Cauldron

by Jack McDevitt

  He visualized Hutch and Antonio scrambling on board, looking around doubtfully at the makeshift shielding. Then Jim alerted him that the lander had sealed. The vehicle made its exit and started back. Moments later the McAdams took it aboard.

  JON WAITED BELOW in cargo, watching it come in. He couldn’t see into the vehicle because of the shielding he and Matt had welded around it. As soon as it had cleared the launch doors, he closed them. It eased into its berth, and he started the pressurization procedure. It would take about two minutes before they could leave the passenger cabin.

  Except that the shuttle opened up immediately. Antonio was wearing an e-suit. He jumped down from the lander, looked around, and spotted Jon. He literally bolted in his direction. There was no sign of Hutch.

  He was carrying something. A piece of cloth, looked like.

  Jon started to wave, and mouthed hello. Was going to add Glad to see you. But he shook his head, no time.

  Jon glanced back at the lander. Nobody else was getting out. Antonio unraveled the cloth and held it up for him. A message was scrawled on it: GET GOING. PRESTON ABOUT TO BLOW.

  He shook his head. That couldn’t be right. Again he tried to form words that Antonio could read. What’s going on? What do you mean?

  The journalist looked directly into his eyes and opened his mouth to form one unmistakable word: Boom.

  That was enough for Jon. He got on the allcom, the ship’s internal communication system, which Frank couldn’t intercept, and called the bridge. “Matt.”

  “They okay, Jon?”

  “Antonio says there’s a bomb ready to go off over there. Move out.”

  “What?” He added an expletive. “Tell him to grab hold of something.” The main engines came online.

  Jon gave a thumbs-up, and Antonio tried to hurry back to the lander, where he could belt down and ride out the acceleration. But the ship was already moving, turning away, power building in the engines. Jon clung to a safety rail, while Antonio lost his balance and slid aft, into storage, where he grabbed hold of a cabinet door handle.

  He looked again around the launch bay. Where was Hutch?

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  When you went away,

  The stars and moon,

  The voices in the tide,

  The kivra gliding above the trees,

  All were lost.

  —Sigma Hotel Book

  chapter 39

  JON LOOKED DISMAYED. “Matt,” he said, “stay off the commlink. Don’t try to talk to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it might be overheard.”

  “Well, if that critter hasn’t figured out by now that something’s wrong, it’s pretty dumb.” But he complied. At the moment there was nothing to be gained by talking.

  Just clear out.

  He couldn’t go to maximum thrust, with people running around the launch bay. But he put on as much acceleration as he dared. A few bumps and bruises were better than getting caught in an explosion, and who the hell’s idea was it anyhow to plant a bomb on board the Preston? “Jon, how much time do we have?”

  “Don’t know.” Jon grunted, straining to hang on to the bar.

  “What kind of bomb?”

  “Don’t know that either.”

  “What do we know?”

  “Matt,” he said, “I haven’t seen Hutch yet.”

  The AI cut in: “Electrical activity’s picking up.”

  They were going to get another bolt up their rear ends. He turned onto a new course. Jon grunted but hung on. Starships weren’t like aircraft. Not nearly as maneuverable, because you don’t have an atmosphere to help you do flips and turns. All Matt could do was roll around and fire attitude thrusters.

  “I think we’ve got another eye forming.”

  “Not surprised.” He changed course again. And fired braking rockets.

  “Hey.” Jon did not sound happy. “What are you doing?”

  “Two of them, in fact. No, three.”

  “It’s getting ready to shoot at us, Jon. I guess it’s figured out—”

  The sky flared.

  “Close,” said Jim. “Building again.”

  He angled off in another direction and heard Jon yell. Heard something crash.

  “Sorry. Can’t help it.”

  “Do what you have to.”

  Another bolt ripped past. It illuminated the hull and was gone.

  At the same instant the sky behind them exploded.

  “That was the Preston,” said Jim.

  He turned again. And took her hard up.

  Lightning rippled across the screens. They went off momentarily, and came back. He could smell something burning. “Jim?”

  “We’re okay. Best not to get hit again, though.”

  “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “It appears the Preston’s engines went. I do not think much will be left.”

  “Jon—”

  “Still here.”

  “Any sign of Hutch?”

  “Hard to see from down here.”

  “You’re on the deck?”

  “Another one building, Matt.”

  It had begun trying to outguess him. This time he stayed on course. Just kept piling on distance.

  The sky brightened again.

  “Matt,” said Jim, “we should be out of range in about a minute.”

  Matt didn’t believe it. “How do you get out of range of a lightning bolt?”

  “You become a small enough target that it’s virtually impossible for the cloud to mount an accurate strike.”

  “Okay.” He would have liked to ease off a bit, but he didn’t dare, and in fact it took all his discipline not to go to full thrust. But neither Jon nor Antonio and maybe not Hutch would have survived. “Jon, how you doing?”

  “No sweat, Matt. The bone’ll set in thirty days.”

  He opened the commlink. It didn’t much matter if they were overheard now. “Antonio, how about you?”

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “Where’s Hutch?”

  Her voice came through: “I’m here. In the lander.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  The sky brightened again. Less intense this time.

  “What did you do?” he demanded.

  “Pretty dumb. I trusted that thing. I still don’t believe it.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the bomb.”

  “Going up again, Matt.”

  “Why the bomb? Why’d you do it?”

  “I wasn’t going to allow that damned thing to take my ship.”

  “You put us all in danger.”

  “I know.”

  Jim broke in: “We are getting a transmission from Frank.”

  “Okay. Let’s hear what it has to say. Hutch, you still there?”

  “I’m here. You’ve been talking to Frank?”

  “Yes. Good old Frank.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I never kid. Put him on, Jim.”

  But there was only the whisper of the stars.

  “It was here a moment ago, Matt.”

  “I am here now.” Matt’s own voice again. Sounding angry. Or maybe hurt. Disappointed. “You broke your engagement.”

  “Promise. It’s called a promise.”

  “Nevertheless, am I not able to trust you?”

  “What was the promise?” asked Hutch.

  Another bolt rippled through the sky, far away.

  Matt’s voice responded: “Who is that?”

  “I’ll tell you who, Frank. I’m the person who’s been blinking lights at you the last few days. The one you tried to kill a few hours ago.”

  “Priscilla Hutchins. From the Preston.”

  “Yes. I was her captain, until you took us down.”

  “I am not familiar with the phrase.”

  “Until you seized my ship. Is that clear enough for you?”

  “I regret the loss. I needed it. The ship.�
�

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “You promised it would not be damaged if I allowed the persons on board to be rescued.”

  “I didn’t promise anything, Frank. You want to know the truth, Frank. I don’t—”

  Another bolt soared past. Enough to dim the lights. But only for a moment.

  “You want to know the truth, Frank?” she said again. “I don’t like you very much.”

  “I am stranded. Have a measure of empathy.”

  “I think you lost that chance. Enjoy your time here, Frank. I think you’ll be here awhile.”

  “I had no choice but to do as I did.”

  “You could have had help. All you had to do was ask.” Maybe, Matt thought. But probably not.

  “You have nothing left, Frank. Even if you get lucky and hit us, you won’t be able to recover the ship.”

  “I know.”

  “Good-bye, Frank.”

  “I think we’re out of range,” said Jim.

  The sky behind them came alive with lightning strikes. “All that power,” said Hutch, “and it’s helpless.”

  ANTONIO WAS LIMPING. He’d picked up some bumps and bruises, but otherwise he was fine. Jon had ended splayed against the after bulkhead, but he discovered he could walk, and nothing seemed to be broken.

  He’d been startled—and happy—when Hutch had begun speaking to Matt. When she hadn’t gotten out of the spacecraft, he’d feared she’d stayed behind to detonate the bomb. He’d seen no other explanation for her absence.

  “What could I do?” she asked Jon as they strolled into the common room. She was carrying the black box that housed Phyl. “I knew Matt would have to go evasive, and I couldn’t get out of the launch area before that started. I’m getting a little too old to get tossed around. Antonio was enough of a gentleman to carry the note.”

  Matt took a seat opposite her. They were about ten minutes from making their jump. “Hutch,” he said, “explain something to me.”

  “If I can.”

  “Why was the bomb such a close thing? Why didn’t you give us more time before detonation? Give yourself more time? You guys were barely inside the ship before it went off.”

  She laughed and the room brightened. “I’d have done that in a minute if I’d known how.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, Matt, I don’t know a thing about making bombs. Do you?”

  “No. Not really. Never had reason to learn.”

  “Me, too.”

  “So how’d you do it?”

  She smiled at Antonio. Tell them.

  Antonio sat back and folded his arms. “The original plan was to dump some fuel in the engine room, but we needed a fuse. The cables are all fireproof, so we tried tying together some sheets. But they burned too fast. We would never have gotten out of the ship.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We took a laser to one of the fuel lines. Then used our clothes and the pages from the Sigma Hotel Book to build a fire.”

  “TRANSMISSION FROM THE cloud,” said Jim.

  Matt nodded, and Frank’s reproduction of Matt’s voice filled the bridge. “Please don’t leave.”

  Hutch was beside him. Her eyes were clouded, and she looked as if she were going to speak, but she said nothing.

  And again: “Please come back.”

  The cloud occupied the navigation screen. It seemed now to be all eyes, all staring after them.

  “Please, help me.”

  “You know,” Matt said, “it was in a bind.” He hated the damned thing. But it didn’t seem to matter. Now that the shooting was over. “It would have recognized how powerless we were to help. It took the only course open to it.”

  “I promise you will be safe.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” said Hutch.

  “And it would have known that we would probably not have been able to help in any case. Unless we gave it a ship. Would we have done that if it asked?” He paused and listened to the silence. “I didn’t think so.”

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  Throw another log on the fire.

  So long as I have you

  And the logs,

  The night cannot get in.

  —Sigma Hotel Book

  epilogue

  HUTCH CONTACTED RUDY’S family as soon as the Preston had arrived back in the solar system. That was an excruciating ordeal. As painful as anything she’d done in her life.

  FRANK WAS A big media splash for several days. Then the president of Patagonia made some negative comments about the president of the NAU, there was talk of imposing economic sanctions in both directions, and the story about the talking cloud moved to the back pages. Within a week it was gone.

  Antonio’s book, At the Core, revived it for a while, and there was talk of another mission. Some wanted to communicate with the creature, some to nuke it. Others claimed it was a conspiracy and that the omegas came from somewhere else, from a source so terrible that the government was keeping it secret. Still others claimed that hell was located at the center of the galaxy, and we all knew who was really imprisoned in the cloud. When Hutch was asked during an interview what she thought should be done, she urged that the matter be left alone. “Maybe until we’re smarter,” she said. In the end, public indifference might have carried the day, but Alyx Ballinger turned the encounter into the musical Starstruck. Hutch, Antonio, and Jon attended opening night in London. Hutch enjoyed it immensely, but always claimed it was because of the music, and had nothing to do with the fact that the Hutchins character was played by the inordinately lovely Kyra Phillips. The musical went to VR, interstellar tourism picked up, politicians got interested, and within three years, a second Academy began operating out of temporary quarters in Crystal City. A larger complex is currently under construction near the old NASA site on the Cape.

  THE PROMETHEUS FOUNDATION had lost Rudy, but with the appearance of Starstruck, it gained support, and eventually became a bridge to the new Academy.

  Most people were inclined to give credit for the resurgence to Ballinger, but Hutch thought it would have happened anyway, in time. It was inevitable, she told friends. Even without the Locarno Drive, she believed, the human race would have gone back to the stars. The retreat from the original effort had been an aberration, much like the long hiatus after the first flights to the Moon. We seem to do things in fits and starts, she told an audience at ceremonies opening the Crystal City complex in 2258. “But eventually, we get serious. It just takes time.”

  Meanwhile, a few independent missions, using the Locarno, went out. Two were lost, never heard from again. When nobody talked of scuttling the program, Hutch understood there’d be no turning back this time.

  JON RECEIVED A half dozen major awards, including the 2257 Americus. In his acceptance remarks, and to no one’s surprise, he gave the bulk of the credit for the Locarno to Henry.

  He was also the recipient of the first Rudy Golombeck Award, given by the Prometheus Foundation to recognize achievement in promoting the interstellar renaissance. Matt Darwin made the presentation.

  In the VR version of Starstruck, Jon was portrayed as brilliant. He was also elderly, forgetful, and often incoherent. His role in rescuing Hutch and Antonio was transferred to Matt. A producer explained that you could only have one hero in these things, and the starship pilot was the natural choice. People don’t identify with physicists, he insisted.

  Matt helped Myra Castle attain the state senate. Four years later she went to Washington, where she became a central figure in a major corruption scandal.

  Matt went back to real estate for a year. When Starstruck appeared, he became an instant celebrity. He was played by Jason Cole, who specialized in action heroes. In that version, the mission had brought along a few nukes, and they took the monster out. Matt commented that a few nukes wouldn’t have mattered much, but nobody really seemed to care. When the Academy came back, he applied for reinstatement and, at the time of publication, is en route to
the Dumbbell Nebula with a contact mission. (There’s evidence some planets in the region are being manipulated.)

  THE SIGMA HOTEL Book was retrieved from Jim’s memory banks and made available to the general public. To everyone’s surprise, it climbed the best seller list and stayed there for months. People who know about such things claim it’s a book everyone buys but no one reads. It’s also shown up in university classes around the world as a demonstration that sentient creatures have more in common than anyone would have believed a century ago.

  MacElroy High School named its gym for Rudy, and made Matt an honorary school board member. When he’s in town, he still gets invited to speak to the classes. And, on his visits to the school, he invariably stops to admire the AKV Spartan lander, which, as a historical object, has been moved indoors out of the weather.

  Jon continues to work in the more arcane branches of physics, trying to develop a system that would allow transportation into other universes. “Provided,” he likes to say, “there are other universes.” The common wisdom is that they are abundant, but Jon would argue that cosmological insight is never common.

  He also serves, with Hutch, on the board of the Prometheus Foundation.

  And the medium through which the Locarno Drive moves is, of course, known as Silvestri space.

  PHYL HAD BEEN disconnected and carried from the Preston by Hutch. She indicated no interest in returning to superluminals. She is now the house AI at the Wescott, Alabama, Animal Shelter.

  SHORTLY AFTER HER return, Hutch sold the house in Woodbridge and moved to Arlington. Several teaching offers came in. Major publishers pressed for a book. And local political operatives invited her to run for office.

  She passed on all of it.

  “Why, Mom?” asked Charlie, referring to a career in politics. Charlie remained interested in art, but after the flight to the Mordecai Zone, he’d taken to talking a lot about piloting an interstellar himself. Hutch approved, of course. It would make a great family tradition.

  “Not my style,” she said.

  She enjoyed doing speaking engagements. She was good at bonding with an audience, at winning them over, at persuading them the human race had places to go. A destiny that would take it well beyond Baltimore. (Or wherever she happened to be speaking. The line was always good for a laugh.) Her old friend Gregory MacAllister, after watching her, commented she was a natural flack.