Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

  “You have any theories about what happened?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “I think they were caught in the warp longer than anybody expected. I think, instead of shrinking, the time element stretched out.”

  * * *

  I thought we’d gone pretty much as far as we could with Garnett Baylee. But Alex looked interested when I passed the Marjorie Benjamin message to him next morning, and an hour later, he was off to talk with her. He came back looking exasperated. “Well,” he said, “she was able to provide some new information about Dmitri Zorbas.”

  “Anything useful?” I asked.

  “He attended Larissa University.”

  “You’re kidding. That was all she had?”

  “That’s it. That’s, of course, where it’s located. He went back to Greece to get his master’s, and met his future wife, Eva Rodia, there. Apparently he planned to stay in Europe, but they headed back to America because Zorbas missed his family. She also told me that Zorbas wrote an autobiography, Lost Dreams. It’s the perfect title because the book is also lost.” He collapsed into a chair. “I wish we could get our hands on that.”

  “Is there any evidence the book might have explained what happened to the artifacts?”

  “Marjorie didn’t know, but she doubted he’d have included that kind of information. He lived and died during the early years of the Dark Age, so he would probably have had no security to rely on. She tells me that people generally believed that the economic downturn and the outbreaks of violence and all the rest of it were the end of the world. That it was Armageddon. But Zorbas never bought into that idea. He expected the problems to go on for a long time though probably not for six or seven centuries. But in any case, he was an optimist. Which is why she says he made a major effort to salvage the artifacts. She can’t believe, though, that he’d have been likely to reveal their location to anyone other than his family or a few people he thought he could trust. Unfortunately, he died in the general holocaust. And maybe so did whoever he took into his confidence.”

  “Including his wife?”

  “Nobody really knows what happened to her. The whole story lacks specifics.”

  “How’d he die? Do we know that?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s no secret. He was still living in Union City, and taking care of the Prairie House when a nearby town, Seymour, was overrun by thugs. They shot their way in, began burning everything, raping the women, you name it, I guess. The townspeople fought back as best they could and called for help. According to the legend, Zorbas rounded up a militia group they’d put together, and they went to Seymour. They drove out the thugs, but he died in the battle. Marjorie Benjamin said there were a number of stories about his helping defend the area. He was apparently almost a mythic figure at the time.”

  “It’s a pity someone didn’t record where he’d put the artifacts.”

  “If somebody had, Chase, I doubt we’d have anything to look for now.”

  “What did Marjorie think? She give any credence to his having stashed everything somewhere?”

  “She’s like us. She wants to believe it.”

  * * *

  Next day, a second transmission came in from Khaled. “I got your message, but giving up is a losing proposition. I’ll let you know what my schedule looks like as soon as it takes shape. You can tell me you don’t have time if you want. Or even that you don’t want me to come. I’ll understand. And I’ll abide by your wishes. But I’m just not going to walk away from you unless you push a little bit. I hope you don’t mind my taking this into my own hands. I’m looking forward to spending some time with you again, Chase. If you’re willing. Incidentally, I’ll only be in the area for a week. But don’t worry. You won’t have to entertain me or anything like that. I have sightseeing plans, so I won’t be getting in your way. See you soon. I hope.”

  “Jacob,” I said, “message going back.”

  “Very good.” I detected a note of approval. But coming up with the right response wasn’t easy. And after a couple of minutes Jacob asked if I’d changed my mind.

  “No,” I said. “I was just thinking. But okay, let’s go.”

  “When you’re ready.”

  “‘Khaled, I’ll confess I’d enjoy seeing you again. But I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Not right now. Eventually, we’ll probably get back to Earth. I’ll let you know if it’s going to happen.’ Make sure it goes priority, Jacob, okay?”

  * * *

  Shara called in the middle of the night. “They found them.” She paused, and I held my breath. “They’re saying they’ve been dead for thirty years.”

  “What?”

  “Thirty years, Chase. Probably died of starvation.”

  “You were right.”

  “Yeah. I guess. Time was moving differently for them than it was for us. But not the way we’d expected. They think that they survived for about four years, until they ran out of food.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  There is no emotion so painful as a happy memory.

  —Aneille Kay, Christopher Sim at War, 1288

  By midafternoon, the media had the story. The victims, the networks were reporting, had died when their food supply ran out. Shock was deep and widespread. Nothing like this, everyone was saying, had ever been reported before.

  The HV ran on and on. Physicists tried to explain how something like that was possible while political commentators predicted that there would be no further talk about manipulating star drives. Walter Brim, a guest on Straight Talk, asked the viewers to imagine how terrible it would be if something like that happened on the Capella.

  I got through the afternoon as best I could, needed some medication to get to sleep that night. Alex called in the morning to make sure I was okay, and suggested we meet at the Hillside.

  When I arrived, he was already there, seated at a corner table. He raised a hand and smiled. “You still okay?”

  “I’ll live.”

  “Apparently, Nick arranged things to conserve power. That’s why so much was shut down. But I guess they couldn’t do anything about the food supply. Believe it or not, they had enough food on board to get them through it if they could have prevented it from spoiling.”

  “I guess,” I said. “I’m not sure though I would have wanted to live inside that thing for four years.”

  We ordered whatever off the menu. I don’t recall what it was, just that I drank a lot of coffee. And we were back to talking about living for the day because you never know about tomorrow. Nick and JoAnn had seemed so alive when they were on the Grainger bridge.

  The Hillside was crowded. “Never noticed before,” I said, “but having almost a full house lends a sense of security to the place.”

  He reached across the table and pressed my wrist. “The world has changed, love.” He was about to continue when his link sounded. He activated it, listened, and nodded. “Good, John, let me know when, okay?” And then: “Yes. She’s with me now.”

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “There’s going to be a memorial for JoAnn and Nick at the headquarters building. Middle of the week. They’ll tell us when they lock in the night.”

  * * *

  That evening, President Davis spoke. He stood behind a lectern, the blue and white colors of the Confederacy draped across the wall behind him. “Friends and citizens,” he said, “you already know of the losses we incurred during an effort to find a better way to manage the rescue of those trapped on the Capella. JoAnn Suttner and Nicholas Kraus, members of the Sanusar Recovery Force working under the auspices of the Department of Transportation, lost their lives in the attempt. I am sorry to report also that, as a result of the experiment, we know now that the technique under development cannot be relied on. We will not risk the lives of the people on the Capella. Therefore, we will be falling back on the
lifeboats that we have been preparing for the last few months.

  “It is a method we would have preferred not to use because it is more time-consuming than we wish. But it is our safest way to proceed. Consequently, we now face the reality that we cannot take everyone off prior to experiencing another jump. In fact, we will be able to provide an immediate escape for only about two hundred of those on board.

  “Having said that, I want to remind everyone that our first consideration remains the safe return of our friends and family members, not on rushing to get them off quickly. Our primary concern is their safety. I regret this reality. But we are confronted with a force of nature. We have no reasonable choice except to wait. It is a price we must be willing to pay to bring this unhappy state of affairs to a successful conclusion.”

  * * *

  Three nights later, we went downtown to the Riverside Hotel for the memorial service, which had been originally scheduled for the Department of Transportation Building. But the planners had been surprised by the public response to the event. “I don’t think we realized,” Senator Caipha Delmar told us, “that people would turn out the way they have.” Obviously, the sacrifice JoAnn and Nick made had an impact.

  Several thousand persons jammed into the hotel. About half got into the Starlight Room, where the ceremony was to be held. The rest filled the lobby, the restaurant, the bar, and a second showroom where the event was put on-screen. John came out onto a raised platform precisely on time, thanked the audience for their support, and introduced himself as Nick’s brother and as the director of the operation that had taken the two lives. “At first,” he said, “I’d planned to describe this simply as an effort gone wrong. But it served to show us that the potential downside of trying to stop the process is too high, and in that sense, because of JoAnn and Nick, twenty-six hundred people will not be put at risk. I’m proud to be Nick’s brother and to have been JoAnn’s colleague.”

  That drew somber applause. “Whatever it takes,” he continued, “we will not waste the sacrifice these two heroes have made. We will get those people off the Capella. The lifeboats are ready to go. We’ll take advantage of its return to get the lifeboats to it, to get them on board, and when it comes back in five years we’ll get the passengers and crew off, all of them, and we’ll throw the biggest party Rimway has ever seen.”

  The place exploded.

  He waited until things calmed down and invited Shara onstage to say something.

  She took her place behind the lectern. “I’ll never forget JoAnn,” she said. “She was young and brilliant, and had so much to give, and in the end, she gave it all. And Nick. He’d been a peerless friend. And he was a professional interstellar captain whose first concern was his passengers and crew. If he were here tonight, he’d consider that the ultimate compliment.”

  Prize-winning physicist Akala Gruder said that she had known JoAnn and could not believe she was gone. “In a sense, she never will be.” She had never met Nick, she said. And added, “My loss.”

  A few others expressed similar sentiments. Then we got a surprise. John introduced President Davis. He came in through a side door and, like everyone else that night, he spoke without notes. “We are gathered here this evening,” he said, “to pay tribute to our friends JoAnn Suttner and Nick Kraus. I don’t know that I can add anything that hasn’t already been said. Other than that it gives me great hope for the future to know that these two friends were by no means unique. Where, I wonder, do we get such men and women?

  “One more thing. The parents of both are present with us tonight. They were invited to speak this evening, but they declined. We can all understand that. The emotional pressure is high. And I think their natural inclination is to let others do the talking. But that said, I would now like to invite them to come up to receive the Presidential Medal of Honor, which is hereby granted to JoAnn Suttner, and to Nicholas Kraus, for extraordinary heroism in the cause of providing assistance to those in desperate need.”

  JoAnn’s husband, Jerry, was halfway across the Confederacy and had not been able to attend. But both sets of parents, Laura and Joseph Dayson, and Sandra and Jack Kraus, made their way onto the platform. The President handed them the awards, they exchanged a few comments, everybody wiped their eyes, and it was over.

  * * *

  In the morning, I was just settling behind my desk when Jacob announced that I had a call from Nick’s mother. “I saw you at the memorial last night, Chase,” she said. “I tried to get to you, but we lost you in the crowd.” That brought an uneasy moment.

  “Hello, Ms. Kraus. It’s nice to hear from you. Please accept my condolences on Nick’s loss.” I paused, not sure where the call was going. “What can I do for you?”

  “Call me Sandy, please. I know Shara, and she told me how things went.” My heart picked up a beat. “I wanted to say that I’m glad you and she were there. And that I hope you’re not too upset.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. Suddenly I was back in the passenger cabin with Nick while he asked whether he could take me to Cranston’s. “I wish I could have helped.”

  “You were there. It’s all you could do. Jack and I just wanted to say thanks. And to make sure you’re okay.” Jack, of course, was Nick’s father.

  “Yes. Thank you. I’m all right. How about you?”

  “We’ll get through it, Chase.” Her voice caught. She said good-bye, and she was gone.

  THIRTY-THREE

  History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet; the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

  —Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book, 1820 C.E.

  Alex showed up next day on Morning Deadline, whose host was Cal Whitaker. The topic, of course, was the Capella. Its projected arrival was now two weeks away. Also appearing on the program was Levi Edward, a celebrated newscaster who’d retired twenty years earlier and was now visibly near the end of his life. His face was lined, and he grunted with pain every time he moved. “Too much running for interviews,” he said, trying to turn it into a joke. The familiar baritone was still there.

  Everyone in the audience knew that Edward’s wife, Lana, was on the lost cruise ship. He’d been at the forefront in pushing for a way to bring the Capella home. “I’d love to see her again.” He looked across the glass table at Alex. “If she has to wait another five years to get back—” He delivered a forced smile.

  “What do you think, Alex?” asked Whitaker. “Is there any chance at all they might find a way to stop it from moving ahead another five years? Or has the Grainger incident ruled that out beyond any chance?”

  Alex was clearly uncomfortable. “I don’t think there’s any chance now that we’ll find a quick fix,” he said. “If there’s any alternative plan in the works, I haven’t heard of it.”

  “But they’re still saying that manipulation would probably work. Despite the Grainger, physicists are claiming that if we simply reduce the power in the engines, the odds are ninety-five percent that everything would be okay, and the process will stop. Am I right?”

  “That’s what some of them are saying, Cal. But I don’t think the people who have to make the decision are willing to take that chance.”

  Edward nodded. “It’s certainly a rational approach. I don’t know whether I agree with it or not, but I can understand it. Alex, if it were your call, what would you do? Would you mess around with these lifeboats? If you were a passenger on the ship, what would you want them to do?”

  Alex’s eyes took on that distant look I knew so well. “If I were on board, with those odds, I think I’d want them to take the chance.”

  * * *

  Overnight, Project Lifeboat had become the focus of everyone’s attention. The news programs carried pictures of the “lifeboats,” and the various ho
sts walked us through them, counted the sixty-four seats in each, and assured their viewers that the vehicles seemed perfectly safe. Easy to say, of course, while they were perched on the landing strip at the Clayborn facility, where a substantial number of them were being manufactured.

  Each lifeboat was folded into a gray, cube-shaped, plastene package with rounded edges. The cube measured slightly less than four meters on a side, which made it too large to fit into the Belle-Marie or most of the yachts that would be involved in the rescue effort. They were also too large to be carried by the shuttles that routinely took people and cargo to Skydeck. So special shuttles were being built. From Skydeck, the packages were loaded onto anything in the rescue fleet that could accommodate them. Some ships could carry two. A few of the cargo vehicles would be able to take an entire complement of forty-four, which would constitute enough to take care of everyone on the Capella. The complication was that there’d be only a few hours to find the Capella and load the lifeboats. If the operation was conducted successfully, which is to say if we were able to load forty-four lifeboats, then everybody should be able to get off when the ship returns in five years.

  Each package was equipped with a pair of jets, which would be used to guide it into one of the Capella’s three cargo decks.

  We watched as a member of John Kraus’s team strolled around one of the packaged vehicles. The cube was marked TOP, BOTTOM, FRONT, and REAR. Four tanks were attached to the rear, and a half meter of black cord hung out of the front of the package. He reached for the cord, held it for a moment, then pulled on it.

  The cube literally unrolled as it filled with air and morphed into a lifeboat. Two aides attached small jets to the rear and sides of the vehicle. That would enable the AI pilot to control movement.

  A section of Skydeck had been set aside to manufacture the lifeboats, but because there was no way to know which ships would reach the Capella during the few hours they expected it to be accessible, thousands of them were needed, and that was far beyond anything that could be done on the station.