Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

So we started back. “I’m not sure how I let this happen,” Shara said, as we left the Grainger behind.

“You’re not responsible.”

“Chase, I knew the risk was greater than JoAnn was letting on.”

“So did she, probably.”

“She did. She hated taking Nick over there, but she had no choice. But I doubt she thought anything like this could happen.” She stopped and heaved a desperate sigh. “Damn it. There had to be a better way to do this. Or not do it.”

John and several of his colleagues were waiting when we arrived at Skydeck. They crowded around us, asking if we were okay, telling us how sorry they were. We retreated into a conference room, and they began looking for details. Had JoAnn changed any of the protocols? I had no idea. We had a record of everything she’d done until the moment when the Grainger went under and communication was lost. Shara insisted JoAnn would not have changed anything without letting her know.

So the experts took over the Casavant to begin analyzing the data while we retired to a conference room and described the experience in painful detail to a group of about fifteen people. They asked a few questions and told us not to talk about it. And they ultimately fell into absolute silence, save for a couple of coughs.

At the end, John sat with his head propped on folded hands.

Alex was at the terminal when we got off the shuttle. He looked worried. “You guys okay?” he asked.

“We’re all right,” I said. But I walked into his outstretched arms and hung on to him. He didn’t have the details, but enough had already gotten out to alert the media and the rest of the world that something had gone terribly wrong and that JoAnn and Nick were assumed lost. Shara joined us in the embrace and we stood in the concourse for a long moment while the crowd passed. “I’m sorry, guys,” he said. “What happened?”

Shara just shook her head. “Let’s get away from here.”

We walked out to the skimmer. The sky was gray and overcast. We took our seats while he put the luggage in back. “I assume,” he said, “they don’t want you to talk about it.”

I looked up at him and nodded.

“It won’t go any farther,” he said.

Shara and I looked at each other. “No way,” she said, “we can keep this to ourselves.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We told him everything. We just sat in the parking lot and talked, tried to describe what it had felt like passing through that empty cruise ship. He listened quietly. Closed his eyes. Finally, when we were finished, he asked if we were okay.

We both said yes . We’d lived to come back. But I, for one, knew I would never be the same.

Nobody wanted to go home, so we headed over to Bernie’s Far and Away. “Some of the people on HV,” Alex said, “were criticizing JoAnn for rushing things.”

“Who was doing that?” asked Shara.

“A couple of physicists. They were on several shows this morning. Saying she should have taken her time.”

Shara made an angry noise in her throat. “We didn’t have any time, damn it. That was just a preliminary run. If it had worked, there would have been a lot more research to do before we could have tried using it on the Capella .”

“Hey,” said Alex, “it wasn’t me talking.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just wish these idiots, when they don’t know what they’re talking about, would keep their mouths shut. Do you know who they were?”

“I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

She was still growling. “Ding-dong,” she said.

Alex wanted me to go home, but I had no interest in spending the rest of the day in my cottage. We invited Shara over to the country house. But she said she had calls to make, so we dropped her off and went back to the office. After we got inside, he waved me into a seat. “Can I do anything?”

“No. Other than maybe change the subject. I need something else to think about.”

He smiled. “I love you, Chase.”

“Thanks. Me too.”

“All right. Let’s try to do something else.”

“Good.”

“I’ve been putting together a list of available artifacts we saw on Earth. If we get enough interest, we can go back and get some of them.” He showed me his notebook, where sixty-seven items were recorded. “Why don’t you take a look when you get a chance? No hurry. See if there’s anything you saw that we should add? Then we can talk about putting out some feelers.”

But the truth was I couldn’t get my mind out of those empty corridors. I sat down at my desk and pretended to start. When he walked away, I don’t think I did much other than sit there and stare at the wall. Then, without warning, he was back, standing in the doorway. “Is there anything at all I can do?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s all right. I’ll be okay.”

He offered to stay with me, but I told him to let it go. “Okay,” he said. “I’m exhausted. Going upstairs to crash.”

After he left, I put the notebook down and turned on the HV, hoping for word about the Grainger . The networks were constantly announcing breaking news, but it always consisted of informing us that it was still being searched by the SRF team, and that JoAnn and Nick had not yet been found.

I hadn’t had time to get to know either of them well. Just the two missions. But on that day, I’d have given anything to have them back. What would it have been like to party with JoAnn? And, of course, the dinner with Nick was not going to happen.

Finally, I settled down to work. I added a couple of items to Alex’s list and had started putting together a sales pitch for them when Lawrence Southwick called. He was seated beside a virtual fireplace. Which contained a virtual fire. That probably meant he was calling from an asteroid. “Alex is asleep,” I said. “Can I help you, Lawrence?”

He smiled. “Hi, Chase. Just tell him that the person he should talk to about Zorbas is Marjorie Benjamin. She’s a researcher at the National Institute. She’s spent half her life doing Golden Age research. I’ve let her know you’re interested. Her code’s attached.”

A few minutes later, Jacob informed me we had a transmission from Khaled. “Hi, Chase,” it said. “I’ve got a vacation coming up, and I’m going to head for Andiquar. I hope that’s okay. I don’t want to rush things, but there doesn’t seem to be any casual way to approach this. I’ll be there in about a month. Will give you more specific information when I have my reservation. I’d love to take you to dinner again.”

He was obviously giving me time to think about it. As much as I liked him, and felt indebted to him, it was too much too soon. I wasn’t comfortable with the arrangement. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to back away.

When somebody is crossing worlds to take you to dinner, and the guy has saved your life, it has already gotten serious. I needed the better part of an hour to put together a response that I hoped was appropriate: “Khaled, I enjoyed our time together. But I don’t think allowing ourselves to become emotionally involved right now is a smart idea.”

I went back to thinking about that empty ship while trying to explain why collectors on Rimway would love to acquire a seven-hundred-year-old bracelet worn by a woman who’d set out on a round-the-world trip in a cabin cruiser which was later found abandoned and adrift in the middle of the Pacific, with the bracelet lying on the deck. Or an ID chain that belonged to Chad Tappett, a European champion for animal rights whose career had been cut short when a lion got loose in an incident that many suspected had not been an accident.