Omega

chapter 1

Arlington.

Tuesday, February 18, 2234.

HAROLD TEWKSBURY WOKE from one of those curious disjointed dreams in which he was wandering down endless corridors while his heart fluttered and he had trouble breathing. Damned thing wouldn’t go away anymore.

The doctors wanted to give him a synthetic heart. But he was over a hundred years old, and even if they could fix things so his body wouldn’t be tired, he was. His wife was long dead, his kids had grown up sixty years ago. Somehow he’d been too busy for his family, and he’d allowed himself to get separated from his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now none of them knew him.

The commlink was chiming, and he heard Rhonda’s soft voice. “Harold,” she was saying. “The lab.” Rhonda was the house AI. “I don’t like waking you for these calls, and I think you should let me deal with them.”

“Can’t, Rhonda. Just patch it through.”

“At the very least, you should take your medication first. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said, pushing up to a sitting position. “I’m fine. Just a little short of breath.” He dumped a pill into his hand and swallowed it. And felt better almost immediately.

It was 3:17 A.M.

“Put them on,” he said. And he knew, of course, why they were calling. The only reason they ever called at this hour except the time that Josephine had tripped over a rumpled carpet, broken an arm, and had to be taken off to the hospital.

“Harold.” Charlie’s voice.

“Yes, Charlie? It happened again?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Same as the others?”

“Right. No record there was ever a star there anywhere.”

“Same signature?”

“We don’t quite have the details down yet, but it looks like it.”

A nova. But not really. Not the right intensity. Not the right spectroscopic reading. And no evidence of a star having been in the neighborhood. He shook his head. Can’t have a nova without a star. “Where?”

“Near the Golden Crescent.”

“On a line with the others?”

“Yes.”

And that was what really chilled him. There had been three earlier events. On a line, as if something were marching through the sky.

“Did we catch it at the beginning? Or was it running when the package opened up?”

“At the beginning, Harold.”

“Okay. Pipe it through.”

He rearranged his pillows. A starfield winked on. The Golden Crescent, nursery to a thousand newborn stars, floated over his dresser. To his left, great smoky walls fell away to infinity. The Mogul, a small, dim class-G, was close enough to illuminate the clock. And the long arm of the Milky Way passed through the center of the room.

“Five seconds,” said a recorded voice.

He pushed himself higher and watched a dazzling light appear over the dresser. Brilliant and blinding, it overwhelmed everything else in the sky.

It looked like a nova. Behaved like a nova. But it was something else.

He ran it a few more times before closing the record. They had this one from the beginning. If it was like the others, the light would sustain itself for sixty-one days before shutting down.

THROUGH HIS WINDOW the lights of the Washington Monument were a distant blur. The White Eagle Hotel, usually a bright beacon in the night, had been swallowed by an unseasonable fog. He sat quietly, allowing full rein to a rush of sheer pleasure. He was caught up in one of the great mysteries of the age, had no clue what was happening, suspected there would not be a reasonable explanation during his lifetime. And he could not have been happier. The universe, it seemed, was smart enough to keep them all guessing. Which was as it should be.

They’d started trying to sell Weatherman fifteen years ago. The idea was to use their FTL capability to put automated observation packages in strategic locations. They’d presented the program as a means for observing omega clouds, finding out what they were, and possibly learning how to combat them. Fifteen years earlier that had been a very big deal. The clouds had still been relatively new. The news that one was headed toward Earth, even though it wouldn’t arrive for roughly nine hundred years, had scared the pants off the general public. But that fear had long since subsided.

The technology had never been right; the program was expensive, and superluminals were needed to make the deliveries. Then there had been a huge piece of luck: the discovery of an alien vehicle at the Twins a few years before provided new technology: a way to build compact self-contained FTL engines and install them as part of the observation package. Push a button, and the Weatherman was on its way.

It had been a long time getting there, but it was on the job at last.

A month ago, the first long-range Weatherman package had arrived in the neighborhood of M68, a globular cluster thirty-one thousand light-years away. Since then, several dozen units had unfurled their sails and powered up scopes and sensors and hyperlight transmitters. More units were en route to hundreds of sites.

The first pictures had come in, and they’d popped the champagne. Sylvia Virgil, the director of operations, had come down and gotten wobbly. But that night nobody cared. They’d stood around looking at a sky filled with dusty clouds like great walls, vast star nurseries that rose forever. It was eerie, gothic, ominous, illuminated by occasional smears of light, like the Monument and the White Eagle. The “walls” were, of course, thousands of light-years across. And they’d watched everything through the eye of the Weatherman. Soon, he’d told himself, they would be everywhere.

MOST OF HAROLD’S colleagues had been blasé about the kind of results they expected. At the time they thought they understood everything, knew how galaxies formed, had a lock on the life cycles of suns, grasped the general nature of the beasts that haunted the dark reaches between the stars. But right out of the box they’d gotten a surprise.

The first phase of the Weatherman Project consisted of the simultaneous launch of more than six hundred probes. When they all arrived at their stations, the Academy would have coverage of sites ranging from within two thousand light-years of the core all the way out to the rim, from Eta Carina to the Lagoon, from the Ring Nebula to the M15 cluster. They would take the temperature of dust clouds and nebulas, track down gravitational anomalies, and provide pictures of the controlled chaos around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. With luck, it would all happen during Harold’s lifetime.

Actually, there’d been several surprises, from black jets to the galactic wind. But the great anomaly was the quasi nova. Behind his back, his people were already calling them tewks. Starlike explosions, eruptions of enormous energy in places where there were no stars. And almost in a line. Not quite, but almost. It made his hair stand on end.

There was no use trying to go back to sleep. He disentangled himself from the sheets, wandered into the kitchen, got out two pieces of farm bread, and slugged some strawberry jelly on them. One of his many guilty pleasures.

The explosions, though they were less than nova force, were nevertheless of sufficient intensity to be visible across tens of thousands of light-years. Probably all the way out to Andromeda. They were far away, and for that he felt grateful. Explosions of their magnitude, for which one couldn’t account, were disquieting.

Light from the four events would reach Earth toward the end of the millennium. They would be visible in the southern hemisphere, where they’d blaze across the sky, in Libra and Scorpius, not quite lining up. But close.

THIS WAS PRISCILLA Hutchins’s second tour in the Academy bureaucracy. She’d served two years as transport chief, gotten bored, returned to piloting, gotten married, and accepted a tempting offer: assistant director of operations. She was at last content to leave the superluminals behind, to get away from the long voyages, to get out of the ships with their virtual beaches and their virtual mountainscapes and their virtual everything-else. The oceans and the breezes and the sand were real now. She had a man who loved her, and a daughter, and a house in the suburbs, and life was good.

But Sylvia Virgil was leaving for a lucrative position in private industry. She was effectively gone, and Hutch had found herself assigned as Acting D.O. With an inside shot at getting a permanent appointment.

But the view from the top was turning out to be a bit more complicated than she’d expected. The days in which she made decisions of no consequence to anyone, invested countless hours formulating policy for the record, attended conferences at establishments with convenient golf courses, reviewed reports from the field, and took extraordinarily long lunches abruptly ended.

Hutch was now responsible for coordinating the movements of all Academy vessels, for deciding who piloted those vessels, and for determining passenger transportation. That sounded simple enough. In the old days, when Professor Hoskinson wanted to bump Dr. O’Leary from a flight to Pinnacle, Hutch had simply passed the issue along and let Sylvia make the call. Now she was in the middle of every food fight, and she had discovered that her clients, for the most part, owned substantial egos and were not above bringing to bear whatever pressure they could manage. Because they were inevitably the top people in their respective fields, the pressure they could bring was considerable.

She had also become responsible, within monetary constraints, for determining which projects the Academy pushed and which it neglected, and for establishing their priority, and the level of resources to be devoted to each. All, of course, controlled by guidelines from the commissioner. She had a staff of scientific advisors, but the decisions tended more often than not to be based on political considerations. Who had clout with Congress? Who had been supportive of the Academy during the previous fiscal year? Whom did Asquith like?

Michael Asquith was the Academy commissioner, her boss, and a man who believed that scientific considerations were necessarily secondary to rewarding the Academy’s supporters and punishing its critics. He called it taking the long view. “We have to give preference to our friends,” he told her in strictest secrecy, as if it weren’t a transparent policy. “If a little science doesn’t get done as a consequence, that’s a price we’re willing to pay. But we have to keep the Academy in business and well funded, and there’s only one way to do that.”

The result was that when a program that deserved support on its own merits didn’t get it, Hutch took the heat. When a popular initiative went through and provided serious results, the commissioner got the credit. During the three months since she’d accepted the assignment, she’d been bullied, threatened, harassed, and hectored by a substantial representation of the scientific community. Many of them seemed to believe they could take her job. Others promised reprisals, and there’d even been a couple of death threats. Her once benign view of academics, formed over more than two decades of hauling them around the Orion Arm, had gone downhill. Now, when they contacted her, she had to make a conscious effort not to get hostile.

She’d had a modicum of vengeance against Jim Albright, who’d called her to threaten and complain when his turn at one of the Weatherman units had been set back. She’d responded by indiscreetly mentioning the incident to Gregory MacAllister, an editor who’d made a long and happy career of attacking academics, moralists, politicians, and crusaders. MacAllister had gone after Albright with a bludgeon, depicting him as a champion of trivial causes and his program as “one more example of squandering the taxpayers’ money counting stars.” He hadn’t mentioned Hutch, but Albright knew.

That didn’t matter, because the bottom line was that she didn’t hear from Albright again, although she learned later that he’d tried to have her terminated. Asquith understood what had happened, though, and warned her to call off the big dog. “If it comes out that we’re behind any of that, we’ll all be out on the street,” he told her. He was right, and Hutch was careful not to use the MacAllister weapon again. But she’d enjoyed watching Albright go to ground.

She was in the middle of trying to decide how to persuade Alan Kimbel, who was currently at Serenity doing research on stellar jets, that he could not stay beyond the original timetable and would have to come home. Kimbel had appealed to her on the ground that there’d been a breakthrough discovery, and he and his team needed a few more weeks. Please. The man had been almost in tears.

The problem was that it happened all the time. Space on the outlying stations was scarce, and there were already people en route and more in line. Extensions could be granted under certain conditions, and her advisors had told her that Kimbel was correct in his assessment. But if she granted the extension, she’d have to tell another group already a week into their mission that, when they arrived at Serenity, they wouldn’t be able to stay. She couldn’t very well do that. And the only alternative was to cut someone else short. She’d looked at the possibilities and, for various reasons, there was no easy pick. In the end, she’d denied the request.

She was recording a response to Kimbel when her link chimed. Harold Tewksbury on the circuit.

Harold was the senior member of the astrophysics staff. He’d been with the Academy when Hutch had toured the place as a high school senior. He was an organization freak, a fussy little man with a penchant for order and procedure. His reputation in the field wasn’t good. His colleagues thought him quarrelsome and uncommunicative, but no one seemed to doubt his capabilities. And he was always nice to Hutch.

“Yes, Harold,” she said. “What are you up to this morning?”

“You busy at the moment?”

She had a hatful of problems. “It isn’t like the old days,” she said. “But I can make time.”

“Good. When you can, stop by the lab.”

SHE FOUND HIM sitting at his desk staring out into the courtyard. He shook his head when he saw her, signaling bewilderment. But he also managed a smile. “Something odd’s going on,” he said.

She thought he was talking about equipment. There had been recent problems with spectrometers. Replacing them would have been expensive, so they’d gone with upgrades. Harold didn’t like upgrades, didn’t like not having the top-of-the-line. “Spend all this money to send out packages,” he’d grumbled to her just a few days earlier, “and then skimp on the retrieval-and-analysis gear.”

But he surprised her. “You know about the quasi novas,” he said.

The tewks. She knew, more or less. It seemed a bit esoteric to her, events a thousand light-years away. Hardly a matter of concern for any but the specialists.

He leaned toward her. His white hair was plumped up and one wing of his collar stuck out sideways. He presented the classic image of a researcher. His blue eyes became unfocused rather easily; he frequently lost his train of thought: and he was inclined often to stop in the middle of a sentence when some new idea occurred to him. In the bright midday sunlight, he looked like an ultimate innocent, a man for whom physical law and mathematics were the only realities. Two cups of coffee arrived.

“They’re almost in a line,” he said.

“And the significance of that is—?”

“It shouldn’t happen naturally.”

She just didn’t know where to go with it. “What are you telling me, Harold?”

“I don’t really know, Hutch. But it scares me.”

“You’re sure they’re not novas?”

“Positive.” He tried his coffee, examined the cup, sighed. “Among other things, there’s too much energy in the visible spectrum, not enough in the X-ray and gamma.”

“Which means—?”

“You get more visible light for the amount of energy expended. A ton more. It’s brighter. By a lot.”

“A lightbulb.”

“You could almost say that.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll pass it on. You recommend any action?”

He shook his head. “I’d give quite a lot to have a Weatherman in place the next time one goes off.”

“Can we do that? Can you predict the next one?”

Now he was looking at the spoon. “Unfortunately not. I can take a stab.”

“A stab? What are the odds?”

“Not good.”

“Harold, let’s do this: Let’s watch for a while. If you reach a point where we know an event is coming, where you can give me a target with a reasonable degree of certainty, we’ll take a serious look. Okay?”

IT WASN’T SOMETHING she could get excited about. She made a mental note to suggest that Eric Samuels, the public relations director, get in touch with Harold to see whether the Academy couldn’t squeeze some publicity out of it. Meantime, she was looking at a busy afternoon.

She had lunch with the president of the SPA, the Superluminal Pilots’ Association. They wanted more money, a better retirement system, better career opportunities, you name it. She knew Ben Zalotski well, from her own days on the bridge. Ben was a decent guy, and a hard charger for the pilots. The problem was that he had no compunctions about taking advantage of their long association to get what he wanted. In reality, it wasn’t even Hutch’s area of responsibility. Jill Watkin in Personnel was supposed to handle all this stuff, but Ben had framed the hour as an opportunity for old friends to get together. She’d known what was coming, but couldn’t very easily refuse to see him. She might have simply gotten busy, but she didn’t like being devious. In the end she had to tell him she couldn’t help, refused even to concede that she sympathized with his objectives, even though she did. But she was part of the management team and her loyalties lay in a different direction. Ben quoted some of her past comments back at her, the pilots are overworked, they can’t keep their families together, and nobody gives a damn for them. They’re just glorified bus drivers and that’s the way they get treated. He allowed himself to look disappointed, and even implied that she’d turned her back on her old comrades.

So she returned to her office in a foul mood, listened to an appeal from Hollis Gunderson, “speaking for the University of the Netherlands,” to have his pet project put on the docket. The project was a hunt for a white hole, which Hutch’s scientific team had advised her didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, and would be a waste of resources. Gunderson had gotten past the appointments secretary by claiming someone had misunderstood his intentions. Hutch had made time to talk with him, on the assumption it was easier to see him while he was here than to call back and cancel him. Anyhow, there was something to be said for not making enemies unnecessarily. Her now-retiring boss, Sylvia Virgil, had commented on Priscilla’s most recent evaluation that she had a tendency to put off confrontations. She’d suggested Hutch was too timid. Hutch had wondered how Virgil would have done on Deepsix, but let it go.

She heard Gunderson out and concluded the “misunderstanding” to which he’d referred was semantic rather than substantive. Call it by any other name, he still wanted to go looking for a white hole. She told him that, to have the project even considered, he’d have to provide a written statement supporting his views from two of the thirteen physicists certified by the Academy to rule on such matters. “Until you can satisfy two of them, Professor,” she said, “I’m afraid we can’t help you.”

A young man had a complaint concerning one of the pilots. He’d been gruff, he said, and rude and generally not very talkative. All the way back from Outpost. Did Hutch have any idea what it was like to ride for weeks with a ship’s captain who kept to himself? He was talking about Adrian Belmont, whom she’d like to get rid of because there were always complaints, but the SPA would come down hard on the Academy if she terminated him. Better to hire a hit man. Cleaner.

In any case, it wasn’t an operational matter. “I’m terribly sorry,” she told him. “You should be aware that the pilots frequently make those voyages alone. Some of them have simply learned to get along without a social life. We ask the passengers to be understanding. But if you really want to press the matter, I’m afraid you have the wrong department. You’ll want Personnel. End of the corridor, turn right, thank you very much.”

She gave an interview to a journalist working on a book about Moonlight, arranged special transportation to Paradise for Abel Kotanik, who’d been requested by the field team, juggled shipping schedules to get a load of medical supplies (which had been mistakenly dropped and left on the pier at Serenity) forwarded to the Twins, and decided to fire the chief engineer at Pinnacle for sins of commission and omission that stretched back three years.

Her final meeting of the day was with Dr. Alva K. Emerson. It was another example of granting an interview she would have liked to hand off to someone else. Anyone else. Hutch didn’t intimidate easily, but she was willing to make an exception on this occasion.

Alva Emerson was an M.D., well into her eighties, and one of the great figures of the age. She had founded and led the Children’s Alliance, which had brought modern medical care to hundreds of thousands of kids worldwide during the past forty years. She’d mobilized the wealthy nations, gotten legislation passed by the World Council and in sixty countries around the globe to provide care for the forgotten peoples of the Earth. While we reach for the stars, she’d said in her celebrated remarks twenty years before at the Sudan Memorial, a third of our children cannot reach for a sandwich. The comment was engraved in stone over the entrance to Alliance Headquarters in Lisbon.

The world loved her. Political leaders were terrified of her. Everywhere she went, good things happened. Hospitals rose, doctors poured in, corporate donations swelled the coffers. (No one wanted to be perceived as stingy or mean-spirited when Dr. Alva came knocking.) She was credited with saving millions. She’d won the Peace Prize and the Americus, was on first-name terms with the pope and the president of the NAU, and had stopped a civil war in Argentina simply by putting her body in the way. And there she was to see Hutch. Not the commissioner. Not Asquith. But Priscilla Hutchins. By name.

Asquith had asked her why, but Hutch had no idea.

“Whatever she wants,” Asquith had instructed her, “don’t commit the Academy to anything. Tell her we’ll take it under advisement.”

He didn’t offer to sit in.

HUTCH HAD SEEN Dr. Alva numerous times, of course. Everyone had. Who could forget the blood-soaked images of her kneeling over a dying girl during the aftershocks of the Peruvian earthquake of ’21? Or leading the Counselor himself through the wreckage of Bellaconda after the Peacekeepers finally put down the rebels? Or charging out of the flyer in plague-ridden South Africa?

But when she came through the door, Hutch would not have recognized her. She seemed smaller somehow. The windblown hair was under control. There was no sign of the no-nonsense attitude that was such a large part of the legend. She was reserved, polite, almost submissive. A woman, perhaps, headed out shopping.

“Dr. Emerson,” said Hutch, rising to greet her, “it’s a privilege to meet you.” Her voice went a few decibels higher than normal.

“Priscilla?” Alva stretched out her hand. “It’s my pleasure.”

Hutch directed her to a wing chair and sat down beside her. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the office.”

Alva wore a pleated navy skirt and a light blue blouse beneath a frayed velomir jacket. Part of the image. Her hair had gone white, “in the service of the unfortunate,” as Gregory MacAllister had once put it. She was probably the only public figure for whom MacAllister had ever found a kind word.

“None at all, thank you.” She arranged herself, glanced around the office, and smiled approvingly. It was decorated with several of Tor’s sketches, images of the Twins and of the Refuge at Vertical, of the illuminated Memphis gliding through starlight, of Hutch herself in an antique Phillies uniform. She smiled at that one, and her eyes settled on Hutch. They were dark and penetrating. Sensors, peering through the objects in the room. This was not a woman to be jollied along.

“What can I do for you, Doctor?” she asked.

“Priscilla, I need your help.”

Hutch wanted to shift her weight. Move it around a bit. Force herself to relax. But she sat quite still. “In what way?”

“We need to do something about the omega.”

At first Hutch thought she’d misunderstood. Alva was of course talking about the one headed toward Earth. When people said the omega, that was always the one they meant. “It won’t become a problem for almost a thousand years,” she said uneasily. “Were you suggesting—?”

“I was suggesting we find a way to stop it.”

That was easy to say. “We’ve been doing some research.”

“It’s been more than twenty years, Priscilla. Or is it Hutch?”

“Hutch is good.”

“Hutch.” Her tone softened. “Somehow, in your case, it is a very feminine name.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“Alva.”

Hutch nodded and tried the name. It was a bit like sitting with Washington and calling him George.

Alva leaned forward. “What have we learned so far?”

Hutch shrugged. “It’s loaded with nanos. Some of our people think it can create gravity fields. To help it navigate.”

“And it doesn’t like artificial objects.”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s a lot of dust and hydrogen. The clouds vary in size by a factor of about 30 percent. They coast along at a pretty good clip. In the range of 20 million klicks an hour.”

“That’s how fast it’s coming? Our cloud?”

“Yes.” Hutch thought for a minute. “Oh, and they seem to come in waves. We don’t know how wide the waves are because we can’t see the end of them. The local waves are 160 light-years apart, give or take, and one of them rolls through the solar system approximately every eight thousand years.”

“But they’re not always the same distance apart? The waves?”

“No. It’s pretty erratic. At the beginning, we assumed that the local pattern held everywhere, and that there were literally millions of clouds drifting throughout the Orion Arm. But of course that’s not true. Fortunately.”

“Anything else?”

“The waves are arcing outward in the general direction that the galaxy is turning. Joining the flow, I suppose.”

“And that’s it?”

“Pretty much.”

“It strikes me there’s not much we didn’t know twenty years ago. As to the questions that come to my mind, we don’t know where they come from. Or why they behave the way they do. We don’t even know if they’re natural objects.”

“That’s correct.”

“Or how to disable them.”

Hutch got up. She could feel energy radiating out of the woman. “They’re not easy to penetrate,” she said.

Alva smiled. “Like a virgin.”

Hutch didn’t reply.

For a long moment, neither spoke. The commlink blinked a couple of times, then shut off. Incoming traffic. Hyperlight from Broadside, personal for her.

Alva smiled politely and fixed Hutch with those dark eyes. The woman looked simultaneously amused and annoyed. “Are we making a serious effort?”

“Well,” said Hutch. “Of course.”

“But we’ve nothing to show. After twenty years. Thirty years, actually.”

“We’re working on it.” She was floundering.

Alva nodded. “We have to do better.”

“Alva—” She had to struggle to say the word. “There’s no hurry. I mean, the thing’s a thousand years away.”

Alva nodded again. But it wasn’t a concession, an acknowledgment that she had a point. Rather it was a recognition that Hutch was behaving exactly as expected, saying precisely what Alva had known all along she would say. She straightened her collar. “Hutch, you’ve been to Beta Pac.”

Home of the Monument-Makers, the lost race that had left majestic relics of their passing across several thousand light-years. Star-travelers while the Sumerians were learning to bake bricks. Nothing more than savages now, wandering through the ruins of their once-proud cities. “Yes, I’ve been there.”

“I have not.” Her eyes clouded. “I’ve seen quite enough decimation here at home.” Another long silence ensued. Then: “I understand the Monument-Makers knew about the omegas. Well in advance of their appearance at Beta Pac.”

“That’s correct. They even tried to divert the things at Quraqua and at Nok. To save the local inhabitants.”

“With no success.”

Hutch saw where this was going. “They cut cube moons and inserted them in orbit around Nok hoping the cloud would go for them instead of the cities.” She shrugged.

“In the end,” said Alva, “they couldn’t even save themselves.”

“No. They couldn’t. There’s evidence they packed up a substantial chunk of the population and cleared out.”

“Yet they had how long to prepare? Two thousand years?”

“A little longer, we think.”

She was on her feet now, moving to the window, drawn by the sunlight, but still not looking at anything. “How do you think that could have happened? Are the clouds so irresistible that even the Monument-Makers, given two millennia, couldn’t do something?”

“It’s probably not easy. To stop one of the omegas.”

“Hutch, I would suggest to you that two thousand years was too much time to get ready. That they probably put it off. Somebody else’s problem. Get to it next year. Or sometime during the next century. And they continued delaying until it became too late.”

“Maybe it’s too late already,” suggested Hutch. But she knew as soon as the words were out of her mouth that it had been the wrong thing to say.

Alva was a diminutive woman, but her presence filled the office. Overwhelmed it and left Hutch feeling like an intruder in her own space. “Maybe it is,” Alva said. “But we’d best not make that assumption.”

The office grew briefly darker, then brightened again. A cloud passing over the sun.

“You think,” said Hutch, “we’re going to let the situation get away from us.”

Alva’s eyebrows came together. “I know we are. What’s going to happen is that people are going to talk and think exactly as you do. And, Hutch, you’ve seen these things in action. You know what they do.” Her gaze turned inward. “Forgive me. I mean no offense. But the situation calls for honesty. We, too, are looking at the omegas as somebody else’s problem. But when it comes, it will be our children who are here.”

She was right, of course. Hutch knew that. Anyone who thought about the issue knew it.

Alva reached for a pad, scratched something on it, furrowed her brow. “Every day,” she said, “it advances on us by a half billion kilometers.”

It was late. It was past five o’clock and it had been a horribly long day. What did this woman want anyhow? “You understand,” Hutch said, “I don’t make Academy policy. You should be talking to Dr. Asquith.”

“I wasn’t trying to influence Academy policy. It’s too far down the scale to worry about, Hutch. Any serious effort to do something about the omegas is going to require political will. That doesn’t get generated here.”

“Then I don’t see—?”

“I didn’t come looking to get Academy support for this. It’s your support I want.”

“Mine?”

“You’re the public face of the Academy.”

“No. You’ve got the wrong person. Eric Samuels is our public affairs chief.”

“You, Hutch. You found the first cloud. You and Frank Carson and the others. Incidentally, someone told me you actually did the math. It was you who figured it all out. Is that true?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And you’re the woman from Deepsix. The woman who rescued her husband from that antique starship, the, what did you call it?”

“The chindi. But he wasn’t my husband then.”

“No matter. The point is you’ve been in the public eye for quite some time.” She was back in her seat, leaning toward Hutch, old friends who had been in combat together. “Hutch, I need you.”

“To—?”

“—become the public persona of the Omega Society.”

Well, it didn’t take a mathematician to figure out what the Omega Society was going to be doing. “Why don’t you do it, Alva? You’re a bit better known than I am.” She managed a weak smile.

“I’m the wrong person.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m associated with charities. With medical care. Nobody’s going to take me seriously when I start talking about long-range destruction. You aren’t taking me seriously and yet you know I’m right and I’m sitting in the same room with you.”

“No, that’s not true,” said Hutch. “I’m taking you seriously.”

The woman had an infectious smile. She turned it on Hutch, who bathed in its warmth and suddenly realized the secret of her success. The mental agility, the worthiness of her causes, her single-mindedness, none of it would have mattered without that pure living charm. Nobody ever says no to me. Nobody turns away. This is the moment of decision.

“I’d stay in the background, of course,” she said. “Board of directors stuff. But I’d be there if needed. We’d have a couple of major league scientific people out front to direct things, to run the organization. To provide the muscle. But you would be its face. Its voice.”

Alva was right. In a moment of startling clarity Hutch saw the centuries slipping away while the cloud drew closer. Not our problem. There’ll be a breakthrough. Don’t worry. How many times had she heard that already? But there probably wouldn’t be. Not without a concerted effort. And maybe there was a window that might close. There’d been talk of an all-out program when we’d first learned about the clouds. But when the initial shock wore off, and people began thinking how far away the thirty-second century was. Well, it was like worrying about the sun exhausting its fuel.

If she accepted, Hutch would have to give up all claim to being taken seriously ever again. The few who worried about the omegas, even if they were backed by Alva, provided the material for late-night comedians. They were greeted in academic circles with amused smiles and people shaking their heads. And she’d be out front.

Alva saw she was reluctant. “Before you answer,” she said, “I want to remind you that the public knows you’re a hero. You’ve put yourself at risk on several occasions, and you’ve saved a few lives. You’ve gotten credit for your acts.” The Academy’s Johanssen Award, which she’d received after Deepsix, hung on one wall. Other plaques commemorated her accomplishments at the Twins and in the rescue of her husband. And, of course, there’d been the sim, in which Hutch had been portrayed by the smoky-voiced, statuesque Ivy Kramer. “This time,” Alva continued, “there’ll be no credit and no applause. No sim and probably no books. No one will ever really know what you’ve accomplished, because you’ll have saved a world that’s quite far away. And we do have short memories. You have a heroic past, Hutch. But this time, there isn’t just one life, or a few lives, in the balance. Unless people like you come forward and act, we’re all going the same way as the Monument-Makers.”

The silence between them stretched out. The room seemed unsteady. “I’m sorry,” said Hutch at last. “But I can’t do this. It would involve a conflict of interest.”

Don’t look at me like that. It’s true.

“My obligations to the Academy—I can’t take up a cause like this and keep my job here. There’s no way I can do it.”

“We have adequate funding, Hutch. I’m sure you would find the compensation sufficient.”

“I really can’t do it,” said Hutch. “I have responsibilities here.”

Alva nodded. Sure. Of course you do. How could I not have seen it? Perhaps I misjudged you.

She gave Hutch time to reconsider her decision. Then she rose, and a business card appeared in her hand. “If you change your mind,” she said, holding it out for her.

“I won’t,” said Hutch. “But I thank you for asking.” And how hollow did that sound?

“I appreciate your hearing me out. I know you’re a busy woman.” Her gaze dissected Hutch and found her wanting. Not who I thought you were, it appears. Then she was gone, leaving Hutch with a feeling of rejection as overwhelming as any lover could have engendered.

THE TRANSMISSION THAT had come in during the interview was from Broadside, the newest of the deep-space bases maintained by the Academy. At a distance of more than three thousand light-years, it was three times as far as Serenity, which had for years been the most remote permanent penetration. Its operational chief was Vadim Dolinsk, an easygoing former pilot who was past retirement age but for whom she’d bent the rules because he was the right man for the job.

Vadim was seated at his desk, and his usual blasé expression had lengthened into a frown. “Hutch,” he said, “we’re getting a reading on one of the clouds. It’s changing course.”

Hutch was suddenly aware of the room. Of the cone of light projecting down from the desk lamp, of the flow of warm air from the vents, of someone laughing outside in the corridor.

Ironic that this would happen on the day that Alva had asked for help and Hutch had brushed her aside. Even Alva had not seen the real danger, the immediate danger. A few years ago, one of the clouds had drifted through the Moonlight system, had spotted the ruins on the fourth world, and had gone after them like a tiger after a buck. What would have happened had they been populated? Millions would have died while the Academy watched, appropriately aghast, unable to help. In the end, they would have shaken their heads, made some philosophical remarks, and gone back to work.

Within the next ten years, clouds would approach seven planetary systems that the Academy knew about. All were presumed empty, because virtually all systems were empty. But who could be sure? The systems in question were outside the range of finances rather than technology, so she simply didn’t know.

“Data’s attached,” Vadim continued. “I’ve diverted the Jenkins to take a look. They were about to start home, so they won’t be happy. But I think this is too important to let slide. I’ll notify you when I have more.

“How’s life in Woodbridge these days?”

Not as good as it was an hour ago.

She looked at the numbers. The cloud in question was another five hundred light-years beyond Broadside. It was approaching a class-G sun known to have three gas giants, but that was all that was known about the system. The star was located in the direction of the Dumbbell Nebula.

There were images of the cloud, and she recognized the streamers exploding away from it, trying to continue along the original course while the cloud turned a few degrees onto a new vector.

It had spotted something.

NEWSDESK

MOB CHIEF ASSASSINATED IN PHILLY

Hobson Still Insists There Is No Mob

SALUTEX CEO INDICTED FOR INSIDER TRADING

McBrady Could Face Ten Years

MIRROR STRAIN SPREADING IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Dr. Alva Headed for Managua

Outbound Flights Halted

ECONOMY WORSENS

Recession Is Now Official

DEMONSTRATORS OUT IN FORCE AT POSTCOMM SUMMIT

Morrison Has No Sympathy

“They’re Against Us, but They Have No Suggestions”

WASHINGTON AREA VOLCANO BECOMING ACTIVE AGAIN?

Disaster Center Issues Warning

ARAB PACT DEMANDS REPARATIONS

Claim Oil Supplies Sold At Fraction of Value To Keep West Afloat

Al-Kabarah: “Without Our Sacrifice, the World Would Still Be in the 18th Century”

IS THERE REALLY A MULTIVERSE?

Gunderson Proposes Hunt for White Hole

“It’s Out There Somewhere”

SYRACUSE COPS ARRESTED IN LIGHTBENDER CASE

ACLU Will File Suit To Ban Invisibility

TIME TRAVEL MAY BE POSSIBLE

Technitron Claims to Have Sent Stop Watch Forward Ten Seconds

Hoax or Error, Say Most Experts

GIANTS FAVORED IN TITLE GAME

Jamieson Says He Is Okay to Play

chapter 2

On board the Peter Quagmor, near the Bumblebee Nebula.

Sunday, February 23.

THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE in all Academy ships had been given the name Bill. His demeanor, and his appearance, tended to change from vessel to vessel, depending on his relationship with the captain. Whatever seemed to work with a given personality type, under whatever local circumstances might prevail. He could be paternal in the best sense, quarrelsome, sympathetic, persistent, quiet, even moody. Bill was sometimes a young and energetic companion, sometimes a gray eminence.

The Quagmor’s version reminded Terry Drafts of his garrulous and mildly ineffectual uncle Clete. The AI took everything very seriously, and seemed a bit on the frivolous side. Terry had been asleep when Bill got him up and asked him to come to the bridge. Jane was waiting.

“What is it?” Terry Drafts was the most senior physicist on the Academy staff among those who had worked actively at trying to solve the various problems associated with the omega clouds. He had been with the Frank Carson group during the initial encounter, had watched that first cloud attack the decoy shapes that Carson had set out for it on the lifeless world now celebrated as Delta.

Terry had been so entranced by what he’d seen that he had dedicated his life to the omegas. He’d appeared before Congress, had done interviews, had written the definitive account, Omega, which had caused a brief stir, all in the hope of rallying public opinion.

But the problem was almost a thousand years away, and he’d never been able to get past that. In the end, he’d given up, and settled for spending his time on monitoring missions. It was Terry who’d discovered that the clouds incorporated nanotechnology, who’d theorized that they manipulated gravity to navigate, that their primary purpose was something other than the destruction of cities. “Horribly inefficient if that’s what they’re supposed to do,” he’d argued in Omega. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of the things never see a civilization. They’re something else—”

But what else, he didn’t know.

Terry was tall, quiet, self-effacing. A believer. He was from the Ivory Coast, where they’d named a high school and a science wing at Abidjan University after him. He’d never married because, he’d once told an interviewer, he liked everybody.

At the beginning of his career, he’d formulated a series of ambitions, which awards he hoped to win, what level of prestige he hoped to achieve, what he wanted to accomplish. It had all narrowed down to a single unquenchable desire: to find a way to throttle the clouds.

One of them was currently on the ship’s scanners. As was something else.

“I have no idea what it is,” said Jane. It was an object that looked vaguely like an artistically exaggerated thistle, or a hedgehog. It was enormously larger than the Quagmor. “Just spotted it a couple minutes ago.”

Jane Collins was the ship’s captain, and the only other person on board. She was one of Terry’s favorite people, for reasons he’d have had trouble putting into words. She was in her sixties, with grandchildren out there somewhere. Pictures of them decorated the bridge. She was competent, he could trust her, and she was good company.

“It looks artificial,” he said. But not like any kind of vessel or package he’d ever seen. Spines stuck out all over it. They were rectangular and constructed with geometric precision.

“There’s somebody else out here,” said Terry, barely able to contain his excitement. Someone else worrying about the omegas.

“It has a low-level magnetic field,” said Bill. “And it is running on the same course as the cloud.”

“You’re sure, Bill?” asked Jane.

“No question.”

“Is it putting out a signal?”

“Negative,” said Bill. “At least, nothing I can detect.”

“Odd,” said Jane. “Range to the cloud, Bill?”

“Sixty thousand kilometers.” In their rear. “Something else: It is moving at the same velocity as the cloud. Or if not, it is very close to it.”

“Pacing it.”

“Yes. It appears so.”

“Somebody’s keeping an eye on the thing,” said Terry. “Bill, is the cloud likely to enter any system in the near future?”

“I have been looking. I cannot see that it could pose a near-term threat to anyone.”

“How about long-term?”

“Negative. As far forward as I can track with confidence, I see no intersection with, or close passage past, any star system.”

“How far forward,” asked Jane, “can you project? With confidence?”

“One point two million years.”

Then what was it doing here? In a half century, no one had yet run into any living creatures with star travel. They’d hardly run into any living creatures, period. “Bill, what are we getting from the sensors?”

“The exterior is stony with some nickel,” said the AI. “But it’s hollow.” He put a picture of the object on-screen. The projections were blunted triangles. There was a wide range of sizes. They were similar to each other, although of different designs, some narrow, some wide, all flat on top. The overall effect was of a hedgehog covered, not with spines, but with sculpted polygons.

“Can you tell what’s inside?”

“Not clearly. Seems to be two chambers in the base unit. And shafts in the spines. Beyond that I can’t make out any details.”

“The spines?” asked Jane.

“Some of them measure out to a bit over two kilometers.” Taller than the world’s tallest skyscraper. “If we consider it as a globe, with the tips of the longest spines marking the limits of the circumference, the diameter is six and a half kilometers. The central section is about two kilometers.” Bill’s image appeared, seated in a chair. Although he could summon whatever likeness he wished, he usually showed up in his middle-aged country lord demeanor. Beige jacket with patched elbows, cool dark eyes, black skin, silver cane, receding silver hair. “It’s a polyhedron,” he said. “Specifically, a rhombicosidodecahedron.”

“A what?”

“It has 240 sides.”

“It’s an odd coincidence,” he said.

“What is?”

“We know the clouds rain down fire and brimstone on anything that has right angles.”

“Okay.”

Terry pointed an index finger at the image on the screen. “This thing is loaded with right angles. That’s what it is: An oversize complex of right angles.”

They looked at one another. “Is it designed to be a target?” Jane asked. “Or are the clouds intended specifically to kill these things?”

“IT IS UNDER power, ” said Bill. “There’s only a trace, but we’re getting an electronic signature.” It was rotating. The spines caught and manipulated light from the Bumblebee. “Once every seven minutes and twelve seconds,” Bill continued helpfully.

They had drawn within a hundred meters of the object. The spines turned slowly past them. Bill switched on the navigation lights so they could see better. Terry was reminded of the puzzles he used to do as a boy, enter here, find your way through the labyrinth, come out over there.

There were no sharp points anywhere. The tops of all the spines were flat. Ninety degrees.

Jane submitted a report to Serenity. While she talked, Terry studied the object. It had no thrusters, no visible communication devices, no sign of a hatch. It had enough dents and chips to suggest it was old. A couple of the spines had been broken off. Otherwise, the surface was smooth, as if it had come out of a mold. “Bill,” he said, “train the lights into the notches. Let’s see what it looks like down there.”

It was a long way. No central surface was visible; the spines seemed simply to rise out of each other. Jane took them in almost close enough to touch.

The Quagmor was dwarfed.

“Still no reaction of any kind, Bill?”

“Negative, Terry.”

They approached the top of one of the spines. It was rectangular, about the dimensions of a basketball court, perfectly smooth save for a couple of chunks gouged out by collisions. The Quagmor passed over it, the ship’s navigation lights sliding across the surface, over the edge and into a chasm. Then he was looking down the slanted side until the lights lost themselves in the depths, to reappear moments later coming back up another wall, wider and shorter and angled differently.

“Bill,” he asked, “do you see any more of these things in the neighborhood?”

“Negative. I haven’t been able to do a complete sweep, but I do not see anything else.”

Jane finished recording and sent her message on to Serenity. Then she got up and stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. “I’ve always assumed the universe made sense, Terry,” she said. “I’m beginning to wonder.”

“I’ve been looking for a hatch.”

“See anything?”

“Nope.”

“Just as well. I don’t think I’d want to go calling. Maybe we should try talking to it.”

“You serious? From the looks of it, there hasn’t been anything alive in there for the last few million years.”

“That’s an interesting estimate. It’s derived from—?”

“It looks old.”

“Good. In the end, I can always count on you to fall back on hardheaded logic.” Her eyes sparkled. “You know, it might be programmed to respond to a signal.”

“It’s a thought.” He swung around in his chair and gazed up at the AI’s image. “Bill, we’ll use the multichannel. Audio only.”

“Ready when you are, Terry. The circuit is open.”

“Okay.” He leaned forward, feeling foolish, and allowed a glib tone to creep into his voice. “Hello out there. Is anybody home?”

Another spine rotated past.

“Hello. This is us out here talking to you over there.” He looked at Jane. “Why are you laughing?”

“I was just thinking how you’d react if somebody answered.”

He hadn’t even considered the possibility. “We getting anything, Bill?”

“There is no response. No reaction of any kind.”

He stayed with it a few minutes before giving up. The hedgehog sparkled and glowed in the lights of the Quagmor. His own interstellar artifact. “Going to have to break in,” he said.

She shook her head. “Not a good idea. Serenity will have the information in a few hours, and they’ll be sending somebody right out. Let’s wait for them.”

There was no way he was going to be sitting on his rear end when they got there, and have to confess he didn’t know any more than he and Jane put in the report. “I want to see what’s inside.”

“We don’t know what it is.”

“That’s why I’d like to see the inside.”

“Let’s let the experts do it.”

“You know any experts on interstellar artifacts? Jane, nobody knows anything about this stuff. Nobody’s better qualified to open it than you and I.”

She made a face. Don’t like the idea. Not a good move. “You know,” she said, transparently trying to change the subject, “it’s one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I mean it.”

“Jane, it has all the lines of a porcupine.”

“No.” She was looking past him, out the viewport at the bizarre landscape passing by. “It’s a rhombi-whatever. It’s magnificent.” She turned a sympathetic smile on him. “You really don’t see it, do you?”

“No.” Terry followed her gaze, watched the shadows from the navigation lights creep up, down, and across the artifact’s planes and angles. “I don’t like the clouds. And I don’t like these things.” He got out of his chair and headed for the storage locker. “You want to come along?”

THEY STRAPPED ON e-suits, which would project a Flickinger field around them, protecting them from the void. The field was flexible, molded to the body except for a hard shell that arced over the face, providing breathing space.

They went down to the launch bay, picked up laser cutters and air tanks, and turned on the suits. While the bay depressurized, they did a radio check and strapped on wristlamps.

There was no launch vehicle in the bay, but it didn’t matter because it wouldn’t have been useful anyhow in the current situation. They pulled go-packs over their shoulders, and Terry hung an imager around his neck. “Bill,” he said, “I’ll record everything. Transmit live to Serenity.”

“Do you really think it’s that dangerous, Terry? Maybe we should reconsider what we’re doing,” said Bill.

“Just a precaution,” he said.

Bill opened the airlock and admonished them to be careful.

They had left Serenity seven months earlier and had spent the entire time studying the omega. It had a numerical designation, as all the clouds did. But they’d gotten into the habit of referring to this one as George. George was apparently a onetime boyfriend of Jane’s, although she refused to provide details. But it amused her to ridicule him. The cloud, she’d said, was inflexible, windy, and took up a lot of space. And it kept coming. No matter what you said or did, it kept coming.

George hung ominously in the background as Terry picked out a spine and directed Bill to match rotation with it, so that it became a stable fixture a few meters from the airlock.

The Quagmor, which was affectionately referred to by almost everyone as the Quagmire, was the first research vessel designed specifically to operate near the clouds without fear of drawing the lightning. Unlike the polygon object it was inspecting, it had no right angles. The ship’s hull, her engine mounts, her antennas, sensing, and navigation equipment, everything, was curved.

They’d even penetrated George’s surface mists, gone a few hundred meters into the cloud, taken samples, and tried to listen for the heart of the beast. That was a joke between them, a reaction to the insistence of one school of thought that the clouds were alive. It was not a view that Terry took seriously. Yet plunging into it had given him the eerie sensation that there might be some truth to the notion. It was a view easily dismissed when they’d emerged. Like laughing at ghosts when the sun was high.

“Ready?” asked Jane.

“All set.” He was standing at the edge of the airlock trying to decide on a trajectory. This was the first time they’d been outside the ship on this run, except for a brief repair job on the forward sensor pods; Terry nevertheless had long experience working in the void. “There,” he said, pointing.

One of the higher spines. Nice broad top for them to land on. Easy spot to start. Jane shook her head, signifying that she’d done dumber things but was having trouble remembering when. They exchanged looks that were supposed to register confidence, and he pushed out of the lock, floated across the few meters of space that separated the ship and the spine, and touched down on his target. But the stone surface was slippery, slippery even for the grip shoes, and momentum carried him forward. He slid off the edge, blipped the go-pack, did a 360, and came down smoothly atop the crest.

“Nice maneuver, Flash,” said Jane.

“Be careful,” he said.

She floated over and drifted gently onto the surface, letting him haul her down. “It’s all technique,” she said.

Terry rapped on the stone with the handle of the cutter. “Feels solid,” he said. “See any way in?”

She shook her head. No.

He looked into the canyon. Smooth rock all the way down, until the beam faded out. The spine widened as it descended. It looked as if they all did.

“Shall we see what’s below?” he asked.

She was wearing a dark green pullover and light gray slacks. A bit dressy for the work. “Sure,” she said. “Lead the way.”

He stepped into the chasm and used the go-pack to start down. Jane followed, and they descended slowly, examining the sheer wall as they went.

Plain rock. Smoother than on the roof, because the lower areas took fewer hits. But there was nothing exceptional, all the way to the bottom.

BILL MANEUVERED THE Quagmire directly overhead, leaving the spotlights off because they would have been a distraction. But the navigation lights were on.

There was nothing in Terry’s experience to which he could compare the place. The spines did indeed grow out of one another. There was no flat or curved surface at the center of the object that could have been described as housing the core. It was dark, surreal, the Quagmire no more than a few lights overhead, and the rest of the world walled out.

Terry felt light-headed. Even in the vacuum, he was accustomed to having a flat space underfoot, a moonscape, a ship’s hull, something. Something to relate to. Here, there was no up or down, and everything was at an angle. “You okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he said.

He took the cutter out of his harness. “There’s a chance,” he said, “that this thing is under pressure. I’m going to cut a narrow hole to find out. But stand clear anyhow. Just to be safe.”

She nodded and backed off a few meters. Told him to be careful. Not to stand in front of it.

Terry grinned. How could he make the cut standing over to one side? He pressed the activator and watched the amber lamp come on, felt the unit vibrate as it powered up. “Big moment,” he said. The lamp turned a bright crimson. He punched the button, and a long red beam of light blinked on. He touched it to the wall.

It cut in. He knew not to lean on it, but simply held it steady while it went deeper.

Jane advanced a few steps. “How’s it going?”

He was about to suggest she try a little patience when it broke through. “Bingo,” he said.

Somewhere deep in the hedgehog, he sensed movement, as if an engine had started. Then the ground murmured. It trembled. Rose. Shook violently. He told Jane to get out, for God’s sake get out, and he stabbed at the go-pack and the thrusters ignited and began to take him up.

And the world went dark.

ARCHIVE

Sky, we lost contact with the Quagmire moments ago. Divert. Find out what happened. Render assistance. Report as soon as you have something.

— Audrey D’Allesandro

Hyperlight transmission to the Patrick Heffernan

chapter 3

Arlington.

Monday, February 24.

THE CHINDI HAD finally begun giving up its secrets. The gigantic alien starship, apparently fully automated, continued its serene slower-than-light voyage toward a class-F star whose catalog number Hutch could never remember. It had taken a major effort, because of its velocity, to get researchers on board. But the Academy had begun to get a good look at its contents, artifacts from hundreds of cultures. And live visual recordings over a span of tens of thousands of years. The ship itself was thought to be more than a quarter million years old.

Its pictures of lost civilizations were opening up whole new areas of knowledge. The vast distances that separated sentient species tended to create the illusion that civilizations were extremely rare. It now appeared they were simply scattered, in time and in space. And, disconcertingly, they did not seem to last long.

They were sometimes suicidal. They were often destroyed by economic, political, or religious fanaticisms; by the selfishness and corruption of leaders; by an inability to stop ever-more-deadly wars. They sometimes simply behaved in stupid ways. Some that had avoided the more obvious pitfalls were swept away by something that should not have been there: the clouds.

Hutch had always felt a special kinship with the Monument-Makers, who’d roamed this section of the galaxy for thousands of years, who’d tried to save others from the omegas. She had been to their home world, and had seen the remnants of a race reduced to savagery, unaware of their proud history. They’d been on her mind recently because the chindi had, a week ago, provided a record of another demolished culture. She’d sat during the course of a bleak wintry day looking at pictures of smashed buildings and ruined cities. And she’d recognized some of the images. It was the home of the Hawks, the race that had come to the rescue centuries ago on Deepsix when the inhabitants of that unlucky world had faced a brutal ice age.

The images haunted her, the broken columns, the brave symbols scrolled across monuments and public buildings, the overgrown roads, the shattered towers, the cities given over to forest. And perhaps most compelling, the starship found adrift in a solar orbit.

The Hawks and the Monument-Makers. And the human race. It was hard not to dwell on what might have been, had they been allowed to sit down together, to pool their knowledge and their speculations. To cooperate for the general good. To become allies in the great adventure.

As has happened with the Monument-Makers, a few individual Hawks had survived. But their civilization was gone. Their racial memory consisted only of a cycle of myths.

Kellie Collier had been there, had been first to board the Hawk starship, and had complained later to Hutch about the cost imposed by the existence of the clouds. There had been tears in her eyes when she described what she’d seen.

KELLIE AND THE broken cities and the clouds were never far from Hutch’s mind. The chilling possibility that they were about to experience another wipeout had kept her awake these last two nights. It would be the most painful of ironies if they had finally found a living civilization, someone other than the Noks, that they could actually talk to, just in time to say good-bye.

The cloud in question was at a substantial distance, more than thirty-one hundred light-years. Nine months away. The Bill Jenkins was enroute, diverted from its survey mission by the station at Broadside. But they’d need a month to get there. Add another week for the report to reach her. It would be April before she knew whether she had a problem.

Prudence, and experience, suggested she expect the worst.

She arrived at the Academy bleary-eyed and in a foul mood. She’d talked it over at home with Tor, but all he could think of was to suggest she ease the pressure on herself by quitting. We can live comfortably on my income, he’d suggested. He was a commercial artist, and the money was decent, although they weren’t going to wind up with a chalet in the Rockies and a beach home on Sea Island.

She needed to talk to somebody. The commissioner wasn’t the right person either, so she put in a call to Harold as soon as she arrived at her desk. He wasn’t in yet, his watch officer explained, but they would contact him. Five minutes later he was on the circuit. Just leaving home.

“Harold,” she asked, “have you had breakfast yet?”

“No,” he said. “I usually eat in the Canteen.”

“How about eating with me this morning? My treat.”

“Is there a problem?” he asked cautiously.

“I need your advice.”

“Okay. What did you have in mind?”

“Meet me at Cleary’s,” she said. “Twenty minutes okay?”

CLEARY’S WAS THE small, posh coffee shop overlooking the Refuge, the alien habitat that had been hauled in from the Twins and reconstructed on a platform at the edge of the Potomac in Pentagon Park. The sun was warm and bright, and the sky full of lazy clouds. When Harold walked in, Hutch was sitting in a corner booth, stirring coffee and staring out the window, her mind gone for a gallop. She didn’t see him until he slid in across from her.

“This is a pleasant surprise, Priscilla.” He smiled shyly.

She knew that she intimidated him, but didn’t know why. She’d noticed it years before when she’d provided transportation for him on a couple of occasions. It didn’t seem to be all women, just her. “It’s always good to get away for a bit,” she said. She asked him a few questions about Weatherman, and the tewks, to put him at ease.

Cleary’s used human waiters. A young woman brought more coffee, and some orange juice.

“So what did you actually want to talk to me about?” he asked.

She told him about the report from Broadside that a cloud was changing course. Heading insystem.

His eyes dropped to the table. “That’s unsettling.” He picked up his spoon, fiddled with it, put it back down, gazed out at the Potomac. “Well,” he said finally, “with any kind of luck, it’ll be a false alarm.”

She looked at him.

“Priscilla,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. Whatever it turns out to be, there’ll be nothing you can do.”

“There might be somebody out there.”

“—In its path. I understand that.” He tasted his coffee, patted his lips with a napkin, shrugged. “If there is someone there, they’ll have to look out for themselves.”

He was trying to be detached, but she heard the resignation in his voice. “To be honest, Hutch,” he continued, “it’s not worth worrying about. Not if we can’t intervene. Anyway, at most it will probably turn out to be more ruins. That’s all they ever find out there anyhow.” The waitress was back. “Bacon and eggs,” he said. “Home fries and toast.”

She’d heard that he was supposed to be on a diet, egg whites and bran flakes, that sort of thing. But she said nothing, and ordered French toast. What the hell.

When the waitress was gone, he sat back and made himself comfortable. She liked Harold. He got the job done, never complained, and on Family Day had made a big fuss over Maureen. “Is that why you asked me here?” he said. “The omega?”

Hutch nodded. “Assume the worst happens. Somebody’s in the way. Is there really nothing we can do to disable this thing? Blow it up? Scatter it? Something?”

It was a lovely morning, crisp and clear. The Potomac, which had risen considerably during the last century, and was still rising, was not unlike a small inland sea. The Capitol, the White House, most of the monuments, were islands now. Hutch had been around long enough to remember when Rock Creek Park could be reached on foot, when you didn’t need a boat to get to the Washington Monument. You could stand out there now on one of the piers, and watch the river, and look out toward Sagitta, which was where the local cloud was, the one with Arlington’s number on it, and you got a sense that despite everything, despite the extended life spans and the superluminals and the virtual disappearance of organized violence on the planet, civilization was still losing ground.

“If it had a physical core of some sort,” Harold was saying, “a vital part, then yes. We could go after it. Take a hammer to it. But it seems to be holistic. Throw as many nukes at it as we like and it simply seems to pull itself back together.”

“We don’t know how it does that?”

His jaws worked. “It’s not my field. But no, as far as I’m aware, we have no idea. The technology is well beyond anything we know about. It uses nanos, but we haven’t been able to figure out how they work, what they do, even how they guide the cloud.” He took a long sip of orange juice. “I look at what those things can do, and I look at the fact they seem to be only dust and hydrogen, and I feel as if I should be sitting off somewhere beating a drum. It’s a whole new level of technology.”

Their food came. Harold dumped a substantial amount of catsup on his potatoes.

“Of course,” he continued, “the real problem is that we can’t seem to penetrate the cloud. Ships don’t come back. Probes disappear. Even scans and sensors don’t give us much.” He sampled the eggs, smiled with satisfaction, covered his toast with strawberry jam, and bit off a piece. “Good stuff,” he said. “This where you normally eat?”

“Usually at home,” she said.

“Yes.” He studied her. “You survived one of those things, Hutch,” he continued. “You were actually inside it, weren’t you? When it came down on Delta?”

Hutch had been with Frank Carson that day. Thirty years ago—my God, had it really been that long? — when they’d deliberately baited a cloud, had structured some plateaus to look artificial, and had watched with horror as the monster came after them. “Yes,” she said. “I was there.”

“You survived it.”

“Heaviest weather I’ve ever seen. Lightning. Tornado winds. Meteors. Not the way you’d want to spend a weekend.”

He used his toast and a fork to finish off the eggs. “Well, I can understand you might be worried. Where did you say this thing is?”

“Out near the Dumbbell.”

“My God. It’s really over in the next county, isn’t it? Well, look, your role, it seems to me, is simple. These things attack cities. If it turns out there are actually inhabitants, you just sail in, tell them what’s coming, and they can head for the hills. Or maybe they could build themselves some underground shelters.”

Out along the pier a gaggle of kids were trying to get a kite in the air and not having much luck. Beyond, a few sails drifted on the river.

The kite was red, and it had a dragon on it.

She needed a dragon.

WHEN SHE GOT back to her office, she called the Lunar Weapons Lab, which had been founded twenty years earlier for the express purpose of developing something that could be used against the omega clouds. The weapons lab was under the control of the Science Advisory Commission, which was a quasi-independent group overseen by the World Council. Like the Academy, it was underfunded.

Arky Chan, the assistant director, was an old friend. He greeted her with a cheery good morning. “We hear,” he said, “you’re taking over permanently up there.”

“They don’t tell me anything, Arky.” Thirty-three years ago, on her first flight beyond the solar system, Arky had been one of her passengers. His black hair had grayed only slightly since then, and his smile was as infectious as ever.

“What can I do for you, Hutch?” he asked.

“Find me the key.” It was code for a way to neutralize the clouds.

He nodded. “Anything else while I’m at it? Maybe produce the universal solvent? Or a time machine?”

“I’m serious. What’s on the table?”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“One of the damned things changed course.”

“I heard. You have anything yet on what’s in its path?”

“A G-class sun. Presumably a planetary system to go with it. We’re still waiting. I’m hoping it just picked up some natural formations and got confused.” That had happened once. A group of remarkably straight stress fractures on a satellite had been attacked. Whatever else the damned things were, they were not bright.

“I hope so too. But no, Hutch, I’m sorry to say we haven’t really made any progress.”

“Nothing at all?”

“They don’t give us any money, love. And the Academy doesn’t give us any ships.” That was pointed at her.

“You have one.”

“The Rajah spends more time in the garage than it does in the field.”

“That’ll change,” said Hutch. She’d been trying to free up some money for more than a year.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it, but to tell you the truth, I’ll believe it when I see it. What we need is for the cloud to be sitting up over the Capitol. Put a couple of bolts down the pants of the Congress. Then they’d damn soon get serious.”

“You have anything at all we can use, if it becomes necessary?”

“Not really.”

“How about nukes?”

“We tried that at Moonlight.”

“How about something bigger? A supernuke? Or maybe we shovel a load of antimatter into it?”

“The problem we keep having is that the thing seems always able to reconstitute itself. Somewhere it has a heart, a control pod, an AI, probably. But we don’t know where it is, we can’t probe it, we’re blind—” He held out his hands. “If you have an idea, I’d love to hear it.”

“Arky, if that thing’s bearing down on somebody, I don’t want to be in the position of having to just sit here and watch.”

“I understand completely.”

“Find me something. Just in case.”

“Look.” His voice got cold. “It’s easy enough for you to demand a miracle. But you people are the ones who keep saying there’s plenty of time, don’t worry about it, we have other priorities right now.”

SHE HAD LUNCH with Tom Callan, her number two guy. Tom was assistant director of operations for special projects. He’d been, in her opinion, the most capable of the applicants for the D.O.’s job, except herself, of course. Tom was young, ambitious, energetic, and if he hung around long enough, would undoubtedly succeed her. That would be as high as he could go in the Academy, however. The commissioner was a political appointment, and the position never went to anybody in-house.

Tom held a license to pilot superluminals, he could work under pressure, and he didn’t mind making decisions. He was about average size, with clean-cut good looks, but without the intensity one usually found in able young people who’d already climbed pretty high. Probably because he knew he was good. “I was thinking maybe,” he said, “if we had to, we could decoy the damned thing.”

“How would you go about it? A projection?”

“That’s what I had in mind.”

“Throw a big cube out there for it to chase.”

“Yes.” He bit into a turkey sandwich. “It might work. We’ve never experimented with it, so we don’t really know. It would help if we knew what kind of sensory system it uses.”

If it were strictly visual, then a big picture of a box might be enough. “Let’s look into it,” she said. “Check the literature. See if you can find anything that either supports the idea or negates it.”

“Okay.”

“And, Tom. Priority. If there’s a problem, we won’t have much time.”

“Consider it done.” He took a long pull at his iced tea and went after the sandwich again. The kid had an appetite. “There is a good chance it wouldn’t be fooled by a holocast.”

“I know.”

“We might try a backup.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Be ready to put a real box out there.”

THAT BROUGHT HER back to the kite with the dragon. Her first afternoon call went to Rheal Fabrics. Rheal specialized in producing a range of plastics, films, and textiles for industry. (They also had a division that operated a chain of ice-cream outlets.) Hutch had, on a number of occasions, taken their executives out to Serenity, and she had kept in contact with several over the years.

One of them was Shannon McKay, who had something to do with R&D. Shannon was tall, redheaded, and very much in charge.

They did a couple of minutes’ small talk, during which Hutch got congratulated on her forthcoming promotion. She was surprised that Shannon knew. “We keep track of the important stuff,” Shannon said. The Academy was a major customer for Rheal, so it made sense that they would.

“I need a feasibility study,” Hutch said. She explained what was happening, emphasized that it would probably amount to nothing, but that if a difficult situation arose, she wanted to be ready to deal with it. “I might need a kite,” she said. “A big one.”

Shannon nodded. “Give me the dimensions.”

Who knew? Who had the slightest idea? She tried some numbers and Shannon said okay. They could do it.

“How long will it take?” A blue lamp blinked on. And Harold’s name. He was on the line, waiting to talk to her.

“How long do we have?”

“From the time you get the go-ahead, not much more than a week. At best.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Can you manage it?”

“Let me look into it. I’ll get back to you.”

“YES, HAROLD.”

“Thought you’d like to know. We’ve got another one.”

“Another what?”

“Another tewk.” A quasi nova. It was the first time she’d heard him use the term his people had coined. Short for Tewksbury Object. The pride in his voice was evident.

“Okay.”

“Different spectrogram. Different color. But the same essentials.”

“Same area?”

“Other side of the sky. Different Weatherman.”

“Okay. You’re sure it’s a tewk and not a nova?”

“We’re sure.”

“All right, Harold. Keep me posted.”

“It’s very strange.”

“When you want to make an announcement, let me know.”

SHE DIRECTED THE AI to get Marge Conway for her at the International Bureau of the Climate in London. Twenty minutes later Marge was on the circuit. “Been a long time,” she said. “What can I do for you, Hutch?”

Marge and Hutch had been friends at Princeton a long time back, had once competed for a boyfriend, now best forgotten, and had kept in touch over the years. Marge had been thin and quiet in those days. Later she’d become a bodybuilder. She’d gone through several husbands. Wore them out, people said behind her back.

“Is there a way to generate a cloud cover?” Hutch asked. “For maybe a few days. Hide some stuff.”

“Cloud cover?”

“Yes. I’m talking about a terrestrial atmosphere—”

“Not Earth.”

“No.”

“Okay. How big would the coverage be?”

“Planetary.”

She shook her head. “No. A few thousand square klicks, maybe, yes. But that’s about the limit.”

“What would it take?”

“You’ll need some landers.”

“Okay. That’s no problem.”

“Four of them. Plus a hauler. An AV3 would probably be best.”

“All right. What else?”

“How much time do we have?”

“To put it together? Ten days. Maybe a week. No more than that.”

“That’s a bit of a rush.”

“I know.”

“And we’d need a helicopter.”

“A helicopter? What’s that?”

“Antique aircraft. Propellers on top.”

“Marge, where am I supposed to get a helicopter?”

“Work it out. Keep it small, by the way. The helicopter.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Okay. Let me take a look at things on this end. I’ll get back to you.”

Marge broke the connection and Hutch called Barbara, the Academy AI. “Find out where there’s an air show. Antique aircraft. I’ll want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”

SHE DISPOSED OF her routine work, handing most of it over to assistants. Eric called to remind her that she’d be expected to make a few remarks at Sylvia Virgil’s retirement.

That was tonight! She’d forgotten. “And you’ll be handing out one of the awards,” he added.

“Okay.”

She had started making notes on what she would say when the commlink blipped again. This time it was the commissioner’s three short bursts. She answered, was asked to wait, the commissioner would be with her momentarily, then Asquith’s plump, smiling features filled the screen.

“Hutch,” he said, “do you have a minute?”

“Yes, Michael. What can I do for you?”

“Why don’t you come over to the office? I need to talk to you.”

When she got there, the blinds were drawn. Asquith waved her in, got up, and came around to the front of his desk. It was a substantial walk because the thing was the size of a soccer field. The office was ringed with leather chairs and walnut side tables. The walls were decorated with pictures of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Twins and the North American Nebula and the Refuge sitting out on the Potomac. Several lamps glowed softly.

“Hutch.” He angled one of the chairs for her. “How are you doing today?”

“Fine, Michael,” she said, warily.

He waited until she’d sat down. “Well, last day for Sylvia, I guess.” He managed to look wistful while adjusting the blinds, brightening the room somewhat. Then he went back behind his desk. “The Academy’s going to miss her.”

“Yes, we will.”

“Pity about—” He stopped midsentence, shrugged, and she knew exactly what he was implying. Virgil was retiring under pressure after a couple of major embarrassments. Three people had died a year ago when the Yves Vignon had collided with Wayout Station. The problem had been traced to equipment maintenance, and ultimately to a negligent supervisor, but some of it had inevitably washed off on the director of operations at the Academy. And then, just a few months later, a breakdown in scheduling had left the Berkeley mission temporarily stranded at Clendennon III. Not Sylvia’s fault, but she’d taken the hit anyhow, just as she had six years ago when Renaissance Station had been destroyed by a massive flare. Renaissance had remained operational for political reasons, and against her continued protests. But none of it had mattered. “Should have kept an eye on things myself,” Asquith had told a group of Academy researchers. “Sylvia tried to get it right. Not really her fault. Bad luck.”

Truth be told, Hutch’s opinion of Sylvia hadn’t been all that high, but that didn’t change the reality that she’d been left hanging in the wind. And that Hutch herself now worked for a guy who would go missing at the first sign of trouble.

“Hutch,” he said, “I know you’re busy, so I won’t take your time.”

“It’s okay, Michael. What can I do for you?”

He opened a drawer and brought out a cream-colored folder, which he opened and placed on his desk. She couldn’t see what it was. “You’ve done a good job here over the last couple of years.” He extracted a document from the folder and gazed fondly at it. It crackled in his hands. “Congratulations,” he said, holding it out for her.

She looked down at it. Saw the Academy’s coat of arms. And her name. Priscilla Maureen Hutchins. Promoted to grade fifteen. Director of Operations. Effective Tuesday, March 4, 2234.

In eight days.

He extended a hand across the desk and beamed at her. “I wish you a long and happy career, Priscilla.”

“Thank you.” It felt good.

“There’ll be a formal presentation early next week. But I wanted you to know.” He took the document back and returned it to its drawer. “We’ll give it to you then.”

“I appreciate your confidence, Michael.” While there had been a selection panel, she knew she would not have been chosen without the commissioner’s approval.

He broke out a bottle. “Vintage pavlais,” he said. And, reading the label, “Twenty-one ninety.”

Expensive enough to pay the mortgage for a month.

He produced an opener, wrestled the cork out of the bottle, and filled two glasses. She was tempted to embrace him. But the formality of the occasion overwhelmed the impulse. “To you, Hutch,” he said. “Never let go.”

It was an echo of the now-celebrated comment by Randall Nightingale, when, with bleeding and broken hands, he’d pulled her out of the clouds over Deepsix. I’d never have dropped you, Hutch. It had become a kind of informal Academy watchword.

Their eyes met over the rims of the glasses. Then the moment passed, and it was back to work. He handed her a disk and a sheaf of documents. “You’ll want to look at these,” he said. “It’s all administrative stuff, position description, personnel considerations, and so on. And there are a few operational issues in there you’ll need to do something with.”

Hutch was no connoisseur, but she knew good wine when she tasted it. He held out the bottle for her. Did she want more?

Yes! But she was too well bred to drink up the man’s expensive store. As a compromise, she accepted a half glass. “Michael,” she said, “did you know one of the clouds has changed course?”

“Yes,” he said. “I heard.”

“I’m concerned there might be somebody out there.”

He beamed. Not to worry. “Let’s wait and see,” he said.

“If there is, would the Academy support intervention?”

His face wrinkled and he made growling noises in his throat. “That could get a little uncomfortable, couldn’t it?”

“We’d probably have to violate the Protocol.”

He waved the problem away. “No,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. There’s no one there.”

“How can you be sure?”

“There’s never anybody there.” He smiled paternally at her and studied his glass. “I’ve been in this office, or otherwise associated with the Academy, for more than twenty years. Do you know how many times we’ve gotten reports that somebody thought they’d found someone? And you know how many times it actually happened?”

“Twice,” she said. That would be the Angels. And the Hawks.

“That’s right. And you were there for one of those. Now if we go back another twenty-five years, there are two more. That makes four. In all that time. Out of thousands of systems visited. Four. I suggest we put it aside and find more important things to worry about.”

The door opened behind her, as if by magic, and he was ushering her out of the room.

“If it happens,” she persisted, “we’re going to be pressed for time.”

“We’ll worry about it when it does, Priscilla.” His smile disappeared as if someone had thrown a switch.

HUTCH CALLED UP the archive files on the Pasquarella, the first vehicle lost researching the clouds. That had been twenty years before. It was a voice-only, the voice belonging to Meg Campbell, the only person on the ship. Hutch had seen Meg once, from the back of a lecture hall. She’d been a tall woman, dark hair, lots of presence. Very sure of herself.

Hutch played it through, listened to the voice she remembered, not from the long-ago presentation, but because she’d played that same record any number of times. Meg had gone three times into the cloud, each descent deeper, each time encountering more electronic interference.

She hadn’t come back from the third descent. A search had revealed nothing, and on July 14, 2211, the Pasquarella was officially designated lost.

In the middle of the recording, Barbara’s voice broke in. “Transmission for you, ma’am. From Serenity.”

She switched off the recording. “Put it up, Barb.”

As soon as she saw Audrey’s face, she knew there was bad news. “Hutch,” Audrey said, “we lost contact with the Quagmor at 0014 hours 24 February. The AI went down without warning. They found an artifact yesterday in the vicinity of the Bumblebee and were investigating. The Heffernan has been diverted and will arrive in the area in three days. Record from Quagmor is attached.”

Her stomach churned. It was possible there was nothing more to it than a communication breakdown. Then she watched the attached report.

NEWSDESK

PITCHERS, CATCHERS REPORT TO SPRING TRAINING

Forty-six Teams Start Today

STRANDED ORCA RESCUED IN PUGET SOUND

AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS STILL LOSING GROUND

Who Was Churchill? Nobody Knows

GOMORRAH COUNTY RESIDENTS SUE TO CHANGE NAME

MASKED ROBBER WEARS NAME ON ARM

Tattoo Leads to Arrest

ORBITAL AMUSEMENT PARK GETS OKAY

ZeroGee Will Open in Two Years

UNN SURVEY: HALF OF ALL AMERICANS BELIEVE ASTROLOGY WORKS

WHO WILL BE ONE-HUNDREDTH PRESIDENT?

Campaign Gets Under Way in Utah, Ontario

BASEBALL: MOVE TO OUTLAW ENHANCEMENTS GAINS STEAM

Evidence Mounts of Long-term Damage

GREAT GATSBY FIRST EDITION SELLS FOR 3.6 MILLION

IBC WARNS OF STRONGER HURRICANES

Southern Coast Overdue for Big One

chapter 4

On board the William B. Jenkins.

Tuesday, February 25.

EXCEPT FOR ONE person, the research team on the Jenkins was delighted to be diverted. The fact that an omega had veered into a planetary system might mean they were close to finding the grail, a living alien civilization. A real one, something more exotic than the Angels, who were pretechnological barbarians, or the Noks, who were industrial-age barbarians. The exception was Digby Dunn, who would ordinarily have joined in the general elation. But Digby was in love with the captain. Her name was Kellie Collier, and Digby’s passion for her was both intense and unrelenting.

On the whole, it had been a painful experience. Love affairs always include an element of discomfort; it is part of what makes them life-changing ventures. But this one had been extraordinarily difficult. Passengers may not touch the captain. Bad for morale and all that. Impossible situation, Digger. We’ll just have to wait until we get clear. Be patient and everything’ll be fine.

She smiled, that gorgeous, alluring smile, rendered even more seductive because she was trying to make it impersonal, friendly, understanding. Lose my job, she’d added on occasion when he’d tried to press her.

They’d been headed back to the station when the call came. We’ve got an omega changing course. Turn left and find out what’s going on. See what it’s after.

So Digby, an anthropologist by trade, but riding as a volunteer with a survey mission that was gathering information about local stars and planetary systems, pretended to be pleased, exchanged platitudes with everybody, and aimed pained glances at Kellie.

“Sorry,” she told him. “But look, it’ll be quick. In and out, see what’s there, and then back to Broadside. We’re only talking a couple of extra weeks.”

She was tall and lovely with soft black skin and luminous eyes and she made every other woman in his life seem hopelessly dull. Ah yes, how he’d like to take her out on an expedition to unearth a few ancient cookpots. But he resigned himself to making an occasional grab, which she usually—but not always—declined with stern disapproval. “Be patient,” she told him. “Our time is coming.”

The Jenkins was more than three thousand light-years out, and they held the current record for going farther from Earth than any other ship. They’d been away from Broadside almost a year. It had been a long and lonely voyage by any standard, broken only by an occasional rendezvous with a supply vessel.

A rendezvous was always a special occasion. There had been a push at the Academy to automate replenishment, to send the sandwiches in a ship directed only by an AI. Asquith had been unable to see the point of sending a captain along since it cost a great deal more, and it was hard to visualize a situation in which human judgment might be needed. But somebody apparently understood what seeing a fresh face could mean when you were out in the deeps.

Jack Markover had thrown his weight into the fight by threatening to quit and hold a news conference if they took the human captains off the run. The commissioner had backed down, pretended it had been someone else’s idea, and it had been quietly put aside.

Jack was the chief of mission. He was a little man with a hawk face and too much energy. He loved his work and, if he’d been forced to follow through on his threat, would not have survived. He talked about retirement a lot, usually during the gray hours when the Jenkins was in hyperflight, and the hours were long and quiet. But Digger knew he’d never step down, that one day they’d have to haul him off and lock him away.

Digger had never quite figured out what Jack’s specialty was. He was from the American Midwest, a quiet, dedicated type with doctorates in physics and literature. There seemed to be no field of human knowledge in which he did not speak as an expert. Acquainted with all, he was fond of saying, knowledgeable in none.

The comment could hardly have been less true. Where Digger knew the ground, the man inevitably had his facts down. He was the only person Digger knew who could explain Radcliffe’s equations, quote Paradise Lost, discuss the implications of the Dialogues, play Mozart with panache, and hold forth on the history of the Quraquat.

Kellie loved him, Digger thought of him as the grandfather he’d never known, and Mark Stevens, who usually piloted the supply ship, was fond of saying the only reason he agreed to keep doing the flights was to spend a few hours with Jack Markover every couple of months.

The fourth member of the research team was Winnie Colgate. Winnie had been through a couple of marriages. Both had expired, according to Winnie, amiably under mutual agreement. But there was an undercurrent of anger that suggested things had not been so amiable. And Digger suspected that Winnie would be slow to try the game again.

She had begun her professional life as a cosmologist, and she periodically commented that her great regret was that she would not live long enough to see the solutions to the great problems: whether there was a multiverse, what had caused the Big Bang, whether there was a purpose to it all. Digger thought they were adrift in a cosmic bingo game; Jack could not believe stars and people had happened by accident. Winnie kept an open mind, meaning that she changed her opinions from day to day.

She was blond, quiet, affable. It was no secret that she was entranced by Jack, would have taken him into her bed, but Jack was something of a Puritan about sex, didn’t believe you should do it outside marriage. In any case, he behaved like Kellie, apparently convinced that his position as head of mission would in some way be compromised if he started sleeping with the staff.

Digger wished for it to happen, because it would have eased his way with Kellie. But, unhappily, Jack held his ground and respected Wendy’s virtue.

JACK MARKOVER HAD spent half his career on these missions, and had come to doubt the wisdom of his choice. He’d staked everything on the glorious possibility of making the first major contact. There was a time when it had seemed easy. Almost inevitable. Just get out there and do it. But that had been during an era of overt optimism, when the assumption had been that every world on which life was possible would inevitably develop a biosystem, and that once you got a biosystem you would eventually get tribal chiefs and math teachers. It was true that the habitable worlds orbiting the sun’s immediate neighbors had been sterile, but that had seemed like no more than a caprice.

Now he wondered whether they’d all simply read too much science fiction.

He knew what his reputation was. Hi, Jack, find any little green men yet? He had, after each of the last two missions, gone home determined not to come out again. But it was like a siren call, the sense that he might quit just one mission too soon. So he knew that, whatever happened this time, whatever he might think about retiring to Cape Cod, he’d be back out again, poking a new set of worlds. Hoping to find the big prize.

To date, during the past year, they had looked at seventy-nine systems, all with stable suns. The stated purpose of the mission was strictly survey. They were accumulating information and, especially, noting planets that might become future habitats without extensive terraforming. They’d found one life-supporting world, but the life-forms were microscopic. In his entire career, across thirty-five years, Jack had seen only nine worlds on which life had gotten a foothold and been able to sustain itself. There’d been two others on which conditions had changed, an atmosphere grown too thin, a passing star scrambling an orbit, and the life-forms had died out. And that was it.

On each of the living worlds, the bioforms were still microscopic. He had never gone to a previously unvisited world and seen so much as a blade of grass.

The omega was approximately 41,000 kilometers through the middle, big as these things went. It had turned, had adjusted course, was still turning. It was also decelerating. You could see it because the cloud had lost its spherical shape. As it decelerated, sections of mist broke loose and fountained forward.

The turn was so slight as to be barely discernible. Jack was surprised it had been detected at all. Observers must have been watching the object over a period of months to make the determination. Then he realized that, because it was approaching a planetary system, the Academy would have been paying special attention.

The Jenkins spent several days doing measurements and collecting readings, sometimes standing off at thousands of kilometers, sometimes pushing uncomfortably close to the cloud front. The numbers confirmed what Broadside had: It was angling into the planetary system.

It wasn’t hard to find the target.

If the braking continued at the present level, and the turn continued as it was going, the omega would shortly line up on a vector that would bring it to a rendezvous with the third planet.

The Jenkins was still too far away to see details. But Jack reported to Broadside. “Looks like a December 14 intersect, Vadim,” he told them. “We’ll head over there and take a look.”

IT WAS THEIR custom to name each terrestrial world they investigated. Although the names were not official, and each planet would continue to be referred to in formal communications by a numerical designator attached to its star’s catalog number, unofficially it was easier to think in terms of Brewster’s World, or Backwater, or Blotto. (Brewster had been Winnie’s companion in her first foray to the altar. The world got its name because it had achieved tidal lock, so the sun, viewed from the surface, “just sat there, doing nothing.”)

It was Kellie’s turn to name the new one. “This might turn out to be a special place,” she said. “When I was a kid we lived near Lookout Point in northern New York. I loved the place. We used to go there and have picnics. You could see the Hudson in the distance.”

“So you want to call it Lookout Point?”

“Lookout would be good, I think.”

And so Lookout it became.

The ship made a jump to get within an AU, and began its approach. They were still much too far for the telescopes to make out any detail. But they discovered immediately that no electronic envelope surrounded the world.

That news produced mixed feelings. Like everyone else, Digger would have liked to see a world with an advanced civilization. It had never happened, and it would be a huge achievement. On the other hand, there was the cloud. Better, he told himself, it should be empty, and the cloud being drawn by unusual rock formations. Or by ruins, like at Moonlight.

By the third day, the disk that represented Lookout was still only a bright sprinkle of light to the naked eye. In the scopes, however, it was covered with clouds. The only visible surface was blue. An ocean. “It has a big moon,” said Winnie, watching the data come in from the sensors. “Two moons, in fact.”

The presence of a large moon was thought to be critical to the development of civilizations. Or, for that matter, of large land animals.

The filters reduced the reflection and they were watching two disks and a star, the larger several times the diameter of its companion. The star was the second moon, which was probably a captured asteroid. They brought the images up to full mag and concentrated on the big moon, looking for signs that someone had been there. But they were still too far away. A building the size of Berlin’s Bergmann Tower would not have been visible at that range.

It was a strange feeling. How many times had they approached worlds like this, literally praying for an earthwork, for a wall, for a light on the sea? And tonight—it was just short of midnight GMT—Digger hoped they would see only the usual barren plains.

The clarity of the images grew. Lookout had white cumulus clouds. Continents. Archipelagoes.

The continents were green.

They shook hands when they saw that. But it was a muted round of celebration.

The poles were white, the oceans blue.

“Looks like Earth,” Wendy said, as if she were pronouncing sentence.

ON THE FOURTH day they were able to pick up physical features, mountain ranges, river valleys, large brown patches that might have been plains. A section of the night side was visible, and they searched it eagerly for lights, but saw nothing.

They slept in shifts, when they slept at all. Usually, they dozed off in the common room, and left only to head for the washroom or to get something to eat. They began imagining they saw things. Someone would sit before a monitor tapping it with a pen, observing that there are lines here, looks like a building, or something there, in the harbor, maybe improvements. At one point, Winnie was convinced she could make out a mountain road, and Digger claimed he saw wakes at sea, maybe from ships. Kellie wondered whether she hadn’t spotted a dam on one of the rivers, and Jack saw changes in the color of the land that suggested agricultural development.

But in the growing clarity of the telescopes, everything faded, save forest, jungle, rivers, and coastline. The arc of the night side remained dark.

THERE WAS A substantial cloud cover, and storms were everywhere. Blizzards covered the high northern and low southern latitudes, a hurricane churned through one of the oceans, and lightning flickered in the temperate zones. Rain seemed to be falling on every continent. Bill did the usual measurements and posted the results. The planet was about 6 percent smaller than the Earth. Axial tilt twenty-six degrees. (Axial tilt was another factor that seemed to be significant if a world was to develop a biosystem. All known living worlds ranged between eighteen and thirty-one degrees.)

According to Bill, the atmosphere would be breathable, but they’d be prudent to use bottled air. The air at sea level was notably richer in oxygen content than the standard mix. Gravity was.92 standard.

The smaller moon had a retrograde movement. Both satellites were airless, and both were devoid of evidence that anyone had ever landed on them. Seventy percent of the surface was liquid water. And Lookout had a rotational period of twenty-two hours, seventeen minutes.

They went into orbit, crossed the terminator onto the night side, and almost immediately saw lights.

But they weren’t the clear hard-edged lights of cities. There was smoke and blurring and a general irregularity. “Forest fires,” said Jack. “Caused by lightning, probably.” He smiled. “Sorry.” Though probably he wasn’t.

Thirty minutes later they were back on the daylight side. There were no major cities. The night was dark as a coal sack. Jack sat down, visibly relieved, visibly disappointed, and sent off yet another report to Vadim, information to the Academy. “No sign that the world is occupied. No lights. Will look more closely.”

“So why is the cloud coming this way?” asked Winnie.

THEY MADE SEVERAL orbits and saw nothing. They zeroed in on numerous harbors and rivers, looking for any sign of improvement and finding none. There was no visible shipping, no indication of a road anywhere.

They were about to send off another message informing Broadside that the Academy need not concern itself with Lookout when Digger heard Jack’s raspy uh-oh. He glanced at the screens, which were showing nothing but night. “I saw lights,” said Jack.

“Where?” Digger knew that Jack had written the world off. He was not going to get excited again. Not about Lookout.

“They’re gone,” said Jack. “We passed over. They’re behind us. But they were there.”

“Bill?”

“Realigning the scopes now.”

The alpha screen, the prime operational monitor, went dark, and then came back on. “I’ve got it,” said the AI.

Several lights, like lingering sparks. But they didn’t go out.

“Fires?”

“What are we getting from the sensors?” asked Winnie.

Bill switched over, and they saw several hazy, luminous rings. “Somebody’s got the lights on,” said Digger. He looked over at Kellie.

“Could be,” she said.

It wasn’t London, thought Digger. But it was sure as hell something.

“What’s the ground look like?” asked Winnie.

Bill put the area on display.

The biggest of the continents stretched from pole to pole, narrowing to an isthmus in the southern temperate latitudes before expanding again. The lights were located on, or over, the isthmus.

It was about four hundred kilometers long, ranging between forty and eighty kilometers wide. It was rough country, with a mountain range running its length, lots of ridges, and three or four rivers crossing from one ocean to the other.

Digger didn’t know what he was supposed to feel. He was along on the mission, and he was dedicated to it like Jack and Winnie. But unlike them, he hadn’t expected to see anything. Nobody ever saw anything. It was a rule.

“How could we have missed that?” asked Winnie.

“It’s still raining down there,” suggested Bill. “Visibility hasn’t been very good.”

“Lock it in, Bill. I don’t want to have trouble finding it again when it gets out into the daylight.” Digger went back to the viewport and stared out at the long dark curve of the planet. There wasn’t a light anywhere to be seen. Well, they’d come around again a few more times before it would be dawn over the target area. Maybe the cloud cover would go away and they’d get a good look.

And then they’d zero in by daylight.

THEY DIDN’T SEE the lights again. But the weather cleared toward dawn, the target area rotated out into the sun, and Digger looked down on a long jagged line that traveled the length of the isthmus. A road! It couldn’t be anything else.

Simultaneously Kellie announced she could see a city. “One of the harbors,” she said, bringing it up on the monitor.

“Here’s another one.” Winnie pointed at the opposite side of the isthmus. And another here, where the isthmus widens into the southern continent. And two more, where it reaches up into the northern land mass.

Cities crowded around harbors, cities spread out along an impossibly crooked shore line, cities straddling both sides of rivers. There was even a city on a large offshore island in the western sea.

The telescope zoomed in, and they saw creatures on the road, large awkward beasts of burden that looked like rhinos. And humanoids, equally awkward, wide around the middle, waddling along, with reins in their hands and hats that looked like sombreros.

“I’ll be damned,” said Jack. “They’re actually there.”

They had pale green skin, large floppy feet (had their ancestors been ducks?), and colorful clothing. It was red and gold and deep sea blue and emerald green. Winnie counted six digits rather than five, and thought their scalps were hairless. They wore baggy leggings and long shirts. Some had vests, and everything was ornamented. There were lots of bracelets, necklaces, feathers. Many wore sashes.

“My first aliens,” said Kellie, “and we get Carpenter.” That was a reference to Charlie Carpenter, the creator of the Goompahs, an enormously popular children’s show. And the aliens did, in fact, look like Goompahs.

“Incredible,” said Winnie.

Somebody laughed and proposed a toast to Charlie Carpenter, who’d gotten there first. They were looking at the traffic on the central road just outside a city that stood on the eastern coast. While they shook their heads in amusement, Jack switched the focus and brought up a building atop a low ridge near the sea. It stopped the laughter.

The building was round, a ring of Doric columns supporting a curved roof. It glittered in the sunlight, which was just reaching it, and it looked for all the world like a Greek temple.

“Say what you like,” said Digger. “But these people know their architecture.”

THEY COUNTED TWELVE cities in all, eight through the isthmus, two on the northern continent, one in the south, and one on the island. It was sometimes difficult to determine where one city ended and another began because, remarkably, they saw no walls. “Maybe it’s a nation,” said Kellie, who’d come down from the bridge to share the moment of triumph. “Or a confederacy.”

There was a similarity in design among all of them. They’d clearly not been planned, in the modern sense, but had grown outward from commercial and shipping districts, which were usually down near the waterfront. But nevertheless the cities were laid out in squares, with considerable space provided for parks and avenues. The buildings were not all of the elegance of the temple, but there was a clean simplicity to the design, in contrast to the decorative accoutrements worn by individuals.

The cities were busy, crowds jostling through the commercial areas, hordes of the creatures doing that curious duck-walk, little ones chasing one another about, individuals relaxing near fountains. And Jack realized with a shock that the natives had running water.

“Can we tell how big they are?” asked Winnie.

“Smaller than they look,” said Bill. “They would on average come up to Jack’s shoulders.”

There were a variety of structures, two-story buildings that might have been private dwellings, others that looked like public buildings, shops, markets, storage facilities. Three ships were tied up at the piers, and a fourth was entering the harbor as they watched. Its sails were billowing in the wind, and sailors scrambled across its decks.

The architecture was similar everywhere. If it lacked the Doric columns of the seaside temple, it possessed the same simple elegance, straight lines, vaulted roofs, uncluttered cornices. Just the thing, Digger thought, that would attract an omega. And he was struck by how much better the cloud’s sensing equipment was than the Jenkins’s.

THE CITIES WERE surrounded by agricultural areas, squares of land given over to one crop or another, orchards, silos, barns. A few rhinos, and other smaller creatures, grazed contentedly.

Gradually the farms gave way to forest.

Beyond the northern cities, the woods grew thick, and broke on the slopes of a mountain range that rivaled the Alps. Beyond the peaks lay jungle, and the jungle, as it approached the equator, became desert. In the south, the cities stood on the edge of more mountains, which proceeded unbroken for thousands of kilometers, all the way to the ice cap.

Where were the other cities?

Digger didn’t realize he’d asked the question aloud until Jack commented that it looked as if the isthmus was the only populated section on the planet. The other continents looked empty. The land above and below the isthmus looked equally empty.

They searched the oceans for ships and found none other than those in the coastal waters near the cities. “Looks,” said Kellie, “as if they stay in sight of land.”

“Look at this.” Digger pointed at two of the rivers that crossed the isthmus. “A lock.”

They zoomed in and saw that it was so. “They have to get ships over the high ground in the middle of the isthmus,” said Jack. “So they use a system of locks to raise them, then get them back down to sea level.”

Kellie raised a congratulatory fist. “The Goompahs are engineers,” she said. “Who would’ve thought?”

Jack was getting ready to make his report. “They’ll want to know about the population.” He looked around at his colleagues. “What do you think?”

Anybody’s guess. Winnie brought the cities up one by one. The northernmost was on the western coast, and it was probably the smallest of the group. It could lay claim to a couple of spectacular buildings. The larger of the two was set in front of a pool and looked very much like the main admin building on the Academy grounds. It was long, low, only three levels, made of white stone. It was probably a bit smaller, but the same architect might have designed both.

The other structure was round, like the temple by the sea, but bigger, with more columns. It appeared to be open to the elements. And something that might have been a sun disk stood at the apex of its roof. It looked out across a park.

Crowds were pressed into the commercial section, which was too narrow. The avenues curved and wandered off in all directions. They were lined with buildings of all sizes and shapes. Minimum twenty thousand, Digger thought. Probably closer to twenty-five. The other cities appeared to be larger. Say an average population fifteen to twenty percent more. Make it thirty thousand for each. That was a conservative estimate. And it gave, what?

“Three to four hundred thousand,” Winnie told Jack.

He nodded. Kellie said the estimate was a bit low, but Digger thought she had it about right. Jack agreed and went across the corridor to record his report.

One of the sailing vessels was making its way northward up the coast on the western sea. It was under full sail, and it looked like an eighteenth-century frigate. No Roman galleys for these guys. Or Viking boats. They clearly had no use for oars.

On the other hand, they hadn’t learned how to make an outboard motor.

“THE QUESTION,” SAID Jack, “is what we do now?”

It was night on the isthmus again, but a clear night this time, and they could see the cities spotted with lights. They were barely discernible, flickering oil lamps probably, but they were there.

“We wait for instructions,” said Jack. “They’ll probably send some contact specialists.”

“I hate to bring this up,” said Digger, “but where are the contact specialists coming from?”

“The Academy, I assume.”

“It’s a nine-month flight.”

“I know.”

“The cloud is only nine months away. When they get here there won’t be anybody to contact.”

Jack looked uncomfortable. “If they get underway without wasting any time, they’ll have a couple of weeks before the cloud hits. In any case, Hutch can get back to us within a couple of weeks and let us know what she intends. Meantime, I don’t think there’s much for us to do except sit tight.”

Kellie frowned. “You don’t think we should go down and say hello?”

“No,” said Jack. “The Protocol requires us to keep hands off. No contact.”

“Nothing anybody can do,” said Winnie.

Digger frowned. “Doesn’t the policy say something about extraordinary circumstances?”

“As a matter of fact, no.”

ARCHIVE

Vadim, we have a lowtech civilization on Lookout. On the third world. It’s confined to a small area in the southern hemisphere. What do you want us to do?

— Jack Markover

February 26, 2234

LIBRARY ENTRY

“Where are you going, Boomer?”

“I’m headed to the Chocolate Shop.”

“Can I go along? It’s my favorite place in the whole town.”

“Sure. As long as you promise not to eat any. It’s not good to eat between meals.”

“I know, Boomer. You can count on me.” (Wink, wink at the audience.)

— The Goompah Show

All-Kids Network

February 25

chapter 5

On board the Patrick Heffernan, near the Bumblebee Nebula.

Thursday, February 27.

“NOTHING,” SAID SKY. They’d been searching the Quagmire’s last known position for six hours. There was no sign of the ship, and none of the hedgehog.

“It couldn’t just have disappeared,” said Emma.

He wasn’t sure whether the “it” she was referring to meant the ship or the hedgehog. But whichever, there didn’t seem to be any sign of either in the neighborhood.

Schuyler Capabianco was one of only two of the Academy’s twenty-three captains who were currently married, and the only one whose wife was part of the onboard team. She was an astrophysicist out of the University of Arizona who claimed she’d never have started taking Academy assignments had it not been for the chance to be with her husband. He didn’t believe it, but he was happy to hear her say so.

Em had been optimistic for a happy outcome to the rescue mission. She had never witnessed a fatal off-Earth incident, and could not bring herself to believe one had happened there. A rationale was hard to find, though. The most likely seemed to be that a power failure had occurred, leaving the ship adrift, without its long-range communication functions. Sky knew it was possible, but only remotely so.

When they’d arrived near the cloud and heard no distress signal, no radio call, they had both realized that the chance of rescue had become vanishingly small. Superluminals were designed so that the radio transmitter would be pretty much the last thing that went down.

There just weren’t many things that could account for the silence other than catastrophe. Nevertheless they looked, but Bill reported no sign of the ship. “It is not in the search area,” he said.

Em and Sky didn’t know either of the people on the Quagmire, but that didn’t soften things any. There was a brotherhood among those who traveled the great deeps. A tradition had developed much like that among mariners in the dangerous early days on the seas: They were a band, they looked out for each other, and they grieved when anyone was lost.

The Quagmire was lost. The mission had become salvage rather than rescue.

“Must have been an explosion,” Emma said.

Sky looked off to starboard, where the omega drifted, dark and quiet. But it was too far away to be the culprit.

Emma folded herself into his arms. “Damn,” she said.

“We knew all along it might be like this,” said Sky.

“I suppose.” She snuffled, wiped her eyes, pulled away from him, and cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “there’s probably no point hanging around here. What we should do is try to get a look at what happened.”

That got his attention. “How do you suggest we do that?”

THEY SLIPPED INTO hyperspace, rode the quiet mists, and jumped out again before Sky could finish his coffee. “Right on target,” Bill announced. They had traveled 104 billion kilometers, had gotten in front of the light wave from the search area, and could now look back at the place where the hedgehog and the Quagmire had been. Bill unfolded the array of dishes that served as the ship’s telescope and aimed it at the region.

They were seeing the area as it had been four days earlier. Had the telescope been more efficient, they could have watched the Quagmire approach the hedgehog, could have watched Terry Drafts and Jane Collins leave their ship and descend into the spines.

Emma posted the time at the Quagmire site, late evening on the twenty-third, exactly twenty-five minutes before communications had stopped.

It was after midnight on the Heffernan. He felt weary, tired, numb, but not sleepy. While they waited he sent off a preliminary report to Serenity. No sign of the Quagmor. Continuing investigation.

They talked about the incident. Odd that they’d just vanish. You don’t think they might have just taken off? Or been grabbed by something? Sounded wild, but no stranger than simply dropping out of sight. Sky laughed at the idea, but asked Bill whether anything unusual was moving in the area.

“Negative,” said Bill.

Watching too many horror sims.

Emma gently pressed his arm. “Coming up,” she said. He was watching the time. Just a minute or so.

The cloud was, of course, invisible at that range. (He couldn’t help connecting the event with the cloud. Knew it would somehow turn out to be responsible.) But they were well away from it now. The distance between their present position and the site of the incident was seven times as great as the diameter of the solar system. “I can’t imagine what we’d expect to see at this range,” he said.

“We won’t see anything, Sky. But there’s a chance—”

“Photons,” Bill reported. “Just a sprinkle. But they were right on schedule.”

“So what’s it tell us?” asked Sky.

“Explosion,” said Em. “Big one.”

“Big enough to obliterate the ship? And the rock?”

“If we can pick up traces of it out here. Oh, yes, I’d say so.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

. Few of us now alive can remember when we looked at the stars and wondered whether we were alone. We have had faster-than-light transport for almost a half century, and if we have not yet encountered anyone with whom we can have a conversation, we know nevertheless they are out there, or have been there in the past.

More than a hundred people have given their lives to this effort. And we are now informed that, during the last fiscal year, roughly 2 percent of the world’s financial resources have gone into this exploration of the outer habitat in which we live.

Two percent.

It does not sound like much. But it could feed 90 million people for a year. Or provide housing for 120 million. It could pay all the medical costs in the NAU for sixteen months. It could provide a year’s schooling for every child on the planet.

So what do we have for our investment?

Sadly, we have nothing to put into the account books. It’s true we have improved our plumbing methods and created lighter, stronger materials. We can now pack more nourishment into a convenience meal than we ever could before. Our electronics are better. We have lightbenders, which have proved of some use in crime prevention, and also of some use to criminals. We have better clothing. Our engines are more fuel-efficient. We have learned to husband energy. But surely all of this could have been had, at far less cost, by direct investment.

Why then do we continue this quest?

It is too easy to think that we go because of the primal urge, as Tennyson said, to sail beyond the sunset.

We pretend that we are interested in taking the temperatures of distant suns, of measuring the velocity of the winds of Altair, of presiding over the birth of stars. Indeed, we have done these things.

But in the end, we are driven by a need to find someone with whom we can have a conversation. To demonstrate that we are not alone. We have already learned that there have been others before us. But they seem to have gone somewhere else. Or passed into oblivion. So the long hunt continues. And in the end, if we are successful, if we actually find somebody out there, I suspect it will be our own face that looks back at us. And they will probably be as startled as we.

— Conan Magruder

Time and Tide, 2228

chapter 6

University of Chicago.

Thursday, March 6.

IT HAD BEEN almost four years, but David Collingdale had neither forgotten nor forgiven the outrage at Moonlight. The sheer mindlessness of it all still ate at him, came on him sometimes in the depths of the night.

Had it been a war, or a rebellion, or anything at all with the most remote kind of purpose, he might have been able to make peace with it. There were times when he stood before his classes and someone would ask about the experience and he’d try to explain, how it had looked, how he had felt. But he still filled up, and sometimes his voice broke and he fell into a desperate silence. He was not among those who thought the omegas a force of nature. They had been designed and launched by somebody. Had he been able to gain access to that somebody, he would have gladly killed and never looked back.

A blanket of snow covered the University of Chicago campus. The walkways and the landing pads had been scooped out; otherwise, everything was buried. He sat at his desk, his class notes open before him, Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons drifting incongruously through the office. He’d spent the night there not because he knew the storm was coming, although he did, but simply because he sometimes enjoyed the spartan ambience of his office. Because it restored reason and purpose to the world.

The classes were into their first period. Collingdale had an appointment with a graduate student at nine thirty, leaving him just enough time to get himself in order—shower and fresh clothes—and get down to the faculty dining room for a quick breakfast.

Life should have been good there. He conducted occasional seminars, served as advisor for two doctoral candidates, wrote articles for a range of journals, worked on his memoirs, and generally enjoyed playing the campus VIP. He was beginning to get a reputation as something of an eccentric, though. He’d discovered recently that some of his colleagues thought he was a bit over the side. Believed that the experience at Moonlight had twisted him. Maybe it was true, although he would have thought intensified to be the more accurate verb. His sensitivity to the subject seemed to be growing deeper with time. He could, in fact, have wept on cue, had he wished to do so, merely by thinking about it.

He’d become sufficiently oppressed by conditions that he worried he might be having an unfortunate effect on his students. Consequently, he’d tried to resign in midsemester the year before, but the chancellor, who saw the advantage of having someone with Collingdale’s stature on the faculty, had taken him to a local watering hole for an all-night session, and he’d stayed on.

The chancellor, who was also a longtime friend, suggested a psychiatrist, but Collingdale wasn’t prepared to admit he had a problem. In fact, he had acquired an affection for his obsession. He wouldn’t have wanted to be without it.

Things got better for him this past Christmas when Mary Clank had walked into his life. Tall, angular, irrepressible, she had heard all the jokes about her name and laughed all of them off. Trade Clank for Collingdale? she’d asked the night he proposed. You must think I have a tin ear.

He loved her with as much passion as he hated the clouds.

She refused to be caught up in his moods. When he wanted to watch a sim, she insisted on a stroll through the park; when he suggested a fulfilling evening at a concert, she wanted to bounce around at the Lone Wolf.

Gradually, she became the engine driving his life. And he found the occasional day when he did not see her to be an empty time, something to be gotten through as best he could.

He’d always assumed that the romantic passions were practiced exclusively by adolescents, women, and the slow-witted. Sex he could understand. But together forever? That’s our song? It was for children. Nevertheless he’d conceived a passion for Mary Clank the first time he’d seen her—at a faculty event—and had never been able to let go. To his delight, she returned his feelings, and Collingdale became happier and more content than he had ever been.

But his natural pessimism lurked in the background and warned him she would not stay. That the day would come when he would walk into the Lone Wolf alone, or with another woman on his arm.

Enjoy her while you can, Dave. All good things are transient.

Well, maybe. But she had said yes. They hadn’t set a date, although she’d suggested that late spring would be nice. June bride and all that.

He squeezed into his shower. He had private accommodations, a bit cramped, but sufficient. Collingdale liked to think he was entitled to much more, that he was demonstrating to the university that he was really a self-effacing sort by settling for, in fact by insisting on, much less than someone in his position would customarily expect. A lot of people thought modesty a true indicator of greatness. That made it, at least, a prudent tactic.

When he’d finished he laid out fresh clothes on the bed. The sound system was running something from Haydn, but the HV was also on, the sound turned down, two people talking earnestly, and he was pulling on a shirt when he became aware that one of them was Sigmund Halvorsen, who usually got called out when a major scientific issue was in the news. He turned the volume up.

“—is unquestionably,” Halvorsen was saying in his standard lecture mode, “a group of cities directly in its path.” He was an oversize windbag from the physics department at Loyola. Mostly beard, stomach, and overbearing attitude.

The interviewer nodded and looked distressed. “Dr. Halvorsen,” he said, “this is a living civilization. Is it at risk?”

“Oh, yes. Of course. The thing is already tracking them. We don’t have much experience with the omegas, but if our analyses of these objects are correct, these creatures, whatever they are, do not have much time left.”

“When will the cloud get there?”

“I believe they’re talking about December. A couple of weeks before Christmas.” His tone suggested irony.

Collingdale hadn’t been near a newscast since the previous evening. But he knew right away what was happening.

A picture of the cloud replaced the two men. It floated in the middle of his bedroom, ugly, ominous, brainless. Malevolent. Silent. Halvorsen’s voice droned on about “a force of nature,” which showed what he knew.

“Is there anything we can do to help them?” asked the interviewer.

“At this time, I doubt it. We’re lucky it isn’t us.”

From his angle near the washroom door, the omega seemed to be closing in on his sofa-bed. “Marlene,” he said, calling up the AI.

“Dr. Collingdale?”

“Connect me with the Academy. Science and Technology. Their headquarters in Arlington. Audio only. I want to talk with Priscilla Hutchins.”

Her whiskey voice informed him that the connection had been made and a young woman’s voice responded. “Can I help you, Dr. Collingdale?”

“Director of operations, please.”

“She’s not available at the moment. Is there someone else you wish to speak with?”

“Please let her know I called.” He sat down on the bed and stared at the cloud. It blinked off, and was replaced by a scattering of lights. The cities by night.

“—any idea what we’re looking at?” the interviewer asked.

“Not yet. These are, I believe, the first pictures.”

“And this is where?”

“The third planet—just like us—of a star that has only a catalog number.”

“How far is it?”

“A bit more than three thousand light-years.”

“That sounds pretty far.”

“Oh, yes. That’s about as far out as we’ve gone. I’d venture to say the only reason we’re there now is because somebody spotted the cloud moving.”

Collingdale’s line blinked. He took it in his sitting room. “Dave.” Hutch materialized standing on the throw rug. She was framed by a closet door and a plaque awarded him by the Hamburg Institute. “It’s good to hear from you. How’ve you been?”

“Good,” he said. “The job pays well, and I like the work.” Her black hair was shorter than it had been the last time he’d seen her. Her eyes were dark and intelligent, and she obviously enjoyed being an authority figure. “I see things are happening.”

She nodded. “A living civilization, Dave. For the time being. We released it this morning.”

“How long have you known?”

“We got the news two days ago, but we’ve suspected it for a while now.”

“Well,” he said, unsure how to get where he wanted to go, “congratulations. I assume there’s a major celebration going on down there.”

“Not exactly.”

No, of course not. Not with a cloud closing in on somebody. “What kind is it?” he asked, referring to the type of civilization.

“Green deuce.”

Nontechnological. Agricultural. But organized into cities. Think eastern Mediterranean, maybe four thousand years ago. “Well,” he said, “I’m delighted to hear it. I know there’ll be some complications, but it’s a magnificent discovery. Who’s getting the credit?”

“Looks like a technician at Broadside. And Jack Markover on the Jenkins.”

That was a surprise. In the old days, it would have been someone higher up the chain. “The cloud led you to it?”

“Yes.” She looked discouraged.

“They’re saying December on the HV.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to try to do anything for them? For the inhabitants?”

“We’re putting together a mission.”

“Good. I thought you would. Do you have anything going, anything that can take out the cloud?”

“No.”

Yeah. That’s what makes it all such a bitch. “What are you going to try to do? What’s the point of the mission?”

“We’ll decoy it. If we can.”

“How?”

“Projections. If that doesn’t work, a kite.” She allowed herself a smile.

“A kite?” He couldn’t suppress a grin himself.

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”

“Ask me in nine months.” She tilted her head and her expression changed. Became more personal. “Dave, what can I do for you?”

He was trembling. The smartest thing he could do, the only thing he could do, was to stay out of it. The mission, round trip, would take close to two years. And it was likely to fail. When it did, he would be happily married to Mary. “When are they leaving?”

“A few days. They’ll be on their way as soon as we can get everybody on board.”

“They won’t have much time after they get there.”

“We figure about ten days.”

“Who’s running it?”

“We’re still looking at the applications.”

He ran over a few names in his memory, thought he knew who’d be trying to get on board. Couldn’t think of anyone with better qualifications than he. “What happens if the decoy doesn’t work?”

“We have some other ideas.”

Decision time. “Hutch—” he said.

She waited.

Two years away. Mary Clank, farewell.

“Yes, Dave?” she prompted.

“I’d like to go.”

She smiled at him, the way people do when they think you’re kidding. “I understood you were pretty well settled.”

“I’d like to do this, Hutch. If you can see your way clear.”

“I’ll add your name to the candidates’ lists.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’d consider it a personal favor.”

She turned away momentarily and nodded to someone out of the picture. “Dave, I can’t promise.”

“I know. What kind of creatures are they?”

She vanished and a different image appeared, an awkward, roundish humanoid that looked like something out of a Thanksgiving parade. Complete with vacuous eyes and a silly grin. Baggy pants, floppy shoes, bilious shirt. Round, polished skull. No hair save for eyebrows. Long thin ears. Almost elfin. They were the saving grace in an otherwise comic physiognomy.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“No. This is what they look like.”

He laughed. “How many of them are there?”

“Not many. They all seem to be concentrated in a group of cities along a seacoast.” Again, something off to the side distracted her. “Dave,” she said, “I have to go. It was good to talk with you. I’ll get back within twenty-four hours. Let you know, up or down.”

HE HAD LUNCH with Mary, and she knew something had happened. They were in the UC faculty lounge, he with only twenty minutes before he was due to conduct a seminar, she with an hour to spare. His intention had been to say nothing until he had the decision from the Academy. But she sat there behind a grilled cheese and looked into him and waited for him to explain what was going on.

So he did, although he made it sound, without actually lying, as if Hutch had called him and asked whether he was available.

“They might pick somebody else,” he concluded. “There’s a lot at stake. It would be hard to say no.”

She looked back at him with those soft blue eyes, and he wondered whether he had lost his mind. “I understand,” she said.

“I don’t really have a choice in something like this, Mary. There’s too much riding on it.”

“It’s okay. You have to do what you think is right.” Steel in the ribs.

“I’m sorry. The timing isn’t very good, is it?”

“You’ll be gone two years, you say?”

“If I get picked, it would be closer to a year and a half.” He tried a smile but it didn’t work. “If it happens, I can probably arrange space for you. If you’d want to come.”

She nibbled at the sandwich. Considered it. He saw her wrestle with it. Saw those eyes harden. “Dave, I’d like to, but I can’t just take two years off.”

“It wouldn’t be two years.”

“Close enough. It would wreck my career.” She was an instructor in the law school. There was a tear. But she cleared her throat. “No. I just can’t do it.” And there was a message there somewhere, in her voice, in her expression. I’m yours if you want me. But don’t expect me to hang around.

In that moment, filled with the smell of fresh-brewed coffee and cinnamon, he hoped that Hutch would pass over him, pick someone else. But he also understood he’d driven a spike into his relationship with Mary, that whatever happened now, things would never again be right.

HUTCH CALLED THAT night. “You still want to go?”

“When do we leave?”

“A week from tomorrow.”

“I’ll be ready.”

“I’m attaching a folder. It has all the information on the mission. Who’ll be there. What we plan to do. If you have any ideas, get back to me.”

“I will.”

“Welcome aboard, David.”

“Thank you. And, Hutch—”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for the assignment.”

He signed off and looked out across the lake. He lived on the North Shore. Nice place, really. Hated to leave it. But he’d already arranged to sublet.

ARCHIVE

Jack, for planning purposes, we will assume that we’ll be unable to stop the cloud. The cloud will target the cities. See if you can come up with a way to move the population out into the country, preferably to higher ground, since they’re all vulnerable to the ocean. We are going to try to master their language. To that end, we need recordings. Raw data should be forwarded to the Khalifa al-Jahani as soon as it becomes available.

Anything you can do without compromising the Protocol will help. I’m informed you don’t have lightbenders. We’re sending a shipment from Broadside, but I’d be grateful if you didn’t wait for their arrival to get started. Find a way to make things happen. Everyone here understands the difficulty that implies. Therefore, be advised that your primary objective is to get the job done. If it becomes necessary to set the Protocol aside, this constitutes your authority to do so.

We also need you to collect and run analyses of food samples. Forward any information you can get. What do they eat? Fruit, pizza, whatever. Any other data that might help us get them through this.

Time is of the essence. In view of the lag between Lookout and your other points of contact, you are free to use discretion.

— P. M. Hutchins

Director, Operations

March 6, 2234

chapter 7

Arlington.

Friday, March 7.

HUTCH FOUND A note on her desk, requesting she report to the commissioner’s office immediately on arrival. She found him packing. “Heading for Geneva,” he said. “Right after the memorial service.”

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“Political stuff. But they want me there. You’ll be acting the rest of the week.”

“Okay.”

He looked at her. “That’s it,” he said.

“No special instructions?”

“No. Just use your best judgment.”

SHE’D BEEN HIT hard by the loss of Jane Collins and Terry Drafts. Hutch had known both, had partied with Jane and risked her neck with Terry. Standing on the lawn by the Morning Pool, listening to the tributes, she couldn’t get the notion out of her head that both would show up, walk into the middle of things, and announce it was all a mistake. Maybe if they had found the bodies, it would have been easier.

The commissioner conducted the event with his usual charm and aplomb. Their friends and colleagues recalled fond memories of one or the other, and there was a fair amount of laughter. Hutch glanced up at the south wall, on which were engraved the names of all who had lost their lives over the years in the service of the Academy. Or, as she’d have preferred to put it, in the service of humanity. The list was getting long.

When her turn to speak came, she filled up. Tom Callan handed her a glass of water but she stood there, shaking her head impatiently. Poor way for a leader to behave. She began by saying that Jane and Terry were good people, and her friends. “They were bright, and they went to a place that was dark and deadly and nobody knew. Now we know.

“I’m proud they were my colleagues.”

THE HEDGEHOG AND the cloud had been on the same course, moving at the same velocity. The cloud was programmed to attack objects with perpendiculars, or even sharp edges. The hedgehog had been all perpendiculars. If Terry’s surmise that someone else was monitoring the cloud was correct, why do it with a package designed in that particular way? Why not just throw an ordinary set of sensors out there?

What was going on?

The two objects had been separated by sixty thousand kilometers. Why put a surveillance package in front instead of alongside? And why so far away?

She made some calls. Everybody she could think of who’d been involved with the omegas. She put the same question to each: Was it possible that there’d been other hedgehogs accompanying other clouds? And that they hadn’t been observed?

The answers: It was certainly possible. And at sixty thousand klicks, it was unlikely they’d have been noticed. The research vessels had been intent on the omegas. It had not been part of the routine to do long-range sweeps of the area.

By midafternoon she was satisfied it was worth an investigation. “Barbara,” she said, “record transmissions for Serenity and Broadside.”

“Ready, Ms. Hutchins.”

She looked into the imager. “Audrey, Vadim: Let’s find out if some of the other clouds have a hedgehog. Assign whoever’s available to take a look. Just nearby stuff. A few samples. Tell them if they find one, or anything remotely like it, to stay away from it. We don’t want to lose anybody else. Let me know results ASAP.”

THE VARIOUS WEATHERMAN packages had sighted several more tewks, for a total of ten. They were concentrated in two widely separated areas, three near the Golden Crescent, four near the Cowbell.

The Golden Crescent, home to millions of aging stars, floated over her couch. Great smoky walls fell away to infinity. A class-G dominated the foreground, close enough to illuminate the clock. A luminous river of gas and dust ran across the back of the room.

She activated the program, and three bright objects appeared, one at a time, inward from the Crescent. One up here, one over there, one down center.

Then the image rotated, the Golden Crescent sank, the vast clouds moved around the walls, and the three stars lined up.

She had just watched the same process happen with the four tewks at the Cowbell. Except that there only three of the four had lined up. But it was enough.

It was almost choreographed. And it chilled her.

They were no closer to figuring out what was happening than they’d been when the first sightings came in a few weeks earlier. She suspected that, with Weatherman packages becoming operational on a regular basis, they were going to see more of these things.

She checked the time and shut the program down. Leave it to Harold to figure out. As acting commissioner she had more pressing matters to attend to.

Asquith had taken her aside after the memorial. It was her first experience as the Academy’s chief decision maker, and he had apparently thought better of his intention to pass along no special instructions. “Don’t make any decisions,” he’d told her, “other than those directly in line with Academy policy. Anything that requires judgment, defer it, and I’ll take care of it when I get back.” He’d looked at her, realized what he’d said, and added, “No offense.”

None taken. Asquith was too shallow for her to take his opinion of her capabilities seriously. The problem, of course, was that he wrote her evaluation.

She pushed it aside, called Rheal Fabrics, and told them to assemble the kite. They gave her the dimensions it would have while stored, which she added to the space requirements Marge’s weathermaking gear would need.

The Lookout mission would require two ships. One would carry Collingdale and his team. The other would have to be a freighter, which meant she’d have to charter it. Oddly, the Collingdale ship was the problem. She needed something that could transport upward of twenty people, and the only thing available was the al-Jahani, currently undergoing a refitting. She’d have to hurry it along.

She’d briefed Asquith on what she intended to do. “Maybe even worse than the direct attack by the omega,” she told him, “is the aftermath. We don’t know what it’ll do to the atmosphere. Might be years before things will grow. That means a possibility of starvation for the natives. We’re going to need to send out relief supplies.”

He’d sighed. “Not our job, Hutch.”

But it would become theirs, and they both knew it. When the pictures started coming back of starving and dying Goompahs, the public would get upset, and the politicians would turn to the Academy. “When it happens,” she’d told him, “we better be ready.”

Next day he’d announced his Geneva trip. It hardly seemed a coincidence.

The al-Jahani was supposed to leave Friday. The logistics were set, and Collingdale and his people were en route. But Jerry Hoskins, the Academy’s chief engineer, had been dubious. Not enough time. The ship was due for a major overhaul, and Hutch wanted to send her on a two-year mission? But he’d see what he could do. So when Barbara informed her that Jerry was on the circuit, she got a bad feeling. “Hutch,” he said, “we can’t really get her ready in a few days.”

“How much time do you need, Jerry?”

“If we drop everything else—?”

“Yes.”

“Three weeks.”

“Three weeks?”

“Maybe two. But that’s the best we can do.”

“That won’t work. They wouldn’t get there in time. Might as well not go.” She had nothing else available. Damned stuff was all out in the boondocks. “What’s the worst that can happen if we go through with the launch?”

“You mean Friday?”

“Yes.”

“It might blow up.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Of course. But I wouldn’t guarantee it’ll get where it’s going.”

“Okay. No guarantee. Other than that, what are my chances?”

“It’ll probably do fine.”

“Any safety concerns?”

“We’ll do an inspection. Make sure. No, they’ll be okay. They might get stranded. But otherwise—”

“—No guarantees.”

“—Right.”

“Okay. Jerry, I’m going to send a record of this conversation to Dave Collingdale. You inform the captain.”

Collingdale hadn’t come in yet, so she left a message, describing the chief engineer’s concerns. She told him reluctantly that it should add some spice to the flight. Then she sighed and headed for the commissioner’s office to assume her new duties.

HER FIRST APPOINTMENT was with Melanie Toll of Thrillseekers, Inc.

Despite the capabilities of existing technology to create images that could not be distinguished from the originals, allowing virtual face-to-face conversations between people thousands of kilometers apart, people with business propositions still found the personal touch indispensable. Making the effort to cross some geography at personal inconvenience sent a message about how serious one was.

Serious. And here came Ms. Toll of Thrillseekers.

Hutch gazed at her over the vast expanse of Asquith’s desk. (The commissioner insisted she use his office when exercising his function.) She was young, attractive, tall, quite sure of herself. She wore a gold necklace and a matching bracelet, both of which acquired additional sparkle in the sheen of her auburn hair.

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Hutchins,” she said.

“You’re giving me more credit than I deserve.” Hutch shook her hand, listened to the light tinkle of the gold, and led her to a seat by the coffee table.

They talked briefly about weather, traffic, and how lovely the Academy grounds were. Then Hutch asked what she could do for her visitor.

Toll leaned forward, took a projector from her purse, and activated it. An image appeared of a young couple happily climbing the side of a mountain. Below them, the cliff fell away five hundred meters. Hutch could see a river sparkling in the sunlight.

Thrillseekers, Inc., took people on actual and virtual tours around the world and let them indulge their fantasies. Aside from dangling from cliffs, they rode golly balls along treacherous rivers, rescued beautiful women (or attractive men) from alligators, mounted horses and fought mock battles with bandits in the Sahara.

The projector displayed all this in enhanced colors, accompanied by an enthusiastic score, and over-charged titles. Danger for the Connoisseur. The Ultimate Thrill-Ride. The latter was a wild chase in a damaged flyer pursued by a man-eating cloud.

Moments later Hutch was racing down a ski slope, approaching a jump that seemed to have no bottom. “Hold on to Your Socks!” read the streamer. She couldn’t help pushing back into her chair and gripping the arms.

“Well,” said Toll, snapping off the image just before Hutch would have soared out into space, “that’s what we do. Although, of course, you knew that.”

She smirked at Hutch, who, despite herself, was breathing hard. “Of course, Ms. Toll.” Steady yourself. “That’s quite a show.”

“Thank you. I’m glad you liked it.”

“How can I help you?”

“We’re interested in Lookout. The place where the Goompahs are.”

“Really. In what way?”

“We’d like to put it on our inventory.” She crossed one leg over the other. The woman oozed sex. Even with no male in the room.

Marla, the commissioner’s secretary, came in with a coffee service and pastries. She glanced at Hutch to see if she could proceed. Hutch nodded, and the woman filled two fine china cups and asked if there was anything else. There wasn’t, so she withdrew. (Asquith didn’t use an AI for secretarial duties because having a human signified his elite status within the organization. Very few people other than CEOs and heads of state had them. But there was no question that Marla added to the ambience.)

“How do you mean,” Hutch asked, “put it on your ‘inventory’?”

“We’d like to make the experience available to our customers. We’d like them to be on the ground when the cloud comes in, watch the assault, feel what it’s like.”

“Ms. Toll, Lookout is three thousand light-years away. Your customers would be gone for almost two years. Maybe gone permanently.”

“No, no, no. We don’t mean we’d literally ship them out. What we’d like to do is send a couple of our technicians to Lookout to record the attack, get the sense of what really happens. Then we’d construct an artificial experience.” She tried the coffee and nodded. It met with her approval. “We think an omega program would do quite nicely.”

“And you’d like permission from me?” She wondered about that detail. Any world shown to have sentient life automatically came under the purview of the World Council, but its agent in such matters was the Academy.

“Permission and transportation,” said Toll.

Her instincts pushed her to say no, but she couldn’t see a reason to refuse. “Thrillseekers would have to pay their share of expenses.”

“Of course.”

“You’d have to agree not to make contact with the natives. But that shouldn’t be a problem. We’d simply set you down on the other side of the globe.”

She shook her head. “No, Ms. Hutchins. I don’t think you understand. The natives and their cities are the critical part of the equation. We’ll want to record them up close. But I can promise we’ll stay out of the way. They won’t see us.”

Representatives from two of the major news organizations had appointments with her during the afternoon, and she suddenly realized why they were there. There was going to be more of this. Let’s get good shots of the Goompahs running for their lives.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Toll, but I don’t think we can do it.”

Her pretty brow furrowed and Hutch saw that she had a vindictive streak. “Why not?” she asked, carefully keeping her voice level.

Common decency, you blockhead. “It puts the Protocol at risk.”

“I beg your pardon.” She tried to look baffled. “They won’t see us.”

“You can’t guarantee that.”

She tried to debate the point. “We’ll keep out of the way. No way they’ll know we’re there. Our people will be in the woods.”

“There’s also a liability problem,” Hutch said. “I assume you expect these people to stay during the bombardment.”

“Well, of course. They’d have to stay.”

“That makes us liable for their safety.”

“We’ll give you a release.”

“Releases have limited value in this kind of case. One of your people doesn’t come back, his family sues you, and then sues us. The piece of paper isn’t worth a damn in court if it can be shown we willingly transported him into an obviously dangerous situation.”

“Ms. Hutchins, I would be grateful if you could be reasonable.”

“I’m trying to be.”

Toll quibbled a bit longer, decided maybe she needed to talk with the commissioner, the real commissioner. Then she shook her head at Hutch’s perversity, shook hands politely, and left.

SHE HAD A brief conversation with maintenance over contracts with suppliers, then went down to the conference room for the commissioner’s weekly meeting. That was usually a scattershot affair, attended by the six department heads. Asquith was neither a good planner nor a good listener. There was never an agenda, although he’d left one for her this time. It was all pretty routine stuff, though, and she got through it in twenty minutes.

It didn’t mention the Goompahs. “Before I let you go,” she concluded, “you all know what the situation is at Lookout.”

“The Goompahs?” said the director of personnel, struggling to keep a straight face.

She didn’t see the humor. “Frank,” she said, “in December, a lot of them are going to die. Maybe their civilization with them. If anybody has an idea how we might prevent that, I’d like to hear it.”

“If we had a little more time,” said Life Sciences, Lydia Wu-Chen, “we could set up a base on their moon. Evacuate them. At least get some of them out of harm’s way.”

Hutch nodded. “It’s too far. We need nine months just to get there.”

“I don’t think it’s possible,” said Physics, Wendell McSorley.

“Did you see the pictures from Moonlight?” asked Frank, looking around at his colleagues. “You have to find a way to stop the cloud. Otherwise, it’s bye-bye baby.”

“There’s nothing we can do about the cloud,” said Wendell.

“No magic bullet?” asked Lydia. “Nothing at all?”

“No.”

Hutch described Tom Callan’s idea. Wendell thought there was a possibility it might work. “It would have helped if we’d been out there with it a couple of years ago, though. We’ve waited until the thing has seen the Goompahs.”

“The same thing,” said Hutch, “could happen somewhere else next month. We need a weapon.”

“Then we need money,” said Wendell. “Somebody has to get serious about the program.” He looked dead at her.

AND THAT BROUGHT her back to the issue of food and blankets for survivors. She’d like to send medical supplies, too, but saw no quick way to find out what would be useful. So forget the medical stuff. The food would have to be synthesized, after they’d discovered what the natives would eat. But who would do it?

She had Marla put in a call to Dr. Alva. Very busy, they told her. Not available. Who is Priscilla Hutchins again? But ten minutes later Marla informed her that Dr. Alva was on the circuit. She looked impressed. “And by the way,” she added, “your three o’clock is waiting.”

Alva was wearing fatigues and seemed to be inside a makeshift lab. “What can I do for you, Hutch?” she asked. She did not sound annoyed, but there was no preliminary talk.

“You know about Lookout, Alva?”

“Only what I’ve read.”

“They’re going to get decimated.”

“Are you going to warn them? At least let them know what’s coming?”

“There’s a mission leaving next week with linguists.”

“Well, thank God for that. I don’t suppose that means we already have people on the ground who can speak with them?”

“Not yet. We just got there, Alva. But we’re trying.”

“I was concerned you’d want to keep hands off. You want my help overturning the Protocol?”

“Actually, that’s not why I called. We’re going to ship supplies to them. We don’t have any samples yet to work from, but as soon as I can get them, we’re going to send food and blankets. And medical, if it’s feasible. Whatever seems appropriate.”

“Good. Maybe you’ll be able to save some of them. What do you need from me?”

“Advice. After I get the formulas, who would be willing to synthesize the food?”

“Gratis?”

“Probably. I’m going to try to get the Academy to spring for some cash, but I have my doubts.”

“Your best bet is Hollins & Groat. Talk to Eddie Cummins over there.”

“Where’ll I find him?”

“Call Corporate. Tell him you talked with me. That I’d consider it a personal favor. In fact, wait until tomorrow and I’ll try to reach him and set things up. You’ve no idea what you’re going to need, right?”

“Not at this point.”

“Okay. Let me see what I can do. If you don’t hear from me, call him tomorrow afternoon. Your time.”

HER THREE O’CLOCK appointment was with the Rev. George Christopher, M.A.D.S., S.T.D. He represented the Missionary Council of the Church of Revelation. His group was currently the largest and most powerful of the Fundamentalist organizations in the NAU.

Christopher was right out of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Tall, severe, pious, eyes forever searching the overhead as if communicating with a satellite. The drawn-out diction that comes from too many years in the pulpit and causes people to think God has two syllables. He was pale, with a lean jaw and a long nose. He told her how glad he was to meet her, that in his view they needed some fresh young blood in the Academy hierarchy, and he implied he was tight with Asquith.

In fact, he was. The Church was of course not a donor, but it had influence over people who were, and it wielded considerable political clout. The Rev. Christopher was an occasional guest at Asquith’s retreat on Chesapeake Bay. “Good man, Michael,” he said. “He’s done a superb job with the Academy.”

“Yes,” she agreed, wondering if there was a special penalty for lying to a man of the cloth. “He works very hard.”

He settled back in one of the armchairs, adjusting his long legs, adjusting his smile, adjusting his aura. “Ms. Hutchins,” he said, “we are concerned about the natives on Lookout.” His lips worked their way around the verb and the two nouns. “Tell me, is that really the name of the place?”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t have a designator other than a number.”

“Well, however that may be, we are concerned.”

“As are we all, Reverend.”

“Yes. Of course. Are we going to be able to head off the disaster?”

“Probably not. We’re going to try. But it doesn’t look as if we have much chance.”

He nodded, suggesting that was the usual human condition. “We’ll ask our people to pray.”

“Thank you. We could use a little divine intervention.”

He looked up, tracked his satellite, and nodded again. “I wonder whether you’ve ever considered how the clouds originated? Who sent them?”

Her flesh chilled. Who? Well, whatever. The truth was that hardly a day had gone by that she hadn’t wondered about it, since that terrible afternoon thirty years ago when she’d watched the first cloud rip into Delta, rip into it because she and Frank Carson and the others had carved a few squares to entice it. And the thing had come like a hound out of hell.

“A lot of good people know what this is about,” he said. “They’ve looked at the clouds, and they know exactly what is happening.”

“Which is—?”

“God is losing patience with us.”

Hutch didn’t really have any comment, so she simply cleared her throat.

“I know how this sounds to you, Ms. Hutchins—may I call you Priscilla?”

“Of course.”

“I know how this sounds, Priscilla, but I must confess that I myself find it hard to understand why God would have designed such an object into the universe.”

“It may not be a natural object, Reverend.”

“I suppose that’s possible. It’s hard to see how, but I suppose it could happen. I’m not a physicist, you know.” He said that as if he might easily have been mistaken for one. “When you get an answer, please let me know. Meantime, I have to tell you what I think it is.”

“And what’s that?”

“A test.”

“It’s a pretty severe one.”

“There’ve been pretty severe ones before.”

Well, she couldn’t deny that. Wars, famines, holocausts. It could be a tough world. “May I ask how I can help you, Reverend?”

“Of course.” He rearranged his legs and studied her, and she understood he was making a judgment about how honest he could be. “You’re not a person of faith, I take it?”

Hutch didn’t know. There had been times when she’d almost felt the presence of a greater power. There’d been times when things had gotten desperate and she’d prayed for help. The fact that she was sitting in this office suggested the prayers might have been answered. Or she might have been lucky. “No,” she said finally. “It looks pretty mechanical out there to me.”

“Okay. That’s fair enough. But I want you to consider for a moment what it means to be a person who believes, who really believes, there is a Creator. Who believes without question that there is a judgment, that we will all one day have to face our Maker and render an accounting of our lives.” His voice had taken on a controlled passion. “Think of this life as being only a taste of what is to come.” He took a deep breath. “Priscilla, do these creatures know about God?”

For a moment she thought he was talking about Academy employees. “The Goompahs?” she said. “We don’t have any information on them yet, Reverend.”

He looked past her toward the window, gazing at the curtains. “They face decimation, and they probably do not have the consolation of knowing there is a loving God.”

“They might argue that if they had a loving God they wouldn’t be facing decimation.”

“Yes,” he said. “You would think that way.”

She wondered where this was going. “Reverend Christopher,” she said, “it’s hard to see what we can do about their religious opinions.”

“Priscilla, think about it a moment. They obviously have souls. We can see it in their buildings. In their cities. And those souls are in jeopardy.”

“At the moment, Reverend, I’m more worried about their bodies.”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Note of sympathy. “You’ll understand if I point out there’s far more to lose than simply one’s earthly life.”

She resisted pointing out that the Goompahs had no earthly life. “Of course.”

“It’s strictly short-term.”

“Nevertheless—”

“I want to send a few missionaries. While there’s still time.” His manner remained calm and matter-of-fact. He might have been suggesting they have a few pizzas delivered. “I know you don’t agree with all this, Priscilla. But I’m asking you to trust me.”

“The Protocol prevents it, Reverend.”

“These are special circumstances.”

“That’s true. But there’s no provision, and I have no authority to override.”

“Priscilla. Hutch. They call you Hutch, don’t they?”

“My friends do, yes.”

“Hutch, I’m asking you to show some courage. Do the right thing.” He looked on the verge of tears. “If need be, the Church will back you to the hilt.”

Right. That’s exactly what the Goompahs need right now, to hear about hellfire and damnation. “I’m sorry, Reverend.” She got up, signaling the end of the interview. “I wish I could help.”

He got to his feet, clearly disappointed. “You might want to talk this over with Michael.”

“His hands would be tied also.”

“Then I’ll have to go to a higher authority.” She wasn’t sure, but the last two words sounded capitalized.

JOSH KEPPLER REPRESENTED Island Specialties, Inc., a major player in communications, banking, entertainment, and retailing. Plus probably a few other areas Hutch didn’t recall at the moment.

Anyone who sought an appointment with the director of operations was required to state his business up front. She assumed the commissioner ran things the same way, but if so, he hadn’t passed the information along. It was becoming a long day, and she couldn’t imagine anything Keppler would have to say that she was interested in hearing.

“Costume jewelry,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Goompahs wear a lot of costume jewelry. It looks pretty good. Sort of early Egyptian.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m following you.”

“The original stuff would be worth enormous money to collectors.”

“Why? Nobody’s interested in what the Noks wear.”

“Nobody likes the Noks. People love the Goompahs. Or at least they will after we launch our campaign. And anyhow, the Goompahs are going to get decimated. That provides a certain nostalgia. These things are going to be instant relics.”

Keppler wore a white jacket and slacks, and he had a mustache—facial hair was just coming back into style after a long absence—that did nothing for him. Add close-set dark eyes, hair neatly parted down the center of his skull, and a forced smile, and he looked like an incompetent con man. Or a failed lothario. Care to swing by my quarters tonight, sweetie?

“So Island Specialties is going to—?”

“—We’re sending a ship out. It’ll be leaving in about a week. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of everything, and we’ll stay out of the way.” He was carrying a folder, which he opened and laid before her. “This constitutes official notification. As required by law.”

“Let me understand this,” she said. “You’re sending a ship to Lookout. And you’re going to—”

“—Do some trading.”

“Why not just reproduce the jewelry? You know exactly what it looks like.”

“Authenticity, Ms. Hutchins. That’s what gives it value. Each piece will come with a certificate of origin.”

“You can’t do it.” She pushed the document back across the desk without a glance.

“Why not?”

“First of all, Lookout is under Academy auspices. You need permission to do this.”

“We didn’t think there’d be a problem about that.”

“There is. Secondly, it would be a violation of the Protocol.”

“We’re willing to accept that.”

“What do you mean?”

“We don’t think it would stand up in court. The Protocol has never been tested, Ms. Hutchins. Why would anyone suppose the Court of the Hague has jurisdiction out around Alpha Centauri?”

Well, he was probably right there. Especially if the Academy granted de facto rights by accepting his notification. “Forget it,” she said.

Keppler tried to smile at her, but only his lips moved. “Ms. Hutchins, there would be a considerable financial advantage for the Academy.” He canted his head to let her know that Island Specialties was prepared not only to buy off the Academy, but her as well.

“Makes me wonder,” she said, “if the cloud doesn’t constitute one of the Goompahs’ lesser problems.”

His expression continued to imply he was trying hard to be her friend. He grinned at her little joke. Flicked it away harmlessly to show he hadn’t taken offense. “Nobody will get hurt,” he said. “And we’ll all do very nicely.”

“Mr. Keppler, if your people go anywhere near Lookout, we’ll act to defend our prerogatives.”

“And what precisely does that mean?”

“Show up and find out.” In fact, she knew that Island would not be able to get a superluminal for that kind of voyage unless they could show Academy approval, or at least Academy indifference.

THE COMMISSIONER CONSIDERED public relations his primary responsibility. Eric Samuels, his PR director, routinely scheduled a press conference every Friday afternoon at four. Shortly before the hour she heard his cheery hello to Marla, then he rolled into the office, bubbly and full of good cheer, affecting to be surprised to find Hutch behind the desk, and did a joke about how the commissioner had never looked better.

He wanted her to sign off on a couple of press releases on matters of no real concern. She was surprised he didn’t have the authority to handle them on his own. One of the world’s top physicists was scheduled to visit the Academy the following week, and Eric wanted to make it an Event. Several new artifacts were going on display in the George Hackett Wing of the library. (That one brought a twinge. Thirty years ago George had stolen her heart and lost his life.) There was also an announcement of new software being installed throughout the Academy buildings to make them friendlier to visitors.

“Okay,” she said, signing with a flourish. She liked the feeling of power it brought. “Good.”

“Did Michael leave anything for me?” he asked. “You know, the Goompahs? They’ll be all over me today about Lookout.” Eric was tall, and would have been quite good-looking had he been able to convey the impression somebody was home. The truth was that he wasn’t vacuous, but he did look that way.

“No,” she said. “Michael didn’t leave anything. But I have something for you.”

“Oh?” He looked suspicious, as if she were about to hand him an assignment. “What’s that?”

She activated the projector and a Goompah appeared in the middle of the office. “Her name’s Tilly.”

“Really?”

“Well, no. Actually we don’t know what her name is.” She changed the picture, and they were in one of the streets of the city with the temple. Goompahs were everywhere. Behind shop counters, standing around talking, riding beasts that were simultaneously ugly and attractive (like a bulldog, or a rhino). Little Goompahs ran screaming after a bouncing ball.

“Marvelous,” he said.

“Aren’t they?”

“How much of this stuff do we have?”

She shut the sound off, extracted the disk, and held it out for him. “As much as your clients could possibly want.”

“Yes,” he said. “The networks’ll love it.”

More than that, she thought. If the public reacted the way Hutch knew they would, it would become politically very difficult for the government to decide the Goompahs were more trouble than they were worth and simply abandon them.

AT THE END of the day, she wandered down to the lab. Harold was in his office, getting ready to leave. “Anything more on the tewks?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, “we do have another one.”

“Really?”

“In the Cowbell again.”

“Still no star it could have been?”

“This was already lit when the package went operational. And we don’t have a good picture of the area beforehand, so we really don’t know. But it’s a tewk. The spectrogram is right. Incidentally, one of the older ones shut down.”

“Okay.”

“The one that shut down: We don’t know how long it was active because we don’t know when it first began. Might have been a couple of weeks before the package started operating.” He tugged at his jacket, as though a piece of lint were hanging on. Finally, he gave up. “There’s something odd about that, too. About the way they switch off.

“Usually, a true nova will fade out. Maybe come back to life a couple times in any given cycle. Burn some more. But these things—” He looked for the right word. “When they’re done, they’re done. They go off, and nobody hears from them again.”

“Like a light going out?”

“Yes. Exactly like that.” He frowned. “Is it cold out?”

Hutch hadn’t been outside since morning. “Don’t know,” she said.

“There’s something else.” He looked pleased, puzzled, amused. “The clouds tend to run in waves.”

“Old news, Harold.”

“Sometimes they don’t, but the ones we’ve seen usually do. Now, what’s interesting, we’ve detected some clouds near the tewks. If we assume they are also running in waves, then at least four of the tewks, and maybe all of them, happened along wave fronts.”

She looked at him, trying to understand the implications. “You’re telling me these are all attacks? We’re watching worlds get blown up?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Nothing like that. There’s far too much energy being expended for that kind of scenario. All I’m saying is what I said: Wherever one of these explosions has happened, we’re pretty sure a cloud has been present.”

“No idea as to what’s going on?”

“Well, it’s always helpful when you can connect things. It eliminates possibilities.” He smiled at her, almost playfully. “I was wandering through the Georgetown Gallery last night.” He was checking his pockets for something. Gloves. Where were his gloves? “I got to thinking.” He found them in a desk drawer, frowned, wondering how they could have gotten there, and put them on. He seemed to have forgotten the Georgetown Gallery.

“And—?” prompted Hutch.

“What was I saying?”

“The Georgetown Gallery.”

“Oh, yes. I have an idea what the omegas might be.”

She caught her breath. Give it to me. Tell me.

“It’s only an idea,” he said. He glanced at the time and tried to push past her. “Hutch, I’m late for dinner. Let me think about it some more and I’ll get back to you.”

She seized his arm. “Whoa, Harold. You don’t drop a line like that and walk off. Have you really figured it out?”

“Give me a few days. I need to do some math. Get more data. If I can find what I’m looking for, I’ll show you what they might be.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

“Go, therefore, and teach all nations.” The requirement laid on us by the Gospels is no longer as clear as it once was. Do the creatures we call Goompahs constitute a nation in the biblical sense? Are they, like ourselves, spiritual beings? Can they be said to have souls?

For the third time in recent years, we are facing the issue of an extraterrestrial intelligence, beings that seem to have a moral sense, and might therefore qualify as children of God. To date, we have delayed, looked the other way, and avoided the question that is clearly being put to us: Was the crucifixion a unique event? Does it apply only to those born of terrestrial mothers? Or has it application on whatever worlds the children of Adam may visit?

What precisely is our responsibility? It is no easy question, and we must confess we find no ready answer in the scriptures. We are at a crossroad. And while we ourselves consider how to proceed, we would remind those ultimately tasked with the decision, who have delayed more than thirty years since the first discovery on Inakademeri, that failure to act is a decision. The cloud is bearing down on the Goompahs, while we bide our time. The entire Christian community is watching. And it is probable that whatever precedent is set in these next few months will determine the direction of missionary efforts well into the future. If indeed we determine that the Gospels are not applicable off Earth, we should so state, loudly and clearly, along with the reasons why. If, on the other hand, they do apply, then we should act. And quickly. The clock is running.

— Christianity Today

April 2234

chapter 8

Union Space Station.

Friday, March 14.

HUTCH SAT QUIETLY in the back of the briefing room while Collingdale talked to his people. There were twenty-five of them, xenologists, sociologists, mathematicians, and technicians. And, primarily, a team of twelve language specialists, whose job it would be to interpret the raw data sent back by the Jenkins crew, and to become proficient in basic Goompah.

The Khalifa al-Jahani was visible through the viewports. It was one of the Academy’s older ships, and she recalled the engineer’s cautions with misgivings. Probably be okay, but no guarantees. Collingdale had not been happy. But he’d accepted the reality of their position, and they’d passed the information on to the volunteers. None had opted out.

He was telling them that he planned to break new ground and he was pleased to have them with him.

“I’ve asked the Jenkins to get as many recordings as possible,” she’d told Collingdale earlier in the day. “They’re going to plant A/V pickups wherever they can. I’ve advised them to get the data and not worry too much about the Protocol unless the natives prove hostile. In which case they’re just going to hunker down until you get there.”

“If they turn out to be hostile,” Collingdale had said, “I doubt we’ll be able to do much for them.”

That had brought up the question of equipment. How many pickups did the Jenkins group have to work with? It couldn’t be many. They’d been doing routine survey work and, in the ordinary course of things, had little use for recording devices. They’d have to jury-rig some spare parts. In any case, there wouldn’t be more than a handful.

She’d ordered a shipment sent over to the Jenkins, along with some lightbenders, including a capital unit that could be used to conceal their lander. None of that, however, would arrive for weeks. So it would be left, for the time being, to Jack Markover’s imagination. She knew Markover, and could think of no one she’d rather have in the present position.

Collingdale had already talked individually with his team members, of course. But this was the first time they’d all been together. She was pleased to see that he refused to use the term Goompahs.

That had raised the question of a proper reference. Had it been visible from Earth, Lookout would have been located in Draco. But Draconians would never do. They were close to the Dumbbell Nebula but that didn’t help much either. In the end, knowing she had no control over the matter, hearing the media going on endlessly about Goompahs, she put it aside. It was already too late.

Collingdale finished his preliminary remarks, which consisted mostly of an orientation and welcome aboard. He invited them to get ready to depart, but asked the linguists to stay a moment. They were, to Hutch’s mind, the heart and soul of the operation. And she was pleased to see a substantial level of enthusiasm.

Judy Sternberg would be their director. Judy was an Israeli, a specialist in the intersection between language and culture, and a born leader. He introduced her, and she said all the right things. Proud to be working with them. An opportunity to make a major contribution. She knew they’d perform admirably.

Judy was no taller than Hutch, but she had presence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she concluded, “we are going to rescue the Goompahs. But first we are going to become Goompahs.”

So much for getting rid of the terminology. She wished Jack Markover had come up with something else on those initial transmissions.

Collingdale thanked Judy and shook her hand. “While we’re en route to Lookout,” he told the linguists, “we are going to break into their language. We are going to master it. And when we get there we are going to warn the natives what’s coming. We’ll help them evacuate their cities and head for the hills.” He allowed himself a smile at the expression. “And we are going to help them. If it comes to it, we may be with them. We’ll do what is necessary to save their rear ends.”

One of them raised a hand. Hutch recognized him from the manifest as Valentino Scarpello, from Venice. “How,” he asked, “are we going to do this? Why would they believe us?”

Valentino had a dazzling smile and leading-man features. Half the women in the group were already drooling in his direction.

“By the time we arrive on the scene,” Collingdale said, “the cloud will be hanging over their heads. I don’t think it’ll be hard to persuade anyone.”

That brought applause. Someone had hung on the bulkhead a picture of a Goompah, with its saucer eyes and large vacuous smile. They were pets, and the Academy people, and maybe the whole world, were adopting them.

“It might be,” he added, “that we won’t need to hide behind the disguises. Hutch back there—Hutch, would you stand a moment please? — Hutch is doing what she can to get us past the Protocol. It’s possible that, by the time we get to Lookout, we’ll be able to walk in, say hello, and suggest that everybody just get out of town. But however that plays out, we will not stand by and watch them die.”

More applause.

“Thank you.” He exuded confidence.

When the linguists had gone up the ramp to the al-Jahani, she took Collingdale and Judy aside. “I appreciate your spirit,” she said. “But nobody stays on the ground when the omega gets there.” She looked both in the eye. “We are not going to lose anyone out there. You guys understand that?”

“I was speaking metaphorically,” said Collingdale. “We’ll take care of them.” He looked at Judy for confirmation and Judy gazed at Hutch.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We won’t let anything like that happen.”

Then they were shaking hands. Good-bye. Good luck. See you in a couple of years. Hugs all around.

She was thinking about Thrillseekers, Inc., and the Church of Revelation, and Island Specialties. Yesterday there’d been four more, a clothing retailer who wanted to bring back some of the natives to use as models for a new line of Goompah fashions (“—and we’d save the lives of the models, don’t forget that—”) which, incidentally, looked not very much like the originals; a representative from the media giants, who were demanding an opportunity to record the destruction; a games marketer who wanted to develop a game that would be called Omega; and an executive from Karman-Highsmith who wanted to send a crew to get location shots for a sim that was already in the works. Major people involved.

Collingdale lingered while Judy boarded. Then he looked down into her eyes. “Wish you were coming?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve gotten too old for this sort of thing.”

WHILE WAITING FOR departure, she checked in with ops and got the latest status report from the Jenkins. It was a week old, of course, the time needed for hyperlight traffic to reach her from Lookout. That was another mistake, allowing the name Lookout to get around. It had become a joke for late night comedians, as well as a predictor of disaster. She saw now that they should have gotten on top of that right away. Should have given the sun a name, something like Chayla, and then they could have called the world Chayla III. And the inhabitants would have become Chaylans. All very dignified. But it was too late for that. It was her fault, but a smart Academy public relations section would have picked up on it right away.

There was nothing new from the Jenkins. They were still debating how best to go down and look around. She didn’t envy Jack, who had some tough decisions in front of him. The ops officer pressed his earphones and signaled her to wait. He listened, nodded, and looked up. “Commissioner on the circuit for you, ma’am.”

That was a surprise. “I’ll take it in the conference room,” she said.

He was seated on the deck of a yacht, a captain’s cap pulled low over his eyes. “Just thought I’d check in,” he said. “How are we doing?”

“Fine. I see you didn’t quite make Geneva.”

He smiled innocently. “Will the al-Jahani get away on schedule?”

“Yes, sir. They’re packed and ready to go.” She paused. “Why?”

“Why do I want to know about the al-Jahani?”

“Why run me through the parade?”

“I thought it would be a good idea if you learned why there’s a Protocol.”

She sat down. “You made your point.”

“Good. Hutch, it’s not just the Goompahs. We’re talking about a precedent. If we break it at Lookout, wherever we find anyone we’ll be baptizing, selling motorized carts, and dragging critters back to perform in circuses. You understand?”

“You really think that would happen?”

“It’s hard to see how it wouldn’t. I take it you told them no deal.”

“All except the media. They’re getting limited access. But not on the ground. How’d you know?”

“I’ve already heard rumblings of formal protests. Good. I’m proud of you.”

She’d always thought of Asquith as a man who’d avoid a fight at any cost. “What chance do you think they have, Michael? The protests.”

“Zero to poor. Unless you give the game away.”

SHE JUST MISSED a flight to Reagan and, rather than wait three hours, she caught one to Atlanta, and then took the glide train to D.C. Just south of Richmond they ran into a snowstorm, the first in that area in ten years or more. It got progressively heavier as the train moved north.

It was late evening by the time she reached home, descending onto the landing pad through a blizzard. Tor was waiting on the porch.

She got out of the taxi and hurried through the storm. The door swung open, and he handed her a hot chocolate. “Well,” he said, “did we get everybody off safely for Goompah country?”

“I hope so. How’s Maureen?”

“Asleep. She missed her mommy. I don’t think she likes the way I read George.” That was a reference to George Monk, the garrulous chimp.

The hot chocolate was good. Inside, he had a blazing fire going. She set the cup down and shook the snow off her jacket.

“It’s all over the networks,” he said. “The talking heads don’t think much of your chances.”

“They’re probably right.” She was about to sit when the house AI (named for the chimp, or maybe it was the other way round) sounded the chime that indicated an incoming call.

“Who is it, George?” Tor asked.

“Academy watch officer. For Hutch.”

“That’s odd,” she said. “I can’t imagine what that would be about.” Actually she could: Her first thought was that the al-Jahani had developed a problem already.

Jean Kilgore’s face appeared on-screen. “Hutch?”

“Yes. What do you have, Jean?”

“I wanted to let you know Harold is in the hospital. Apparently it’s serious.”

She needed a moment to understand. “What happened?” she asked. “How is he?”

“Heart attack. They took him to Georgetown. It happened this afternoon.”

“Do you have anything on his condition?”

“No, ma’am. Only what I told you.”

“Okay.”

“He went home early. Said he wasn’t feeling well.”

“Thanks, Jean.” She was headed toward her closet for a fresh jacket.

“Jenny Kilborn says he’s been on heart medication for years.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“But they didn’t think it was that serious. If he was having trouble, he doesn’t seem to have told anyone. Jenny talked with somebody at the hospital. Or maybe the police. I’m not sure which. They said his neighbor couldn’t get her front door open because of the snow. He went over to help her dig out.”

Great. Guy with a heart condition. “Thanks, Jean.” She’d have to change her shoes. “George, get me a cab. And connect me with that aunt of his, the one who lives in Wheaton.”

SHE COULDN’T GET through to the aunt, whom she’d met once, years before. She was, as far as Hutch knew, Harold’s only relative in the area. But the traffic director informed her she was offline. Apparently one of those people who did not carry a commlink. Well, Hutch could understand it. If she ever got clear of the Academy, she’d think about ditching hers.

All attempts to get information from Georgetown also went nowhere. “He’s been admitted,” the hospital told her. “Other than that we don’t have anything at the moment.”

Twenty minutes after leaving Woodbridge she settled onto the roof of the Georgetown Medical Center. She climbed out, momentarily lost her balance on the snow-covered ramp, and hurried down to the emergency room receiving desk.

The aunt was there, standing in a small circle of worried-looking people. Mildred. Her eyes were red.

Hutch introduced herself. Mildred smiled weakly, stifling tears. There was also a female cousin, a neighbor, a clergyman, and Charlie Wilson, one of the people from the lab. “How is he?” she asked.

Charlie looked steadily at Hutch and shook his head.

NEWSDESK

RECORD COLD IN MIDWEST

Temperature Hits Fifty Below in St. Louis

WCN SENDS PEACEKEEPERS TO MIDDLE EAST

Train Bombed by Iniri Rebels

TIDAL WAVE KILLS HUNDREDS IN BANGLADESH

Triggered by Collapsing Island

SINGH DEFEATS HARRIGAN FOR HUMAN CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP

First Off-Earth Title Match

DOCTOR ALVA ACCEPTS PERUVIAN MEDAL

Honored for Efforts During Bolus Outbreak

WOMAN KILLS FOUR IN NEW HAMPSHIRE BAR

Claims Devil Was On the Way to Snatch Their Souls

RECESSION ENTERS THIRD QUARTER

Unemployment Up Seventh Straight Month

SIX KILLED AT BELGRADE CONCERT

Grandstand Gives Way During Beethoven Fair

DEALY GUILTY

Billionaire Convicted On All Counts

Victims Demonstrate Outside Court

Civil Suits Pending

Faces Character Reconstruction

SANASI CALLED BEFORE CONGRESS

Expected to Take Fifth

Martin Says No to Deal

ALIENS IN DRACO

Primitive Civilization Under Cloud

Natives Resemble Goompahs