Infinity Beach (38 page)

Wilma looked at the letter, frowned, and moved her lower lip back and forth. “I don’t know what to tell you, Dr. Braddock. I’ll inform him when he comes out that you’re here. There’s not much more I can do.”

“When do you expect the meeting to be over?”

“About eleven-thirty, sir. But it’s really hard to say.”

“That won’t do at all,” Kim said. “Not at all. I’m on a deadline, you understand. Professor Teasdale is not going to be happy.” She contrived to look pained and then glanced hopefully at Wilma, inviting her to volunteer. When she didn’t, Kim folded her arms and smiled at the young woman. “I wonder if you might be able to help. I don’t really need much.”

“I’d like to,” she said doubtfully. “But I’ve only been at the museum for a couple of weeks.”

Kim retrieved her letter, folded it, and slipped it into a pocket. “You know who Professor Teasdale is, right?” A nod. “You may also know she’s working on a definitive history of the Pacifica War.”

“Yes,” she said, taking a stab, “I had heard.”

“The museum had until recently a display on the
376
and the battle off Armagon. Back in the east wing.”

“Yes. We took it down just a week or so ago. After the truth came out about Markis Kane.”

Kim let her dismay show. “That was a terrible business, wasn’t it?”

Wilma showed by the way she set her jaw that she was embarrassed the museum had ever raised an exhibit to honor such a man.

“Anyway,” Kim continued, “the exhibit has some factual data which would be very helpful to us. I wonder if you could show me where the material is now? And arrange for me to have access to it for a bit?”

She looked around for someone to consult. Or pass the problem to. Fortunately there was no one. “I’m not sure I can do that, sir.”

Kim tried a desperate smile. “I promise I won’t disturb anything. It would be a great help, and I only need a few minutes.”

Wilma was trying to decide whether the request had a potential for getting her into trouble.

“Professor Teasdale is a close friend of Mikel’s,” Kim added helpfully.

The woman’s lips curved into a smile. Kim suspected she was somewhat taken with Jay Braddock. Amusing notion.

“Of course,” said Wilma. “Let me see if I can find a key.”

She went into one of the offices and Kim heard voices. Moments later a dark-complexioned man with ice blue eyes peered out the door at her, frowned, and withdrew without showing any further sign that she existed. Wilma came back with a remote.

“That was Dr. Turnbull,” she said, without further comment, as though Turnbull were known far and wide.

She led the way to a cargo lift, and they descended into the bowels of the building. Wilma stood nervously off to one side until the lift stopped and the doors opened. Lights came on and Kim saw that they were in a storage area divided into cages. Wilma had to look around a bit, but she finally figured out where she wanted to go. “This way,” she said, walking toward the back. More lights came on. Wilma pointed the remote, locks clicked, and the doors of two cages opened. “This is the stuff from the
376
display.”

The command chair, the parts from the missile launcher, the assorted other sacred artifacts from the battle of Armagon, were already covered with dust. Someone had stacked containers nearby, but no packing had been done yet.

“What exactly were you looking for, Dr. Braddock?”

Kim wanted her to leave but Wilma stayed close by. Which meant she had orders to make sure the visitor didn’t make off with anything. Okay, that was reasonable. “Details of command and control functions during the engagement,” she said.

Kim put a hand in her pocket to assure herself the two replacement disks were still there. She’d labeled them in the manner of the two disks that had been on display:
376 VISUAL LOG, JUNE 17, 531
and
376 SYSTEMS DATA, JUNE 17, 531
. It was one of the most celebrated dates in Greenway’s checkered history.

There was material here that had not been in the original exhibition, mostly parts from the interior of the
376
and other ships involved at Armagon: lockers and chairs, a
replica of a captain’s quarters, an array of mugs carrying the insignia of the various vessels, uniforms, copies of letters sent by the Council to the families of those killed in action.

Kim mentally waved it all aside and concentrated on finding the logs.

“Can I help in any way, Dr. Braddock?” asked Wilma.

“Call me Jay,” Kim said. She realized she had
not
been mistaken about her effect on the woman, who smiled at her invitingly. She knew the museum aide would not know where anything was: she’d had trouble just finding the cage. Best was to avoid calling her attention to the disks. “No,” she said. “That’s quite okay. I believe I can find everything.”

Wilma backed off a bit and Kim saw a package wrapped in plastic with a sticker marked
LOGS
. It was the right shape, and it was on top of a worktable that was identified as having once been in the
376
tactical display center. Kim rummaged among other materials until Wilma looked away, and then she picked up the package and peeled off the plastic.

Two disks.

VISUAL LOG
and
SYSTEMS DATA, JUNE 17, 531.

At the same moment she heard the whine of the lift. Coming down.

Wilma looked toward the sound and Kim dropped the disks into her pocket and brought out the substitutes.

The lift stopped and doors opened.

There were voices.

Mikel. And a woman.

Tora.

“Oh,” said Wilma, gratified. “That’s Dr. Alaam now.”

The meeting must have broken up early. “He knows I’m here?”

“I left a message.”

Kim pretended to examine the substitute disks, then quickly rewrapped them and put the package back on the worktable.

Mikel and Tora were at the gate, both looking surprised. “What’s going on?” asked Mikel, glancing from Wilma to Kim. “Is this Braddock?”

“Yes,” said Wilma.

“I assumed you were waiting upstairs.” He looked carefully at Kim, and her heart stopped while she waited for recognition to come. “Do I know
you
?” he asked.

“We’ve met once or twice,” she said, speaking in a low register. “Professor Teasdale is still working on her history of the period, and I’ve been gathering materials.”

“Yes,” he said. “I recall. Well, good to see you again, Braddock. We’re happy to cooperate, of course. I’d suggest in future though that you let us know in advance that you’re coming.”

“They did,” said Wilma. “He has a letter from us.” Diplomatically, and fortunately for Kim, she did not say, “from
you
.”

“Oh.” Mikel was pondering the comment when Tora Kane assumed center stage. “I wonder if we can get on with it.”

“Yes,” said Mikel. “Of course.”

Kim smiled politely. “Well,” she said, “I think I have everything I need.”

“Already?” asked Wilma. “That was quick.”

“We only wanted a couple of verifications.” She nodded to Tora, who was standing with her arms folded, pretending to be interested in a navigational console. Kim could barely suppress a grin: they were waiting for her to leave so they could pocket the disks.

No. More likely, Mikel knew nothing. Tora was playing the same game Kim had. She wondered what kind of story she’d told the director. Or whether she had simply bought him off without explanation. In either case, nothing would happen while she and Wilma were in the neighborhood.

Kim made her farewells and, accompanied by the aide, slipped into the elevator. Wilma was clearly inviting Jay to make a move. When he didn’t, she looked briefly disappointed and got off at the main floor. Kim rode up to the roof.

Tora’s Kondor was parked in a bay off the taxi pad. Kim wandered over to it, removed the microtransmitter, climbed into a cab, and rose into the sunlight in high good humor.

She inserted the visual log and instructed Shep to run it.

The wall over the sofa changed texture, the flatscreen appeared, and she was looking at the
Hunter
pilot’s room. A technician was working and his shoulder patch was visible:
ST. JOHNS MAINTENANCE.

The date, translated to Greenway time, was February 12,573.

Specialists came and went, calibrating sensors, checking subspace communications, and performing a myriad other tasks.

The sequence was identical with her recollection of the version she had taken from the Archives. She fast-forwarded. The technicians raced through their tasks, then left, and the picture blinked. The timer leaped ahead more than two hours and Kane appeared.

She switched back to normal play. Kane turned and looked into the imager, directly out of the screen at Kim. His jaw was set, his mouth a thin line. He ran through a checklist, got out of his chair, and disappeared. The imager shut off. Sixteen minutes later, ship time, it blinked on again.

“
Hunter
ready to depart,”
he told St. Johns control.

“
Hunter
, you are clear to go.”

Kane warned his passengers they were thirty seconds from departure, and his harness locked in place.

Kim watched it all again: The launch of the
Hunter
, Kane’s warning to Kile during the early minutes of the flight that the vessel would need a general overhaul when it got back, the jump to hyperspace. She watched the passengers come forward one by one and she listened to the now-familiar conversations. She hastened through the periods when Kane was alone in the pilot’s room.

The
Hunter
team talked about what they hoped to find in the Golden Pitcher. The Dream.

Nothing else mattered.

Tripley’s recurrent assertions,
“We’re going to do it this time, Markis; I know it,”
took on special poignancy.

She saw again Kane’s infatuation with Emily. And hers with him.

She watched moodily, not expecting the record to deviate from the one she remembered until
Hunter
arrived off Alnitak. And probably even then it would not happen until just before they encountered the celestial. She was wrong.

It was almost three
A.M.
on day six when Kane, wearing a robe, appeared in the pilot’s room with a cup of coffee. He sat down, checked his instruments, looked at the time, and activated his harness.
“Okay, everybody, buckle in.”

Voices broke in over the intercom.

Yoshi:
“Would somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

Emily:
“We have a surprise for you.”

Yoshi:
“In the middle of the night?”

Tripley:
“Yes. It’s worth it.”

Yoshi:
“So what is it? Markis, what are we doing?”

Kim froze the picture, sat back in her chair, and stared at Kane’s image in the glow of his instruments. In the doctored version, this hadn’t happened.

No surprises for Yoshi.

And she knew now why Walt Gaerhard, the Interstellar technician, had been reluctant to talk about the jump engine repairs to which he’d signed his name.

There had been no repairs.

There’d been no damage.

The
Hunter
Logs: February 17–19, 573

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
It was Yoshi’s voice. But only Kane was visible, relaxed in his chair. He was looking off to his right, gazing out beyond the view of the imager. Kim, recalling the design of the
Hunter
, knew he was looking through large double windows. The overhead screen depicted the Alnitak region, the vast roiling clouds, the dark mass of the Horsehead, the brilliant nebulosity NGC2024, the giant star itself, and the sweeping rings of the Jovian world.

“We thought you’d not want to miss it.”
Emily this time.
“There’s nothing quite like it anywhere we’ve been.”

She came into the picture now and sat down in the left-hand chair.
“I think,”
she said,
“we should have dinner tonight out on one of the terraces.”

“Precisely what we had in mind.”
That was Tripley. Kim judged from the body language of Emily and Kane that their colleagues were not physically present in the pilot’s room.
“In fact, we’ve made it a tradition to do that whenever we’ve been out here.”

Something on the control board caught Kane’s eye. He made adjustments, looked at his screens, and frowned.
“Well
, that’s
interesting.”

“What is it, Markis?”
asked Tripley’s voice.

“I don’t know. We’re getting a return—”

“What kind of return?”

“Metal. Moving almost perpendicular to the plane of the system.”

Emily leaned forward to get a better look at the screen.
“Is that significant? I wouldn’t think a chunk of iron’s that much out of the ordinary.”

“This one appears to have some definition.”
After a pause:
“But don’t get excited. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Nevertheless, Emily’s face took on an aura of hope.

“Markis.”
Tripley again.

“It’s on your monitor now, Kile. We’re still too far away to make anything of it.”

“You think it might be an artificial object?”

“I think it’s a chunk of iron.”
He pressed a key on the control panel.
“So everybody knows,”
he said,
“the Foundation requires us in any unusual circumstance to record everything that happens throughout the ship until we resolve the situation. Save for private quarters, of course. We will go to full recording mode in one minute. So get your clothes on back there, kiddies.”

“Can we get a picture of the thing?”
asked Yoshi.

“It’s still too far away.”

“How far is that?”

“Seven hundred thousand kay. It’s in orbit, about to drift behind the planet. We’ll lose it in a few minutes.”

“Not altogether, I hope,”
said Emily.

“No chance,”
said Kane. They watched it drop down the sky, disappearing finally behind the rim of the big planet.

“Kile, I assume we want to take a closer look?”

Tripley laughed.
“Sure. Why not, as long as we’re here?”

“How long before we see it again?”
asked Yoshi.

“Don’t know. We didn’t get enough to plot an orbit.”

“Just stay with it,”
said Tripley.

“All right.”
Kane gave directions to the AI.
“If we’re going to pursue we should get rolling. Everybody belt down.” Hunter
rotated, realigned itself, and the mains fired.

They’d been running for almost three quarters of an hour when the object reappeared. Kane tried unsuccessfully to acquire an image.
“It’s still too far,”
he said.

“Markis.”
It was the AI.
“The object is in a long irregular orbit. It’ll decay quickly. Within about six weeks, in fact.”

“When will we catch up with it?”
asked Tripley.

Kane put the question to the AI.

“Late tomorrow morning,”
came the answer.

Two lamps burned dimly in the pilot’s room.

Rings and moons dominated the windows. At 2:17
A.M.
, the AI woke Kane.
“We have definition, Markis.”

The object was
smooth
, not the rugged piece of rock and iron one would have expected. It was shaped somewhat like a turtle-shell.

Kane studied it for almost ten minutes, enhanced it, tapped his fingers on the console, nodded to himself. Eventually he opened the intercom.
“Friends,”
he said quietly,
“we have an anomaly.”

They padded one by one into the pilot’s room, in bare feet, all wearing robes. All cautiously excited. Emily looked at the overhead, the others turned to the windows, into which Kane had placed the image.
“It’s an enhancement,”
he explained.
“But I think this is close to what’s really out there.”

They stared quietly. Yoshi stood near Tripley and they seemed to draw together. Emily’s face shone.

“It’s not very big,”
Kane said.

“How big is that?”

“A little more than a half meter long, maybe two-thirds as wide.”

Kim could almost feel the room deflate.

“It looks like a toy,”
said Yoshi.
“Something somebody just tossed overboard.”

It was tumbling, turning slowly end over end.

Tripley stood near a desk lamp. He turned it off so they could see better.
“Just for argument’s sake,”
he said,
“is there any possibility of a local life-form?”

Emily shook her head.
“Alnitak puts out too much UV.”

“But we don’t really know that it couldn’t happen,”
Tripley said.

“Almost anything’s possible,”
said Emily.
“But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.”

Antennas and sensor pods were becoming visible. Kane tapped the window.
“It has a Klayson ring.”

It might have taken a minute for the implication to set in. A Klayson ring indicated jump capability.

“Aside from the size,”
said Emily,
“anybody ever seen this kind of design before?”

Kane shook his head.
“I’ve run a search. It doesn’t match up with anything.”

“It’s a probe,”
said Emily.
“Probably left by the survey unit when it was here.”

“Can’t be,”
said Kane.

“Why not?”

“The Klayson ring.”

“Some probes have Klayson rings,”
insisted Emily.

“Not this size. It’s too small. We wouldn’t know how to pack a jump system into a package like this. Unless there’s been a major advance in the last few months.”

“Are you suggesting,”
said Yoshi,
“it’s a celestial artifact?”
She barely breathed the conclusion.

Kane got up, went over to the window, and studied the object.
“I don’t want to get everybody excited, but I don’t think we, or anybody we know, left this here.”

They looked at one another. Tentative smiles appeared. Emily pressed her hand to her lips. Tripley glanced around the room as if he feared someone would have a more
straightforward explanation. Yoshi stood unmoving in front of the windows, beside Kane.

“
Don’t be discouraged by its size,”
said Kane. “
It might still be possible to talk to it. There might be an AI of one sort or another on board.”

“Let me ask a question,”
said Tripley.
“Does intelligent life
have
to be big?”

Emily nodded.
“Theoretically, yes. Got to have big brains.”

“Theoretically. But is that really true?”

No one knew.

Kane looked up from his console. He seemed to be alone in the pilot’s room.
“Kile,”
he said to the commlink.

Tripley and the others showed up literally within seconds.

“We’re getting power leakage,”
he told them.
“It’s not dead.”

“Magnificent!”
Tripley jabbed his right fist in the air and turned toward the women.
“Ladies,”
he said,
“I do believe we’ve done it!”

They embraced all around. Emily kissed Kane’s cheek while he pretended to be annoyed, and Yoshi threw her arms around him.

“From this point,”
said Tripley,
“we will proceed on the assumption that they’re alive over there.”

When they overtook the turtle-shell they were looking down on the rings from a point somewhere over the north pole. Kane closed to within forty meters of the object. He’d arranged the approach so that Alnitak was behind the
Hunter
, to prevent its blinding the imagers.

Everybody was in the mission control center, save Kane, who stayed in the pilot’s room. Tripley sat down at a comm console, looked at his colleagues, and signaled to Kane, whose virtual image occupied a chair. Kane nodded and Tripley put his index finger on the transmission key. Kane had pointed out that the AI could handle all the transmissions, but the moment was a bit too historic for that.

“Okay,” said Kane. “When you’re ready—”

Tripley pressed the key once. Then twice. He looked up at his colleagues and beamed.
“Maybe,”
he said,
“the first communication—”

He tapped it again,
three
times.

“—between humans and their starborn siblings—”

Four.

“—has just been sent.”

They looked at one another expectantly. In the windows, the turtle-shell tumbled slowly across a moonscape.

“It’s dark over there,”
said Kane.

Emily shook her head.
“It’s too small. It’s a pity. But I’ll settle for the artifact.”

“You give up too easily,”
said Yoshi.
“Try again, Kile.”

Tripley resent. One, two, three, four.

The room glowed with the colors of the rings.

“I think Emily’s right,”
said Tripley.
“If anybody were there, they’d certainly want to respond.”

They tapped out the signal a third time. Then Yoshi sat down at the key and continued patiently to send.

“Something to consider,”
said Kane, studying the image. He pointed at an object mounted in the nose of the turtle-shell. It looked like a bracket or fork.
“It might have an attack capability.”

“Why would they attack?”
asked Emily.

“You’re poking a strange animal. What I’m saying is that it
could
happen. It might be a good idea to think about it.”

“They’re not going to shoot at us,”
said Tripley.
“Why would they bother? They don’t even know us.”

Kane’s voice was unemotional.
“Think about our relative sizes. We’re what, several hundred times as big as they are. If there’s really something alive over there, I’d expect them to be nervous. If our situations were reversed, I sure as hell would be.”

“So what are you suggesting?”
asked Emily.

“That we be prepared to back off on short notice. Which means if I say we’re leaving, I’ll want everyone to belt down
quickly, and to do it without argument. I doubt that the occasion will arise, but I won’t want to get into a discussion if it does.”

“Okay,”
Emily said, without bothering to conceal her amusement.
“If they shoot, we run. I don’t think anybody’s going to argue with that.”

“So what’s next?”
asked Yoshi.
“They don’t seem to have their radio turned on. What else can we do?”

“Blink the running lights,”
said Emily.

Tripley nodded.
“Okay.”

Kane turned them off and then on again. Waited a few seconds. Turned them off. Turned them on.

They kept it up for a while. After a few minutes Tripley asked whether anyone else had an idea.

“Yes,”
said Yoshi.
“Why don’t we back away so they don’t think we’re pushy? Let them make a move, if they’re inclined. They
have
to be as curious as we are.”

They agreed it was worth trying, and Kane withdrew to a range of five kilometers and assumed a parallel orbit.

They spent the next few hours in a long, generally pointless and often circular discussion. The turtle-shell seemed unlikely to be a warship under any circumstances because the Alnitak region was a no-man’s-land, a place that could not conceivably be of strategic value. It was also probably not a trader or commercial vessel for the same reason. And that left only survey and research.
If
the vessel was not completely automated, and if it
was
in fact a vessel, then it should be staffed by scientists. But if that were so, why hadn’t they responded?

Tripley suggested they try the radio again. They changed the transmission to one-three-five-seven and put it on automatic. It ran for two hours before they gave up and shut it down.

“We need to start talking,”
said Emily,
“about what we do when they don’t answer.”

“That’s easy,”
said Kane.

Everyone looked at him, surprised. Kane customarily avoided making policy suggestions that concerned the mis
sion, as opposed to technical matters or the operation of the ship.
“We take a lot of pictures and go home.”

“No,”
said Tripley.
“It’s out of the question.”

“Even if there were no other considerations,”
Yoshi said,
“they seem to be adrift and in a decaying orbit. If there’s anybody in there, and we leave them, they’ll die.”