Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

“I don’t agree at all, Chase. He was always overheated. I think you’re mistaking his resentment of us for a lack of feeling.”

Despite all that was happening, Alex could not get the Corbett transmitter out of his mind. “I should have realized,” he said, “the thing’s in a class of its own. What’s Rifkin’s blowtorch or the last flag at Venobia compared with the first hypercomm unit?” He’d looked at the visuals, but he finally decided he wanted to see the actual device.

Marissa needed a couple of days, but she eventually showed up at the country house, carrying it in a cloth bag. She and Alex exchanged greetings. Then she put the bag on a table in the conference room. The transmitter was a black box, big by modern standards, about the size of a man’s shoe. It wore a battered plate with an inscription in ancient English which, after translation, indicated a manufacturing date of 2712.

It looked battered, which you could expect after eight or nine thousand years.

Alex pressed his fingertips against the casing. “It’s been in a fire.”

Marissa nodded. “I thought so, too, Alex. But I couldn’t be sure. It might just be ageing.” She sat down. “So what do you think? Have you any theories as to why my grandfather might keep something like this quiet?”

Alex let her see he had no idea. “Marissa, my guess at the moment is that you’d be better able to answer that question than we are. I can’t think of any possible explanation other than that he was in failing health and simply forgot about it. Or that he misunderstood the significance of his find. But he was a major player among archeologists. I just can’t believe that could have happened.”

“No.” She chewed her upper lip. “Neither of those is possible. My grandfather was in good health for a few years after he came back. He was a bit morose, but he kept his mind right until the end. I just can’t imagine how he could have forgotten to tell us he had this .” Her eyes focused on the transmitter. “There must be something else. Something we’re missing.”

When Marissa was gone, we went into my office. “I guess you’re aware,” Alex said, “Baylee was another one of these guys who had no avatar.”

“Yes, I know.”

“We need to start looking into this. Baylee must have had some friends. Somebody we can talk to.”

“Marissa mentioned a Lawrence Southwick.” He made a note of the name. “You want me to set up an appointment?”

“No. I’ll take care of it. How about family members? Somebody probably knows something.”

“His daughter’s name is Corinne. She married Larry Earl. Larry’s a technician. Corinne is the chief executive of Random Access.”

“Health services,” said Alex.

“Correct. Marissa tells me neither of her parents were ever all that interested in the archeology. At least with regard to what her grandfather was doing. They just wanted him to come home safely. They were apparently as surprised as Marissa when they found the transmitter.”

“All right. Let’s talk to them, too.” His mood darkened a bit. “By the way, there’s a movement to have families and friends of the people stuck on the Capella write messages for them. To be delivered in a single package.”

“They going to do a burst transmission?” I said. “They’ll get a lot of traffic, so they’ll have to.”

“It’s a bad idea. I don’t know who started it. But the people on board the ship may not be aware of what’s happening, and almost certainly don’t know it’s not 1424 anymore. I’m not saying it would start a panic, but if they’re trying to get people off in an orderly fashion, that kind of news won’t help.”

Marissa came in to talk with Alex. He told me later that there was no new information. But she wanted to keep us on as consultants. “I need to know what happened here,” she told him. Alex agreed to do everything he could.

Later that day, we sat down with her parents, Larry and Corinne. Larry was convivial and easygoing, a low-pressure type who showed no inclination to get caught up in the possibility that something the family had found in a closet could make him wealthy beyond his dreams. “I’ll believe it,” he said, “when they transfer the money.”

“Who found the transmitter?”

“I did,” Larry said. “It was on the top shelf of a closet, under some blankets.”

“And you never knew anything about its existence before?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Are there any other artifacts around the house? Anything else your father-in-law brought home?”

“Not that I know of. Now, I’m not so sure.” He looked at Corinne.

Like her daughter, she was a charmer, with dark brown hair and animated features. But she shook her head. “There’s nothing else that I’m aware of. After we found out about the transmitter, realized what it might be worth, we turned the place upside down. Found nothing.”

“Professor Baylee,” said Alex, “was on Earth for a long time, wasn’t he?”

“My dad was there for probably six or seven years on that last trip,” said Corinne.

“Did he ever talk about what he’d been doing there?”

“Not really,” she said. “In general terms, maybe. Mostly what I remember was his saying it had been a waste of time. He’d been there before, of course. He probably lived there for twenty years altogether. He’d come back once in a while and talk about the pyramids or the Shantel Monument or something. But after that last one, he seemed depressed. Worn-out. He always denied it, claimed everything was fine, but he never really told us what had been going on.”

“It’s true,” Larry said. “Something happened. Something changed him. He never went back. Never showed any inclination to.”

“Did he keep a diary? Any kind of record at all?”

“None that I knew of,” Corinne said.

“Marissa mentioned a guy named Lawrence Southwick. Do you know him?”

They looked at each other. “Not well,” said Larry. “We’ve met him. He’s an archeological enthusiast. A rich one. And he was a close friend of Dad’s for years. Even funded some of the expeditions.”

“Do you think he might know anything about this?”

“I’ve asked him. He was as stunned as we were to hear about the transmitter.”

“Okay. Marissa said your father didn’t have any health problems. Is that correct?”

Corinne shook her head. “If he did, he concealed them pretty well. For five or six years, anyhow. Then he was gone.”

“What happened to him?”

“A stroke. We never knew he had a problem until it killed him.”

“Did he ever say why he stayed on Earth so long? Was there something special he was looking for?”

“We knew,” said Larry, “that he was primarily interested in the Golden Age. He had a picture of one of the early space museums on his bedroom wall.”

“The Florida Space Museum?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Chase told me that you’d mentioned he’d been diving there. He told you about that, but he never mentioned why he was doing it?”

“No.” Corinne closed her eyes. Her cheeks had grown damp. “I never really thought to ask.” She looked at Larry, who shrugged and shook his head. “All this business about the transmitter has made me realize I never took the time to talk to him. He sat up in his room every night and read or watched HV. He almost never went out. That was nothing like the man who’d been my dad. Who took me to zoos and parks and beaches.” She took a deep breath. “Look, Alex, I was never into all the archeology. Neither of us was. He knew that, and he was disappointed in me. Looking back on it now, I wish I had it to do over. That I’d shown a little interest.”