her robe, and padded across the floor. The passageway was dark, but there was just enough light to see it was empty. “Meredith?” she said, louder this time.

The avatar appeared a few steps down the corridor. “Yes, Amy? Did you need anything?”

“Are we alone in here? Is anybody else in the place?”

“No,” she said. “There are just the three of you.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

Meredith winked off. The corridor was clear. She could see all the way back to the airlock and, beyond it, almost to the bridge. In the other direction lay the doors that opened into the main exhibit areas. Beyond that, where the VR chambers were, and some of the specialized displays, the corridor passed into darkness, save for two patches of starlight cast by viewports.

It was scary, but she was too old to be frightened by shadows and odd noises. She could remember hiding under the blankets at night sometimes when her father was gone on those inevitable junkets, and she was alone at home with the AI. He never knew how she’d felt, and would never have understood.

She took a few steps toward the exhibit doors. The AI obligingly turned lights on for her. She looked into the display rooms, and more lights came on. They were silent. She looked out one of the viewports at the stars. Arcturus was not directly visible, but its light illuminated part of a wing and a pair of thrusters. She passed by, checked the crew’s quarters, looking into each room. (They were sealed so you could look at them but could not enter.) She peeked into the VR chambers and the engineering spaces. And finally she retraced her steps, passed the welcome center and the airlock, and went up onto the bridge.

Nothing was amiss.

She felt proud of herself. All secure, Captain. She liked to think she would have acted as Emil Hightower did. She imagined herself moving through the crippled ship, seeing that passengers and crew got out, then coming back here, not taking time to put on one of the ungainly pressure suits they had then, no time for that, have to get to the radio.

Chan Ho Park, this is Taylor aboard the Surveyor. Blast in main engines. Code two. Code two.

She eased herself into the captain’s chair and repeated the message, Code two, come at once, position as follows, until the gathering dark began to take her, and she slumped back.

She had never before seen a bridge without viewports. The captain had been dependent on displays. There was probably nothing wrong with that, but it would have made her uncomfortable if she’d been sitting in the command chair.

Something moved behind her, and she jumped a foot, but it was only Eric. “Problems sleeping?” he asked.

“Not really. I thought I heard something.”

He glanced around. “Probably mice.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Maybe.” He gazed down at the controls. “I noticed you were missing. I just wanted to be sure you were all right.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay. I’m going back to sleep.” He grinned at her. “You’re not going to take us anywhere, are you?”

“I thought maybe Quraqua,” she said.

He laughed. “Let’s let it go until morning.” And he got serious. “Don’t stay out here too long, Amy. It’s chilly.”

He trundled off through the hatch into the dim passageway. She wondered what it felt like to take a ship into a planetary system and put it in orbit around a living world.

When she had her own command, she would never quit the way Hutch had. Would never take an office job. Not as long as she could breathe.

SHE MUST HAVE fallen asleep. The lights had dimmed and momentarily she didn’t know where she was. But the controls were spread out in front of her, and she felt the stiff fabric of the captain’s chair against the back of her head.

And she heard something behind her.

Eric again.

She swung the chair around. Someone was out in the passageway. The luminous panels were still on, but the figure was nevertheless cloaked in darkness. And gradually she saw that it was a woman.

“Hello,” Amy said, her voice just above a whisper. “Who’s there? Meredith? Is that you?”

The museum’s projection system had obviously broken down.

The woman was approaching, moving smoothly, almost floating. She reached the hatch, and stopped. Amy still couldn’t see who it was. It was a projection, a problem with the software. Had to be.

“Amy.”

A familiar voice. And she realized what had happened. The Salvator had come back. But the voice wasn’t Valya’s. Whose was it?

“Amy, listen to me.”

The darkness shrouding the figure faded. The woman was tall. Graceful.

It was Hutch.

Amy stared at the apparition. It couldn’t be. Hutch was light-years away. And the figure was too tall. “Hutch, is that you?”

“There’s something you must do.” The woman came through the hatch, although she seemed not to walk. She did look exactly like Priscilla Hutchins. But she must have been a foot taller. Maybe it was because Amy was sitting.

The woman wore the same white blouse and dark blue slacks that Hutch had been wearing when they’d said good-bye at Union. “Who are you —?” Her voice squeaked.

“You need not be afraid, Child,” she said. “You have a mission to perform.”

Amy wanted to get to her feet, but her legs felt wobbly. “You look like Hutch.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not her, are you?”

“No.”

She wanted to run. To call for help. To get away from this creature, whatever it was. “You’re a projection. Something’s wrong with the AI.”

“Stay calm. I will not harm you.”

“What do you want?”

“Blueprint. The Origins Project.”

She looked exactly like Hutch. Except for the size. And the eyes. They were the same color. But they were different in a way that unnerved her. Not human. “What about it?” she asked.

“We are going to destroy it.”

Amy’s voice shook. “Who are you?”

“We will allow you time to evacuate everyone who is there. But do it promptly.”

“Wait.” Amy wondered whether the apparition was crazy. “They won’t listen to me. They’ll laugh at me.”

“Do it promptly, Amy. Don’t test our patience.” It was Hutch’s voice.

“Who are you? Did you attack the hotel?”

The woman was becoming harder to see. The darkness seemed to be gathering about her again. “We’ve attacked no one. See to Origins.”

Amy was pushing back in her seat, the way you do when you’re accelerating. She watched Hutch fade out. Like a hologram.

IT WAS PROBABLY twenty minutes before she found the strength, the nerve, to go into the passageway and return to the welcome center. Mac and Eric were both sprawled comfortably in their sheets.

She knelt trembling beside Mac and pulled on his arm. “Mac,” she said, “they’ve been on board. I talked with one of them. They said we had to warn — ”

“What?” he growled. “Amy? Who was on board?”

“The moonriders. I think. One of them. She looked like Hutch.”

He smiled in his closest approach to a fatherly manner. “You’ve been dreaming, Sweetheart.”

“No.” She knew that wasn’t true.

Then they were both talking at once, she trying to explain what the apparition had said about the Origins Project, he trying to tell her to wait a minute, slow down, take it back to the beginning. “You say it was Hutch?”

“Except bigger. Taller. And she said we — ”

“Hold it. Wait. Stop a second. Think about it a minute. What does it sound like to you?”

Eric was awake now, staring at them.

“I’m not making it up, Mac. I was on the bridge, and I was wide-awake.”

“All right. And what did it say again?”

“She even had Hutch’s voice.”

Mac reached for her. Tried to embrace her, but she kept her distance. “Amy,” he said, “you need to calm down.”

“I’m calm.”

“Okay.” He sat up and pulled his blankets around him. “Tell me again what she said.”

“She said they were going to destroy the Origins Project. Something about a blueprint.”

“A what?”

“A blueprint. I don’t know what that was about.”

“Okay.”

“What’s a blueprint? Do you know, Mac?”

“It’s an archaic term. They used to use blueprints to create architectural designs.”

“Okay. Maybe I didn’t hear it right. But she told me to get everybody off. Before they do it. How am I supposed to do that?”

“Wave a wand, kid,” said Eric. “Did she say why they were going to destroy it?”

“No. Just that they were going to do it.”

“When? When are they going to do this?”

“I don’t know.” She was close to hysteria. “She didn’t say. What she said was I shouldn’t test her patience.”

Mac was getting frustrated. “Did she explain why they were throwing rocks at things in the first place?”

“No. In fact she said…” Amy had to stop and think. “I asked if they’d attacked the hotel. She said they hadn’t.”

“There you are,” said Mac. “It has to be a dream.”

“It’s probably an AI malfunction,” said Eric. “It happens sometimes.”

“I asked her about that. She said no.”

“That’s part of the malfunction, Amy.”

“Well, it’s simple enough to check,” said Mac. “Meredith?”

“Yes, Mr. MacAllister?” Just a voice this time.

“You have a security system, I assume?”

“Yes. We have the Hornet 26. It is top-of-the-line.”

“Do you have a record of the time Amy spent on the bridge this evening?”

“No, I do not.”

“How come?”

“I only record events of a specific nature. Theft, vandalism. If a fight were to break out, I would record that.”

“So nothing unusual happened on the bridge?”

“Nothing that fit within the security parameters.”

“That helps,” said Eric.

Mac looked unhappy. “I don’t know what to tell you, Amy.”

“We have a transmission,” said Meredith. “From the Salvator.”

“Patch it through, please.”

Valya appeared in the middle of the room. “Mac, the Arcturus monitor has reported moonriders in your area. Probably not a problem, but be aware.”

I’ve seen it before. People in trying circumstances, under pressure, scared. You wind up with hysteria. I guess adolescents are especially susceptible. We need another woman on the premises. I don’t know how to deal with it. Amy’s angry with both of us.

As I write this, the lights are out, except for the patches and my lamp. But she’s made no move to lie down. She’s sitting in a chair with her head thrown back. Her eyes are closed, but she’s awake. Valya, where are you?

— Sunday, April 26

In an overnight poll, 66 percent of people in the Council nations think the moonriders are real. Of those, 78 percent think they constitute a serious threat. A clear majority favor arming against the possibility of an attack. Of course almost half think the Earth is 6,000 years old.

— Barcelona Times, Sunday, April 26

FIRST AMENDMENT UNDER FIRE AGAIN?

“Hellfire” Trial Reminiscent of Cohen vs NIH

Landmark Case Limited Parental Right to Allow Hate Indoctrination

chapter 29

The uplifters are forever running around telling blockheads they would do better if they would believe in themselves. But they already do. That is why they are blockheads.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Illusions at Lunch”

They didn’t believe her. Were never going to believe her.

She almost didn’t believe it herself, but damn it, Hutch had been there, something had been there. She had been breathing, and she had spoken with Hutch’s voice.

You have a mission to perform.

Amy regretted not having reached out and touched her. Not having told the woman she had no way to evacuate Origins. Why had she picked on her? How could she think anyone would believe her?

— Going to destroy it.

They’d looked at the bridge. They’d scoured the passageways. Even looked outside to see if there were moonriders. But the sky was placid.

Now they were back in the welcome center. Eric was asleep, and Mac was pretending to be asleep. She’d be okay in the morning, they’d said. It’ll be easier to talk about it then.

She did not want ever again to be alone in this place.

WHEN SHE WOKE, Mac and Eric were already in the snack shop. She could smell bacon and coffee. She grabbed some clothes, made for a washroom, cleaned, and changed. When finally she joined them, they both looked uncomfortable.

“It happened,” she said.

They nodded and looked at each other.

Best, she decided, was to leave it alone. “Any news from anybody?”

“Not really,” Eric said. “There’ve been no more reports of moonriders.”

“That’s good.” They were eating pancakes and bacon. She sat down and ordered some for herself. “Valya said the first load of people from the hotel would be here Tuesday night, right?”

“That’s correct,” said Mac. His voice echoed faintly.

“They were lucky there were a couple of ships nearby.” Her voice trailed away. “You’re looking at me funny.”

“Sorry,” said Mac. “I didn’t mean to. I was just wondering if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Amy,” said Eric, “this has been a strange trip. And the museum, when we’re stuck here and the place is empty, can be pretty spooky — ”

“Forget it.” Her breakfast came, and she took the plate, got up, and walked over to another table. Well away from them.

“Amy,” said Mac, “I wish you wouldn’t get upset.”

“I’m not upset.” She dumped maple syrup on the pancakes. “Mac, think how you’d feel if you told me something important, and I wouldn’t believe you.”

WHEN THEY’D FINISHED, Eric and Mac retreated into the welcome center, while Amy stayed in the snack bar. Mac opened his notebook, and Eric dropped into a chair, closed his eyes, and let his head drift back. He didn’t know what to do. But sitting there pretending the problem would go away was only going to increase the tension.

He got up wearily and went back into the snack bar. She’d barely touched her food. “Hi,” he said.

She looked up. “Hi.”

“Can we talk?”

“Sure.”

He sat down beside her. “It has nothing to do with you,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not that we believe you’d lie to us. We both know you wouldn’t do that. But sometimes people see things that aren’t really there. What you’re asking us to believe isn’t necessarily impossible, but it flies in the face of common sense.”

“I know.”

“If either of us told you the same story, would you believe it?”

She thought about it. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Be honest.”

“Probably not.”

“Okay. There’s an old saying: Extraordinary assertions require extraordinary proof.” She sat quietly watching him. “If you want people to believe you’ve seen a moonrider, for example, you have to be able to walk it into the room. Let us ask it some questions. Maybe do an inspection to make sure it’s not the AI run amok. Even then I probably won’t buy the story. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”

“It’s far more likely that what you saw last night resulted from a bit too much excitement, or from being alone in a strange place, or from too many french fries, or maybe all three, than that there was actually a visitation.”

She cut out a piece of the pancakes, looked at it, exhaled, and put it in her mouth.

“It might actually have happened. I’m not saying it didn’t. What I am saying is that — ”

“I know what you’re saying, Eric.”

“Okay. Good.”

“But if I am right, and I can’t get anyone to believe me, a lot of people are going to die.”

“I hear you.” He couldn’t think of an answer for that one. “Why don’t we just take some time and walk around a bit? Go sightseeing. Maybe it’ll clear our heads.”

He was hoping it would clear hers. She was still angry. And scared. No way she could not be. But he didn’t want her to sit and just sulk for the rest of the day.

SHE TRIED TO concentrate on the pictures and exhibits. There was a portrait of Hightower’s wife receiving the posthumous commendation awarded her husband by the World Science Foundation. And another depicting the launching of the Surveyor, silhouetted against Luna. You could sit and talk with Hightower’s avatar, or with other members of the crew or the researchers. You could re-create the launch, complete with contemporary media coverage. Or watch the Surveyor cruising in low orbit over Beta Centauri III.

When they returned to the welcome center, shortly before noon, Mac still had his nose in his notebook. He looked up as they entered. “You guys really made a morning of it. I was getting ready to send in the marines.”

Eric described what they’d been doing and recommended he take some time himself to look around the place.

Amy positioned herself so she could see over Mac’s shoulder. “Doing an article for The National?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said. “There’s nothing newsworthy here. The story’s over at the Galactic.”

Amy felt a rush of warmth in her cheeks. But she said nothing.

Eric picked his bedding up off the floor and tossed it across a chair. “She’ll probably be able to take you on the second flight, Mac,” he said.

“Maybe.”

Amy was still standing behind him. “Want to know a secret, Mac?”

“Sure, kid.”

“I think she likes you.”

He laughed. “Everybody likes your uncle Mac.”

“Eric’s right. She’ll want you to go back with her. To the Galactic.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, Amy: This is looking more and more like War of the Worlds stuff. If that’s the case, I’m not sure I want to get involved with it.”

“You believe me.”

“I know you’re telling me what you believe is true. Beyond that, I’m keeping an open mind.”

“I don’t know how to prove it to you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It would have made things simpler if she’d given you something. Some kind of proof.” He tapped his stylus on the screen. “Anyhow, I’m not so sure now I want to go anywhere near the Galactic.”

“I thought that’s what reporters did,” said Amy. “Go to the places where the action is.”

“I’m not a reporter, Love. I’m an editor. Good editors stay out of the line of fire.”

“Oh.” She let him see she knew he was kidding.

“Not that we’re afraid of anything, of course.”

“Right,” she said. “Mac, what do you think is going on?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly can’t figure it out. If they have the technology to move asteroids around, I’d think they could find a better way of attacking us than throwing rocks. I mean, all that does is warn us they’re there. If they really meant to come after us, they’d use flash weapons, right? Or nukes or something. They’d hit strategic targets. Not a hotel that hasn’t even been completed yet. And an empty world.” She stood for a long moment, looking down at him. “What do you think, Amy?”

“They might be a really old race,” she said.

“And?”

“Maybe they don’t care about whether we’re warned. Maybe they’re so far ahead of us they don’t see us as a threat. Maybe they’re playing games with us. Or maybe with each other, using us as pieces. As pawns.”

Mac closed the notebook. “See who can hit the monkeys with the rock. Extra points for a big rock.” He sat back. “You might have something.”

She managed a brave smile, but hearing it put that way sent a chill through her.

AMY SPENT THE afternoon doing homework. After dinner, they played a political game that Mac liked in which you chose strategies that would defame opponents while defending yourself as best you could. He was particularly good at it.

There were no recurrences of Amy’s vision. But then she didn’t go off by herself anymore. They watched a sim, and by eleven, she was exhausted and glad to climb into her sheets.

Eric also retired early. The day had been wearing for him as well. He would be glad when the experience was over. Mac was awake and working, seated in a chair with his lamp set up beside him. The rest of the welcome center was dark.

He remembered waking briefly and seeing Mac turn off his light. Then he drifted off again, waking a second time to Meredith’s soft voice. “Eric, the Lin-Kao is calling. Do you wish to take the call, or would you prefer I respond?”

“I’ll take it in the souvenir shop,” he said. He climbed to his feet and padded across the cold floor. The lights came on in the shop. He went in and closed the door behind him. “Okay, Meredith,” he said.

The Lin-Kao’s captain looked well along in years. He had white hair, grizzled features, steely blue eyes. “Surveyor.” He straightened himself. “We have just made our jump into your area. We’ll be there in about five hours.”

“Okay, Lin-Kao,” he said, feeling very professional. “We’ll be waiting.” He felt as if he should say something more. “You may have heard that moonriders were reported locally. You’ll be glad to know they are gone. As far as we know.”

There was a delay of about three minutes while the signal traveled out, and the response came back. “Good,” the captain said. “I am indeed glad.” His tone suggested he was not much impressed by wild stories. “We’re in good shape here, Surveyor. Other than running late. I have eleven people with me. All of whom are anxious to get off the ship. See you when we get there.”

He’d just settled into his blankets when Meredith was back. “Another call,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Salvator.”

“Okay.” Eric trooped back to the souvenir room. “Let’s hear it.”

Valya appeared, seated in the command chair. “I’ll be at the Galactic in a few hours,” she said. “I’ll pick these folks up and be on my way back as quickly as I can.”

The green lamp came on, inviting him to answer. “We’ll be waiting.” He should have stopped there, perhaps. “Valya, Amy thinks she saw something in the museum last night. She thinks it might have been one of the moonriders. She claims it looked like Hutchins. And that it told her they, whoever they are, are going to destroy Origins. She insists it wasn’t a dream. Anyhow I thought you should know.”

He signed off, unsure whether it had been a good idea to pass the story along.

HARRIET HEADS FOR GULF COAST

Monster Hurricane to Make Landfall Tomorrow Evacuations Ordered

ASTEROID CLOSES IN ON ORBITING HOTEL

Galactic Would Have Been First of Its Kind

Has Been Under Construction Six Months

Rescue Effort Under Way

MOONRIDERS SEEN IN NEBRASKA

Hundreds Near Omaha Watch Lights in Sky

GROUP GATHERS ON MOUNTAINTOP TO AWAIT

SALVATION

“Salvation City” Adherents: The Lord Is Coming Tonight

Seventeen Hundred Packed and Ready to Go

Camped atop Mt. Camelback in Poconos

MOONRIDERS MAY BE GROUP HYSTERIA

Study: Sightings Are Delusional

Rock Clusters, Reflections, Imagination Account

for Phenomena

“People See What They Want to See”

MOONRIDER COMMITTEE: THEY EXIST

“Too Many Sightings to Dismiss”

MOONRIDER ACTION TOYS GETTING HOT

Aliens Jumping off Shelves

CHURCH GROUP RECOMMENDS REVIEW OF CURRICULA

NAC: Overemphasis on Damnation?

chapter 30

For males, sex is like baseball. Hit-and-run. Or put one out of the park, circle the bases and score, head for the showers, and clear out. That kind of behavior necessarily upsets the ladies. But it’s not anyone’s fault. It’s the way people are wired, and nothing’s ever going to change it.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Love and Marriage”

Amy watched on one of the welcome center screens as the Lin-Kao docked, and she was at the foot of the exit ramp when the hatches opened, and the workers from the Galactic trooped in. They were a noisy bunch, six women and five men, carrying their belongings. Plus the captain, whose name was Hugo Something. They dropped their bags, Hugo exchanged a few words with his passengers, glad he was able to help, see you at home sometime, took a moment to wave at Amy, and shook hands with Mac and Eric. “Got to get moving,” he said. “There’s a bunch more to pick up.” And that quickly he was gone.

The new arrivals were happy to be off the ship. “It was a bit crowded in there,” one of the women told Amy. “The air was getting stale.”

They were all hauling supplies. They’d arrived with the impression that food would be scarce at the museum, and had consequently brought a substantial amount from the Galactic. They also had blankets and pillows. A few took up residence in the welcome center; others moved into outlying locations.

The shadow that had hung over Amy dissipated, and the image of Hutch on the bridge suddenly felt far away. It couldn’t have happened. Maybe Eric and Mac were right.

Valya called to say she had picked up her contingent and was on the way back. A few minutes later a transmission arrived from the Cavalier. Its captain, a young man who looked barely older than Amy, told them he was on his way from Union to provide transportation home. “We’ll be there in four days.” The announcement was greeted by a cheer.

Amy struck up a friendship with one of the women, Vannie Trotter, a design specialist from Toronto. Vannie was amiable and reassuring, a dark-complexioned woman with black hair and a relentlessly upbeat personality. She was pretty old, about thirty, and had a husband and one son at home. She won Amy’s affection by questioning her about the moonriders, and about Amy’s reaction to them. At first, Amy said nothing about the experience on the bridge. Vannie was taking her seriously, and she didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. But eventually she could no longer hold back, and she told Vannie everything.

“It really happened?” Vannie asked, when she’d finished.

“Yes.”

“What did the others say? The two guys who were here with you?”

“They think I was dreaming.”

“Were you?”

It seemed remote now. Something that couldn’t have happened. But she remembered how she’d felt when she saw the image, and how certain she’d been when she was pleading with Mac and Eric. “No,” she said.

Vannie smiled and drew closer to her. They were sitting on one of the padded benches that lined the walls in one of the exhibition rooms. The room was dominated by the Surveyor’s lander. “Don’t be too hard on them,” she said.

“You believe me, Vannie?”

“After what I’ve seen,” she said, “I’m ready to believe anything. Sure. Maybe they’d try to pass a message.”

“But why me?”

“Don’t know, Babe. Maybe you were the only one here with an open mind.”

“I don’t know what to do, Vannie. People will think I’m crazy.”

She nodded. “Who can you talk to that you can trust?”

She thought about it. “I have a few friends at school.”

“Any adults? How about your folks?”

“My father would never believe it.”

“Anybody else?”

“Maybe Hutch.”

“Hutch? Who’s he?”

“Hutch is a she. She’s the one who arranged for me to come out here.”

“Okay. Don’t worry about these guys anymore. They have their minds made up. When you get the chance, talk to this Hutch.”

“You really think she’ll believe me?”

“You persuaded me, Amy.”

THE MUSEUM WAS much easier to take since the additional people had arrived. That was an unusual reaction for MacAllister. He generally preferred to be left alone. But in that place noise and company were a distinct improvement. A supply of beer and liquor showed up from somewhere. Several played horns and stringed instruments. By midday Monday a serious party was under way.

Valya called late Tuesday evening to announce she was back in Arcturus space.

He was glad to be able to talk with her again. Even though it meant dealing with the delays caused by her distance from the museum. He got on the circuit and said hello. Commented that the people from the Galactic had made themselves at home. Told her that the Cavalier was on its way. Everything’s good here.

Her image froze while the signal traveled out, and, several minutes later, the response came back. “Mac, I’m glad everything’s well,” she said. “Sounds as if you’re having a good time.” He was in the souvenir shop with the door closed. The party had died down, and most of the people were off somewhere watching a horror sim. But there was still a fair amount of singing coming through the thin walls. “No problems of any kind?”

That was code for Amy. Valya had no way of knowing who’d be with him when the transmission came in.

“No,” he said. “She seems to have gotten past it.” He found a chair and sat down. “This is a hell of a way to hold a conversation. You say something, go get a coffee, do some reading.”

He sent the transmission and went outside, picked up his notebook, brought it in, called up the latest news reports, and looked through them.

Eventually, her image came back to life. “It’s because you don’t do it often enough, Mac,” she said. “You need to get out more.”

“I’m certainly out now,” he said. “Really out. Anyhow, we missed you.”

“I’m sure. Nobody to fight with. No sign of the moonriders?”

“No. They never showed up. How many people are still back at the hotel?”

“I don’t think Hugo’s gotten there yet. After he picks up his load, there’ll be four. The asteroid may show up before I can get back. So the plan is that when it gets close, they’ll use one of the shuttles and clear out. I’ll get them from the shuttle.”

“Have you seen the asteroid?”

“Yes. It’s pretty big.”

“Listen, Valya. You’re obviously going to be leaving here as soon as you drop off your passengers. We talked about my going back with you. I want to do that. I’ll be ready to go when you dock.”

She looked pleased. “Good. I could use the company.”

THE SALVATOR ARRIVED just before midnight. Several of the construction workers stayed up to greet their colleagues. Valya was last to come through the connecting tube. She waved at MacAllister, started in his direction, but saw Amy in the passageway. She signaled MacAllister to be patient, strolled over, and took the girl aside.

The conversation was short. It looked amicable enough, but it had no animation. Valya was asking questions, Amy shook her head yes and no, but the responses seemed abbreviated. Of course it was understandable. It was extremely late, but Amy had insisted on staying up to wait for the Salvator. Or maybe just on staying up.

Eventually Valya nodded, gave the girl’s shoulder a squeeze, and came away.

“I just don’t know what to think about it,” she told MacAllister. Then her eyes refocused, and she surprised him with an embrace. “It’s good to see you again, Mac.”

“You, too. Is she okay?”

“You tell me.” She took a deep breath and looked at the time. “Got your toothbrush?”

A few minutes later she hustled him through the airlock into the Salvator and onto the bridge. “The air’s bad,” he said. It didn’t so much smell bad, as that it felt oppressive. Stuffy.

“We had too many people crammed in here,” she said. “We’re supposed to have a seven-passenger capacity. Just give it a little time, and it’ll clear.” She ran quickly through her checklist, gave some instructions to Bill, and virtually pushed MacAllister into the right-hand seat. She sat down beside him, secured the harnesses, and asked if he was ready to go while simultaneously shutting off the magnets that secured the Salvator to the dock. Then they were under way.

“Yes,” he said. “Anytime you’re ready.”

She laughed. It was a sound he enjoyed hearing. Damned women. Nature makes fools of us all. Valya told Bill to set course for Capella, then pushed back and exhaled. “I’ll be glad to get this over.”

MacAllister nodded as the image of the museum in the navigation monitor shrank. “What did she say when you talked with her?”

“Amy? She pretty much invited me to go away. Did it politely, but that was the message. What did you guys do? Tell her it was her imagination?”

MacAllister decided he would never understand women. “It was her imagination.”

“Of course,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you tell her that.”

“What would you have done?”

“Just listened. Agreed that it was a scary experience. She’s the one who has to decide it didn’t really happen.”

“She wanted us to tell her what to do.”

“And you did. Orea takanes. Now she knows exactly how to handle things.” She tried to shake it off. “I’m sorry. It really wasn’t your fault.”

Right. Men are naturally slow-witted. “You’re a sexist,” he said quietly.

“Oh, Mac, you just see right through me, don’t you?” Her eyes grew serious. “The museum must have been a little scary at night. You shouldn’t have let her wander around in there by herself.” She shook her head. “No wonder she started seeing things.”

“Valya, she’s sixteen. I don’t think she wanted us following her around.”

“She’s fifteen. And she’s still a kid.” She patted his arm. “It’s all right, Mac. You meant well.”

It was the sort of comment he often made about politicians and bishops.

They were both dead tired. They went back to the common room, where Bill provided some cheese and pineapple juice. It tasted okay, but it wasn’t exactly elegant. Valya fell asleep in her chair with the snack untouched.

MacAllister was seated opposite her. He dimmed the lights, and she looked almost ethereal, her head resting on the back of the chair, red hair framing finely chiseled features, one arm in her lap, the other resting on a side table beside her juice.

He returned to his quarters, found a quilt, brought it out, and draped it over her.

He went back to his chair, killed the lights altogether, closed his eyes, and sat listening to her breathe.

Yes, my dear, alone with you at last.

SHE WOKE HIM. “Mac, you need to get into your harness. We’ll be making our jump in a few minutes.”

The daylight illumination was on. He checked the time. It was almost ten.

“It’ll be a twenty-two-hour run to the Capella system,” she said. “Which puts us in there at about 0800 Thursday.”

“When does the asteroid arrive?”

“Just after ten.”

“That gives us plenty of time to get them off, doesn’t it?”

“It would if the jump took us in close,” she said. “But we’ll be lucky to get within three hours. No, safest is to stick with Plan A: Assume the rock will get there first. They’ll use a shuttle to get out of harm’s way.”

He followed her onto the bridge, took his seat, and activated the harness. He’d already begun imagining how the story would appear in the media. Prominent Editor Rides to Rescue.

MacAllister Saves Four in Race with Asteroid.

MacAllister Wins Americus for First-Person Account of Galactic Ordeal.

“It’d be nice,” he said, “if we could get there before the asteroid. Take them directly off the gridwork.”

She’d started the countdown with Bill. “Why?”

“Makes a better story.”

“If we didn’t get there in time, which we probably wouldn’t, there’s a good chance they’d be killed.”

MacAllister grinned. “That would be a good story, too.”

She leaned over and whacked him, and they both laughed. “But you’re not really kidding, are you?”

“Not entirely,” he said. “If we were late, they could still get clear, right? I mean, they’ve got the shuttle.”

“Forget it, Mac. The asteroid’s as big as a sizable chunk of Arizona.”

“One minute,” said Bill.

THE SALVATOR SLIPPED into the transdimensional mists, and so did the conversation. They retreated to the common room and talked about MacAllister’s journalistic passions and why Valya enjoyed piloting interstellars and would consider no other line of work. Why MacAllister liked giving trouble to people who, he argued, needed to be kept in line. Why Valya enjoyed solitude. “Most people only talk about themselves,” she said. “Which would be okay if they had some imagination. But I get tired listening to stories about spouses who don’t understand, or incomprehensible physics experiments, or what sims they watched recently. It’s empty chatter and, if you’re not careful, it can crowd you out of your life. Up here it’s quiet, and you’re alone with yourself.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“For what?”

“For taking me along.”

“Mac,” she said, “you have your problems, but you do make for entertaining flights.”

He sat quietly, enjoying the moment. “You know, Valya, when we get home, I’d like to take you over to the Seahawk.”

“The Seahawk?”

Everybody in Arlington knew the Seahawk. But he played her game. “Nicest club on the Potomac,” he said.

“Oh, yes. I have heard of it.” She looked out at the mist. “Yes, that would be nice.” Her eyes brushed over him, came back, locked. She was making up her mind about something.

“You don’t think very highly of men, do you, Valya?”

“They’re okay. Some of them.”

“What’s their primary problem?” MacAllister was quietly amused, but tried not to show it.

“Bottom line?” she said.

“Please.”

“Don’t take offense, Mac. Most guys aren’t very bright.”

MacAllister saw no reason to be offended. “Most people generally aren’t very bright.”

“There’s an extra dimension with men.”

“Sex.”

“It’s more complicated than that. But yes.”

“What else?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Maybe. But there’s more. You’re not good at hiding your feelings.”

“Guys are more self-centered. It’s why you only hear males talking about What’s the meaning of it all?”

“Explain.”

“To a woman, it’s self-evident. Life is what it is. A brief stroll in the sunlight. A chance to enjoy yourself for a century or so. Love. Be loved. Have a few drinks before the fire goes out. But guys think there has to be something more. That’s why all the big religious figures are men. They’ll claim it just doesn’t make sense that the world could move on without them. Must be an afterlife. Has to be more than this. So they live on, as saints or whatever. The guys never really want to leave the table.” Her lips curved into a smile.

MacAllister felt warm. “You are lovely, Valya,” he said.

The smile widened. “There’s my point. Even you, Mac.”

“What? Enjoying the company of a beautiful woman? It’s just part of the stroll in the sunlight.”

She asked how it felt to be feared by so many politically powerful people. MacAllister realized she felt the conversation had wandered into deep water and was trying to get onto safer ground. Which was okay. “I really don’t think about it,” he said.

She sighed. “Of course you don’t. After all, who would want to be a guy the power brokers are all afraid of?”

“I think you’re overstating things a bit.”

She was enjoying herself. She knew the effect of those luminous eyes. Add the high-voltage personality, and you had an extraordinary woman. Yet there was always a part of her that seemed aloof, that stayed outside the conversation, amused, detached. As if she’d done all this before.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Bill. “We have an incoming transmission.”

At home, Tilly could be shut down. He wasn’t always present, always lingering in the background as Bill seemed to be. Mac and Valya were not really alone after all.

One of the construction workers appeared in the middle of the room. He was about forty. He had dark skin and a black beard, and he ate too much. He looked both scared and tired. “Valentina,” he said, “I just wanted you to know we’re lined up and ready to go. Appreciate it if you could let us know your TOA as soon as you can.” He hesitated, reluctant to break away. “We’ll be glad to see you.”

The image clicked off. “I think you have a fan,” said MacAllister.

“Yeah. Next time you ask me why I do this stuff for a living — ”

It was MacAllister’s turn to smile. “I’m sure you get to rescue people at least once a month.”

“Well. Once is enough, kardoula mou.”

“My Greek’s a little rusty.”

“It means ‘opinionated one.’”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Would I lie to you?”

“I’m going to look it up.”

“You are entitled to do so.” She sighed. “Bill.”

“Yes, Valya.”

“Response for the hotel.”

“Ready.”

The lighting shifted gently as Bill lined up her image. “Karim, we’ll make the jump into your space about eighteen hours after you receive this. As soon as we’re there, I’ll let you know. Hang in. You’ll get off with no problem.”

The lights rose and fell again. Went back to normal. “You never married, Mac, did you?”

“I was married,” he said. “Years ago. My wife died.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “It happens.”

“You have a reputation as a misogynist. Carefully cultivated if I read you correctly. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have wanted a woman in your life.”

He had no family, no one he could really talk to. He kept everyone at a safe distance. And here was this Greek pilot, standing at the edge of the clearing. “Jenny was special,” he said.

Her eyes slid shut, closing off that azure gaze. “She must have been. You want to tell me about it?”

“Nothing to tell,” he said. “She died young. Katzmeier’s Disease.”

“Must have been a painful time.”

“Yeah.”

She could see he didn’t want to go any further, so, after a long pause, she retreated. Talked about the flight back from Capella with a crowded ship. Asked how the reports for The National were coming. Was he going to mention Amy’s claims?

“No,” he said. “They’re not really relevant to anything.”

“Unless the Origins Project blows up.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“If it does, if, and it happens without warning — ”

“Valya, they throw rocks you can see coming for a long time — ”

“Eric told me the apparition denied the asteroid stories. If Amy’s got it right, more than a hundred people will die out there.”

“If something were to happen, there’d be time to get them off.”

“Worst-case scenario. If it did happen, suddenly, a surprise, how would you feel? All those people dead?”

“I don’t deal in hypotheticals, Valya.”

“Sure you do. It’s bread and butter for the media. What if she’s right? I mean, the moonriders were there, weren’t they? In the vicinity of the museum?”

“We didn’t see anything.”

“The monitor picked them up.”

“We dropped the monitor a long way from the museum.”

“Hell, Mac, they could have been at the front door, and you wouldn’t have seen them.”

“Are you really going to argue she actually talked with an alien?”

“I’m talking like you said: hypotheticals.”

He was tired of Amy’s story. “Look, assume for a minute the moonriders wanted to talk to us. Warn us they were going to take down a major facility. Why would they pass the message to Amy? Why not me? Or Eric?”

“Maybe they thought she’d be the easiest one there to talk to.”

“Ho-ho.” He kept his tone soft. Make it clear he was above taking offense. “Although there is something ominous about the Origins Project.”

“Really? And what’s that?”

He told her about the call from Anthony DiLorenzo.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “He really said that?”

“Yes, he did.”

She thought about it. “I just can’t believe it’s possible, Mac.” They sat looking at each other. “We need to change the mood,” she said.

She went back to her quarters. He heard her talking with Bill. Then she returned with a bottle of wine. “With the noted Gregory MacAllister on board, I think the captain is justified in declaring a special occasion.”

“Do I get to make a speech?”

“Go ahead.”

“You are the loveliest captain this side of Sirius.”

She reached for an opener while he examined the bottle. “I’m not sure, Mac, but that may not be much of a compliment.”

“Accept it in the spirit intended.”

“Indeed I will.”

They opened it and filled two glasses. “You’re a remarkable guy, you know that?”

“Thank you.”

“You can be a bit of a strain sometimes, but God knows, as I think I said earlier, you’re always a kick to have around. Anyhow, if we’re about to be overrun by moonriders, or sucked down into the universal black hole, we should probably drink up while we can.” She filled their glasses. “When we get home, I’ll cook a meal for you. If you like.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”

He began to suspect she was offering herself to him. MacAllister had never been quick on the social subtleties attendant on romantic relations. Still, there was no mistaking the luminous quality of her face, the body language, the growing huskiness in her voice. But something warned him off. He’d managed his share of intimate encounters over the years, so it wasn’t that he was a stranger to such things. But something restrained him. It might have been the eternal vigilance of the AI, the sense that any playing around on the Salvator was necessarily a ménage. Or maybe it seemed improper when they were supposed to be racing to the rescue of four stranded construction workers. Whatever it was, it seemed too soon. Laid her at the first opportunity. What would that say about him? And yet he wondered why he was hesitating. Why on Earth did he care about the proprieties?

Sex with Valentina would mean more than a simple romp with one of the groupies who often sought him out. It would not be a quick roll in the hay, then back out into the workaday world. Even if there was a workaday world beyond the hatches. But there was more than that. Take Valentina into his bed, and he knew he would never again be free. It might already be too late. He found himself thinking of her at odd hours, wondering what she might be doing at any given moment, wondering how she would react if he admitted to being entranced by her.

Hutch had told him once that captains were prohibited by regulation from improper relations with passengers. On consideration, it now seemed a wise, if unrealistic, restriction. So he held back.

They talked politics, books, and vids they’d both liked. (MacAllister didn’t like many.) They speculated on the moon-riders, circled back to Amy’s dream, wondered whether anything intelligible would ever be learned at Origins. MacAllister mentioned how good she looked, and she observed that Mac had a lot of savoir faire for a reporter.

Eventually it simply became too much. Probably she’d intended it from the beginning. Or maybe he had. However that might have been, she got too close, or he did, it was impossible later to remember which, and suddenly, her lips were pressed against his, and he was helping her out of her blouse. No buttons anywhere. Just sort of pull in the right places and clothes fell away. “We shouldn’t be doing this,” she whispered.

Mac, for once, was at a loss for words.

She tugged at his belt, but stopped and asked him to wait a minute. She strode topless across the deck and onto the bridge. The lights dimmed and went out, leaving only a few glowing strips. She became a shadowy figure moving toward him, shedding clothes as she came.

“Why didn’t you just tell Bill to do that?” he asked.

“Bill’s in sleep mode,” she said.

He hadn’t even known there was a sleep mode.

The sofa wasn’t lush, but neither were the beds in their compartments. The sofa had the advantage of providing more space. He was thinking how the Salvator was not built for romance, but she certainly was. There was a last fleeting notion that he should not let this go any further. Then his good sense kicked in.

I don’t know whether I have ever felt quite the same degree of exhilaration as on that night, racing across the stars, knowing the whole time the asteroid was bearing down on that group of unfortunates stranded at the Galactic. It was one of those occasions when one ceases to be simply a reporter, and becomes instead a participant.

— The Notebooks of Gregory MacAllister

chapter 31

The sheer size of the Capella asteroid, and the thought of the kind of technology it must have taken to redirect it and aim it at the Galactic, to arrange that it arrive at the precise time and place to intercept the hotel, carries one overwhelming message: The best way for the human race to handle the moonriders would be to hide under the table.

— Gregory MacAllister, Journals

He came out of a deep sleep to find her coming back off the bridge, wrapped in a sheet. “Anything wrong?” he asked.

“Just waking Bill.” She stopped for a moment, pretending innocence, to let him get a better look.

“‘Naked Singularity,’” said MacAllister.

“Mac, you’re shameless.”

“Or maybe ‘Unclad at Capella.’”

“Are you trying out titles?”

“How’d you guess?”

“For a National story? Or your autobiography?” She pulled the sheet tighter, revealing more. “How about ‘Orgy at Ophiuchi’?”

More than ever, he felt the restrictions imposed by the bulkheads. He would have liked to take her out somewhere, to a park, or a restaurant, or simply for a walk downtown. He wanted to show her off.

“Last night was very nice, Mac,” she said. “I think you do not believe all the things you say.”

“What do I say?”

“That there’s a legitimate point of view for celibacy.”

“I never said that.”

“You imply it.”

“That’s because families are such a hassle.”

“Do you have any? Children?”

“No.”

“Then what do you know about it?”

“Bizet never went to a bullfight.”

“That sounds like a myth. How could anybody possibly know whether he did or not?”

“All you have to do is listen to people who’ve been through the experience. Do you have any kids?”

“No.”

“Okay. Most people who’ve been parents will tell you that when they first started thinking about marriage they would have been smart to head for a mountaintop and go into philosophy.”

“Mac,” she said, “you deliver these generalizations, and they are both funny and wicked. But we both know life is much more complicated. The country is fortunate to have you. Although I would ask where you’d be if your father had behaved as you suggest?”

MacAllister showered and dressed. Then she showed him pictures of the hotel. Some walls and panels were in place, and even a few viewports, but the Galactic was still, for the most part, no more than a large gridwork. When completed, it would have resembled the Crystal Palace.

Watching the images seemed to have a depressing effect on Valya. “You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Something’s wrong.”

She didn’t reply.

“The hotel?”

“No,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“They can build a new hotel, Valya. And everybody’s getting out.”

“Damn it, Mac, I don’t care about the hotel.”

Oh. “We’re talking about last night.”

She shrugged.

“There’s no commitment,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then what?”

He could see her debating whether to answer. “Call it sleeping with the enemy.”

“I’m not an enemy,” he said.

She nodded. “I know, Mac. I know.”

CAPELLA FEATURES FOUR suns. Two were immediately visible when they arrived in-system. They were yellow-white class-Gs, one slightly brighter than the other. “These two,” said Bill, “are both much larger than Sol. Each has a diameter of about fourteen million kilometers.”

MacAllister tried to recall the size of the sun.

“Ten times greater,” said Bill, apparently reading his mind. “And much brighter. Capella A is eighty times as luminous. B is about fifty times brighter.”

“That sounds as if they burn a lot of fuel,” he said.

“That is correct. Each of these two has completed its hydrogen-burning phase.” He paused. “They’re dying giants, Mac.”

“Bill,” Valya said, “open a channel to the shuttle.” The AI complied, and she sent a message to Karim, informing him of their position and arrival time. Half hour or so after the asteroid was going to arrive.

Ten minutes later they had a response. “We’re fine,” Karim said. “We’re well clear of the asteroid.”

“Okay, sit tight. We’ll be by to pick you up.” She switched back to the AI. “Bill, give me some vectors and fuel consumption.”

AS THEY ACCELERATED toward the shuttle, MacAllister asked about the other two suns.

Two dim red stars showed up on the navigation screen. “They’re both class Ms, Mac. Red stars. Quite dim, as you can see. They’re a double star themselves, but they’re almost a light-year away.”

The yellow suns seemed quite close to each other.

“They are,” said Bill. “They’re only one hundred million kilometers apart. Roughly the distance from Venus to the sun.”

“It’s one of the reasons they wanted to build the hotel here,” Valya said. “It’s a spectacular sky.”

Bill replaced the red stars with a close-up image of a blue world. “You don’t usually get planets orbiting a close binary,” he said. “Usually, they’re ejected. If they survive, they will normally orbit one star or the other. When the stars are as close together as these are, that’s not going to happen, and you just don’t find planets. Capella is the exception. Here we have not one world, but two, orbiting the gravitational center between the two suns. The hotel is located at Alpha Capella II.”

“As I understand it,” said MacAllister, “Alpha II is not a living world. Right?”

“That’s right. But it’s supposed to have great skiing. And in fact they claim there’s a lot to see. Towering mountain ranges, long island chains, rugged coasts.”

“Does it have a breathable atmosphere?”

“Unfortunately not. I think I read somewhere it’s loaded with methane.”

“I don’t know,” said MacAllister. “I’d expect people planning to vacation on another world would want dinosaurs. And I know they’d prefer oxygen.”

She laughed. “Oxygen, maybe. But lizards? I’ve seen some big ones up close. You can have them.”

Bill was putting groundside images on screen. Canyons. Mountain peaks. River valleys. Waterfalls.

MacAllister frowned. “I wasn’t talking about me. But most people like animals.”

She was watching the display. Never took her eyes from it. “It’s a lovely world, Mac. Slightly larger than Earth. And there’s a magnificent river system that puts the Mississippi to shame. It’s perfect for rafting.”

“That sounds like Eric. You might consider a career in public relations.”

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve got what I want. I’m going to stay out here until they come to get me.”

KARIM CALLED. “WE left an imager at the hotel to watch the thing come in. Would you like us to relay the visuals to you?”

“Please,” said Valya.

The asteroid looked more like a planet than a rock. Otherwise, it was run-of-the-mill: misshapen, scarred, cratered, ridges here, smooth once-molten rock there. It was just visible over the rim of the world. It might have been coming off the ocean. “How big is it again?” asked MacAllister.

“The diameter’s roughly six hundred kilometers at its widest point.” She showed him. She put up an image of the Surveyor museum. The asteroid and the Surveyor appeared about the same size. She moved the museum closer to the asteroid. His perspective changed and he watched it dwindle. Shrink to the size of an insect. And ultimately vanish. “It won’t collide with the hotel,” she said. “It’ll be more like a swat.”

“And it won’t hit the planet?”

“No. It’ll skim past, right at the top of the atmosphere. It’ll obliterate the hotel and go back out.”

“Perfect shot,” said MacAllister. “I wonder if these guys play pool.”

The asteroid was turning slowly. You had to stay with it a few minutes to see the movement. As he watched, a chain of craters came over the horizon.

Below, on the planetary surface, storms drifted through the atmosphere. And towers of cumulus. There was snow at the caps and on some of the mountaintops. But there was no green. Alpha II had a sandstone appearance. It was a beautiful woman with no soft lines.

Valya switched to a view of the Galactic. “That’s taken from the shuttle,” Valya said.

The hotel glittered in the light from the two suns, a sprawling, mostly open framework. “How long have they been working out here?” he asked.

“I think about nine months.”

“Doesn’t look as if they got very far.”

“Don’t know,” she said. “I’m not up on construction projects.”

From the perspective of the imager at the hotel, the asteroid was rising, climbing higher above the curve of the world. Getting bigger. Overwhelming the sky.

Bill appeared in his captain’s uniform. “One minute to impact,” he said. “It’s closing at thirteen kilometers per second.”

It blocked off the sun.

MacAllister held his breath.

“Twenty seconds,” said Bill.

Somebody on the shuttle let go with a string of profanity.

The perspective changed. He was looking at a moonscape, and it was as if they were in a plunging ship. Going down.

Then the screen blanked.

THEY PICKED UP Karim and his three companions without incident. MacAllister accepted thanks from everyone for the rescue, even though he’d just been along for the ride. Valya broke out more wine, and they converted the return flight into a celebration. They talked about how big the asteroid had been, and how good it was to get on board the Salvator. How nice to be able to snuggle inside a set of bulkheads again.

MacAllister had never before considered the human propensity to put up walls everywhere. He’d always thought of it as a need for privacy from other people. But he decided that even more important, walls were a way of setting aside a portion of space from the rest of creation, of blocking out the vastness that, seen too vividly, wounds the soul.

It was exactly the kind of line that, uttered by someone else, he would have ridiculed. What the hell did it mean?

As much as he’d enjoyed having Valya to himself, something had changed, and MacAllister was grateful for fresh company.

“I’ll tell you,” Karim said, “we were never really sure we were out of the thing’s path. I kept thinking suppose the numbers were wrong. Or the sensors had screwed up? That son of a bitch kept getting bigger. We were supposed to be clear, but you couldn’t tell that sitting out there watching it. And there was a lot of debris running with it.”

Two of the other three were women. “Closed my eyes,” one of them said. “I thought we were dead.”

Later, as they enjoyed a rowdy meal, Karim commented that management must have known what it was doing after all.

“How do you mean?” asked MacAllister.

The other male laughed and helped himself to some grapes.

“We were three or four months behind,” said Karim. “They had us out here, but we were always short of resources. Never had the people to do the job right.”

“The way things turned out,” the guy with the grapes said, “it’s just as well.”

They spent much of the return voyage singing. One of their favorites was “I Been Workin’ on the Platform.”

Famed editor Gregory MacAllister helped rescue a group of construction workers stranded in the path of a giant asteroid today. MacAllister was onboard the Salvator when it arrived in the Capella system to snatch four people who’d escaped from a construction site in a shuttle….

— London Daily Telegraph, Thursday, April 30

chapter 32

Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Women and Children Last”

The news from the Salvator and the museum was uniformly good. They’d gotten the engineers and construction workers out of the Galactic without a hitch; the Cavalier would arrive shortly to pick them up and bring them home; and the media were already circulating MacAllister’s first-person account of the rescue. From the museum, Eric mentioned something about Amy and a bad dream, but that hardly seemed consequential. “She’ll be fine when she gets home,” he added. “This place gets pretty spooky at night.”

Senator Taylor, watching reports while the asteroid closed in on the hotel, told Hutch that he and Amy would not go through anything like this again. Hutch knew that would ultimately be Amy’s decision, but she kept her opinion to herself.

She saw a report that Orion was filing an insurance claim for the hotel. The risk, of course, had been apportioned among a half dozen companies, and there were already rumors they would refuse to pay because the policy didn’t cover acts of war.

Charlie Dryden called to ask where Asquith was. “I can never reach him when I need him,” he complained.

The commissioner was at a conference in Des Moines. He had a talent for being out of town when crises loomed. It was his philosophy, he claimed, that his people should be able to make decisions without him, so he frequently turned off his commlink. That would have been okay, except that he didn’t back his staff if they made calls with which he didn’t agree, or that didn’t go well. It was one thing to take a subordinate aside and explain the preferred course of action; it was quite another to back away publicly and imply to the media that someone in the organization had acted without authority. He always claimed he named no names, and thereby protected his people, but everybody knew. Hutch had been through it a few times, had taken him to task, and had even threatened to resign. When driven to the wall, Asquith always apologized, privately, and promised it wouldn’t happen again; but he seemed unable to help himself.

Dryden was seated by a window overlooking a body of water. He wore a light blue jacket and a string tie. “I wanted to say thanks for getting our people out of the Galactic,” he said. “If not for the Salvator, I hate to think what would have happened.”

Hutch returned his smile. “It was our pleasure, Charlie. I’m glad we were in a position to help.”

“I understand there were no injuries.”

“They’ve reported everybody’s okay. This time tomorrow, they should all be on their way home.”

“Good.” He sat back, relaxed. Over his shoulder, she could see a sailboat tacking in a brisk wind. “On another subject, what’s your sense about these moonriders?”

“I honestly don’t know what to think, Charlie. I don’t know what they are, and I can’t imagine what they’re trying to do. It doesn’t look as if the world is prepared to deal with them.”

“We became complacent.”

“I guess we did.” Certainly, she had. A widespread assumption had developed that everything we could see in the surrounding cosmos belonged to us. And there was nobody out there to dispute any of it.

“I think we need a navy,” he said.

“A battle fleet?”

“Yes.”

“It would cost a fortune.”

A flock of ducks or geese, something, fluttered down onto the water. “Hutch, it’s the price of security. In uncertain times.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, one of her staff sent over a segment of the Blanche Hardaway Hour that she thought might be of interest.

Blanche was a tall, fragile-looking but utterly ruthless blonde. She did a daily tabloid show, lots of scandal, lots of moralizing, lots of the cheapest sort of politics, regular attacks on the Academy as a waste of money.

She had a guest, but he was just sitting there while she went on a tirade. “ — To wait around any longer and take chances with lunatic aliens,” she was saying. “Congress should get on the stick and take action. We don’t want to wait for the World Council to get in gear. This is not one of those things they can talk to death and pass a bill on sometime in the next century. I’ve been saying for years now that we cannot assume we’re alone, as we have been doing. And we cannot assume that anybody we meet out there is going to be friendly. We need armed ships. Guns, Frederick. A navy. An armed fleet that will demonstrate to these creatures, whatever they are, that they better not mess with us. Now, am I right? Or have I missed something?”

Frederick was oversized. About seventy, he had dark hair and the look of a guy who’d wandered into the wrong studio. He shifted his position and assumed what he must have thought a professorial attitude. “No question,” he said. “As I see it, what we need to do…”

She killed the volume. Watched the big man waggling his finger and lecturing the audience. There’d been a lot of that lately. “Marla,” she said, “do a sweep for me, please. Last six hours. I’d like to see any commentaries taking the same position: The moonriders are a threat, and we need to build a fleet to deal with them.”

“Very good,” said Marla. “It’ll take a minute.”

“Meanwhile, you can shut down Blanche and Frederick.”

The picture went off.

She got two calls on administrative issues, then Marla was back. “Ready to go.”

First up was Red Dowding warning the viewers in his flat, matter-of-fact style that time might be running out “for the human race.” Judith Henry, a regular on The Capital Crowd, advised that we may not have the luxury of guessing wrong. And Omar Rollinger, on Sunrise with Omar, commented that there will be weak-kneed people who say we shouldn’t rush into anything, but it might already be too late. A dozen more shows were queued up.

There were plenty of pictures. The asteroid sweeping the hotel aside, the Salvator collecting survivors from the shuttle, preparations going forward to send a pair of cargo ships to turn aside the Terranova Rock. Several commentators thought the mission shouldn’t be launched until an armed escort could be provided.

ASQUITH WAS BACK that afternoon, looking flustered. “Don’t have time to talk,” he told her.

“What’s going on, Michael?”

“Another hearing.”

“The appropriations committee again?”

“No.”

“Who?”

He was dragging a change of clothes out of his closet. “Defense. They’re trying to decide whether the moonriders are a threat. The truth is it’s probably politics. People are excited, so they have to do something. They called a committee meeting with no advance warning.” He disappeared into his inner sanctum, then popped right out again. “People are worried about what they’re hearing.”

“The media have gone berserk.”

“The media always go berserk. A kid falls off a bike in Montana, they’re all over it. Until something else happens. This time, though, the fears may be real.”

“Michael,” she said, “don’t you think this is all a bit over the top?”

“Who knows?” His expression seemed frozen. “Whatever the moonriders are, they’re obviously not friendly. If we get attacked, what do we fight with? We’d be helpless.”

“If they have the capability to divert anything as massive as the Galactic asteroid, and aim it dead on at the hotel, we’re going to be helpless no matter what.”

Asquith smiled. “I can just see the Congress saying something like that to the voters.”

“I’m not concerned about the voters. I’m not a politician.”

“You better be concerned, Hutch. The voters pay your salary.”

“That’s not significant at the moment. I was trying to make a point.”

“As was I. If it gets around that we can’t compete with these lunatics after all the money that’s been put into the program over more than sixty years, longer than that really, then when this is over, you and I will be out on the street. And deservedly so.”

It was a beautiful spring day. A bit on the warm side, maybe. Bright sun in a cloudless sky. “What are you going to tell the committee, Michael?”

“I’ll ask that they increase our funding so we can beef up the surveillance program we’ve just initiated. Track these things down. Find out what they are. What they want.”

“We’ll need ships. New ones.”

“Right. That’s what I’m going to request. And I’m going to ask for some armament. We have to confront the problem head-on.” He actually looked pained. “We need to get the Council on board. If they’re not willing, then the NAU should go it alone with our allies. Whatever it takes. It’s what they want to hear. So they’ll buy into it.”

“Okay.”

“We need to think about what kind of armament should be placed on Academy ships. I’ll want a proposal on my desk in the morning.”

“Michael, I don’t know anything about weaponry.”

“Ask somebody. Particle beams, lasers, and nukes. That’s what we’ll want. And anything else you can think of.”

ATTACK IMMINENT FROM OUTER SPACE?

Amid Laughter, World Council to Debate Options

LANBERG TAKES AMERICUS

Black Hole Physics Wins for Winnipeg Native

CHILD ABDUCTIONS UP ACROSS COUNTRY

Experts Advocate Tracking Devices

CAVALIER NEARS SURVEYOR MUSEUM

Galactic Engineers to Start Home Tomorrow

Orion Will Rebuild “Won’t Be Scared

Off by Crazies,” Says CEO

SUPERLUMINALS TO DIVERT TERRANOVA ROCK

Corporate Giants Cooperate to Save First Living World

Kosmik, MicroTech, Orion, Monogram Combine Resources

HURRICANE SEASON: MORE STORMS, MORE INTENSE

Population Decline in Hurricane Alley Continues

Dakotas, Saskatchewan, Manitoba Booming

CONGRESS: TERM LIMITS WILL NOT GET OUT OF

COMMITTEE

PROPOSAL TO BAN SMOKING IN HOMES WHEN

CHILDREN PRESENT

Iowa Bill Promises Major Clash

What Are the Limits of Government?

TREATMENT OF LIVESTOCK BECOMES ISSUE IN

WYOMING

Do Steers Have Rights?

Energy Relay Collapses

City in Dark for Six Hours

LOOKING BACK: LAST NUCLEAR PLANT CLOSED 100

YEARS AGO TODAY

HELLFIRE TRIAL TO GET NATIONAL COVERAGE

Starts Thursday

chapter 33

Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there’s a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don’t like it very much.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Why We All Love Sweden”

When the Salvator docked at Union, officials, journalists, and well-wishers were waiting. Valya and her passengers strode out of the exit tube and were greeted by shouts and applause. Amy spotted her father in the crowd. With Hutch beside him. He waved and pushed through. “Good to see you, Hon,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. Everybody was taking pictures. “Glad you’re home. I was worried.”

“I’m fine, Dad,” she said. “It was a good flight.” That sounded dumb, but she didn’t know what else to say.

People began tossing questions at her. There was confusion; some of them thought she’d been with Valya during the rescue at the Galactic. When they discovered she’d stayed behind in the museum, they went elsewhere.

Eventually Hutch worked her way to her side. “Hey, Champ,” she said, “welcome home. You guys had quite a time out there.”

She moved to embrace the girl, but Amy stiffened. Allowed it to happen but didn’t respond. Hutch was too much like the woman on the bridge.

Hutch got the message and let go. “Anything wrong, Amy?”

Amy needed to talk to her alone, but that would be difficult to manage. She wondered whether the others had told her what had happened. Kid’s gone funny in the head. Talking to people who aren’t there. Talking to you, Hutch.

“I’m fine.” She knew. Amy could tell.

The event morphed into a press conference. How had MacAllister felt when he saw the asteroid hit the hotel? Had he been worried the moonriders might go after him? Would he be likely to support —?

MacAllister cut the last question short. He’d grown quickly impatient with the questions, and pointed everybody at Valya. “Here’s the young lady who did the rescue,” he said. “She’s the one you want to talk to.” And Amy caught his whispered aside to the pilot: “Good luck.”

Valya answered a few questions and quickly turned the proceedings over to Eric, who was experienced at these things. Who was nearly delirious at being the center of attention.

Was it true moonriders were detected near the museum? Had they seen them? (Disappointment that no one had.) “Did you at any time feel your life was in danger?”

“No,” Eric said. “We kept the doors locked.” He expected the comment to get a laugh. But none came. “I don’t think any of us ever felt directly threatened.” He looked around for confirmation, and got it from MacAllister and Valya. It wasn’t what the media wanted to hear.

A short, bearded man, dressed as if he represented the underground press, asked whether they thought we should arm the ships.

“Yes,” said Eric. “Absolutely.” They’d seen the people trooping in from the Galactic, especially that last bunch, the ones who’d been thrown into space for several hours. “Whatever these things are, they have no regard for human life.”

Jessica Dailey from the Black Cat wanted to know whether Eric spoke for everybody.

“He does for me,” said Valya.

“What about you, Mr. MacAllister?”

“I guess so,” MacAllister said grudgingly. He looked uncertain.

Nobody asked Amy.

THE JOURNALISTS FOLLOWED them onto the shuttle, where there were more questions and more pictures. Amy finally got her turn in the spotlight. How would it feel going back to school now that she was a national celebrity? That surprised her so thoroughly that she could only smile and ask when she’d become a celebrity.

More people were waiting in the terminal at Reagan. A beautiful chestnut-haired woman threw herself into MacAllister’s arms. (Amy saw a strange look in Valya’s eyes, but it passed quickly, and the pilot turned away.) One of the journalists drew her father aside, and she saw her chance. Hutch was standing only a few feet away, talking with Eric.

The conversation broke off when she approached. Hutch offered to give her a hand with her bag.

“It’s okay,” Amy said. “I need to talk to you.” Eric discovered he had something else to do and left them.

A news team was headed their way. Hutch nodded. “I know. But this is not a good time. Call me tonight.”

“Okay.”

“And, Amy —?”

“Yes.”

“Whatever it’s about, we’ll take care of it.”

AMY WAS NOT close to her father, even though he always tried to do the right thing. When she performed in the school theater, he was there. He came faithfully to watch her play softball. He talked to her about homework and her future and did everything he could to replace the mother who’d abandoned them both so many years before. But he’d never learned to listen. Their conversations were always one-way. So when she came home from the Surveyor museum with a story no one would believe, she did not sit down with him and tell him what had happened.

Other than Hutch, there was no one to whom she could turn. She had a couple of indifferent boyfriends, but neither would be able to understand what she was talking about. They’d both think she’d taken something. And there was a math teacher who was reasonable and sympathetic, but who was far too rational to believe a story like hers.

She had shed whatever doubts she might have had about the reality of the experience. The image of the ultratall Hutch walking out of the darkness, issuing that deadly warning, was simply too vivid. It had happened.

Damn moonriders.

Why had they picked on her in the first place? They had the Academy’s public information officer available, and the editor of The National. But the blockheads came to her. What was she supposed to do? Pass it on to the principal?

She rode home alone. Her father claimed important Senate business and put her in a taxi. Fifteen minutes later she was in her Georgetown town house replaying the experience over and over.

She became gradually aware of the silence, accented somehow by voices outside. And a barking dog.

She switched on the VR. Brought up Tangle, her favorite show. Find your way through the maze. Don’t get distracted by boys, clothing displays, misnomers, false trails. But she couldn’t keep her mind on it, and finally realized she might be on the news. She switched over and saw trouble in Central Africa. A serial killer loose in Oregon, imitating the murders done in Relentless, a popular vid from the year before. There seemed to be no end to homicidal kooks. A Senate committee was conducting hearings on whether to support the creation of an armed interstellar fleet. It would be the world’s first space navy. Then, yes! There she was. Standing off to one side at Union while Eric answered questions.

Well, tonight she’d talk to Hutch and pass the whole thing over to her. She was the big hero. Let her worry about it.

ERIC WAS HAPPY to be home. And pleased with himself. During the taxi ride from Reagan, he’d also watched himself on the news shows and decided he’d looked pretty good. Self-effacing, heroic, and always ready with a punch line. The real Eric Samuels had arrived at last.

One of his neighbors, Cleo Fitzpatrick, had been walking past as he unloaded the cab. She’d smiled brightly, told him she’d missed him, said how she’d been reading about him. Cleo was a physician. She was also a knockout who had never before paid any more than minimal attention to him. “It’s good to have you back, Eric,” she’d said, with an inviting smile.

It was good to be back. Once inside, he dropped his luggage and said hello to his AI. She whispered a throaty greeting. “It’s nice to see you again, Big Boy.” He wondered what it said for his life that the thing he had most missed was his AI. He eased down into a chair, closed his eyes, and savored the moment.

He had achieved what he set out for. He’d been part of something significant. Beyond his wildest dreams. They’d confirmed the existence of the moonriders and rescued the personnel from the Galactic. Not bad for a guy whose biggest exploit until now had been winning a commendation for perfect attendance in the fifth grade.

But he couldn’t get his mind off Amy.

Kids are flexible, though. She’d get over it. He was suddenly, unaccountably, tired. It was so good to be home. Lounging on a comfortable sofa again. Stretched out in a private place, with the shades drawn against the midday sun.

It was a good life.

MACALLISTER HAD SEEN the look on Valya’s face when Tara Nesbitt showed up at Reagan. Tara was an occasional friend and sometimes a bit more. Perfect for inciting a little jealousy.

He directed Tilly to call Valya and felt his pulse pick up a notch when she appeared in the room. “Hello, Mac,” she said. She’d gotten rid of the jumpsuit and the work clothes, exchanging them for shorts and a University of Kansas pullover. The woman always looked good. Didn’t matter what she wore.

“Hello, Valentina. I just wanted to be sure you’d gotten home okay.”

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you.” The Greek lilt in her voice was somehow more pronounced than it had been on shipboard.

They went on in that vein for a few minutes. She was seated on a sofa, crosshatched by sunlight. Her red hair glistened, and she looked genuinely pleased to see him. The chemistry was running both ways. Not necessarily good, he thought. He had avoided emotional attachments all his life. Except once. And he’d paid a substantial price for that. “How long are you going to be home?”

“I haven’t received my next assignment yet. They have more pilots than ships at the moment, so I expect I’ll be unemployed for a while.” She leaned back against a cushion. “Might have to find a job over at Broadbent’s.” Broadbent’s was a furniture chain.

“You don’t seriously think they’d cut back, do you?”

“They’ve already done it. Hard to see what else they could have done the way things are going. But” — she shrugged — “there’s always work for people like me.”

“I was wondering,” he said, “if you’d care to have dinner with me. We promised ourselves an evening at the Seahawk.”

“Wish I could, Mac. But I’m wiped out. I’m going in and collapse for the rest of the day.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“I’ve got relatives in tomorrow. How about Thursday?”

“Sure,” he said. “That sounds pretty good.”

AMY CALLED PROMPTLY at seven.

“I understand something happened at the museum,” said Hutch.

“Yes, ma’am. I think I talked with one of them.” Amy was in her bedroom. Pictures of Academy ships hung on the walls.

“With one of the moonriders?”

“I had no way to know for sure. But something that wasn’t human.”

“You say you think this happened.”

“It happened, Hutch,”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Describe it for me. Tell me everything. What you saw. What you heard. Don’t leave anything out.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to record it.”

Hutch had heard that the apparition had more or less taken her form. Now she listened intently while Amy told her story. How she’d been unable to sleep. Sitting on the bridge. How the figure wrapped in darkness had come down the passageway.

How it had been Priscilla Hutchins. But a taller version.

And its message. Blueprint. The Origins Project.

“We are going to destroy it.”

“Did she say why?”

“No. When I asked why she just said for me to get everybody off. That they wouldn’t wait forever. Or words to that effect.”

“Okay. Let’s go back a minute. What’s ‘blueprint’ all about?”

“It’s an old term for a building plan.”

“No. I’m aware of that. I’m just wondering what it means in this context.”

“I don’t know. I asked her what she wanted, and she said ‘blueprint.’”

“Was there anything else?”

“No. Yes. She denied they’d attacked anyone.”

WHAT WAS BLUEPRINT?

“George.” The household AI.

“Yes, Hutch.”

“Do a search on ‘blueprint.’ I want to know — ”

“Yes —?”

What was she looking for? “If there’s any connection with unknown aerial or space phenomena?”

There were several action vids by Blueprint Entertainment that pitted various heroes against outer space monsters.

And a 250-year-old blueprint of a moonrider — they called them UFOs then — obtained originally by a married couple who claimed to have been riding all over the solar system in the vehicle.

And Blueprint for Armageddon, published in the twenty-first century, a book predicting an attack by aliens. It even had pictures of the creatures, but none of them looked anything like Hutch.

There was also the Madison, Wisconsin, urban legend about a thing running loose that left monstrous footprints and bled blue. The whole affair was supposedly hushed up by the authorities. For reasons not given.

And an oil painting, Cosmic Blueprint, by somebody she had never heard of, depicting two ships, one obviously alien, watching each other in the foreground of a ringed planet.

She gazed thoughtfully at the alien vessel and realized she’d missed the obvious. “George.”

“Yes, Hutch.”

“Let’s try it again. Make it ‘blueprint’ and the ‘Origins Project.’” She rubbed her eyes. It had been a long day, and she was tired.

“I have more than seventeen thousand hits,” said the AI. “Do you wish to narrow it down?”

Bingo. “Yes. Eliminate all that have to do with the design of the facility itself. How many are left?”

“Four thousand three hundred seven.”

“Pick one at random. Let me see what they’re talking about.”

“The vast majority are simply technical documents.”

“Pick one.”

George put up a title page: Blueprint, credited to two names with which she was unfamiliar, and filled with text and equations that meant nothing to her, references to hybrid tangles and monolith reversals.

She looked at a few more documents, all similar, all incomprehensible, and called Amy back. “Answer a question for me, Love.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What do you know about Origins?”

“Just what I learned on the flight. Why?”

“Were you aware of any of the initiatives they’re involved in? Any of the things they’re doing?”

“I know they bounce particles off one another. That’s all.”

“Blueprint appears to be the name of one of their projects.” Amy bit her lip. “My question is, could you have learned about it somewhere else? Before you got to the museum?”

“No,” she said. “I never heard of it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”

SHE CALLED ERIC. “They have a Blueprint,” she said.

“Whoa. Who has a blueprint? What are we talking about?”

“Origins.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t aware of that. She probably saw it somewhere and remembered it.”

“That was my first thought. Eric, she insists that didn’t happen.”

“That’s very strange.”

“You guys checked with the AI, right? We have no record of this visitation other than Amy’s word.”

“That’s correct.” Eric took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. “Hutch, they have a lot of people out there. At Origins. If there’s even a chance she might be right…”

“Okay. We’d better look into it. I’m going to talk to the commissioner. You make some calls. Use your contacts. See if you can find out what Blueprint is about. And ask them when they’re doing it.”

“The public information office is in Paris. It’s closed at this hour. I can try to track down some of the people who are involved.”

“Do it. Get back to me as soon as you have something. But Eric —?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t say anything to them about moonriders. Okay?”

SHE USED HER time to inform herself about the Origins facility. How many people were currently there. Whether they routinely kept a ship on station. (They didn’t.) What kind of person the groundside administrator, Hans Allard, was.

Eric called back. “I talked with Donald Gaspard,” he said. “He’s part of the consulting team for Blueprint.”

“Okay. So what’s it about?”

“How’s your physics?”

“Try me.”

“It has something to do with using the collider to make small black holes.”

“Black holes?”

“Small ones. Micros. Apparently they’ve been doing it all along. For years, according to Gaspard. Blueprint will be an extension of the effort. But he says there’s no danger to the facility. The holes dissipate quickly. Almost right away. I think he said within microseconds.”

“Why are they doing it? What’s the point?”

“It helps them figure out the parameters of the other dimensions. He said there are eight or nine of them. Other dimensions.”

“Nine,” she said.

“The point is that they’re trying to push back past the Big Bang. To find out how it happened. What’s on the other side. And how we arrived at the settings for our universe.”

“That’s why they call it Blueprint.”

“I guess. I’m not sure what it means.”

“But they haven’t started it yet?”

“Not Blueprint, no.”

“When are they going to begin?”

“Gaspard didn’t know. He’s not sure they’ve set a date yet.”

“Okay, thanks, Eric. I’ll take it from here.”

GASPARD WAS IN New York. She jotted down his code and asked George to connect with him.

He was a physicist acting as liaison between Manhattan Labs and a consortium based in Marseilles. She was surprised by his appearance. He looked not much older than a high school kid. He had a bright smile and a lot of energy. Cinnamon-colored hair, matching eyes, and a long nose. She immediately thought of a young Sherlock Holmes. But he dispelled that quickly with a decided French accent. “Yes,” he said, after she’d introduced herself, “I spoke with your Mr. Samuels.”

“We’re fascinated by what you’re doing, Professor.” It seemed an odd title for one so young. “Do you really expect to be able to penetrate beyond the Big Bang?”

He lit up. His favorite subject. “Yes,” he said. “There is no doubt.”

“Can you explain it to me? Tell me what you plan to do?”

It would be his pleasure, madame. He launched into a description of particles, equations, evaporating holes, collider capabilities. She tried to follow but quickly got lost. It didn’t matter. She asked innocuous questions: How long do you think it will take to get that result? How much energy is employed? And, eventually, one that intrigued her: “What kind of results do you expect? What will you find?”

“That’s impossible to answer, Madame Hutchins. We are only at the beginning of transuniversal physics. At the moment, we know almost nothing.”

She wondered why anyone would want to destroy the effort. It seemed harmless enough. “Do you foresee the possibility that we will acquire weapons capabilities from this?”

“Weapons?” He let her see the question was absurd. “I can’t imagine how. But who knows? Why do you ask?”

“Idle curiosity, Professor. I’m impressed that you can manipulate black holes. I would have thought that would entail a level of risk.”

“At no time,” he said. “It was never an issue. The black holes we have always worked with. They are quite small. Microscopic. They are by nature unstable.” He shrugged and smiled. Voilà.

“You told Eric you weren’t sure when they would run Blueprint?”

“That is correct. They haven’t set a date yet, but I suspect it’s imminent. Most of their support personnel left last week.”

“You’re not going?”

“Oh, yes. I’m leaving Tuesday. But I’ll be there purely as an observer.”

“I see.”

“If everything goes according to plan, it will be an historic occasion.”

“That makes it sound as if they’re going to be working with a more massive hole.”

“Ah,” he said, “holes do not have mass. But for practical purposes, that’s true. We need more energy than we’ve been able to produce previously. Blueprint will be bigger than anything we’ve done before. That is the advantage of having the hypercollider. And this is only the beginning. We are entering a whole new era, madame. I would very much like to be here when the project is finished.”

“You’re referring to the construction of Origins.”

“Yes. When it is finally done, I think everything will lie open to us.”

“Is the larger hole safe?”

“Oh, yes. There’s no question about that. We wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t safe.”

“It’ll dissipate on its own.”

“Absolutely.”

“You look doubtful, Professor.” Actually, he looked supremely confident.

Gaspard waggled his head back and forth. Grinned. “Well, of course, when you’re dealing with a completely new area of research, you can never be one hundred percent certain. Of anything.”

“What could go wrong?”

“Nothing, really.”

She smiled at him. Come on, Gaspard, we’re all friends here. “Worst-case scenario.”

He considered it. “There’s a remote chance, extremely remote, the experiment could cause a tear.”

“In —?”

“The time-space fabric. But the chance of that happening is so slight that it is essentially zero.”

“If that did occur, Professor, a tear in the time-space fabric, what would be the result?”

He looked uncomfortable. Tried to wave it away. “It would disrupt things.”

“What things?”

“Pretty much everything.”

“Are we talking about losing the facility?”

“Well, yes. Along with — ”

“Everything else.”

“Yes. But it’s not going to happen.”

“It would proceed how? Instantaneous lights out for all of us?”

“Oh, no. It would be limited to cee.”

“Light speed.”

“Yes.”

“We’re talking about the possibility of destroying, what, the entire cosmos?”

“I keep trying to explain, that is not really a consideration — ”

“Maybe it should be.”

THE TRUTH WAS, Hutch didn’t want to believe Amy’s experience had actually happened. Not only because the prospect of a shoot-out with a species that appeared to have advanced technology was not a happy thought, but also because the whole idea of an apparition in a lonely museum just begged to be written off as someone’s imagination.

She had to decide whether she believed the story or not. If she did, she was going to need the commissioner’s support. There could be no cautious statements with him, no observation that we have reason to believe. Either it was so, or it wasn’t.

She found him in a downtown restaurant. He had company and wasn’t happy about being disturbed. “Yes, Hutch,” he said wearily. “What is it?” She could hear the murmur of conversation in the background and the occasional clink of dishes or silverware.

“Sorry to bother you, Michael. I thought you should know what’s happening.” They were audio only, but there was no mistaking the resignation in his voice. “There was a direct encounter, a conversation, with the moonriders.”

“We talked to them?” His voice became simultaneously hushed and high-pitched. “Wait a minute.” She heard his chair scrape the floor. He assured someone he’d be right back. Then: “We talked to them by radio? Are you sure?”

“Not radio. At the museum.”

“They stopped by the museum?”

“Yes. In a manner of speaking.”

“Hutch, what are you talking about?”

She described the incident, holding back only that the moonrider had resembled her. “If she’s right, they’re all in danger out there.”

“Amy?” He sounded despondent.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s just great. Does the senator know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll have to tell him.” He sounded like a man in pain. “Why on Earth are they doing these things?”

She hated to mention her suspicions about Blueprint. He’d want to dismiss it. And might use it to dismiss everything. But it would come out eventually. So she told him everything. To her surprise, he listened quietly. When she had finished, she could hear him breathing. Then: “God help us. You really think there’s something to it?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Let me talk to Taylor. Then — ”

“Michael, don’t say anything to him until tomorrow. Give me a chance to get back to Amy. Warn her, so she can tell him herself.”

“You say they’re going to run this Blueprint soon?”

“It sounds as if they’ll do it within a week or two.”

These things don’t happen. “It’s a kid with an overactive imagination,” he said. “It has to be.”

“She told the others about Blueprint right after it happened. It’s too much of a coincidence, Michael. How much clout do we have with the Europeans?”

“Not much. Look, even if I pass this along, I can’t swear to it. Nobody’s going to believe it.” He was talking to himself under his breath. “Okay. I’ll head home. Keep a channel open. We’ll talk to Allard from there.”

We?

SHE ALERTED AMY, who got annoyed. “I wish he wouldn’t involve my father.”

“We don’t really have a choice.”

She was silent for a time. “Okay, I’ll tell him.”

“Something else you should be aware of. We’ll try to keep your name out of it, but I doubt we’ll be able to. You’ll probably have to deal with the media again. This time they might be a bit more aggressive.”

ASQUITH WAS IN a dinner jacket when he appeared in Hutch’s home office. He was also in a foul mood. Maybe it didn’t help that it was raining, and he looked wet. “Why didn’t you tell me about this when it first happened?” he demanded.

“I didn’t think there was anything to the story. That’s beside the point now. We need to call the Europeans. Warn them.”

He dropped into a chair, looked away, played with his cuffs. “How?” he said. “How do I tell them to evacuate two hundred people, but the only evidence we have is a kid’s dream? How are we going to look?”

“You’ll also want to tell them to cancel Blueprint.”

“Hutch, this is crazy. My career is on the line here. So is yours.”

“There’s a lot more on the line than our careers, Michael.”

“That’s easy to say. You know, this probably is nothing more than the kid’s imagination.”

Hutch was tired. It had been a horribly long day. “Let’s grant that. So we give them a warning, nothing happens, and you and I look dumb. But suppose it’s the other way round and we sit on this and two hundred people die?”

“I know. It’s not an easy call.”

Don’t say what you’re thinking, Babe. “We have no choice, Michael. If you want, you can disappear, and I’ll make the call. If it goes wrong, you can deny all knowledge.”

“No.” He climbed gallantly out of his chair. Squared his shoulders. “It’s my job.” It was right out of a vid. You go ahead, get clear, I’ll take the heat on this one. He told the AI to get Dr. Allard. Then he turned back to Hutch. “Make yourself comfortable. This might take a while.”

It took only seconds. Allard’s official title was Director of the European Deep Space Commission. Hutch had met him at a formal dinner several years earlier, but had never really had a chance to talk with him. It was four or five A.M. in Paris, but he nevertheless seemed to be in his office. “Hello, Michael,” he said cheerfully. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Hutch was safely out of Allard’s view, apparently there for the sole purpose of lending moral support.

Asquith led off by describing the Salvator’s visit to the Origins Project. Marvelous concept, and all that. Very good.

“Thank you.” A modest bow. “But I know you didn’t call me at this hour to extol the virtues of the initiative.” Allard was in his sixties, with sharp features softened by a sense of absolute calm. This was not a guy who got excited. He had intelligent eyes, a wide brow, a goatee. “Isn’t the Salvator the same ship that performed the rescue at the Galactic?”

The commissioner nodded, yes, and took his opening. “Hans, your organization is involved with a project called Blueprint.”

“That is so. We’ll be running it in a few days.”

“We had a curious experience while our people were at the Surveyor museum. We think we may have made contact with aliens.”

Allard’s eyes widened slightly. “Aliens?”

“Yes. We’re pretty sure.”

Hutch shook her head no. You have to be absolute about this. It happened. We don’t think it did. But he waved her off.

“If I may ask, in what way was this contact made?”

“The details aren’t important, Hans — ”

“The details aren’t important? How can you say that, Michael?”

Asquith pressed ahead. “The aliens are concerned about Blueprint. They’ve indicated they are going to destroy Origins.”

“My God, Michael. That’s the wildest story I’ve ever heard.”

“Nevertheless, it’s so.” He kept his voice firm, and she was proud of him.

“How did it happen?”

“It happened at the museum…” He described the visitation. Mentioned the warning that moonriders were in the area. That they’d specifically mentioned Blueprint. That Amy’d had no idea what Blueprint was.

Allard resisted for a while. Rolled his eyes. Clamped jaw muscles. “When?” he said. “When are they going to do this?”

The two men stared at each other. “We don’t know when. But it seems logical they will not permit you to initiate the experiment.”

“So they are going to destroy the project within the next week or so.”

“Yes.”

“What did these aliens look like? Did they have faces?”

“There was only one of them. She looked like a young woman.”

“And this young woman said they are going to destroy Origins? No question about it?”

“Yes.”

“I take it no one else witnessed any of this?”

“No.”

“Is there any independent evidence it happened?”

“None other than what I’ve mentioned.”

“Michael, you’re aware Blueprint is not exactly a secret. It’s been in the media. This person might easily have seen it and forgotten about it. And you’ve nothing else?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“Very good. Thank you for warning me. I shall certainly take it under advisement.”

When he was gone, Asquith sat looking dejected. “I told you.”

“Maybe,” said Hutch, “we can get him the evidence he wants.”

“You’re suggesting we send a ship out there ourselves to, what, look for rocks?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what we need to do.”

“Hutch, I really hate all this.”

“Doesn’t matter. We can’t just stand by and hope we’ve misread things.”

“Do we have a ship?”

“Not really. The Salvator is scheduled for the Moscow Affiliates Group.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. What the hell. “Cancel them.”

“This’ll be the second time, Michael. They won’t be happy.”

“Then don’t. Let it go.”

“I’ll make the calls.”

“Do it. And, Hutch? Let’s try to keep a lid on this, okay?”

SHE CALLED VALYA at home and explained.

“You need a volunteer?”

“Yes. You’re the obvious person for the assignment.”

“You want me to go to Origins and do a sweep and make sure there are no incoming.”

“Yes.”

She was in a blue robe, sipping a drink. “Okay.”

“I don’t like asking you to go out again so soon. I could get somebody else.”

“No. I’ll do it. It’s just that it seems like a waste of effort.”

“You don’t believe Amy’s story?”

She was seated behind a coffee table, on which a book lay open. “No,” she said. “Not really. I think she got hysterical. But what do I know? I wasn’t there. I’m pretty sure Eric believes her.”

“What about Mac?”

“Mac didn’t want to talk about it. I think he was afraid of hurting the kid’s feelings. Which tells me the answer to your question.” She put the glass down and leaned back. “When do I leave?”

“Can you be ready to go by Thursday?”

“You’re giving me a day off?”

“Maintenance needs time with the ship.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

“One other thing, Valya. I’m trying to raid Union’s supply of air tanks. I’m going to put as many of them on board as I can get my hands on.”

“Why?”

“Worst-case scenario. In case there’s a rock inbound, and it’s too close to mount a rescue. You won’t have enough to save everybody, but you’ll be able to get a few.”

“Hutch, aren’t you overreacting a little bit?”

“Sure. And I won’t mind listening to the jokes if they’re not needed.”

The Blueprint experiment holds out hope that we may for the first time be able to start piecing together the events that led to the Big Bang. Until the construction of the Origins Project, scientists had been unable to accelerate sufficiently massive particles to achieve the desired results. Now, however, we can create black holes of an adequate size to produce, as they dissipate, sufficient levels of energy to reveal the character of the dimensions that our senses do not perceive, but which account for quantum action. In plain English, we may finally break through the ultimate singularity and discover how it all happened.

— Tuesday, May 5

VATICAN ISSUES STATEMENT REAFFIRMING

REALITY OF HELL

Pope: “Forewarned Is Forearmed”

— Los Angeles Times, May 5

chapter 34

People tend to think well of their fellow humans. We see them as, for the most part, generous, noble, brave. We admire their tenacity in desperate times, their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the common good, their kindness to those in need. These perceptions generally result from another human trait: our failure to pay attention.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Down the Slippery Slope”

Wednesday was MacAllister’s first full day home. He planned to do little except lie around. He’d held a brief morning conference with Wolfie and left him to get the current issue of The National up and running. There were several calls requesting interviews and asking him to make guest appearances. He accepted a few, agreed to do the interviews that evening, and was about to climb onto his sofa when Tilly announced a call from Jason Glock.

He’d forgotten about the Beemer trial.

“Starts tomorrow,” said Glock. He was extremely tall, a head higher than MacAllister, who checked in at over six feet. Blond hair, impeccably dressed, eyes that looked right through you.

“How do we stand, Jason?”

Glock always gave the impression everything was under control. “I’m not optimistic,” he said. “The issue clearly flies in the face of the First Amendment. People have a right to tell kids whatever they want about religion.”

“Do they have a right to push human sacrifice?”

“Of course not, Mac. But this isn’t human sacrifice. It’s just a church school.”

“I’m not sure the effect isn’t similar.”

“Whatever, we’ll never persuade a judge.”

“What are we claiming? Temporary insanity?”

“We’re going to argue that the damage done to Henry’s psyche was so severe that when he encountered the preacher he lost his judgment.”

“Why not insanity?”

“The judge wouldn’t buy it, take my word. I’ve done the research. But he is open to the argument that a justifiable anger drove our client to take matters into his own hands. He’ll still be guilty, but I think we can get clear with a minimum penalty. Probably a fine.”

“Do that, and the church schools will continue to poison kids’ minds.”

“Mac, my responsibility is to take care of my client. Not put the churches out of business.”

“What actually happened, Jason? How’d the assault take place?”

Glock was seated behind a table littered with papers. “Henry was in the store. He was waiting in line to pay for several novels, one of which was Connecticut Yankee. The Reverend Pullman came in. Beemer saw him and, after a few moments, left the line and followed the preacher to the back. There, in the self-help section, they engaged in a loud dispute that rapidly devolved into pushing and shoving. When Pullman tried to walk away, Henry took one of the books, put the others down, and went after him. The preacher heard him coming and turned just in time to get whacked with the Mark Twain.” He couldn’t restrain a laugh.

“Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. The store manager and his security officer pulled Henry away from Pullman. Pullman was visibly bruised, but he declined medical assistance. Police arrived and arrested Henry. As they dragged him out of the store he was screaming that Pullman had ruined his life.

“The guy will never be sure,” said Glock, “that he’s not going to hell.”

“What kind of person is he?” asked MacAllister. “I mean, is he violating the Commandments on a regular basis?”

The lawyer smiled. “Not as far as I can tell. Probably no more than the rest of us. But he’s lost the conviction that the Bible is literally true. And Pullman made it pretty clear during the classes what the penalty was for that.”

The trial would start at nine. A seat had been reserved for MacAllister.

HE DECIDED HE’D skip the trial, at least on the first day. If he went, he wouldn’t get back in time to have dinner with Valya.

He switched on the news. The Black Cat was running a clip of Charlie Dryden, who was saying that, by God, Orion Tours wasn’t going to be scared off. “You can bet there’ll be another Galactic. We’ve decided, though, that Capella may not have been the best place for it.”

“It’s going to be somewhere else?” asked the interviewer.

“We were always divided about the site. There was a lot to recommend Capella, but we’ve come to feel that people would prefer a world where they can see some animals. So we’re going to build at Terranova.”

That fitted exactly with MacAllister’s notion. He personally preferred a quiet world. But he’d always known most people would want animals. Something they could throw bread crumbs to.

So they would build another Galactic. Something stirred in his memory. The comments of Karim and the others after the Salvator had rescued them. Three or four months behind.

Never had the people to do the job right.

The way things turned out, it was just as well.

MacAllister didn’t think of himself as cynical. Realistic was closer to an accurate description. It was remarkable, though, a tribute to his character, that he wasn’t a cynic. As a working journalist, he’d seen constant abuse of power and authority, too much greed, too much hypocrisy. The current surge of interest in building an armed fleet, in expanding the interstellar presence, would be of enormous benefit to Orion, which owned and operated three of the six deep-space stations. Other giants would benefit, as well. Monogram would get prime contracts for building warships. Half a dozen companies would profit from designing weapons systems. Much of the software would be created and installed by MicroTech. And then there were outfits like Kosmik, that had been forced out of the terraforming business when the desire to colonize never really materialized. Kosmik would love an opportunity to help establish naval bases around the Orion Arm.

Trillions would be involved if the World Council took the moonrider threat seriously.

Trillions.

The sun was a red splotch in his curtains.

He called Hutch and got right through.

“On the run, Mac,” she told him. “What can I do for you?”

“Got a question. From what I’ve heard, the Galactic asteroid was too big to have been diverted and aimed at the hotel by anything we have. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

She looked at him suspiciously. “Do you know something I don’t?”

“No, not really. I just wanted to know whether it would have been possible for, say, a couple of cargo ships to redirect that thing?”

“No.”

“No chance?”

“No more than you’d have of pushing the state building off its foundation. You could maybe nudge it in one direction or another if you installed a bunch of thrusters. But to manage a pinpoint strike. Without leaving a trace? No.” She waved it away. “It’s not possible. With no technology we can imagine.”

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

“By the way, Mac, we’d like to have you over for dinner. Are you free tomorrow?”

Hutch would say yes if he asked to bring Valya, but it might put her in a spot. Bosses and subordinates and all that. That was another problem with relationships. They complicated everything. “Have to pass, Hutch. I’ve got commitments. Maybe next week sometime?”

HE CALLED WOLFIE. “Did you ever hear any stories about construction of the Galactic running behind schedule?”

“The hotel?”

“Yes.”

Wolfie was in his apartment. Someone else was there, out of view. A woman, undoubtedly. Wolfie mixed women and alcohol with enthusiasm. But he was a good journalist. “Not that I can recall,” he said. “Want me to look into it?”

“Yeah. Don’t make a project of it. But try to find out if there’s anything to it. And if so, why?”

He disconnected, poured himself a glass of brandy, went back to the sofa, and slept until Tilly woke him. “Valya is on the circuit, sir.” His breathing changed again. Maybe her relatives had gone home early.

The moment she reappeared, though, he knew that wasn’t it. “Mac,” she said, “I have to bail on the dinner tomorrow night. Sorry.”

“Me, too,” he said. “Anything wrong?”

“No. I’m fine. I’m going to be gone for a while. They’re sending me out again.”

“Already?”

“Looks like.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“On the Salvator? I mean, you’ve got an assignment?”

“Yes.”

“It’s short notice, isn’t it? Where are you headed?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Are you serious?”

“I mean it, Mac.”

“Sure.”

“They’re sending me hunting for asteroids.”

“You want me to talk to Hutch? I can probably get it canceled.”

“No. It’s my job.”

Damn. “Okay.” He sighed. “Are we talking about Origins?”

“Yes.”

“They’re taking Amy seriously.”

“Yes.”

“The Europeans have their own resources. Why don’t they send somebody?”

“I guess they don’t believe the story. Hutch was pretty vague about it. I suspect she’s not sure how to proceed. They probably don’t want to push too hard because it’s so crazy.”

“They have anything more to go on than Amy’s dream?”

“What more could they have? I think it’s a fool’s run, but Hutch asked, and I didn’t see how I could say no.”

“I guess not.”

“You want to come?”

It was tempting. But it would mean another week or two in that tin can. He had a lot of work to do. And there was the trial. “I have to pass, Valya. Is anyone going with you?”

“No. But that’s not the issue.”

“I understand. And I appreciate the offer. I’m just not able to manage it right now.”

“Okay.”

“See you when you get back?”

“Absolutely. Talk to you, Mac.”

DECIDING THAT AMY’S dream might have some substance in reality had unsettled Eric. He didn’t want to spend time alone in his modest two-story home outside Falls Church. The commissioner had left a message directing him to attend a staff meeting at the Academy that afternoon. A few weeks ago he’d have been right there. But it was a nice day, and he’d never been to a staff meeting at which anything was accomplished. So he decided to pass. He’d come up with a story later. Instead, he changed and went out for a stroll. Until about two years ago he had jogged regularly, but his knees had stiffened. Now he walked instead. He usually maintained a brisk pace, but today he decided he’d take his time.

He always had an audio book with him. On this occasion, he was starting Command and Control, an analysis of military and political leadership during the last sixty years. The book led off with the economic competition that had developed between Canada and the United States during the last century, and how it had led ultimately to their union. He was listening to an account of the cod wars when his link vibrated. It was Hutch.

He stopped on the edge of a grassy field and thought about letting the AI pick up, but Hutch wouldn’t give him away. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Eric, we’re sending Valya back to Origins to take a look around. Something about the mission will probably leak. Which means you may hear from the media later today or tonight.”

“Okay.”

“Officially, it’s a routine flight. After the incidents at Terranova and Capella, we’re just being cautious. Okay? It’s no big deal.”

“Unofficially, you think she’s going to find another rock?”

“Maybe two of them. For all we know, maybe the moonriders are thinking of hitting both ends of the accelerator.”

“Who’s going with her?”

“Nobody. She’ll be fine.”

“And if she sees an incoming?”

“Then we can sound the alarm.”

“When’s she leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“You know, she doesn’t believe it’s going to happen. Last time I talked to her, she thought Amy had imagined everything.”

“That hasn’t changed. She thinks I’m pushing the panic button.”

“Okay.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. She’ll do the job.”

Eric hesitated. Destiny was waiting.

“Did you have something else?”

Valya was going to go out there, spot a pair of incoming asteroids, give the alarm, and save one or two hundred lives. “Yes. I’d like to go along.”

ORIGINS WAS TWENTY-FOUR light-years away. Fifty-five hours flight time to get into the area, plus whatever it would take to get to the facility.

It was time for Hutch to decide whether she was willing to go the whole route with Amy. There was no safe way to play it.

She called Operations and got Peter. “We may want to get some resources over to Origins in a hurry. Do we have anything at all available if the need arises?”

“Nothing close by.”

“What about the Rehling?” It would be carrying two VIPs home from Nok. But it would be within range of Origins. It could only accommodate eight or nine people, but it would be something.

“It hasn’t left Nok yet.”

She stared at Peter’s image. He was annoyed, trying not to show it. He thinks I’m going off the deep end, too. “Tell them to head out now. I want them to get to Origins as quickly as they can.”

“You’re sure about this? They’re supposed to bring Autry and Cullen home. Those guys will not be happy.”

“Do it anyhow. We have anything else?”

“Nothing closer than a couple weeks.”

“Okay. Take care of it, Peter. And let me know what the TOA looks like.”

“Will do.”

“Something else. I’m going to want a summary of everything that’s going to be at Union during the next twenty-four hours. I don’t suppose one of the Stars is in port?”

“Negative. They wouldn’t send one of those anyhow. Wouldn’t matter what sort of emergency was going on.”

“Sure they would. It all depends how you ask.”

He laughed. “Okay. You’ll have the summary in a few minutes.”

SHE CALLED ASQUITH. “Michael, I’m diverting the Rehling. Sending it to Origins.”

“What?” He looked baffled. “Why? Haven’t you already sent the Salvator out there? Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s a precaution. If there’s an event at Origins, we wouldn’t be in a position to do much for them.”

“For God’s sake, Priscilla, it’s none of our business. Origins isn’t our operation. Let Allard worry about it. We’ve warned him. We’re covered.”

“It’s done, Michael.”

“Who’s on it? Anybody who’s going to give us trouble?”

“Cullen and Autry.”

“That’s just great. They’ll scream to high heaven.”

“Michael, if an attack happens, we don’t want to be in a position where we know we might have done something about it but just sat here.”

“Have it your own way, Priscilla. But I think it’s crazy.” He was at the capitol, supposedly conferring with a congressional work group. He looked a bit rumpled.

“I want you to do something for me, Michael.”

“What is it now?”

“Call Dryden. Explain what we’ve got, and ask him if Orion can send a couple ships to Origins.”

He pressed his fingertips against his temples, a man with a headache. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Look.” Father to daughter. “You want to put your reputation on the line because this kid has wet dreams, go ahead. But I’m not going any further with this. You’re that hot about it, you take care of it. You can tell him you’re speaking for me, if you want.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s not make it sound like an emergency, though. Right? This is something that isn’t going to happen. We know that. He’ll know it. It’s just a precaution. Or maybe a public relations move. But if something goes wrong, you’re out there by yourself. Understand?” He was about to disconnect when he remembered something. “By the way, I’ll be traveling on Academy business tomorrow. Attending a conference in Copenhagen. You’ve got the helm until I get back.”

Hutch knew the symptoms. Asquith thought the whole thing would blow up, and he was getting as far from the fallout as he could.

“WHY?” DRYDEN ASKED. “What’s the problem?”

“There’s a chance there might be an attack at Origins.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“That sounds a trifle odd, considering what Orion’s just been through.”

“Is there another asteroid coming in?”

“Not that we know of, but we have reason to believe a strike may be imminent.”

“Hutch, look, I can’t just grab some liners and send them off on a wild goose chase. What’s your evidence?”

“I’m not free to say.”

“Then I really can’t help. I’m sure you understand. We’d be happy to do what we can, but you’ll have to take us into your confidence.”

“Let it go,” she said.

She also needed to warn Origins. There was no indication Allard was likely to pass the Academy’s concerns on. She knew a few people at the facility. But if she communicated directly with them, it would constitute defying the director. If nothing happened, the Academy would be seriously embarrassed, and she would be making profuse apologies. Maybe there was a better way. She asked Marla to get Mac back on the circuit.

“Hi, Beautiful,” he said. “What do you need?”

“You have any contacts at Origins?”

“I know a few people there. What did you need?”

“Can you get a warning to them? Without involving the Academy?”

“What did you want them to hear?”

PETER SENT A schedule listing everything that was currently at Union, or that was expected within the next twenty-four hours.

A lot of people on the orbiter owed Hutch favors. Over the years, the Academy had supplied ships and information to virtually every off-world corporate entity. They’d provided training, and even occasionally gone to their rescue. She’d included their VIPs on survey runs, when it was feasible, and had encouraged Academy technicians to help where they could.

She looked over the list of ships, their current status, and their capacities. Then she made her first call to Franz Hoffer, at Thor Transport, which specialized in servicing the deep-space stations. “Probably not going to be a problem,” she said, “but if you can arrange things so a ship is available in the event we need it, I’d be grateful.”

“We can let you have the Carolyn Ray,” Franz said. “It’ll only hold twenty people. But it’s all we’ve got.”

“We’ll take it, Franz. And thanks.”

Franz was a small, thin man. Blond hair. Mustache. Always perfectly pressed and combed. “We’ll have to do some preps.”

“Okay.”

“Bring in a pilot. It can be out of here Friday.”

Two days. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

Nova Industries moved capital equipment to interstellar construction sites. Lately business had been slow, and they’d officially mothballed the Rikart Bloomberg. But it could be made ready to go in a couple of days. “It will accommodate thirteen,” they said.

Maracaibo would send an executive yacht, the Alice Bergen. They apologized. It could only carry five, but it was all they had. They’d bring in a pilot immediately. Get it under way late Thursday.

Beijing FTL agreed to send the Zheng Shaiming as soon as they could refuel and run systems checks. Probably Friday night. No later than Saturday morning. It had a capacity of twenty-six. Mitsubishi donated the Aiko Tanaka, an experimental craft that had been undergoing testing. That gave her sixteen more.

WhiteStar, which operated the big cruise liners, could have settled the issue had any of its three mainline ships been available. But they weren’t. They could however provide two service vehicles. “Not comfortable,” Meaty Hogan, their maintenance boss told her, “but they’ll each hold four passengers, and they can leave as soon as we get the pilots over to them.”

“How many in an emergency?”

Meaty thought about it. “Five. But not for an extended period.”

The French government had a vehicle in transit. The Christophe Granville. “It can accommodate twenty-two, and be at the site in a few days, Priscilla,” said their operations chief. “You wish us to divert?”

“Please.”

“It is done.”

The Norwegians contributed the Connor Haaverstad, capacity fourteen. It was undergoing maintenance, however, and would not be able to leave for three days. “Send it when you can,” said Hutch.

“We’ll try to hurry things along.”

When she got home that evening and told Tor what she’d done, he was as supportive as he could manage, considering he believed she’d committed a major-league blunder. Thrown away her reputation and her career. As she lay beside him on that darkest of nights, she suspected in her heart he was right.

Our preliminary review of the global defense posture indicates that arming vehicles operated by the Academy, the Alliance for Interstellar Development, and the European Deep Space Commission will constitute, at best, a temporary fix. The hard truth is that we cannot ensure security against an enemy whose capabilities are unknown, and may far exceed our own. However that may be, a fleet of ships whose armament is jury-rigged will not provide a long-term answer. We need to start thinking seriously about a battle fleet whose capabilities will be of the highest possible order our technologies can support.

— Joint House/Senate Report, Wednesday, May 6

The rush to arms is just one more glorious boondoggle. We’ve been on this planet for a million years or so, and nobody’s bothered us yet. The last thing we need is battle cruisers in space. If there are really intelligent aliens out there, surely we can talk to them. We haven’t even tried. In any case, there are plenty of empty worlds. Why would they bother us?

— Epiphany, Wednesday, May 6