Jack McDevitt - The Devil's Eye

Alex did a round of speaking engagements, contributed a set of Myanamar dishware-three hundred years old-to the Altreskan Centenary Museum, cut the ribbon at a cultural center at Lake Barbar, and attended the inauguration of the newly elected governor of West Sibornia. But he remained bothered by what had happened to Vicki Greene. He began subscribing to news reports and summaries of current events from Salud Afar. Because of the

distance involved, they were about ten days old when they arrived. When I asked what he was looking for, he told me he'd know it when he saw it. He spent hours in his office, going through everything that came in. He didn't trust Jacob to do it because he couldn't spell out the specifics for the AI. He discovered that Vicki had done an interview show, conducted by a local academic, and managed to get a copy of the show. It was called, as best I remember, Imkah with Johansen. Imkah was apparently a concoction like coffee. And there was Vicki, fresh and alert, the real Vicki, talking about why people love to be frightened, how glorious it feels to hide under the bed while the storm rages outside. "Storms are what we're about," she told Johansen. "Lightning bolts and other things that come out of the night. There's nothing like a good scare. It's even good for your heart." It was the Vicki from the Nightline Horror Convention.

Alex took me to lunch once a week. Sometimes twice, if we had something to celebrate. He liked celebrations and rarely missed an opportunity. Usually we went to Debra Coyle's. It looks out over the Melony, they keep a fire going, the food is excellent, and the prices are right. Three or four weeks after the memorial, he came down the stairs and hustled me out the door. A few minutes later we were walking into Debra's. It was one of those dreary, cold, rainy days. The sky sagged down into the river, and occasional gusts shook the building. We ordered salads and talked about nothing in particular although I could see there was something on his mind. When he finally got around to it, I wasn't particularly surprised: "Chase," he said, "I'm going to Salud Afar." "Alex, that's crazy." But I think I'd known it was coming. He looked at me and laughed. "We both know why she paid me the money. She was asking me to find out what happened to her. And do something about it." "You're sure you want to do this. That's a long run out there." He was staring through the window at the soggy weather. "I've gone through everything I can find about Salud Afar. There's no indication of an incident of any kind. And certainly nothing about anybody getting killed. But Chase, something happened." They brought a decanter of red wine and poured two glasses. I didn't say anything while he made some sort of nondescript toast. Then he put his glass down, folded his arms on the table, and leaned forward. "It's the least I can do." "It's a long ride." "I know." He stared at me, looking guilty. Actually, I knew him well enough to be sure he wasn't feeling guilty, but was putting on a show. He paid me generously, and I was supposed to be ready when the bugle sounded. "I know it's asking a lot, Chase. Especially on such short notice." He hesitated, and I let him hang. "I could hire a pilot, if you can't manage it." "No," I said. "I'll take you. When are we leaving?" "As soon as we can pack."

That left Ben to deal with. "No," he said. "Not again. Not so soon." "Ben, it's an emergency. And I can't let him go alone." "That's what you always say, Chase. I've been living with this now for a long time. I think at some point you have to decide what you want." "I know." "So what are you going to do?" "I can't walk away from him when he needs me." "You know, Chase, if I thought for a minute this would be the last time, I'd say fine, go ahead, and I'll see you in, what, three months?" We were in his car, riding on River Road. I was supposed to be taking him out to dinner. My treat. His birthday was three days away, but I wasn't going to be there for it. "So what can you tell me? Is it going to be the last time?" I thought about it. I was still thinking when he said, "You don't have to answer. I guess I know."

I didn't usually look forward to getting back on board the Belle-Marie . Maybe I was getting old. But it's a bit confining, physically and otherwise. I'd become a city-lights type, I guess. I liked parties and guys. I liked the social side of my job, which kept me running around with Alex, playing Rainbow's public relations maven. I got to meet a lot of interesting people, interesting in that so many of them had serious accomplishments on the record. And also that many of them were passionate about the bits and pieces of our past that had survived, sometimes across thousands of years. Watching them walk through our traveling exhibit, pressing their fingers against a display case, holding the captain's insignia from a vessel that left Earth in the first years of the interstellar age, staring at the laser rifle that misfired while Michael Ungueth was trying to hold back the giant lizard during the evacuation of Maryblinque, listening to their voices drop to a whisper-What other line of work could have matched any of that? Maybe too much had changed. Alex had become driven, and I knew there'd be no peace until he figured out what kind of message Vicki Greene had been trying to send. Nonetheless, this time, I was glad to see the ship again. He was back in the passenger cabin, still making calls to clients while I got ready for departure. When he finally signed off, he buzzed my line, thanked me again, admitted we were probably on a wild-goose chase, but pointed out we were being paid very well. Twenty minutes later, we were on our way.

When the quantum drive first appeared on the scene four years earlier, replacing the old Armstrong, it had seemed like near-instantaneous transportation. It could cover five light-years in a few minutes. But it was less accurate than the older system, so there was inevitably a long glide time, often a few days, into the target area. This was true regardless of the range of the hyperspace transition. If you arrived, say, twenty-five million klicks out from the space station and tried to jump closer, you might find yourself twice as far away on the other side. It was, at best, an erratic system. I'd always thought of Rimway as being on the edge of the galaxy. But Salud Afar was thirty-one thousand light-years farther out, pretty much in intergalactic space. As we pulled away from Skydeck and began accelerating, I tried to picture going all the way out there on Armstrongs. "I just can't imagine how they did it," I told Alex. "Actually," he said, "they didn't have the Armstrong when people first went to Salud Afar." "What did they have?" "We're talking four thousand years ago, Chase. I'm not sure anybody knows what they had, or how long the flight took. But the Armstrong had only been around a few centuries." We talked about it in the past tense because it was now in the process of being supplanted by the technology the Dellacondans had developed during their war with the Mutes. The quantum drive, which got you around a lot faster.

Traveling all the way to Salud Afar with a primitive system made no sense to me. "I can understand that explorers might have found the place, but the flight must have taken years. Why would anybody settle out there?" Alex grinned. "Some people like solitude," he said. "Back to Eden." "Something like that. It's apparently a nice place. Oxygen content perfect. It has broad oceans, beautiful views. Gravity's light, a little more than eight-tenths of a gee. So you don't weigh so much. The only thing the place lacked was stars." "So what's the plan when we get there?" "Find out where Vicki Greene went and track her. It shouldn't be hard to pick up her trail." "Alex, she was one person on a world of, what, about two billion?" "But she's well-known. There'll be media stories. Some people will have met her. It should be easy."