Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

  “Who’s us?”

  “The SRF.”

  “What?” I almost spilled my iced tea. “About what?”

  “You know Guy Bentley is on the Capella?”

  “The comedian? Yes, I remember hearing that.”

  “The studio wants him back. They want us to arrange things so he’s one of the first people off the ship.”

  “They’re crazy.”

  “Bentley’s one of the most popular people in the Confederacy.”

  “So what? They can’t sue you, can they?”

  “No. But they’re suggesting that they’ll target John Kraus and a few of the other people at the top of the organization. Make them laughingstocks.”

  I tried my tuna sandwich. And put it back down. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “The SRF will take some heat if they can’t get everyone off this time around. But if they can manage five years down the line, they’ll all be heroes. And Kraus especially will be untouchable.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “We’re getting a lot of requests. People asking us, pleading with us, to get relatives and friends off, and do it now. Some are offering money. We got a call from a woman yesterday who couldn’t stop crying.” She took a deep breath. “I feel sorry for them. But there are limits to what we can do.” She glared past me at nothing in particular. “The strawberries are good.”

  Two guys and a young woman were sitting at an adjoining table, behind Shara. They exchanged whispered comments. Then one of the guys got up, walked over to us, and waited until he’d caught Shara’s attention. “Pardon me,” he said. “I couldn’t help overhearing.” He was average size, mid-thirties, with black hair. He looked unhappy. “I’m Ron Aquilar. My fiancée, Leslie Cameron, is on the Capella. I understand what you’re saying, but I’d do anything to get her off. Is there really no way it can be done?”

  Shara looked lost. “Ron,” she said, “we won’t have any control over which passengers get off first. We can’t even contact the ship until it shows up. So there’s no time to make special arrangements. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I understand that. I’m not asking you to move her to the head of the line.” He glanced in my direction, then his eyes locked on Shara. “She was twenty-two when she got on that damned thing. I was twenty-seven. If you guys have it right, her age hasn’t changed. I’m thirty-eight now. She probably won’t make it off this time. Which means that the next time around, I’ll be forty-three. She won’t have changed. Doctor—?” He groaned. “I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.”

  “Michaels,” she said.

  “Dr. Michaels?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Michaels, she isn’t likely to be very interested in marrying somebody twice her age. This is probably my last chance with her. What I need you to do is to let me go on the Capella.”

  “Ron,” she said, “I can’t do that. The time we’ll have available is too short. Putting you on board will only take a few seconds. But the loss of those seconds will prevent someone else from getting off. Probably more than one person, in fact, because you’ll be bucking traffic. Look, I’m sorry. But putting more people on the ship just makes the problem bigger.”

  He stared down at one of the empty chairs, hoping she’d ask him to sit. She didn’t. He looked my way again. And I remember thinking how this was a situation to stay out of if there’d ever been one. But I didn’t. “Ron,” I said, “there’s a chance if you went on board that, in the confusion, she’d get off.”

  “Okay,” he said. It wasn’t clear any longer which of us he was talking to. He touched his link. “Thank you both. Dr. Michaels, you have my code, in case you change your mind. Please think about it.”

  ELEVEN

  Take the plunge, or hesitate at the brink,

  Seize the moment, or stop to think.

  Make the call, and know for certain

  That to stand on the side will bring down the curtain.

  —Richard Hobbes, Moonlight Lessons, 2417 C.E.

  “Alex,” Marissa said, “I feel the same way you do. I’d love to know why Grandpop never said anything.” We were at her house, which was an exquisite manor with Greek columns and circular windows looking out across the ocean. “There must be a way to find out.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Alex, “as things stand now, we don’t even know where to begin. I’ve been looking at everything I can find about him. But I still don’t have a handle on what happened. We just don’t really have much to work with.”

  She was sitting in a sofa, looking weary. “I hate to give up that easily.”

  “We’re not giving up. Maybe someone who knew him will remember something that will help us. You and your folks should continue to think about who else there might be.”

  “You don’t sound optimistic, Alex.”

  “To be honest, I’m not.”

  * * *

  There’s a piece of advice my mom offered one time that has stayed with me: Never back off something you really want to do because you’re afraid of failing. You don’t want to get near the end of your life and wonder whether you might have succeeded if you’d only tried harder.

  I knew that would be the case with Alex. If he let this thing go, it would always haunt him. But I didn’t say anything. If I tried persuading him to do something, his position would only harden. Anyhow, we’re all aware that the subconscious knows what’s best for us. As long as the conscious mind doesn’t get in the way. So I sat back and waited for him to tell me he’d found something, or whatever, and that we were headed for Earth.

  And I waited.

  When, after a couple of weeks, nothing happened, Marissa let me know how disappointed she was. “The reason I came to you guys,” she said, “was your boss’s reputation. He’s supposed to be a guy who gets things done.”

  * * *

  We had a rule at the country house: You never, ever, for any reason, summon the avatar of Gabriel Benedict. He was gone, and maybe we’d get him back and maybe we wouldn’t. That’s another issue. In any case, the experience had been painful, and neither of us needed to have an electronic version of him showing up to remind us of how much we’d lost.

  This whole thing with avatars has always puzzled me. Why people would want to get simulacra of themselves onto the net, or, worse, why we’d want to sit and talk with people we once loved who were no longer really there, just seems crazy. They have some value for people conducting an investigation, but other than that, the whole process seems counterproductive. The number of marriages breaking up, for example, because people are more interested in younger versions of their spouses, has gone through the roof.

  All right: Back to the issue at hand. Gabe had known Baylee. There was a possibility his avatar might be able to provide some helpful information. I thought about breaking the rule and bringing his avatar in, but Alex would have taken umbrage. So I dug a photograph out of the collection, one in which Gabe was wearing his charge-the-hill expeditionary hat, framed it, and put it on my desk.

  Next time Alex came into my office, it caught his eye immediately. “What’s that?” he said.

  “Just came across it this morning. You know, I miss him.”

  “I know.” He was playing it straight. “I do, too.” Then he surprised me. “We need to talk to him.”

  “To Gabe?”

  “Yes. He might have an idea about this thing with Baylee. Jacob, get him for us, please.”

  I braced myself, but Alex sat down and smiled politely when the avatar appeared moments later.

  * * *

  “I don’t think I can be of much help,” Gabe’s avatar said. “I never really knew Garnett Baylee that well.”

  “Welcome to the club,” said Alex.

  “He was a decent man, as far as I could tell. You could trust him. I was pretty yo
ung when I met him. What I particularly liked was that he really cared about being an archeologist. In fact, he might have been the reason I got so interested in the profession myself.” Gabe was dressed the way I remembered him, in fatigues with a hat very much like the one in the picture. And he had a laser strapped to his belt.

  “Can you think of any reason,” Alex asked, “why he’d have brought the Corbett home and done nothing with it other than toss it into his closet?”

  “No. I can’t imagine how that could have happened.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “If you don’t have a specific lead, and it sounds as if you don’t, I’d just let it go. Trying to chase this down sounds like a waste of time.”

  “There might be more artifacts out there.”

  “That’s unlikely, Alex, and you know that as well as I do. If there were more, they’d have been in his closet, too. To be honest, I can’t imagine why you are pursuing this.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Ineffective use of your time. Occasionally, things happen that we can’t account for. Just let it go.”

  “Okay, Gabe. One more question: When Baylee was on Earth, there must have been someone he spent time with. A friend.”

  “I can help you there,” he said. “Try Les Fremont. He was director of the North American Archeological Institute. The problem is that he wasn’t young when Baylee was running around. He may not even be alive now. But if Baylee had anything he would have been willing to share, Fremont would be as good a bet as anyone.”

  * * *

  I called Marissa. “We have a couple of good offers for you on the transmitter. But Alex thinks you should be patient. We’re pretty sure others are on the way.”

  “My dad thinks we should do what Grandpop would have done. Decline the museum’s offer and give it to them.”

  “Marissa, I wouldn’t want to get in the middle of this, but keep in mind it’s worth a lot of money.”

  * * *

  Alex makes it a point to take me to dinner once, and sometimes twice, a week. We vary the restaurants, but on that night we headed off to Mully’s Top of the World. Mully’s is located on the summit of Mt. Oskar, and it provides a magnificent view of surrounding mountains, the Melony, and Lake Accord. There were a couple of boats on the lake. They were lit up and apparently partying.

  We’re supposed to have an arrangement that we don’t talk business on these occasions, but, of course, that’s an impossible objective. Although I should give him credit: He tries. He was talking about Payton’s Follies, a show he’d seen the previous evening. It was a musical satire on inept guys trying to figure out ways to bed women. You know, the usual. When he’d finished, he mentioned as a kind of by-the-way that he’d had a call from John Kraus. “He tells me the Capella Families is organizing a virtual protest. You know why?”

  I shrugged. “I can guess.”

  “Apparently your buddy JoAnn ran another experiment. And it worked. They shut down the drive completely, and the ship just stayed where it was. They’re going to try it again. Try to get a sense of how safe it is, I guess. The Capella Families wants them to stop, to touch absolutely nothing and bring the families out as best they can.”

  TWELVE

  The mind has a thousand eyes

  And the heart but one.

  Yet the light of a whole life dies

  When love is done.

  —F. W. Bourdillon, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1873 C.E.

  Shara called to explain why I hadn’t been informed. “There’s so much political pressure right now,” she said. “They didn’t want to take a chance on the word getting out before they had a chance to run the test. But it was beautiful. Everything went exactly according to schedule. But there’s still a problem.”

  “It was another yacht,” I said.

  The news was all over the talk shows by noon. The reactions of the pundits ran the gamut from being horrified to observations that at last someone was showing some sense. Jerry Dumas, on The Dumas Report, called it, “finally, the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.” Lucia Brent thought it was “a disaster waiting to happen.” Hosts and guests on The Daytime Show and Jennifer in the Morning were appalled and grateful, sometimes simultaneously.

  Several days after it started, Jacob informed us we had a call from a Mr. Culbertson. “He’d like an appointment to talk with you, Alex. He’s a lawyer. Represents the Capella Families.”

  “I know who they are, Jacob,” said Alex. “Tell him I’m busy.” Alex shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell these people.” We were in the conference room, where he was looking through an inventory of eleventh-century Jamalian antiques that had just become available.

  He marked off a couple that we would pursue. Then Jacob was back. “Sir, he says it’s very important.”

  Alex sighed. “Okay. Put him through.” He sat back and looked out the window at the old cemetery stones on the perimeter of the property. I got up to leave, but he waved me back into my seat.

  * * *

  Leonard Culbertson seemed like a decent guy. I guess I expected one of those smarmy lawyers who always show up in the police procedurals and the law-firm commercials. But he was quiet and unassuming, both qualities I didn’t associate with his profession. He had thick silver hair that he had to keep brushing back. And blue eyes that had all the appeal of youth. After he’d been introduced to Alex, he asked who I was.

  “Chase Kolpath,” he said. “She’s my associate.”

  He studied me for a moment. “Ms. Kolpath, do you have a connection with Gabriel Benedict?”

  That surprised me. “He was my former employer,” I said. “And a friend.” I was still talking about him in the past tense.

  “All right. I assume you both know what our concerns are. And Ms. Kolpath, you’re welcome to participate in the discussion, if you like. Assuming Mr. Benedict has no objection.”

  “I don’t have time for a discussion,” said Alex. “Please keep it short, Mr. Culbertson.” He looked my way. Did I want to get clear?

  I hesitated because I didn’t know what was coming. But there was no way I could walk away from it.

  “You’ve had an extraordinary career, Mr. Benedict,” said Culbertson.

  Alex turned his let’s-move-it-along gaze on the lawyer. “It’s been a good run. The downside was losing my uncle.”

  “I’m sure. You must have been very happy when you learned he was still alive. That it might be possible to bring him back.”

  “Of course. May I ask you to get to the point?”

  “Since you’ve been connected with this from the beginning, you understand more than most what’s involved. The scientists want to experiment with the star-drive unit. They think that they can fine-tune it, and the ship will no longer be dragged into that odd area they call transcendental space.”

  “Transdimensional space, you mean. But actually, we’re talking about a warp.”

  Culbertson laughed it away. “I’m sorry. My physics has always been a bit on the weak side. The point is they’re not sure. There’s a possibility we could lose the ship permanently. Along with its passengers.”

  “I don’t know whether they’re certain or not, Mr. Culbertson. You’d have to ask them.”

  The lawyer was leaning out of a large, cushy armchair. “I don’t have to ask them. They are telling us that there’s no guarantee. They like the odds. That’s what they’re saying. Mr. Benedict, I represent the families of more than four hundred passengers. The families do not want anybody screwing around with the drive unit. They don’t want anyone taking any chance on stranding their loved ones permanently on that ship.” He looked across at Alex, then at me. “I’d be surprised if you don’t feel the same way.”

  “Mr. Culbertson, I don’t believe they are going to take any chances with the lives of the passengers.”

  “I hope you’re right. We w
ould all like to get these people back to their families as quickly as possible. But I’m sure you’d agree that risking all those lives to hurry the process along when otherwise they seem to be in no danger is at the very least reckless?”

  “Possibly. The problem is that, as things are now, a lot of families are broken apart. Some kids face the prospect of not seeing their parents for twenty-five years. Or more. I know you represent families who want to exercise caution on this. But there are several hundred other families who are saying that their family members have already been gone eleven years. That they want them back. In some cases, husbands are separated from wives. There are teenagers on board, without their parents.” Alex’s eyes were locked on the lawyer. “For that matter, there’s no guarantee that the cycle will hold indefinitely. It’s possible that no matter what we do, the ship could go down and not come back. They just don’t know, Mr. Culbertson.”

  “What about you, Ms. Kolpath?” he asked. “Where do you stand on this?”

  “I hate it,” I said. “I’m grateful they don’t need me to make the decision because I don’t know what the right call would be.”

  “I understand,” he said. “But somebody’s going to have to decide. Now either we—the concerned families—can make it, or we can leave it to the physicists. If they get their way, and we lose all those people, they’ll simply comment that these things are not definitive, and they took the most appropriate action. They don’t have a serious stake in the game.”

  I kept going: “Do you really believe that, Mr. Culbertson? Nobody has a higher stake than they do. JoAnn Suttner is putting everything on the line. She feels personally responsible for the lives of those people. If she can’t make the right thing happen, it will follow her through the rest of her life.”

  Culbertson was looking into a corner of the room. At a photo of Gabe. “Is that your uncle?”

  “Yes,” said Alex.

  “You look alike.” He rearranged himself in the chair, trying to get comfortable. “Mr. Benedict, if they asked your advice, what would it be?”