“Okay.”
“Another way would be to accelerate. Or slam on the brakes. Either way, the intruder goes downtown.”
“So for something to get in, the people inside had to cooperate, right?”
“Or at least not take action against it.”
He sat for several minutes without saying anything. Jacob was running a report from the team that had investigated the interior of the Polaris after it had been returned to Skydeck. No indication occupants were at any time in distress.
No sign of a struggle.
No evidence of hurried departure.
Clothes, toiletries, and other items present suggest that when personnel departed, they took with them only what they were wearing.
Open copy of Lost Souls in one of the compartments and half-eaten apple in the common room imply ship was taken completely by surprise. Book is believed to have belonged to Boland. Towel found in the washroom had Klassner’s DNA.
“I wonder who directed the search,” he said.
“Survey did.”
“I mean, at Survey.”
“Jess Taliaferro,” said Jacob.
Alex folded his hands and seemed lost in thought. “The same guy who disappeared himself.”
“Yes. That is an odd coincidence, isn’t it?”
“They never found him either.”
“No. He left his office one day, and nobody ever saw him again.”
“When?” he asked.
“Two and a half years after the Polaris.”
“What do you think happened to him, Chase?”
“I have no idea. Probably a suicide.”
Alex considered the possibility. “If that is what happened, would it have been connected with the Polaris?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. The common wisdom is that Taliaferro was distraught by the disaster. He dreamed up the idea to send a group of VIPs out to watch the event, to accompany the research ships. He knew Boland and Klassner personally. They were both past chairs of the White Clock. Of which he was a contributor and fund-raiser.”
“The old population-control group,” said Alex.
“Yes.” I told Jacob to shut down. He complied, the curtains opened, and bright, dazzling sunlight broke into the room. “When the search found nothing, according to Taliaferro’s colleagues at Survey, he got depressed.” I could see it happening easily enough, the idealistic bureaucrat who had lost a ship’s captain and six of the most celebrated people of the age and couldn’t even explain what had happened to them. “I’ve been reading about him. After the Polaris, he used to go to Carimba Canyon sometimes and just stand out there and watch the sun go down.”
Alex’s eyes had become hooded. “He might have jumped into the Melony. Been carried out to sea.”
“It could have happened that way.”
“But there wasn’t a suicide note?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Chase,” he said, “I wonder if I could persuade you to do me a favor?”
Georg Kloski had been with the team of analysts that went over the Polaris when it was brought back. He had to be older than he looked. He could have passed for a guy in his midforties, but he was at least twice that age. “I work out,” he said, when I commented on his appearance.
He was about medium size and build, affable, happily retired on Guillermo Island in the Gulf. I introduced myself, told him I was collecting information for a research project, which was true enough, and asked whether I could take him to lunch. It’s always more convenient, of course, to ask questions over the circuit. But you can get a lot more out of people if you treat for tea and a steak sandwich.
He said yes, of course, he’d never decline lunch with a beautiful woman. I knew right away I was going to like this guy. I flew down next morning and met him at a waterfront restaurant. I think it was called the Pelican. There are, of course, no pelicans on Rimway, but Georg (we got quickly to a first-name basis) told me the owners were from Florida. Did I know where Florida was?
I knew it was on Earth somewhere, so I guessed Europe and he said close enough.
He lived alone. Some of his grandkids were nearby on the mainland. “But not too close,” he said with a wink. His hair was thick and black, streaked with gray. Broad shoulders, lots of muscle, a helping of flab. Good smile. Every woman in the restaurant seemed to know him. “I was mayor at one time,” he said, by way of explanation. But we both knew there was more to it than that.
So we sat for the first few minutes, getting acquainted, listening to the shrieks of seabirds. The Pelican was located off a stone walkway that ran along the waterfront. The island has a much balmier climate than Andiquar. Hordes of people in beachwear were strolling past. Kids trailed balloons and some folks rode in motorized coaches. Guillermo was popular because it had real thrill rides, glider chutes, tramways, boat rides, a haunted house. It was a place for people who wanted something a bit more challenging than the virtuals, which induced the same heart-stopping effects, but were always accompanied by the knowledge you were actually sitting in a dark room, perfectly safe. Which some folks thought took the edge off things.
From the Pelican we could see a parachute drop.
“It was a terrible time,” he told me, when I finally steered the conversation around to the Polaris. “People didn’t know what to think.”
“What did you think?” I asked.
“It was the lander that really threw me. I mean, it would have been easy enough to imagine that they’d all decided to go for a joyride somewhere and gotten lost, or hit by an asteroid. Or something. At least it would have been a theoretical possibility. But the lander was still moored in the launch bay. And that last message—”
“—Departure imminent—”
“—Imminent. It still sends a chill down my back. Whatever happened, happened very fast. Happened within the few seconds between the time she sent the message and the moment she’d have initiated the jump. It’s as if something seized them, shut them down, cut off their comms, and took the people off.”
The sandwiches arrived. I tried mine, chewed on it for a minute, and asked whether he had any ideas at all how it could have happened, other than superior technology.
“Look, Chase,” he said, “it has to be something out there way ahead of us. I mean, on their own, it wouldn’t even have been physically possible for them to leave the immediate area of the ship. Not without the lander. Maddy had four pressure suits on board. They were still there when the Peronovski arrived on the scene.”
There was a tourist artist out on the walkway, sketching a young woman. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and smiled prettily for him. “Georg,” I said, “is it possible there could have been some kind of virus or disease that drove everyone insane?”
Two young women in see-through suits strolled past. Followed by a couple of guys. “Shocking what people wear these days,” he said with a smile. His eyes never left the women until they disappeared past the window. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. But even had something like that happened, had they been rendered incompetent by a bug of some sort that subsequently became undetectable to the cleanup crew, so what? It still doesn’t explain how they got off the ship.”
The tea was good. I listened to the roar of the surf. It was solid and real and reassuring.
“No,” he continued. “The suits were still there. If they went out one of the airlocks, they were either already dead, or they died a few seconds later. You ever been on a ship, Chase?”
“Occasionally.”
“The outer hatch won’t move until the air pressure in the airlock goes to zero. Anybody trying to leave who doesn’t have a suit is going to be in pretty bad shape before the door even opens. But let’s say he holds his breath and doesn’t mind that things get a little brisk. He jumps out. It’s a good jump. Say, a meter a second. The Peronovski gets there six days later. How far away is the jumper?”
“Not very far,” I said.
He pulled a napkin over, produce
d a pen, and started scribbling. When he’d finished he looked up. “I make it at most five hundred eighteen kilometers. Round it off to six hundred.” He tossed the pen down and looked at me. “That’s easily within the search range of the Peronovski’s sensors.”
“Did they do a search?”
“Sure. They got zero.” He sighed, and I wondered how many times he’d thought about this during the past sixty years, whether he’d ever been free of it for a full day. “If I hadn’t lived through it, I’d say that what happened to the Polaris wasn’t possible.” He ordered a lime kolat and sat staring at the window until it came.
“When they brought the ship back,” I said, “did you find anything you hadn’t expected to? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“No. Nothing. Their clothes were all there. Toothbrushes. Shoes. I mean, what it looked like was that they’d all stepped out for a minute.” He leaned over the table. His eyes were dark brown, and they got very intense. “I’ll tell you, Chase. This was all a long time ago, but it still scares me. It’s the only really spooky thing I’ve seen in my life. But it makes me wonder if sometimes the laws of physics just don’t apply.”
Georg looked like a guy who ordinarily enjoyed his food. But he only nibbled at his sandwich. “We spent weeks inside the ship. We pretty much stripped it. Took everything out and labeled it and sent it to the lab. The lab didn’t find anything that advanced the investigation. Eventually, they put the stuff in a vault somewhere. Later the Trendel Commission came in and sorted through it. I was there for that, too.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but how thorough were you?”
“I was only a tech. Fresh out of school. But I thought we were reasonably thorough. The commission brought in outside people so nobody could claim cover-up. I knew one of the investigators they brought in. Amanda Deliberté. Died early. In childbirth. You believe that? She’s the only case of a childbirth fatality we’ve had during the last half century. Anyhow, Amanda wasn’t given to screwing around. But they didn’t find anything more than we did. I’ll tell you, Chase, there was nothing there. Whatever happened to those people, it happened fast. I mean, it had to, right? Maddy didn’t even have time to get off a Code White. Not a blip. People talk about some sort of alien whatzis, but how the hell could they get through the airlock before she’d sent off an alert?” He tried the drink and looked at me across the top of the glass. “I’ve never been able to come up with any kind of explanation. They were just gone, and we didn’t have any idea, any at all, what had happened to them.”
I watched a couple of people seated against the wall trying to mollify a cranky kid. “Your team took everything out of the Polaris, right?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?”
“Well, we left the fittings.”
“How about clothes? Jewelry? Books? Anything like that get left behind?”
“Yeah. I’m sure we left some stuff. We were looking for things that would have thrown some light on what happened. Look, Chase, it’s been a long time. But we wouldn’t have left anything of consequence.”
NiNe
The disappearance of Jess Taliaferro embodied more than simply the loss of a supremely competent administrator. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to describe him as a great man. But he was the sort of person who works behind the scenes to make great men (and women) possible. We tend to overlook him, because he never aspired to political office. He never won a major award. He did not show up on the newscasts, save as the spokesman for a befuddled Survey when seven people walked off the Polaris into oblivion. But he was an inspiration and a bulwark to all of us who wanted to provide a better life and a brighter future for everyone.
——Yan Quo, Taliaferro: The Gentle Warrior
Alex told me to take the next day off to compensate for the travel, but I went in anyhow that afternoon. When I got there, he was looking at screens filled with information about Jess Taliaferro.
The onetime director is the subject of three major biographies. He has appeared at least tangentially in dozens of histories of his era. I’d thumbed through much of the material by then. It was not that he was a towering political or scientific figure, or that the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research broke new boundaries during his thirteen-year tenure at its helm. But he seemed to know all the groundbreakers of the era. He was constantly in the company of councillors and presidents, major show business personalities, Galaxy prizewinners, and other news-makers. But more important from my point of view was that he seemed to be a man of iron principle. He was a champion of humane causes. Take care of the environment. Arrange things so nobody gets too much power. Make sure we educate, rather than indoctrinate, our kids. Find a way to establish a permanent peace with the Mutes.
He was unstinting in his exertions, and he never backed away from a fight. He supported efforts to reduce government corruption, to achieve stable populations on the worlds of the Confederacy, to reduce the power of the media, to control corporate thieves. He battled developers who were willing to destroy archeological sites and pristine wilderness. He did what he could to protect species in danger of extinction.
He, Boland, and Klassner were close allies in these culture wars. “People never appreciated him,” one biographer observed, “until he closed up his office that last evening, said good night to his staff, and walked away from the world.”
In those days, Survey was located in Union Hall, an old stone building that had once been a courthouse. When Taliaferro was ready to go home, his skimmer routinely picked him up at the rooftop pad. But on that final day, he instructed his AI that he would be dining out and that he’d call for transportation if and when he needed it.
With whom was he planning to eat?
“Nobody knows,” said Jacob. “When investigators tried to figure out what had happened, they discovered he’d pretty much cleaned out his bank accounts, except for a modest sum that eventually went to his daughter, Mary. His only child, by the way.”
“What about his wife?”
“He was widowed. She died young. Boating accident. According to friends, he never stopped mourning her. But there was another woman later in his life.”
“Who was that?” asked Alex.
“Ivy Cumming. She was a physician.”
“How much money did he have?”
“Millions.”
That surprised Alex. “Where’d it come from?” he asked.
“It was old money,” I said. “His family’d been wealthy for generations. When its resources came under his control he began using it to support various causes. He seems to have been utterly unselfish.”
I had dinner with a friend, went home, and decided to take a whack at the Taliaferro avatar. I’d seen it briefly at the Polaris convention, of course, when I didn’t even know who he was. Now I had a few questions.
There’s always a problem, of course, with an avatar. It looks like the person it’s representing, but you know it’s really just a projection backed by a data retrieval system. People trust data retrieval systems, though, and the avatars look absolutely real. They’re convincing, so everyone has a tendency to take these things at their word, when in fact all the information is based on the input provided by the subject himself, which is to say, it’s somebody putting his best foot forward. And there might be additions by interested persons with agendas of their own. Consequently, they’re no more reliable than the subject himself might have been. If you’re approaching one of these conversations to learn something rather than to be entertained, you have to bring along a healthy skepticism.
Jess Taliaferro appeared standing on a rocky beach. He was a small man, middle-aged, with fading auburn hair that would not stay down and eyes that seemed a bit too far apart. He had too much stomach and not enough shoulder. When he moved, as he did constantly during our conversation, he was awkward, weaving from side to side in a flatfooted manner. There was much of the camaroo about him, the big southeastern bird that one finds waddli
ng along shorelines looking for stranded sealife. He was quite ordinary in appearance. I would not have thought of him as a driving force. But there you are. You just never know.
“Hello, Ms. Kolpath,” he said. “You were at the convention, I believe.”
“Yes, I was. I enjoyed your presentation.”
“Very kind of you.” He stopped by a stone bench, facing out to sea. It seemed to be the only structure in the area. “May I?” he asked.
“Please,” I said.
He sat down. “It’s lovely here at night.” He was dressed in the antique manner of his era, colorful shirt, wide-open collar, cuffed trousers, a rakish blue hat with a tassel.
“Yes,” I said.
“How may I help you?”
How, indeed? A long wave broke and rolled up the beach. “Dr. Taliaferro, please tell me about yourself. What you care about. What you’re proud of. How you felt on the day the Polaris set out. What you think happened.”
“About myself?” He looked surprised.
“Yes,” I said. “Please.”
“Most people want to hear about the Polaris. Not about me.”
“You know why.”
“Sure. But it’s as if I never did anything in my life except send those people to Delta Kay.”
He talked about his family, his dreams, his years of service to Survey.
“Did you ever have any indication at all,” I asked, “that there might be somebody else out there, other than the Mutes?”
His eyes slid shut. “No,” he said. “Oh, look, we knew there would be other sentient life somewhere. We’ve always known that. The universe is just too big. It happened twice that we knew about, so we understood that it necessarily existed elsewhere. Once you had that much, once you knew it wasn’t the result of some virtually impossible combination of events, then there had to be others. Had to be. The real question was whether they were scattered so far in time and space that we would never encounter another in the lifetime of the species.”
There were lights moving at sea.
“An intersection seemed so unlikely that we never seriously considered it. I mean, we had a policy in place, guidelines on what to do if anyone actually saw another ship out there. But we never believed it would happen. And we certainly assumed that if it did, the aliens would not be hostile. Cautious, perhaps, but not hostile.”
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