Cauldron

by Jack McDevitt

  “I don’t know,” Rudy said. “They weren’t big about women in cockpits in those days.”

  AT ABOUT FIVE o’clock, GMT, when they were starting to talk about a late meal, Paul showed up. “My treat,” he said. Nobody gave him an argument.

  They knew they’d get no peace in one of Union’s restaurants, so they gathered in Rudy’s room and had pizza sent up. The dinner was a quiet one, everybody watching the clock, lots of talk about how good the food was, people looking out the window and making philosophical remarks about the planet below. They were over one of the oceans, but Rudy had no idea which one.

  He hated having to wait for the results. Had it been a Hazeltine flight, they could have used its associated FTL comm system, the hyperlink, and everyone would have known the result within a few minutes. The Locarno had not yet been adapted for a hyperlink. There was no point spending the time and effort until they knew whether the transport system worked. Consequently, they had to wait it out. And radio signals, which crawled along at the speed of light, took forever.

  That should be the next project, he decided. If everything turned out all right today. Rudy had already asked Jon whether it could be done. “It’ll be expensive,” he said. “And it’ll take time. But yes. I can’t see any reason why not.”

  They watched some of the reports, watched their own interviews, laughed at the things they’d said. “The entire galaxy will be within reach,” Rudy had told New York Online.

  “Right.” Paul shook his head. “If you don’t mind three-year missions.”

  “That’s still pretty decent,” said Hutch. “The other side of the galaxy and back. In a few years.”

  One of the board members, Charles McGonigle, who also headed the Arlington National Bank, chuckled and looked around. “Any volunteers?”

  “I’d go,” said Rudy, turning serious.

  Paul looked pensive. “Not me.”

  Rudy was surprised. “Really?” he said. “You wouldn’t go on a flight to the other side of the galaxy?”

  “Are you serious? That’s the problem with the Locarno. It puts all this stuff within range. But what’s really going to be there that we haven’t already seen? If we’ve learned anything at all these last few decades, it’s that the galaxy looks pretty much the same everywhere. Dust clouds, empty worlds, a few ruins. The stars are all the same. What’s the big deal?”

  Rudy took a moment to chew down a piece of pizza. “It’s someplace we’ve never been before, Paul. The other side of the forest.”

  AT A QUARTER to seven they trooped back down to the control center. Jon was escorted by reporters, who never seemed to tire of asking the same questions. Margo Dee took him aside to wish him luck. “Let’s hope,” she said, “this is a day we’ll always remember.”

  By seven the room had settled down, they were up live on the networks, and Jon was back at the panel. The clock activated with three minutes to go. When the signal arrived, it would come in the form of a voice message, the words Greetings from Pluto. Jon had argued for a simple series of beeps, especially with the world watching. “It has a little more class.” But Rudy was part showman, had to be, or the Foundation would never have survived. So Greetings from Pluto it became. They were using the voice of a well-known character actor, Victor Caldwell. Caldwell, a major force in promoting the Foundation, had died the year before. But his baritone was known around the world.

  Hutch stood in a corner calmly drinking coffee. She could be a cold number when she wanted to.

  The room went dead silent as the last seconds drained off. Rudy told himself to relax. The counter hit zero, and everybody strained forward. He could hear himself breathing.

  Somebody coughed.

  Somewhere a door closed. Distant voices.

  Jon pushed back in his chair.

  Plus one minute.

  Rudy shoved his fists into his pockets. Come on, Victor. Where are you?

  Reporters began to look at one another. Jani Kloefmann leaned in his direction. “When do we reach a point where it becomes a problem?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

  “Don’t know, Jani,” he said. “We’re in unknown territory here.”

  Two minutes.

  WHEN SIX MINUTES had passed, Jon stood up and faced the cameras. His face told it all. “No way it could have taken this long,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

  It was as if the air went out of the room. Everything deflated. There was another barrage of questions, a few laughs, and lots of people talking on commlinks.

  Rudy took time to commiserate with Jon, who managed to maintain a brave demeanor. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “The numbers were right. It should have worked. It had to work.”

  They waited a half hour. People came over to shake their hands, tell them they were sorry. Then the crowd drifted away. Rudy decided he’d waited long enough. He corralled Jon and Hutch, was unable to find Paul, and went up to the main concourse. While they walked, Jon speculated that maybe there’d been a problem with the Happy Times. “Maybe the main engines were defective,” he said. “Maybe they screwed up the wiring. That’s all it would have taken. With no AI on board, nobody would have known.”

  They ended in the Orbital Bar & Grill, where they could watch the sun rise. It was soaring into the sky as the station rushed toward the horizon. Not like on the ground, where movement wasn’t quite visible.

  Jon couldn’t stop talking about where things might have gone wrong. He mentioned several possibilities, other than the ship. “There are areas,” he confessed, “where the theory becomes elastic. Where the parameters are not entirely clear. Where you have to test. Find out.” They needed to learn from this, he continued. Make some corrections. He thought all it might take would be an adjustment in fueling correspondences.

  And, of course, another ship.

  Rudy wondered why he hadn’t brought these details up before.

  “WE NEED TO find a tech,” Jon said. “One of the people who helped with the launch.”

  “Why?” asked Hutch.

  But he was already signaling for his bill and pushing himself away from the table.

  Rudy and Hutch followed him back to the operations section, where they prowled the passageways until they found a technician who seemed to have time on her hands. Jon identified himself. “I was part of the Happy Times experiment earlier today,” he added.

  She nodded. “I’m sorry about the way it turned out, Dr. Silvestri.”

  “I’d like to look at the last few seconds again. The ship’s transit. Can you arrange that?”

  She gave him a sympathetic smile and took them into a room with several cubicles, all empty. “Pick one,” she said.

  He sat down in front of a display, and she brought up the Happy Times, adjusted the clock, and froze the picture. Twelve fifty-eight P.M. One minute to jump. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Sure.” She explained the controls. “This starts it again. This freeezes it. And this slows it down or speeds it up. Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “When you’re finished, just leave it. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  He started it forward, and played it in real time. The ship filled the screen, moving quietly against the field of stars. The clock counted down, and it vanished.

  He backed it up and ran it again. At a slower pace.

  Watched as it blinked out.

  Something was there.

  He ran it again, still more slowly this time, and slower still as it approached the critical moment.

  The ship began to fade out of the three-dimensional universe. The transition started in the Happy Times’s after section, where the Locarno Drive was installed, and moved forward.

  Something else was happening: The ship was bending, folding up, as if it were cardboard, as if an invisible hand had taken hold of it, had begun squeezing it. Or maybe pulling it apart. Metal bent in extraordinary ways, and in those last moments, as it faded to oblivion it no longer resembled a ship. Rather it might ha
ve been a clay model that had simultaneously exploded and crumpled.

  He threw his head back in the chair. “It didn’t survive entry.”

  “No,” Rudy said. “I guess not.”

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  The failure of the Locarno Drive is a major setback for us all. The talking heads are telling us we’re better off, that it could only lead to another interstellar age, and thereby drain funds needed elsewhere. And it may be true that there are places too dangerous to go. New York Online has cited the classic Murray Leinster story “First Contact,” in which a human starship encounters an alien vessel, and neither ship feels it can safely leave the rendezvous point without risking the possibility that the other will follow it home. And thereby betray the location of the home world to God knows what.

  That is the argument we are now hearing from those who think we should not venture into deep space. The stakes are too high, the risk too great. What chance would we have against technologies wielded by a million-year-old civilization? And these fears have been underscored by the recent discovery, and subsequent loss, of an alien vessel said to be more than a billion years old.

  But one has to ask whether we wouldn’t still be sitting in the middle of the forest if we were a species that first and foremost played it safe.

  Eventually we will move out into the galaxy. We will, or our children will. If we can perfect a drive to enable more extensive exploration, then we should do it. And I’d go a step farther. One of the objections most often raised to the development of an enhanced transport system is the fear that somebody will make for the galactic core, stir up whatever force exists in the Mordecai Zone, and bring them down on our heads. This is haunted house logic. If somebody is still there, still orchestrating the omegas that drift through the galaxy blowing things up, maybe it’s time we explained things to them.

  A new propulsion technology might put us in a position to stop the production of omegas. That will not matter much to any but our most distant descendants. The omegas are, apparently, already in the pipeline for well over a million years to come. But if we can shut the operation down, we should do it. We owe that much to ourselves, and to any other reasoning creatures in the path of the damned things.

  —Mark Ingals, The Washington Post, June 5, 2255

  chapter 9

  HUTCH HAD TAKEN care to see that she and Rudy sat together on the shuttle flight back to Reagan. However things went, she wanted to be with him. Either to celebrate the moment. Or to limit the damage. Jon was staggering a bit, but he was young, and seemed strong enough to rebound. In fact, he was already talking about where he thought the problem lay. Rudy was another matter.

  As the vehicle fell away from the station and began its descent, she saw that, beneath the brave front he’d put on for the media, the guy was stricken. “Rudy,” she told him, “we knew all along the odds were against us.” She almost said long shot. In fact, she was the only one of the inner circle who’d believed that.

  He was staring listlessly out the window. “I know.”

  Rudy was an optimist, the kind of guy who thought you could do anything if you put your mind to it. The immediate problem was less that the test had failed than that they’d lost the Happy Times. “Listen,” she said, “why don’t you take the day off tomorrow? Come over to the house? I’ll make dinner.”

  Rudy managed a smile. “Do I look that desperate?”

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m a decent cook.”

  He squeezed her hand. “I know. I mean, that’s not what I meant.”

  Whatever. “You need to get away from it for a bit. You and Jon both. We’ll make a party out of it.”

  He still avoided looking at her. “You know that business up there today all but destroyed the Foundation.”

  She knew. “What’s our situation?”

  “It leaves us with payments to make on a ship we no longer have.”

  “It wasn’t insured?”

  “Insurance was out of sight. Everybody knew what we were trying to do.” The eyes finally found her. “It’s a pity. Imagine what a working drive would have meant.”

  “We’ll need to find new donors.”

  “In this atmosphere…” His voice trailed off.

  “They’ll be there,” she said. “This isn’t the first time the Foundation’s been a little short.”

  “A little?” He laughed. It was a harsh, ugly sound, not at all characteristic of the Rudy she knew.

  “There is one possibility,” she said.

  They punched in drink orders, and she thought he hadn’t heard her. “What’s that?” he asked finally.

  “If Jon can figure out what went wrong, we still have the Preston.”

  “What? Let him lose our other ship?” He squeezed his forehead. “No, Hutch. We aren’t going to do that.”

  She was quiet, for a time. “Look,” she said at last, “it’s a gamble, sure, but it could pay off.”

  “No. I’m not giving him another ship to play with.”

  “IT’S THERE,” JON insisted. They were standing on the roof of the terminal, watching Hutch climb into her taxi. She waved as it lifted off, and her eyes brushed his. He caught a faint smile. She knew he’d been waiting for a chance to speak to Rudy alone, and she knew why. “We just have to make some adjustments. Run the tests until we get it right.”

  But Rudy looked beaten. His eyes were bleary, and he had adopted a manner that was simultaneously apologetic and resentful. “I don’t think you understand the position the Foundation is now in, Jon,” he said. “We invested a lot in the Locarno. We were counting on your getting it right.”

  That hurt. “Some of these things,” he said quietly, “don’t lend themselves to exact calculations. We have to try them. See what works.”

  “That isn’t what you’ve been saying.”

  “Sure it is. You just haven’t been listening.”

  Rudy’s eyes were closed. He was trying not to sound bitter. “I know, Jon,” he said finally. “It’s not your fault. Not anyone’s fault, really. You’re human, and humans screw things up. It happens. It’s as much my doing as anybody’s.”

  “Rudy, I didn’t screw things up.”

  “Okay, Jon. You didn’t. Let’s let things go at that.”

  “You don’t want to try again?”

  “What? Risk losing the Preston? No, I don’t think so.” He jammed his fists into his pockets. “No. Not a chance.”

  The air was heavy. “It will work, Rudy.”

  He grunted. “Everything I’ve read, everybody I’ve talked to, they all say it can’t be done. They can’t all be wrong.” His cab drifted in and opened up. Rudy tossed his bag in back and climbed in.

  “Paul thought it would work.”

  “Paul was wrong.”

  Jon held the door so Rudy couldn’t close it. “There was a time,” he said, “when everybody agreed that heavier-than-air flight would never work. And another time that we’d never get to the Moon. Sometimes you just have to do it.”

  Rudy gave the driver his address. “I’m sorry, Jon. I really am. But let’s just let it go, okay?”

  JON ROUTINELY TRAVELED with his commlink turned off. He didn’t like being subject to calls when he was out of his apartment or away from the lab. That was his own time. Consequently, when he walked into his apartment after returning from Union, his AI informed him the circuit had been busy. “You have 114 calls,” it said.

  “From whom, Herman?”

  “Four from family, eleven from friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, fifty-two from persons identifying themselves as the media, eleven from assorted well-wishers, thirty-four I can only identify as cranks, and two from charities seeking donations.”

  He sank into a chair and sighed. “Nothing corporate?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Delete the media.”

  “Done.”

  “What kind of cranks?”

  “Some threatening your life because they think you are going to arouse whatever’s p
roducing the omega clouds. Or similar concerns. I referred them for analysis. So far none looks dangerous, but you will wish to show some caution. Just in case.”

  “What else?”

  “Thirteen claiming they already have an ultra star drive. Seven claim to have devised it themselves, but say they can get no one to listen. Five say it was a gift from extraterrestrials.”

  “That’s twelve.”

  “One says he found a design in a vault inside a pyramid.”

  “Valley of the Kings?”

  “He didn’t specify.”

  He’d hoped Orion or Lukacs or somebody would have tried to get in touch to offer him testing facilities. Don’t these nitwits understand how valuable a decent drive would be? He mixed a bourbon and soda and responded to the personal calls. His mother. His uncle Aaron. Two cousins. Everybody offered sympathy. Assured him they knew that the Locarno would work next time. Ditto with his friends.

  “Let’s see the well-wishers, Herman.”

  A list scrolled onto the screen. He scanned the names. Nothing rang a bell. He sampled a few of the messages. Hang in there, Jon, they said. Man was designed for something greater than the Earth. (You could always tell the crazy ones. They talked about ‘Man’ rather than ‘people.’ They couldn’t go two sentences without citing ‘destiny.’)

  The world was full of lunatics. Herman had trouble sorting them out. If they didn’t rave and threaten, the AI didn’t see them for what they were. And Jon was reluctant to provide a list of key words and phrases. Sometimes perfectly sane people also said those things. His father was fond of saying that his destiny was to be overwhelmed by unintelligible kids. Dad wasn’t big on physics, and Jon’s sister was a lawyer.

  “Get rid of them,” he said finally.

  ARCHIVE

  NOMAD GENE FOUND