Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

“You don’t sound optimistic, Alex.”

“To be honest, I’m not.”

There’s a piece of advice my mom offered one time that has stayed with me: Never back off something you really want to do because you’re afraid of failing. You don’t want to get near the end of your life and wonder whether you might have succeeded if you’d only tried harder.

I knew that would be the case with Alex. If he let this thing go, it would always haunt him. But I didn’t say anything. If I tried persuading him to do something, his position would only harden. Anyhow, we’re all aware that the subconscious knows what’s best for us. As long as the conscious mind doesn’t get in the way. So I sat back and waited for him to tell me he’d found something, or whatever, and that we were headed for Earth.

And I waited.

When, after a couple of weeks, nothing happened, Marissa let me know how disappointed she was. “The reason I came to you guys,” she said, “was your boss’s reputation. He’s supposed to be a guy who gets things done.”

We had a rule at the country house: You never, ever, for any reason, summon the avatar of Gabriel Benedict. He was gone, and maybe we’d get him back and maybe we wouldn’t. That’s another issue. In any case, the experience had been painful, and neither of us needed to have an electronic version of him showing up to remind us of how much we’d lost.

This whole thing with avatars has always puzzled me. Why people would want to get simulacra of themselves onto the net, or, worse, why we’d want to sit and talk with people we once loved who were no longer really there, just seems crazy. They have some value for people conducting an investigation, but other than that, the whole process seems counterproductive. The number of marriages breaking up, for example, because people are more interested in younger versions of their spouses, has gone through the roof.

All right: Back to the issue at hand. Gabe had known Baylee. There was a possibility his avatar might be able to provide some helpful information. I thought about breaking the rule and bringing his avatar in, but Alex would have taken umbrage. So I dug a photograph out of the collection, one in which Gabe was wearing his charge-the-hill expeditionary hat, framed it, and put it on my desk.

Next time Alex came into my office, it caught his eye immediately. “What’s that?” he said.

“Just came across it this morning. You know, I miss him.”

“I know.” He was playing it straight. “I do, too.” Then he surprised me. “We need to talk to him.”

“To Gabe?”

“Yes. He might have an idea about this thing with Baylee. Jacob, get him for us, please.”

I braced myself, but Alex sat down and smiled politely when the avatar appeared moments later.

“I don’t think I can be of much help,” Gabe’s avatar said. “I never really knew Garnett Baylee that well.”

“Welcome to the club,” said Alex.

“He was a decent man, as far as I could tell. You could trust him. I was pretty young when I met him. What I particularly liked was that he really cared about being an archeologist. In fact, he might have been the reason I got so interested in the profession myself.” Gabe was dressed the way I remembered him, in fatigues with a hat very much like the one in the picture. And he had a laser strapped to his belt.

“Can you think of any reason,” Alex asked, “why he’d have brought the Corbett home and done nothing with it other than toss it into his closet?”

“No. I can’t imagine how that could have happened.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “If you don’t have a specific lead, and it sounds as if you don’t, I’d just let it go. Trying to chase this down sounds like a waste of time.”

“There might be more artifacts out there.”

“That’s unlikely, Alex, and you know that as well as I do. If there were more, they’d have been in his closet, too. To be honest, I can’t imagine why you are pursuing this.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Ineffective use of your time. Occasionally, things happen that we can’t account for. Just let it go.”

“Okay, Gabe. One more question: When Baylee was on Earth, there must have been someone he spent time with. A friend.”

“I can help you there,” he said. “Try Les Fremont. He was director of the North American Archeological Institute. The problem is that he wasn’t young when Baylee was running around. He may not even be alive now. But if Baylee had anything he would have been willing to share, Fremont would be as good a bet as anyone.”

I called Marissa. “We have a couple of good offers for you on the transmitter. But Alex thinks you should be patient. We’re pretty sure others are on the way.”

“My dad thinks we should do what Grandpop would have done. Decline the museum’s offer and give it to them.”

“Marissa, I wouldn’t want to get in the middle of this, but keep in mind it’s worth a lot of money.”

Alex makes it a point to take me to dinner once, and sometimes twice, a week. We vary the restaurants, but on that night we headed off to Mully’s Top of the World. Mully’s is located on the summit of Mt. Oskar, and it provides a magnificent view of surrounding mountains, the Melony, and Lake Accord. There were a couple of boats on the lake. They were lit up and apparently partying.

We’re supposed to have an arrangement that we don’t talk business on these occasions, but, of course, that’s an impossible objective. Although I should give him credit: He tries. He was talking about Payton’s Follies , a show he’d seen the previous evening. It was a musical satire on inept guys trying to figure out ways to bed women. You know, the usual. When he’d finished, he mentioned as a kind of by-the-way that he’d had a call from John Kraus. “He tells me the Capella Families is organizing a virtual protest. You know why?”

I shrugged. “I can guess.”

“Apparently your buddy JoAnn ran another experiment. And it worked. They shut down the drive completely, and the ship just stayed where it was. They’re going to try it again. Try to get a sense of how safe it is, I guess. The Capella Families wants them to stop, to touch absolutely nothing and bring the families out as best they can.”

Shara called to explain why I hadn’t been informed. “There’s so much political pressure right now,” she said. “They didn’t want to take a chance on the word getting out before they had a chance to run the test. But it was beautiful. Everything went exactly according to schedule. But there’s still a problem.”

“It was another yacht,” I said.

The news was all over the talk shows by noon. The reactions of the pundits ran the gamut from being horrified to observations that at last someone was showing some sense. Jerry Dumas, on The Dumas Report , called it, “finally, the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.” Lucia Brent thought it was “a disaster waiting to happen.” Hosts and guests on The Daytime Show and Jennifer in the Morning were appalled and grateful, sometimes simultaneously.

Several days after it started, Jacob informed us we had a call from a Mr. Culbertson. “He’d like an appointment to talk with you, Alex. He’s a lawyer. Represents the Capella Families.”