He was easy to like. Especially when he asked whether she wasn’t the woman who’d saved everybody’s ass at that Deepsix thing, when that entire world had been swallowed? She really couldn’t take credit for that, and she suspected he knew that, but it was nice to hear him say it anyhow.
Jon took her back to the engine room to look at the Locarno. It was just a pair of black boxes, much smaller than the Hazeltine enabler. He explained how it worked. She’d listened to the explanation before, hadn’t understood it then and didn’t understand it now. But the reality was she’d never figured out how the Hazeltine had worked either. You punched a button, and you slipped between the dimensions. That was about as clear as it got.
When they returned to the common room, she could hear Matt going through his preps with Phyllis, the AI. “You miss being up front?” Antonio asked.
“I’ve been away from it too long,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to ride in this thing if I were at the controls.”
Antonio grinned at her, and at Jon. “These things don’t really need pilots anyhow, do they? I mean, don’t the AI’s handle everything?”
“The AIs handle everything,” she said, “as long as there’s no problem. If something goes wrong, you’ll be glad you have Matt up there.”
“Well, yeah.” He made a face as if she were running an old story past him. “How often does something go wrong?”
He offered her a grape juice. She took it and sat back. “It happens all the time. Research missions, particularly. The physicists like to go in close. Usually as close as they can until something blows up. And there are unexplained bursts of energy in hyperspace that sometimes penetrate the shielding and knock out equipment.”
“But of course”—Jon looked in on them from the bridge—“we won’t be traveling in hyperspace anymore. Not with the Locarno.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “The dimension we’ll be traveling through. What’s its name?”
“We haven’t given it one yet.”
“You’ll want to do that before we get home, or Antonio here will do it for you. Won’t you, Antonio?”
“I already have a name for it,” he said. “I suggest we call it Giannotti space.”
Matt announced over the allcom they were ready to go. “Priscilla,” he added, “would you like to sit up front?”
She looked at Antonio and Jon. “Anybody else want to do it?”
“Go ahead,” said Jon. “Enjoy yourself.”
She took a long pull from the grape juice and strode onto the bridge, feeling young again, feeling as if she could do anything. She took the right-hand seat, the observer’s seat, and, while Matt talked to Union Ops, she activated the harness. It slid down around her.
Matt finished and looked her way. “Welcome back,” he said.
Yes. At that moment, Hutch was in love with the world.
Matt activated the allcom. “Everybody belt down,” he said. “Phyl, start the engines.” Then to the allcom again: “We are three minutes from departure.”
She felt the familiar vibration as additional power came online. “How does the Locarno work?” she asked him. “We still need a running start, right?”
Matt was a good-looking guy, with red hair and a mischievous smile offset by intense eyes. He reminded her of Tor, but she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the innocence. Matt was a guy who still believed in things. In a decaying society, wracked by too much leisure, corruption in high places, a crippled environment, and God knew what else, there weren’t too many like that. The assumption had always been that if people are well fed, feel secure, and have decent homes, everything will be fine. But they needed something else as well. Call it self-respect or a sense of purpose. Whatever, it was missing now. Maybe spreading out through the galaxy would provide it, maybe not. But she was convinced that if the human race simply settled onto its collective front porch, as it seemed to be doing, it had no future.
She didn’t think it was a coincidence that nobody was producing great holos anymore. The ones that everyone remembered, Barcelona, Bugles at Dusk, Icelandik, and all the rest were from the previous century. The same was true of drama, the novel, architecture, sculpture. Civilization as a whole seemed to be in decline.
She had loved Tor, and missed him every day. He’d made his living as an artist, but she knew his ability was only moderate. Nobody was going to be naming museums and schools after him. That hadn’t mattered: She hadn’t loved him for his talent. But the hard truth was there weren’t any great artists anymore. She didn’t know why, and couldn’t connect it to the general malaise that had settled across the planet. Maybe somebody somewhere knew what was happening. She didn’t. Maybe life had become too easy in too many places, and too pointless in too many others. Maybe it was just that old business that you had to wait a century to sort out who was great and who wasn’t. Whatever it was, her instincts screamed that it was the same process. That humans were designed to do what they’d always done: climb into their canoes and move out across uncharted seas. Whether those seas were philosophical or physical, she thought they had to do it.
“Yes,” Matt said, “we still need a running start. Not as long as we did with the Hazeltine. Maybe twenty minutes or so to build up a charge.”
“It feels good to be back, Matt.”
He looked at her. Nodded and smiled. Union Ops broke in with information about solar activity. It wouldn’t affect them, but they shouldn’t linger insystem.
They were at two minutes. Support lines began disconnecting, withdrawing into the dock. She felt a mild jar as the magnetic locks turned them loose.
Matt eased the ship into its exit lane, adjusted the artificial gravity, took them past the series of docks, and moved out through the launch doors. “Still a nice feeling,” she said.
“Yeah, it is. Beats hustling condominiums.”
Earth, blue and white and endlessly lovely, spread out below them. A sliver of moon floated off to port. Toward the end of her piloting career, she hadn’t much noticed such things. Stars and worlds had become navigational objects, markers in the night and not much more. That was when she’d realized it was time to do something else. But seated on the bridge, as Matt increased thrust and they began to move out, she felt she’d come home at last.
AS THE PRESTON accelerated, they traded a few quips. You’re sure the drive works? We’re not going to come out of it with our brains scrambled, are we? “If the monkey could make it,” Matt said, “we should be fine.”
Matt had a taste for music, and he asked whether she objected, then brought up Beethoven. The Pathétique. It was pleasant, and fit the mood.
“What happens during the jump?” she asked.
“Not much. It’s not like hyperspace. The mists are gone. The sensors pick up nothing. It’s just unbroken darkness.”
Hutch looked out through the viewport. No moving lights anywhere. There was a time that something was always coming or going at Union. The station had been the center of traffic to a dozen regular ports of call and literally hundreds of star systems. It had been filled with tourists, some coming simply to see the station itself, others boarding one of the tour liners for the voyage of a lifetime.
People still came to look on Earth from orbit, and to spend a weekend, to give their kids a completely different experience. And maybe they came, most of all, so they could say they’d been there. Gone to the top of the world.
The station fell behind.
They came to the end of the Pathétique and moved on to something else. The music began to run together.
Matt opened the allcom: “Six minutes to insertion, guys,” he said. And to Hutch: “Has Rudy ever done a jump before?”
“He’s been out a couple of times,” she said.
“Okay. Antonio’s pretty well traveled. Says he’s been everywhere.”
“That takes in a fair amount of ground.”
“He’s the science reporter for WorldWide. I’d expect him to have gotten around.”
Hutch a
sked Phyl to produce a file of Antonio’s work. It matched what she already knew. Antonio did his science straight. No editorializing, though he was capable of getting excited. He’d been with the al Jahadi when it discovered the sun’s brown dwarf companion. He’d gotten to Nok right after Kaminsky had started his war against bureaucratic indifference and taken his stand. She felt guilty about that because she’d been one of the bureaucrats who thought that keeping hands off an alien society was a good idea no matter what they were doing. But Antonio had gotten the public on board, just as they’d gotten on board when the Academy moved to save the Goompahs.
It looked as if they were carrying the right journalist.
“Thirty seconds,” said Matt.
At 11:48 A.M., Washington time, they made their jump. Hutch was looking at the moon when it vanished.
TRANSITION WAS ALMOST seamless. She was accustomed to a mild queasiness during transits. But this time there was only a momentary pressure in her ears, as if the atmosphere had given her a quick squeeze. Then the sensation was gone, and she was looking out at the utter darkness Matt had described.
“Everybody okay back there?”
“We’re fine,” said Jon. “Transition complete?”
“It’s done. Welcome to”—he made a face—“wherever. Jon, you’re going to have to come up with a name for this place.”
“We’ll name it for Henry.”
“Barber space?” said Matt. “I don’t think it’ll work.”
“Yeah. I suppose not. Well, we’ll figure it out later. Okay to release the belts?”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Anybody hungry?”
It was lunchtime.
NEWS DESK
STARSHIP TESTS NEW DRIVE
The Phyllis Preston left the Union orbiter minutes ago en route to Alioth, eighty-one light-years away. What makes this flight a bit different is that, if all goes well, they’ll be back this evening.
We watched the ship disappear out of the night sky. There’s no way to be sure that everything is going as planned because there will be no communication with the Preston until it returns. Starships customarily use a device they call the hyperlink, which provides faster-than-light transmissions. But the Preston, if the new drive unit is working as it should, would far outrun a hyperlink transmission. So we’ll just have to wait and see.
—Jack Crispee, on The Jack Crispee Show, Tuesday, September 18
chapter 18
FIVE AND A half hours to Alioth. It was unthinkable.
Antonio couldn’t stop talking about it. Hutch seemed struck by how different the transdimensional flight looked, how the mists were gone, how the navigation lights had simply reached out into the night until they faded whereas now they seemed smothered by the darkness. Jon was going on about what Henry Barber had missed, and what a pity it was he hadn’t lived just a bit longer.
With the success of the first lander flight, the world had assumed that Rudy controlled the Locarno. And that perception had intensified when word got out that the first manned flight would be made by the Foundation’s lone ship, the Phyllis Preston. Rudy had been getting calls for weeks from people who had a special black hole they wanted to see, or a nebula with a peculiar characteristic, or who wanted to go to the center of the galaxy. Several had even wondered about the prospects for an intergalactic flight.
Avril Hopkinson, from Media Labs, had asked about the Locarno’s range, had suggested they start designing ships specifically for the drive system, instead of just tacking it onto existing vessels. Media Labs, he said, would be willing to undertake the expense.
It had been a glorious time for him. He’d played the chief executive, cautioning against extravagant plans, let’s just take this one step at a time, I’ll get back to you if we start thinking about going in that direction.
The people who were calling him now, trying to climb onto the bandwagon, were by and large people who had not noticed the Foundation over the past fifteen years. They’d seen Rudy as a person of no consequence, a guy fighting to hold on to the past. A man with no imagination, no sense of where the real priorities lay. Someone not to be taken seriously.
It had given him a rare sense of pleasure to put the world on hold. I’ll call you if I need you.
It occurred to him he was being small-minded. Even vengeful. But that was okay. Small-minded could be good. Better to think of it as justice.
RUDY HAD NEVER been successful with women. For some inscrutable reason, he did not arouse their passions. Even his wives had seemed always to regard him as a comic figure. He was a guy a woman could confide in, could exchange stories with. They seemed impressed by his accomplishments, but not by him. He had no trouble getting dates, but nobody ever seemed to connect with him emotionally. Even his most recent wife had, somehow, been a remote figure. They’d parted amicably. Old buddies.
He was a good friend. A nice guy.
It wouldn’t be correct to say he’d been leading a lonely existence, but since he’d become an adult, he’d never shared an intense relationship with another human being. His life had been marked with a desire to distance himself from other people. As a kid he’d dreamed of living one day on an island. Or on a mountaintop. Somewhere inaccessible.
It was ironic that someone with his sensibilities, and his passions, had not traveled widely beyond the Sun’s immediate neighborhood. He allowed people to believe he had. Didn’t outright lie about it, but didn’t deny it either. In a sense, he had done a lot of traveling, but most of it had been virtual. Or with books.
There’d been opportunities. His specialty was stellar life cycles, and he’d gotten invitations from both Jesperson and Hightower when they were setting out, years ago. But he was young then and did not want to spend six or seven months inside a ship, cloistered with the smartest people in their various disciplines. He wouldn’t be able to get away from them, and he knew he lacked depth and didn’t want to be exposed. His mentor at the time told him he needed to believe in himself, but he couldn’t do it, wasn’t going to sit cooped up with MacPherson and Banikawa and the rest, talking about shadow matter and negative energy and neutral spin. He had plenty of time to go out to the stars later. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t there anymore.
When he became director of the Foundation, he’d thought about going with one of the missions. Something to establish his credibility. (They’d had three ships at one time.) But it didn’t look right. People would have thought he was taking advantage of his position. So he’d stayed back while the researchers went.
It wasn’t as if he’d never before been in a ship. He’d gone to a couple of the nearby stars. Had traveled to Iapetus to see Saturn close up. And to see the monument. But it wasn’t the same as going deep, as setting down on a world that was home to a different biosystem. As being so far from home that when you looked through a telescope at the sun, at Earth’s sun, you knew you were seeing it as it had looked before you were born. That was traveling.
Now, of course, if all went well, they’d be able to go the next step. So far away that the sun, if you could see it at all, would appear as it had been before the first pyramids had gone up. Before Baghdad.
Before Gilgamesh.
NEWS DESK
SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE 100 YEARS AGO TODAY
Third Major Quake Marked End of Fabled City
Ceremonies Planned at Memorial and White House
CAPABILITY TO PREDICT QUAKES STILL FAR OFF
Some Maintain It Will Never Be Possible
CULVERSON NAMED YEAR’S BEST POLITICAL CARTOONIST
Wins Shackleford Award Second Year Running
NEW YORK LEVEES TO BE REINFORCED
HURRICANE ROMA TURNS NORTH
Hatteras Watches
Season’s 18th Major Storm
LAST SLAUGHTERHOUSE CLOSES
Nanoburgers Too Much for Cattle Industry
AMERICAN SCHOOLS STILL RANK LOW
Test Scores in English, Math Weak
“Get Parents Involved,” Says Snyde
r
“Read to Your Kids”
Studies Show Parents Should Start When Kids Are Two
CHURCHES SPLIT OVER CLONING ISSUE
First Human Clones to Appear in Germany
Do They Have Souls?
VIRGIN APPARITION CLAIMED IN DUST CLOUDS
Mary’s Likeness Reported 6000 Light-Years Away
Telescopic Images from Ballinger Cloud
MOVEMENT TO BAN ALCOHOL GAINS STRENGTH
Prohibition Again?
POPULATION GAINS CONTINUE FOR CENTRAL AND MOUNTAIN STATES
People Feel Safer Away from Coastlines, Quake Zones
Trend Expected to Continue
Kansas Now Has More People Than Florida
NEW FOREST FIRES IN COLORADO
Long Dry Spell Creates Hazard
Campers Asked to Exercise Caution
TANAKA LANDS IN KENTUCKY AFTER 16 DAYS
Completes Round-the-World Hot-Air Balloon Flight
Misses Record by Seven Minutes
chapter 19
ALIOTH IS A white class-AO sun. Its formal name is Epsilon Ursae Majoris. Eighty-one light-years from Arlington, it didn’t exactly equate to going deep, but it was far enough. And they’d be within striking distance of help should something go wrong.
Alioth is about four times as wide as Sol, and more than a hundred times brighter. It’s large for a class-A, and consequently has been burning hydrogen at an accelerated rate. It is now near the end of that phase of its existence, and will soon enter its helium-burning phase. For that reason it had been visited several times by Academy ships studying the decline of class-A stars.
Seventeen worlds orbit Alioth, one of which, Seabright, is unique in that it’s the only known planet entirely covered by water. It’s perfectly located in the middle of the biozone, but it has produced not so much as a single living cell.
The recently discovered companion star is a dull class-G orbiting at a range of almost a light-year.
AS THEY CAME out of jump status, Klaxons sounded. Collision alert. Matt barked a goddam and froze while Phyl activated the ship’s defensive systems and fired a series of particle beams at something.
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