Toward the end of the second week, Hutch called. “I don’t know,” he told her. “He hasn’t said anything yet.”
“Have you called him?” She was a beautiful woman, he thought. Dark, penetrating eyes, an intense energy, and a sense of what mattered. She was at home, wearing a white blouse and a gold necklace. Behind her was a wall of books.
“Of course. He knows I’m anxious to hear.”
“Okay. Let me know when you have something.”
Silvestri called less than an hour later. “I’m still waiting to hear,” Rudy said. “Just be patient a bit longer.”
“Rudy, this is using up a lot of time.” He was behind a desk or table, his hands folded, his chin propped on them. “I wish we could move things along.”
“It’s a good sign,” Rudy said. “He’s taking a long look. That usually means he’s impressed.” Actually, Rudy was making it up as he went along.
Silvestri’s expression hardened. He saw right through Rudy’s happy talk. “It will work.”
“Nobody hopes for it more than we do,” he said. “But you must understand, it means a considerable investment on our part. We have to be sure what we’re doing.”
PAUL CALLED THE next morning. “It might be okay.”
“Marvelous.” Rudy would have gone into ecstasy, but Paul wasn’t smiling.
“Of course, you understand there’s no way to be absolutely certain,” he said, “until we run the test flight.”
“I understand that.”
“I’m trying to think how to say this.”
“Just say it.”
“I think it’ll work.”
“You want to put a number on it, Paul?”
“I can’t. Not with any certainty. But I’m optimistic.”
“Okay, then. We’ll do it.”
“You should be aware, though, that if it doesn’t perform as expected, there could be a catastrophic result.”
“Destruction of the vehicle?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Still, if it succeeds, it will be one hell of a payoff.” Paul lounged in a leather chair, wrapped in an oversized gold sweater. He allowed himself a smile. “Look, Rudy, I’d like to see you try it. Because I’d like to be around to see it work. And maybe that’s clouding my judgment. But it’s worth backing.”
THOMAS MACELROY HIGH School was the home of the Explorers. It was named for the commander of the first ship to travel beyond the solar system.
When Matt arrived, he paused, as he always did, to look at the lander standing outside the main entrance. It was an AKV Spartan model, the kind routinely used on the old Academy ships, manufactured in 2229 by Starworks. It had at one time been aboard the Bill Jenkins when that ship found the nascent civilization at Lookout in 2234. The lander had descended on 117 worlds, four of which, including Lookout, had supported biosystems. Its history was inscribed on a bronze plaque mounted beside the hatch. The hatch itself remained closed and locked to protect the interior from the weather and the vagaries of the students. And, probably, old star pilots who’d get in and not want to leave.
He’d had one of these aboard the Resnick.
ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY was emblazoned in black letters on the hull, along with the familiar logo, Socrates’ scroll circled by a star. The after section carried the school’s name, with the seventeenth-century four-master that served as their motif, along with their sports designation EXPLORERS in script. A sudden gust of wind pulled at the trees, and he drew his jacket around him. A car eased into one of the parking places. An older woman got out and marched into the school building. A parent, he thought. And judging by her expression, the kid was in trouble.
Some things never change.
He followed her inside, signed in at the office, and collected a teenage escort who took him to the library. Julie was there, talking to a small group of students. She saw him, smiled brightly, and came over. “Good to see you, Matt,” she said. “You’ll have two eleventh-grade classes to start. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
“Can I get you something?”
They had fresh-squeezed orange juice. While he sampled it, bells rang, the room emptied, the hallways became active, and a fresh batch of kids began pouring into the library. Some of them looked curiously in his direction, but for the most part they were preoccupied with each other. Julie gave them a couple of minutes, asked if he was ready to go, strode to the lectern, and called them to order.
They settled in, and she introduced him. Matt Darwin. “He’s a retired star pilot.”
Not really retired. Unemployed. That sounded better.
Matt never used lecterns. They got between him and his audience. He’d been seated on a tabletop, and he stood upright as the audience’s attention swung his way. “Mr. Darwin flew Academy missions. You know what the Academy was, right?” A few hands went up. Julie looked at a tall, dark-eyed girl in back.
“They used to do exploration missions,” the girl said.
In front, a male student rolled his eyes.
“Very good, Sylvia.” Julie looked down at the male. “Mr. Darwin, Harry, has been farther from Alexandria than anyone here could imagine.”
She took a seat along the side where she could watch Matt and her students.
Matt thanked her and looked around at the audience. “You have a lander out on the lawn in front of the school,” he said. “I’d like to tell you a little about it.”
ARCHIVE
The people who argue that we confront a vast unknown, that it has already shown itself to be dangerous, and that therefore we should hide under our beds, do not speak for me. Nor do they speak for the Prometheus Foundation.
That’s not to say there’s no risk involved in exploration. We don’t know what’s out there, and we don’t know what we might blunder into. But there’s a risk in just sitting home, as well. For one thing, if there are predators loose, we’ll be better off if we find them, rather than the other way around.
Moreover, if we decide to wait things out, our technological progress will slow. What’s more important is that we’ll lose any claim to greatness. We’ll become an embarrassment to our grandkids. Eventually, a generation with some courage will show up, and they’ll hold us in contempt.
—Priscilla Hutchins, addressing State Librarians Association at Athens, Georgia, April 11, 2254
chapter 7
RUDY AND HUTCH looked at four interstellars and settled on a Grosvenor 352, the Happy Times, which the Foundation bought from Orbital at auction. The ship was forty-two years old, had hauled freight and passengers out to Serenity and the other stations, and on one occasion had been immortalized by Whitmore Covington in his Quantum Dialogues, conversations on the state of the human race supposedly conducted on the ship during a flight to Nok, whose idiotic inhabitants continued to kill one another over dwindling resources with early-twentieth-century weapons.
Despite its claim to fame, the cost was minimal because the ship’s Hazeltine engines were inoperable. That was, of course, irrelevant to Rudy. So he saved substantial money, and in addition picked up a vehicle whose historic value, if the Locarno Drive went nowhere, would allow it to be resold later. “Of course,” his occasional companion Ellen Simons told him, “if the Locarno’s a flameout, the Foundation’s going to have to shut down anyhow.”
Mouths of babes. Ellen was a pessimist, and was always ready to explain why something wouldn’t work. It was the reason she and Rudy would never get serious. But about this, she was right. The Foundation was on its last legs. Poking around the vast unknown with one Hazeltine ship wasn’t going to get anyone excited. They needed the Locarno.
PAYING FOR THE Happy Times, as well as financing the installation of the new drive, drained the Foundation’s resources. Silvestri virtually moved onto the station to assist the work of a team of technicians. That part of the operation didn’t go well. The technicians didn’t really need him, and they quickly took offense
at his presence. “We’ve got the basic unit,” one of them complained to Rudy. “All we have to do is tie it in to the ship’s systems. We just don’t need him looking over everybody’s shoulder all the time.”
So Rudy arranged a series of public presentations for Silvestri. He’d be doing guest appearances at colleges and universities and talking to Rotary groups and press associations and whomever else Rudy could round up. When he presented the package, Silvestri smiled. “They’ve been complaining to you, haven’t they?”
“Yes,” he said. “Come on home. We can use the PR.”
In fact, Rudy would have kept the project quiet had he been able. He’d have preferred to present the world with a successful test rather than hang himself out there to look silly if the Locarno fizzled. But with so many people involved, word would inevitably leak out, so he called a press conference and announced what they were trying to do. It became a big story for about two days. But other events, a grisly murder in a Chicago teknopark, followed by a fresh bribery scandal involving several congressmen, pushed it aside. Meanwhile, several physicists gave interviews. All admitted they saw no reason to suppose a better drive was impossible. Nonetheless, they were uniform in predicting failure. Eliot Greeley, the renowned cosmologist from the University of London, remarked that, “Hell, anything is possible, unless it’s specifically prohibited. But that doesn’t mean you can do it.”
When he called Hutch, pretending to be upbeat, she caught his mood and pointed out that the experts had been saying much the same thing about FTL travel in general until Ginny Hazeltine had proven them all wrong.
As a counterbalance, Paul became increasingly enthusiastic with each passing day. “I think we’re going to make it happen, Rudy,” he said. “Keep the faith.”
Ah, yes. And so he did. When the Foundation’s contributors got in touch to urge Rudy on, he told them he was confident, but they should keep in mind it was a gamble. It may not work. Whether it does or not, we’ll still need your support.
The most stinging rebuke came from Joe Hollingsworth, who had been one of the Foundation’s founders. Hollingsworth arrived in his office one morning to excoriate him for wasting resources on a crank project. He was one of those intimidating figures who commands everyone’s attention when he enters a room. He didn’t stand out physically in any way. He was not quite six feet tall, part African, part Massachusetts Yankee, part Mexican. Dressed impeccably. But you knew he was there, and you always got the feeling he’d just come from advising the president. “Rudy,” he’d said, “you’re throwing money away and, more significantly, you’re demolishing the Foundation’s reputation. When the Happy Times goes out there and blows up, which is what’s going to happen, nobody will ever take us seriously again.”
“It won’t blow up,” Rudy had said.
“Doesn’t matter. Anything short of an all-out success is going to make us look foolish. Why didn’t you talk to us before you started all this?”
Why indeed? “Because I knew you’d veto it,” he’d replied in a burst of indignant candor. “Because there are always people on the board who think we can’t get the job done and somebody else should take the risk. Joe, I wanted us to be the ones to do it. Because it would ultimately give us the inside track on using the system.”
“Good.” Hollingsworth sounded as if he was talking to a child. “For an ego trip, you risk everything. If it fails, as it will, it will be the end of the Foundation. Worse, it’ll be the end of the interstellar effort in our lifetime. Well done, Rudy.”
There were others. A substantial fraction of their contributors were unhappy. They demanded to know how much the project was costing and were warning him that if the experiment didn’t work, they would be withdrawing their support.
So sending Silvestri on a public relations tour was not a bad idea. Moreover, he surprised Rudy with his ability to charm his audiences. The references to quantum fluxes and spatial entanglement were gone. Instead, he told them what the Locarno would mean. Easy access to places that had been weeks and months away. The establishment of colonies would become practical, should we choose to go that route. Travel that had once been limited to people with large bank accounts would become available to everybody. “People will be able to vacation in the Pleiades the way we do on the Moon. It will be like replacing fifteenth-century sailing ships with jets.”
Nevertheless, it seemed too good to be true. Rudy told himself he’d feel better about it if he could understand it. None of it was Rudy’s specialty. He was an astrophysicist by trade. He understood the dynamics by which stars formed and died. But nuclear processes and stellar collapse and the rest of it all seemed fairly straightforward in contrast with this multidimensional talk. Had he been around in the last century when Ginny Hazeltine was claiming she was going to be able to get to Alpha Centauri in a few hours, he’d have been one of the skeptics.
ON FEBRUARY 19, a Monday, word came that the Itaki had found the Jenkins. On the twentieth, Rudy received a message from François, informing him they’d all been taken aboard the rescue ship and were on their way home. Everybody, he said, was in good spirits. “Sorry we lost your ship.”
The Itaki arrived at Serenity on March 1. “I thought they were closing the place down,” François reported. “But they’re telling us it’ll take years.”
The following day he sent another transmission: “Rudy, I know the Foundation is down to one ship now, and you have no need for two pilots. So I’m taking a job out here. Going to run shuttles around the station while they decommission the place. Ben and the others will be returning on the Itaki. I’ll miss working for you. I’ve enjoyed it, and I’ll look forward to seeing you when I get back. In a couple of years.” He smiled and signed off.
THREE DAYS LATER, the Phyllis Preston returned from a mission. Rudy was there, of course, when she docked. He took Jon along.
The Preston had been poking around in the Hyades, 150 light-years out. The cluster was thought to be about 625 million years old. It was, like all clusters, changing over time as heavier stars sank toward the center and stars on the periphery were propelled outward after near collisions.
Like most of the relatively small bubble of space into which humans had ventured, it was basically unknown country.
The system consisted of slightly more than two hundred stars, or slightly fewer, depending on how you structured your count. The Preston, conducting a general survey, had been away almost six months. It had visited about a quarter of the systems. They had found one living world, on which the biological forms were still single-celled. Early reports indicated they would need another two billion years before multiple-cell forms appeared.
There was a gas giant that might be harboring life in its atmosphere. The mission wasn’t equipped to test for that. Which meant a second flight would be needed to make the determination. Everyone knew, of course, there would be no second flight.
You could tell how desperate the exploration effort had become by the ages of the researchers. You rarely saw young people on the flights anymore. With only a couple of privately supported organizations running missions, there was simply no space available. The research teams were inevitably department heads or award winners. No more postdocs, the way it had been in the old days.
Rudy missed the old days. He’d been out three times, for a total of about eight months. He’d twice been to local systems, and once to M44, the Beehive, where he’d awakened one morning to a magnificent view of the eclipsing binary, TX Cancri.
He remembered sitting in the operations room on that flight with Audrey Cleaver, from the University of Paris. Audrey had commented that the day would come when they would give almost anything to be able to come back and repeat that experience. At the time, he’d thought Audrey was talking as much about being young as she was about watching the binary.
But it was true. And not in the sense that he’d like to go back to that particular system, as that he wished he could return to that milieu, to live again in a world where ever
ybody was going out to the stars, where the taxpayers happily supported the initiative, and even the politicians were excited. Where people cared.
RUDY AND JON greeted each of the Preston researchers as they came out of the tube, asked them how the flight had been, had the instruments performed okay, had it been worthwhile. They all seemed satisfied with the results of the mission but were tired and glad to be home. And of course, like every returning mission, they had one regret that nobody ever admitted to: no sign of a living civilization.
The last person off was Armand (Cap) Shinyu, its pilot. Rudy introduced Jon, and Cap’s eyes went wide. “You’re the guy with the Locarno,” he said.
“Yes.” Jon flashed a covert grin at Rudy. It’s nice to be recognized.
“Well, good luck,” said Cap. He expressed his regrets over the loss of the Jenkins (which he’d already done by hyperlink, but this was the first time he and Rudy had actually been together since the accident). “Thank God nobody was hurt,” he said.
“François couldn’t get them to leave the derelict.”
“Is that what happened?” Cap was an average-sized guy with huge shoulders, a beefy face, and thick white hair. And an extraordinary baritone. He sounded like a seven-footer. He’d once been a teacher of Eastern literature.
“That’s what happened.”
Cap shook his head. “For smart people,” he said, “some of them can be pretty dumb.”
“Yeah. Can we buy you dinner?”
They wandered down to the Quarter Moon. It was quiet, mostly empty, an off-hour. “I’ve been hearing from my wife,” Cap said.
“How’s Carrie doing?”
“She’s okay. But the business with the Jenkins shook her up a little.”
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