Odyssey

by Jack McDevitt

  “Mac, you’re shameless.”

  “Or maybe ‘Unclad at Capella.’”

  “Are you trying out titles?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “For a National story? Or your autobiography?” She pulled the sheet tighter, revealing more. “How about ‘Orgy at Ophiuchi’?”

  More than ever, he felt the restrictions imposed by the bulkheads. He would have liked to take her out somewhere, to a park, or a restaurant, or simply for a walk downtown. He wanted to show her off.

  “Last night was very nice, Mac,” she said. “I think you do not believe all the things you say.”

  “What do I say?”

  “That there’s a legitimate point of view for celibacy.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You imply it.”

  “That’s because families are such a hassle.”

  “Do you have any? Children?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you know about it?”

  “Bizet never went to a bullfight.”

  “That sounds like a myth. How could anybody possibly know whether he did or not?”

  “All you have to do is listen to people who’ve been through the experience. Do you have any kids?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Most people who’ve been parents will tell you that when they first started thinking about marriage they would have been smart to head for a mountaintop and go into philosophy.”

  “Mac,” she said, “you deliver these generalizations, and they are both funny and wicked. But we both know life is much more complicated. The country is fortunate to have you. Although I would ask where you’d be if your father had behaved as you suggest?”

  MacAllister showered and dressed. Then she showed him pictures of the hotel. Some walls and panels were in place, and even a few viewports, but the Galactic was still, for the most part, no more than a large gridwork. When completed, it would have resembled the Crystal Palace.

  Watching the images seemed to have a depressing effect on Valya. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “The hotel?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  “They can build a new hotel, Valya. And everybody’s getting out.”

  “Damn it, Mac, I don’t care about the hotel.”

  Oh. “We’re talking about last night.”

  She shrugged.

  “There’s no commitment,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Then what?”

  He could see her debating whether to answer. “Call it sleeping with the enemy.”

  “I’m not an enemy,” he said.

  She nodded. “I know, Mac. I know.”

  CAPELLA FEATURES FOUR suns. Two were immediately visible when they arrived in-system. They were yellow-white class-Gs, one slightly brighter than the other. “These two,” said Bill, “are both much larger than Sol. Each has a diameter of about fourteen million kilometers.”

  MacAllister tried to recall the size of the sun.

  “Ten times greater,” said Bill, apparently reading his mind. “And much brighter. Capella A is eighty times as luminous. B is about fifty times brighter.”

  “That sounds as if they burn a lot of fuel,” he said.

  “That is correct. Each of these two has completed its hydrogen-burning phase.” He paused. “They’re dying giants, Mac.”

  “Bill,” Valya said, “open a channel to the shuttle.” The AI complied, and she sent a message to Karim, informing him of their position and arrival time. Half hour or so after the asteroid was going to arrive.

  Ten minutes later they had a response. “We’re fine,” Karim said. “We’re well clear of the asteroid.”

  “Okay, sit tight. We’ll be by to pick you up.” She switched back to the AI. “Bill, give me some vectors and fuel consumption.”

  AS THEY ACCELERATED toward the shuttle, MacAllister asked about the other two suns.

  Two dim red stars showed up on the navigation screen. “They’re both class Ms, Mac. Red stars. Quite dim, as you can see. They’re a double star themselves, but they’re almost a light-year away.”

  The yellow suns seemed quite close to each other.

  “They are,” said Bill. “They’re only one hundred million kilometers apart. Roughly the distance from Venus to the sun.”

  “It’s one of the reasons they wanted to build the hotel here,” Valya said. “It’s a spectacular sky.”

  Bill replaced the red stars with a close-up image of a blue world. “You don’t usually get planets orbiting a close binary,” he said. “Usually, they’re ejected. If they survive, they will normally orbit one star or the other. When the stars are as close together as these are, that’s not going to happen, and you just don’t find planets. Capella is the exception. Here we have not one world, but two, orbiting the gravitational center between the two suns. The hotel is located at Alpha Capella II.”

  “As I understand it,” said MacAllister, “Alpha II is not a living world. Right?”

  “That’s right. But it’s supposed to have great skiing. And in fact they claim there’s a lot to see. Towering mountain ranges, long island chains, rugged coasts.”

  “Does it have a breathable atmosphere?”

  “Unfortunately not. I think I read somewhere it’s loaded with methane.”

  “I don’t know,” said MacAllister. “I’d expect people planning to vacation on another world would want dinosaurs. And I know they’d prefer oxygen.”

  She laughed. “Oxygen, maybe. But lizards? I’ve seen some big ones up close. You can have them.”

  Bill was putting groundside images on screen. Canyons. Mountain peaks. River valleys. Waterfalls.

  MacAllister frowned. “I wasn’t talking about me. But most people like animals.”

  She was watching the display. Never took her eyes from it. “It’s a lovely world, Mac. Slightly larger than Earth. And there’s a magnificent river system that puts the Mississippi to shame. It’s perfect for rafting.”

  “That sounds like Eric. You might consider a career in public relations.”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve got what I want. I’m going to stay out here until they come to get me.”

  KARIM CALLED. “WE left an imager at the hotel to watch the thing come in. Would you like us to relay the visuals to you?”

  “Please,” said Valya.

  The asteroid looked more like a planet than a rock. Otherwise, it was run-of-the-mill: misshapen, scarred, cratered, ridges here, smooth once-molten rock there. It was just visible over the rim of the world. It might have been coming off the ocean. “How big is it again?” asked MacAllister.

  “The diameter’s roughly six hundred kilometers at its widest point.” She showed him. She put up an image of the Surveyor museum. The asteroid and the Surveyor appeared about the same size. She moved the museum closer to the asteroid. His perspective changed and he watched it dwindle. Shrink to the size of an insect. And ultimately vanish. “It won’t collide with the hotel,” she said. “It’ll be more like a swat.”

  “And it won’t hit the planet?”

  “No. It’ll skim past, right at the top of the atmosphere. It’ll obliterate the hotel and go back out.”

  “Perfect shot,” said MacAllister. “I wonder if these guys play pool.”

  The asteroid was turning slowly. You had to stay with it a few minutes to see the movement. As he watched, a chain of craters came over the horizon.

  Below, on the planetary surface, storms drifted through the atmosphere. And towers of cumulus. There was snow at the caps and on some of the mountaintops. But there was no green. Alpha II had a sandstone appearance. It was a beautiful woman with no soft lines.

  Valya switched to a view of the Galactic. “That’s taken from the shuttle,” Valya said.

  The hotel glittered in the light from the two suns, a sprawling, most
ly open framework. “How long have they been working out here?” he asked.

  “I think about nine months.”

  “Doesn’t look as if they got very far.”

  “Don’t know,” she said. “I’m not up on construction projects.”

  From the perspective of the imager at the hotel, the asteroid was rising, climbing higher above the curve of the world. Getting bigger. Overwhelming the sky.

  Bill appeared in his captain’s uniform. “One minute to impact,” he said. “It’s closing at thirteen kilometers per second.”

  It blocked off the sun.

  MacAllister held his breath.

  “Twenty seconds,” said Bill.

  Somebody on the shuttle let go with a string of profanity.

  The perspective changed. He was looking at a moonscape, and it was as if they were in a plunging ship. Going down.

  Then the screen blanked.

  THEY PICKED UP Karim and his three companions without incident. MacAllister accepted thanks from everyone for the rescue, even though he’d just been along for the ride. Valya broke out more wine, and they converted the return flight into a celebration. They talked about how big the asteroid had been, and how good it was to get on board the Salvator. How nice to be able to snuggle inside a set of bulkheads again.

  MacAllister had never before considered the human propensity to put up walls everywhere. He’d always thought of it as a need for privacy from other people. But he decided that even more important, walls were a way of setting aside a portion of space from the rest of creation, of blocking out the vastness that, seen too vividly, wounds the soul.

  It was exactly the kind of line that, uttered by someone else, he would have ridiculed. What the hell did it mean?

  As much as he’d enjoyed having Valya to himself, something had changed, and MacAllister was grateful for fresh company.

  “I’ll tell you,” Karim said, “we were never really sure we were out of the thing’s path. I kept thinking suppose the numbers were wrong. Or the sensors had screwed up? That son of a bitch kept getting bigger. We were supposed to be clear, but you couldn’t tell that sitting out there watching it. And there was a lot of debris running with it.”

  Two of the other three were women. “Closed my eyes,” one of them said. “I thought we were dead.”

  Later, as they enjoyed a rowdy meal, Karim commented that management must have known what it was doing after all.

  “How do you mean?” asked MacAllister.

  The other male laughed and helped himself to some grapes.

  “We were three or four months behind,” said Karim. “They had us out here, but we were always short of resources. Never had the people to do the job right.”

  “The way things turned out,” the guy with the grapes said, “it’s just as well.”

  They spent much of the return voyage singing. One of their favorites was “I Been Workin’ on the Platform.”

  LIBRARY ARCHIVE

  Famed editor Gregory MacAllister helped rescue a group of construction workers stranded in the path of a giant asteroid today. MacAllister was onboard the Salvator when it arrived in the Capella system to snatch four people who’d escaped from a construction site in a shuttle…

  —London Daily Telegraph, Thursday, April 30

  chapter 32

  Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it’s almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.

  —Gregory MacAllister, “Women and Children Last”

  The news from the Salvator and the museum was uniformly good. They’d gotten the engineers and construction workers out of the Galactic without a hitch; the Cavalier would arrive shortly to pick them up and bring them home; and the media were already circulating MacAllister’s first-person account of the rescue. From the museum, Eric mentioned something about Amy and a bad dream, but that hardly seemed consequential. “She’ll be fine when she gets home,” he added. “This place gets pretty spooky at night.”

  Senator Taylor, watching reports while the asteroid closed in on the hotel, told Hutch that he and Amy would not go through anything like this again. Hutch knew that would ultimately be Amy’s decision, but she kept her opinion to herself.

  She saw a report that Orion was filing an insurance claim for the hotel. The risk, of course, had been apportioned among a half dozen companies, and there were already rumors they would refuse to pay because the policy didn’t cover acts of war.

  Charlie Dryden called to ask where Asquith was. “I can never reach him when I need him,” he complained.

  The commissioner was at a conference in Des Moines. He had a talent for being out of town when crises loomed. It was his philosophy, he claimed, that his people should be able to make decisions without him, so he frequently turned off his commlink. That would have been okay, except that he didn’t back his staff if they made calls with which he didn’t agree, or that didn’t go well. It was one thing to take a subordinate aside and explain the preferred course of action; it was quite another to back away publicly and imply to the media that someone in the organization had acted without authority. He always claimed he named no names, and thereby protected his people, but everybody knew. Hutch had been through it a few times, had taken him to task, and had even threatened to resign. When driven to the wall, Asquith always apologized, privately, and promised it wouldn’t happen again; but he seemed unable to help himself.

  Dryden was seated by a window overlooking a body of water. He wore a light blue jacket and a string tie. “I wanted to say thanks for getting our people out of the Galactic,” he said. “If not for the Salvator, I hate to think what would have happened.”

  Hutch returned his smile. “It was our pleasure, Charlie. I’m glad we were in a position to help.”

  “I understand there were no injuries.”

  “They’ve reported everybody’s okay. This time tomorrow, they should all be on their way home.”

  “Good.” He sat back, relaxed. Over his shoulder, she could see a sailboat tacking in a brisk wind. “On another subject, what’s your sense about these moonriders?”

  “I honestly don’t know what to think, Charlie. I don’t know what they are, and I can’t imagine what they’re trying to do. It doesn’t look as if the world is prepared to deal with them.”

  “We became complacent.”

  “I guess we did.” Certainly, she had. A widespread assumption had developed that everything we could see in the surrounding cosmos belonged to us. And there was nobody out there to dispute any of it.

  “I think we need a navy,” he said.

  “A battle fleet?”

  “Yes.”

  “It would cost a fortune.”

  A flock of ducks or geese, something, fluttered down onto the water. “Hutch, it’s the price of security. In uncertain times.”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, one of her staff sent over a segment of the Blanche Hardaway Hour that she thought might be of interest.

  Blanche was a tall, fragile-looking but utterly ruthless blonde. She did a daily tabloid show, lots of scandal, lots of moralizing, lots of the cheapest sort of politics, regular attacks on the Academy as a waste of money.

  She had a guest, but he was just sitting there while she went on a tirade. “—To wait around any longer and take chances with lunatic aliens,” she was saying. “Congress should get on the stick and take action. We don’t want to wait for the World Council to get in gear. This is not one of those things they can talk to death and pass a bill on sometime in the next century. I’ve been saying for years now that we cannot assume we’re alone, as we have been doing. And we cannot assume that anybody we meet out there is going to be friendly. We need armed ships. Guns, Frederick. A navy. An armed fleet that will demonstrate to these creatures, whatever they are, that they better not mess with us. Now, am I right? Or have I missed something?
”

  Frederick was oversized. About seventy, he had dark hair and the look of a guy who’d wandered into the wrong studio. He shifted his position and assumed what he must have thought a professorial attitude. “No question,” he said. “As I see it, what we need to do…”

  She killed the volume. Watched the big man waggling his finger and lecturing the audience. There’d been a lot of that lately. “Marla,” she said, “do a sweep for me, please. Last six hours. I’d like to see any commentaries taking the same position: The moonriders are a threat, and we need to build a fleet to deal with them.”

  “Very good,” said Marla. “It’ll take a minute.”

  “Meanwhile, you can shut down Blanche and Frederick.”

  The picture went off.

  She got two calls on administrative issues, then Marla was back. “Ready to go.”

  First up was Red Dowding warning the viewers in his flat, matter-of-fact style that time might be running out “for the human race.” Judith Henry, a regular on The Capital Crowd, advised that we may not have the luxury of guessing wrong. And Omar Rollinger, on Sunrise with Omar, commented that there will be weak-kneed people who say we shouldn’t rush into anything, but it might already be too late. A dozen more shows were queued up.

  There were plenty of pictures. The asteroid sweeping the hotel aside, the Salvator collecting survivors from the shuttle, preparations going forward to send a pair of cargo ships to turn aside the Terranova Rock. Several commentators thought the mission shouldn’t be launched until an armed escort could be provided.

  ASQUITH WAS BACK that afternoon, looking flustered. “Don’t have time to talk,” he told her.

  “What’s going on, Michael?”

  “Another hearing.”

  “The appropriations committee again?”

  “No.”

  “Who?”

  He was dragging a change of clothes out of his closet. “Defense. They’re trying to decide whether the moonriders are a threat. The truth is it’s probably politics. People are excited, so they have to do something. They called a committee meeting with no advance warning.” He disappeared into his inner sanctum, then popped right out again. “People are worried about what they’re hearing.”