Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

  * * *

  I waited almost half an hour before clearance came. Then doors opened, and we passed through into the docking area and out through another set of doors into the night. Belle set course, and, finally, we were on our way.

  I made my jump, divided my time between reading and sleeping, and eventually surfaced just outside the target zone. At least that was Belle’s best estimate.

  Belle worked to get an angle on our position while I checked in with the Dauntless. When I’d finished, she informed me we’d need thirty-six hours to arrive on station. “Find a good book,” she said.

  We had some material about Baylee in the library, and I settled in with it. There were a couple of histories that had information on his assorted treks around terrestrial archeological sites. I sat looking at pictures of him standing with a spade in one hand at an Egyptian dig site, directing excavations at Chicago, examining ancient English inscriptions on a building in the American Southwest, talking with locals near Roman ruins. There were pictures of him and his team working at the Broomar site on Mars. And investigating an early space station orbiting Jupiter.

  Lawrence Southwick had obviously spent more time with him than I realized. He was in many of the photos. And there was somebody else. In a picture from the Nevada desert, near the Phoenix ruins, a young woman stood between Baylee and Southwick. A fedora was pulled down to block off the sun. It was hard to make out her face. But I knew her.

  “Who is it?” asked Belle.

  “It’s Madeleine O’Rourke.”

  “The reporter?”

  The caption identified her as Heli Tokata.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Enjoy your time with a friend. You will not have him forever.

  —Elizabeth Stiles, Singing in the Void, 1221

  I sent a message to Alex suggesting he run a search on Heli Tokata and informing him where I’d seen her picture. A response came back within a few hours. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s her. I can’t believe I missed it.”

  And finally we arrived in the search area. The Capella was due in a little over four days. I informed the Dauntless that we were on station and checked in with the squadron commanders who were assigned to me. Six were there; four were presumably still en route.

  There was no sign of movement in the sky, of course. We were too far from each other to see anything with the naked eye. I invested my time by going back over Alex’s research material. He’d added not only a few books to Belle’s library but also probably a thousand essays, reports, journals, and diaries. Belle offered to help, but Alex had already put her through the more obvious searches. I didn’t see any familiar names among the authors, so I picked a book titled Golden Vistas. It was a history written by Marcia Hadron. She was a contemporary, living on Toxicon. The fact that I wasn’t familiar with her name shouldn’t be interpreted as implying that she was an obscure voice in the field. To begin with, despite my job, I’m not nearly as well-read as I should be. Hadron had won several major prizes for her research.

  The title referred to archeological missions aimed at recovering artifacts from the early space age. The Golden Age. Baylee got an entire chapter. But Hadron barely mentioned the Prairie House or Dmitri Zorbas. Nevertheless, I read through the chapter, and in the process found my respect for Baylee continuing to grow. He was described as a man who inspired others, who accomplished a great deal during his career, but who consistently gave the credit to his colleagues. “They loved him,” Hadron says. “He was remarkably selfless in a profession that traditionally attracted giant egos.”

  “You know,” I told Belle, “you tend to hear the same thing about physicists, writers, lawyers, and actors. You never hear it said about physicians, though.”

  “Maybe,” Belle said, “it’s because physicians are in a position to inflict serious damage on a patient who criticizes them.”

  Baylee was mentioned a few times elsewhere in the book, but I couldn’t find anything relating to the hunt for the Apollo artifacts other than the author’s regret that they had never been recovered. Hadron dismissed the Dakota “myth,” as she called it. The artifacts, she believed, had almost certainly been taken out of Huntsville by thieves.

  “I have something you might be interested in,” said Belle. “It does not relate to the artifacts, but it is nevertheless intriguing.”

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “It’s from a doctoral dissertation by a young woman who cites Luciana Moretti as her source. Apparently Baylee and Southwick did an excavation at Tyuratam.”

  “Where?”

  “It was a Russian launch site. The Baikonur Cosmodome. It sent the first satellite into orbit in the 1950s. The exact date has been lost. Anyhow, according to the account, he and Southwick led an expedition there twenty years ago. Well, technically Southwick led the expedition. He was the guy with the money. A few of them went out rafting on a nearby river, the Syr Darya. And something in the water attacked them. No indication what it was. Anyway, one guy was killed. But Baylee emerged as the hero. He fought the thing off with a pole. Saved Southwick’s life. And two other people.”

  “I’m surprised,” I said, “Southwick never mentioned that to us.”

  “I am surprised as well.”

  “It might be a male thing. You don’t look very good floundering around in the water while somebody else tackles the alligator. Do they have alligators at Tyuratam?”

  “I have no data on that.”

  “Most guys,” I said, “would probably claim that they used an oar or something to help.” Whatever the truth was, Baylee kept looking better.

  * * *

  I found something else. It showed up in Trevor Nakada’s memoir, Life in the Ruins. Nakada was an archeologist who’d spent most of his career working in Asia. But he’d gotten his start with Baylee and Southwick in an underwater expedition that had brought back artifacts from the White House. The book had a substantial number of photos from the mission, most with Nakada on eminent display. One shows him standing between two young women, using a cloth to hold a tray. One of the young women has just removed her swim fins; the other has a broad-brimmed cap pulled down over her head. The caption reads: The author holds a nine-thousand-year-old platter which he has just recovered. Margaret Woods stands to his left, with an unidentified colleague.

  The unidentified colleague was Madeleine again.

  Belle’s light blinked. “Transmission coming in,” she said. “From the Dauntless.”

  It was John. “A few vehicles are not going to make it out here. So we’re doing some minor changes in positioning.” We acknowledged receipt and relayed it to the squadron commanders, all of whom had by then arrived. We were, however, still missing three ships.

  With about forty hours remaining before the Capella’s expected arrival, the last two ships in my unit checked in.

  * * *

  I rarely spend time alone in the Belle-Marie. Belle is company of sorts, but it’s not really quite the same as actually having a living person on board. On that flight, I did more workout sessions than usual. Took most of my meals on the bridge. After the first night, I slept in the passenger cabin. Anything to break up the routine.

  I couldn’t help thinking about the first time I’d boarded the Belle-Marie. I’d been with my mom, back in the days when she’d been Gabe’s pilot. Gabe had just bought the yacht, replacing the Tracker, which he’d had for years. They’d brought me aboard for the maiden voyage, which had only been a short flight to Lara. I was twenty at the time. That was when I decided I wanted the same career my mother was enjoying. A couple of years later, when Mom decided to go home and live a normal life, Gabe hired me, reluctantly, to replace her. I’m pretty sure he did it to make her happy, expecting he’d have to get rid of me pretty quickly. But everything worked out, and I spent a year and a half with him before he climbed on board the Capella. Ordinarily, he’d have used the Belle-Marie, but he was looking at a long flight and wanted to turn it into a vacation. So he’d gotten on the c
ruise ship and gone into oblivion. I’d wondered if his decision had something to do with maybe not trusting me on an extended mission. But Mom told me he’d liked the big cruise ships, and there’d been nothing unusual in his decision.

  When he and the other passengers and crew were all declared dead a year later, Alex inherited the Belle-Marie, and it became officially the means of transport for Rainbow Enterprises.

  I’d enjoyed my time with Gabe. This should not be read as a criticism of Alex in any way, but he was easier to talk to. More amiable. There was no subject that didn’t interest him. He loved to talk about history and politics and religion. He was passionate about everything but never in the sense that he’d get angry if you disagreed with him. In fact, he seemed to enjoy contrary opinions and was always willing to listen. Once or twice, I thought I even succeeded in changing his mind. He thought, or pretended to, that the human race would have been better off if everyone were kept just slightly inebriated. “People are much friendlier, much more empathic,” he told me, “when they’ve had a couple of light drinks. But not when they get much beyond that. And there’s the problem. You can’t control intake.”

  There’d been a lot of girlfriends. He even took them on his archeological missions occasionally. At first I felt a little uncomfortable, alone in an interstellar with a guy who seemed to be a makeout artist, but he never got out of line. I was the pilot, and if he wanted a woman along on a trip, he brought one. My mom just smiled when I asked her about it. “Some things never change,” she said. “But you don’t have to worry about him.”

  I’d have trusted him with my life. I had trouble once with a technician on the Dellacondan space station. He was a big guy, and I can’t say he really intended anything serious, but he mouthed off about my looking “delicious.” He was with a couple of oversized friends. All of them were considerably bigger than Gabe, but he stepped in immediately and made it clear that he’d do whatever it took.

  I slept late into that final morning before the Capella’s expected arrival time.

  I couldn’t help thinking about him as I showered and had breakfast and took my seat in the passenger cabin. I remembered his disappointment on the return flight from a mission to the City on the Crag. I don’t recall any longer precisely what it was he’d been looking for, but it’d had something to do with a two-thousand-year-old civilization that had collapsed with no apparent explanation. Whatever he’d been looking for specifically, he hadn’t found it. There were five members of his archeological team coming back with him, all annoyed, all convinced they’d missed something. But in the end, the gloom had gone away, and it had turned into a party. Sometimes, Alex partied, but it always carried with it a sense of dutiful behavior. Alex did social stuff because whatever he wanted to accomplish required it. Gabe loved having a good time. It was hard to believe that, if we could get him off the Capella, Gabe would be only a few days older than the last time I’d seen him, eleven years before. I was sitting there thinking what a crazy universe we live in but how we wouldn’t be able to get around much if time and space weren’t so counterintuitive. It was hard to understand how the structure of the universe could come about naturally. Why wasn’t there just hydrogen drifting around? It was a question physicists had struggled to answer since Isaac Newton’s time. There were theories, of course. But they were always hidden in equations. There was never anything you could visualize.

  “Chase.” Belle’s voice. “Transmission coming from the Dauntless.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good afternoon, all. Be advised the Capella could now appear at any time.” It was John. “Those of you who are able, pick up passengers: After they’re on board, they’ll probably be asking questions. Be honest with them. No point trying to hide the truth. We’d like to prevent their communicating with people on the Capella, but I don’t see any way to block that other than to ask them to refrain. I suggest you not let them know about the time differential unless specifically asked. Don’t lie about it, but try to avoid the issue.”

  I remember thinking that, if we were successful, and the passengers and crew were actually rescued, that someone would make a movie of the experience. And I had a title: Waiting for the Capella.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The thing that irritates me about how the universe works is that, once we get born, it shows zero concern for us. It’s a system filled with supernovas, giant gas clouds, predators, and earthquakes. We might turn an asteroid aside, but don’t try to rewire the process to prevent recurrences. When a tornado shows up, just get under the table and pray.

  —Schiaparelli Cleve, Autobiography, 8645 C.E.

  “As most of you know,” John said, “the captain of the Capella, Dierdre Schultz, has a solid reputation. But it’s incumbent on us to stay out of her way. As soon as we make contact, we’ll try to ensure that she understands what has happened. That conversation will be relayed to the fleet to keep everyone apprised of the situation. If we get this right, we’ll only have to come out here to do this one more time.”

  “I wish it would come,” I said. “I hate the waiting.”

  Belle asked something irrelevant. Did I want her to locate and run a good comedy? Was I getting tired? I don’t recall exactly what it was. But I told her to relax.

  Her lights blinked in her standard suggestion of a giggle.

  We’d probably get a few people out on this attempt, and eventually, even if things didn’t go well, we’d recover the vast majority. I was happy to be part of it, but I wanted it to be over. I didn’t like the idea of its going on for another five years. Or maybe more.

  I didn’t think I was actually talking, but Belle was picking it up. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “There is reason to be optimistic.”

  “I know, Belle. I just wish we could bring them home now.” JoAnn would have been bitterly disappointed at how this was playing out. Despite John’s assurance that whatever had been determined by the physicists would be passed on to Robert Dyke, I doubted that would include JoAnn’s contribution. Considering the President’s stand, I guessed not.

  * * *

  I talked with some of the nearby ships. They were mostly yachts, like the Belle-Marie, but there were also two freighters. The freighters were the Bentley and the Bollinger, carrying twenty-eight and twenty-two lifeboats respectively. Five of the pilots told me they had either relatives or friends on board the Capella. There was a lot of frustration and even some tears. They all understood that the odds against recovering any specific person on this attempt weren’t good. And they agreed that they were prepared to settle. “If I can just come away from this with the knowledge that they’re okay, and that we’ll get them back, I’ll go home happy.” It was a sentiment I heard again and again. But they didn’t sound as if they meant it. Five years is a long time.

  One of the entertainers on board the Capella was Dory Caputo. She sang, danced, and did comedy. Her husband was on the Bentley, and would be helping move lifeboats if they got into position. He sent me a vid of one of her performances. Dory laughed, told jokes, explained how to handle idiot bosses, and simply seemed too alive to have gone missing for eleven years. “I never wanted her to sign on for the thing,” he said. “I hope, when she gets back, she’ll have more sense.”

  There was a lifeboat team of four on the Bollinger. “They’ve got thousands of these things stashed on the ships,” one of the pilots told me. “They’re going to use, at most, forty or so of them. What will they do with the rest? It’s a goddam shame the thing won’t stay on the surface long enough to make it a bit easier to do this stuff.”

  Halfway through the afternoon, the timer sounded. Zero hour. Two hours later, John addressed the fleet and said that patience was in order. “This is at best an imprecise operation,” he said.

  I awoke on the fifth morning to the smell of bacon and eggs. “We’re going to do a minor position adjustment in about an hour, Chase,” Belle said. “Since you have to get up, I thought you’d like some breakfast.”

&n
bsp; “Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “And we’re getting another transmission. From the Raven.” Raven headed one of the squadrons reporting to us.

  It was a woman’s voice: “Belle-Marie, we have a sighting. Reported by the Breckinridge. Awaiting confirmation.”

  I acknowledged. Belle waited a few seconds. Then: “Chase, do you want me to pass it on to the Dauntless?”

  “No. Let’s give it a minute. See what happens.”

  I got some orange juice to go with my breakfast. Then the Raven was back. “False alarm. It was apparently somebody showing up late. Wait, hold on.” She clicked off, and a few seconds later, was back. “It was the Holtz. They’re listed among the no-shows. But I guess they got here. Anyhow, false alarm. Out.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Man is not capable of forgetting. He refuses to let go of the past. However far or fast he runs, he drags the chain with him.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, unknown date

  The rest of that fifth day in the target zone passed without incident, other than one more false alarm caused by another late arrival. The pilot apologized and explained that he’d been given the wrong arrival date. He didn’t say how that could have happened, but as far as I know, nobody pressed the issue.

  That period of quiescence ended when Belle came alive in the middle of the morning: “Message from the Dauntless.”

  John’s voice again: “We have a confirmed contact. The Capella has arrived. Its position has been forwarded to your AI. We have not yet established a radio link with them, but as soon as we do, we will use the beta frequency to pass the transmissions on to all ships.”