Jack McDevitt: Coming Home

People who knew him said that he’d never pursued a degree because he was simply too knowledgeable, too brilliant, leaving him no patience for routine academic work. He simply bypassed it. And apparently lost nothing thereby.

Baylee was more than moderately handsome. Even in his later years, his features resisted the usual tendency toward gradual decline and ultimate collapse. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and there was something in his eyes that made it clear he was in charge. I could see a distinct resemblance to Marissa, who also showed no reluctance to take over.

It was impossible to imagine this guy’s coming up with a major discovery and failing to mention it. I sat there looking at a picture of the transmitter.

The second eruption was delivered by Shara Michaels, who called and invited me to dinner at Bernie’s Far and Away.

“Sounds like a last-minute operation,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I have some news. Will you be there?”

“What time?”

The Far and Away was crowded. A piano played softly in the background. Shara was seated at a corner table with another young woman, probably in her twenties. She waved me over. “Chase,” she said, “this is JoAnn Suttner.” Suttner had chestnut hair and wore a gold blouse and light blue slacks. She and Shara had already drawn the attention of a couple of guys at an adjoining table. I sat down, and we shook hands. “JoAnn’s working with the SRF,” Shara said. “She’s the top gun in megatemp research.” That was shorthand for time-space structure. SRF, of course, was the Sanusar Recovery Force, a team of scientists dedicated to tracking down the lost ships that had gotten tangled in warps caused by the passage of superdense objects. Sanusar was to have been the final port of call for the Capella on that fatal last flight. “Her husband,” she added, “is one of the top mathematicians in the Confederacy.”

JoAnn rolled her eyes. “She always talks like that, Chase. Anyhow, it’s nice to meet you.”

“The pleasure’s mine, JoAnn. What’s going on?”

Interstellars had been disappearing since they first came on the scene back in the third millennium. It’s probably inevitable, when you have hundreds of vehicles traveling among the known systems, and beyond, constantly. Losses have been attributed to a variety of causes. Engine breakdown. Power failure. Deflector malfunction, causing a ship to emerge from transdimensional space into an area already occupied by rocks and even too much dust. When that happens, when two objects try to occupy the same space, you can look for a large explosion. A few incidents were even attributable to hijackings.

But it turned out there was another reason for at least some of the disappearances. Black holes and other superdense objects traveling through space tend to leave damage in their wake. Not the kind of damage we’d always known about—disrupted stars, planets ripped from orbit, and so forth—but something else entirely. The space/time continuum itself could become twisted. Warped. The result has been that some vehicles, jumping into or possibly out of transdimensional space, got sidetracked. And lost control. They became wrapped in the time/space distortion, and carried a piece of it with them. It continued to affect the vehicle, moving it along its projected course, but causing it to reemerge periodically in linear space. It was also apparent that, on board the ship, the passage of time also became distorted. It was, scientists had come to believe, what had happened to the Capella eleven years earlier.

We’d recovered three ships since discovering what was happening. In each of them, crew and passengers had known they’d suffered a malfunction, but they’d been totally unaware that weeks and years had been passing in the outside world. One of the three, the Avenger , was a destroyer that had disappeared during the Mute War two centuries ago. For the crew, only four days had passed between making their jump and being rescued. The first recovery had been the Intrépide , which had, incredibly, left its home port seven thousand years earlier. From the perspective of the passengers, the flight had lasted only a few weeks.

The lost ships were by then commonly referred to as Sanusar objects, named for the world that was to have been the Capella ’s final port of call.

“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” said Shara. A big smile took over her features. “We think we’ve found the Capella .”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes. It looks good this time.”

They’d predicted an arrival more than a year earlier, but the lost ship hadn’t shown up. “You’re not going to get everybody excited again, are you? And then leave them watching blank screens?”

“Chase,” said Shara, “I’m sorry. We’re still in the early stages of research on this stuff.”

They thought they’d known where it would be coming in, but the evidence had never arrived, nor, when they sent out a couple of vehicles just to be certain, had the ship. For Alex and me, it was personal. Gabriel Benedict, my former boss and his uncle, was among the passengers. He’d left a message for Alex, informing him about the Tenandrome , which had seen something during an exploratory voyage that the government wanted to keep quiet. It had been the Tenandrome that had brought Alex and me together. “What makes you think you have it this time?”

JoAnn picked up the conversation. “I’m sorry, Chase. I can imagine what you must have gone through. We’d have kept it quiet until we were certain had we been able to, but there was just no way to do that. But we should be able to do something positive this time. I know everybody thinks we gave up on it. But we didn’t. One of the things we did was to check the record for every sighting that came anywhere near the Capella ’s projected course over the last eleven years. And we got lucky. There was a sighting through one of the telescopes in the Peltian System. We couldn’t be sure that it was the Capella . All we got was a glimpse of radiation, but it was located where we’d expected to see her. We sent a ship out, and they picked up a radio signal. And it was the Capella .”

“Beautiful,” I said. “What did the signal say?”

“About what you’d expect. That they were lost and were requesting assistance.”

“When did it happen?”

“A little over five years ago. The original sighting, that is. Nobody thought anything of it at the time. I mean, we weren’t looking for Sanusar objects then. Nobody really even knew they existed. But when we saw it, we went out and tracked the signal down. It was aimed toward where Rimway would have been if this were still 1424.” The year when the Capella had vanished.

“So,” I said, “you know when it left Rimway, and when it reappeared. So you know—”

“—When we can expect it again and where it should be. Yes.” Both of them were beaming. I probably was, too.

“When’s it going to happen?”

JoAnn passed the question to Shara, who apparently handled the trivia. “In a bit more than three months,” she said. “It’ll be here on the first day of spring, give or take a day or two.”

“First day of spring? That sounds like a good omen.”

The callbox inquired whether we were ready to order. We took a minute to comply, then I asked the critical question: “What are we going to do when it happens? Judging from what we’ve seen with the other vehicles, we’ll only get a few hours’ access. That’s not much time to locate it, get to it, and take twenty-six hundred people off.”

Shara nodded. “That’s the bad news. We probably won’t be able to rescue everyone this time around. Although JoAnn’s been working on something.”