Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

“I’ll give myself three days to get into the area. I don’t want to be charging around at the last minute.”

He nodded. “Okay. How difficult will it be for the ships going out there to pinpoint their own positions? You’ve always said you can’t be too exact about where you are when there’s no star nearby.”

“That’s part of the problem, Alex. Everything’s too far away from any landmarks, so a few million kilometers one way or another doesn’t make much difference in the way the sky looks.”

“Then how—?”

“It’s one of the reasons they need so many ships. There’s going to be some guesswork involved in establishing the location, so they’re trying to flood the area. They want to set up the fleet cruisers first. And the cargo vehicles. Both carry a load of lifeboats. They have to be able to get one of them close to the Capella with at least five hours available to transfer the boats.”

“I hate to say this, Chase—” He didn’t look comfortable.

“I know. We’re going to need some luck.”

“Well, maybe JoAnn’s work will give them a breakthrough.”

I took a deep breath. “Shara tells me they’re beginning to think there might be an uncertainty principle involved that would take any hope of a guaranteed solution out of it. They don’t have a method to analyze the structure of the warp. It can vary, and that makes it impossible to be sure about the details. She thinks the reality is that they’d be very likely to be able to shut down the process, but there’d never be a guarantee.”

“So in the end—”

“Take a chance. Or use the boats.”

Senator Angela Herman showed up on The Peter McCovey Show that afternoon. She was an attractive woman, or would have been had she not been so combative. She obviously had presidential ambitions, and belonged to the Union Party, which was then out of power. She liked to portray herself as one of the “ordinary folks” who were always getting trampled by government stupidity or its deliberate malfeasance. “Who do you think,” she asked Peter, “is going to see to it that this business with Sanusar ships doesn’t happen anymore? It turns out it’s been going on for literally thousands of years, and nobody noticed it until a physicist doing independent research and an antique dealer, for God’s sake, figured it out. And now we have to depend on the government to rescue the people stuck on the Capella . And they obviously don’t know what they’re doing. Look how this business with the Grainger went. Why didn’t they hire a good private corporation, like Orion or StarGate, to work out a solution? I just hope that they get it right this time.”

“Aren’t you being a little harsh, Senator? I mean, there are a lot of lives at stake. Kraus and his people are trying to pull off a small miracle.”

“Sure they are. And who do they put in charge? I don’t want to malign those who’ve been lost, but the reigning so-called genius was a twenty-seven-year-old who managed to get herself and her pilot stuck for thirty-some years on a ship that she disabled. Maybe they should have picked somebody with a little more experience?”

The host was clearly uncomfortable. “Senator, I’m sure you’re aware that the most productive time for the great physicists down through the ages has always come before they hit thirty. That’s when they’ve had their major accomplishments. Do it in your twenties or forget it. JoAnn Suttner had an incredible career.”

“Until it mattered. The notion that you have to be a kid to do physics is a myth , Peter. It’s never been true. Never will be.”

“Jacob,” I said, “shut it down.”

After it went off, I don’t recall that my office had ever seemed so quiet. Outside, a few birds were chirping, and branches were swaying in a warm breeze. But somehow a general stagnation had infiltrated the country house.

“You okay?” Alex was standing at the door.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “She’s a crank.”

“I wasn’t thinking about her .”

“I know. You just have to have some time to get past this.”

“It won’t be all right, Alex. It never will be.”

He took me to dinner that evening at Bernie’s Far and Away. We sat out on the enclosed terrace, ordered drinks and I’m not sure what else. The Moon was full. But seeing Earth’s oversized satellite had spoiled me. Lara looked almost insignificant by contrast.

“I can’t help thinking,” he said, “how many artifacts will be created by everything that’s been happening.”

“How do you mean, Alex?” I asked.

“You remember the coffee cups you had made for Belle last year?”

“Sure.” Belle-Marie was inscribed beneath a pyramid and the company name, Rainbow Enterprises .

“If we get lucky and actually become part of the rescue—”

“Not much chance of that.”

“I know. But if it happens, those cups will be worth a ton of money in a few years.”

“How many years?”

“Well, maybe a century or two.”

“Okay. I’ll hang on to them, just in case.”

The drinks came. Dark wine. I raised my glass toward the Moon. “JoAnn and Nick,” I said.

Alex nodded. “Yeah. However things go, the price will have been pretty high.” We drank. And stared at each other. And put the glasses down. “I’ll tell you what has a chance of becoming a huge collectors’ item.”

“I don’t really care, Alex.”

“Okay.”

I could see I’d offended him. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I shouldn’t be preoccupied with trivia.”

We were both silent for a time. Then I finished my wine. “So what will, Alex?”

“Will what ?”

“Become a big collectors’ item?”

“Oh.” He didn’t want to pursue the issue. “Anything off the Casavant .”

“Like its cups?”

“Yes.” He studied me. “You don’t believe it?”

“Eventually, everything becomes valuable.”

“These are historical times, Chase.”

I knew what he was doing, trying to get my mind off the losses we’d taken. “I know,” I said. “The ship’s name is inscribed on them, in handwritten form, beneath its silhouette.”

“They’ll be worth a fortune.”

“I hate to say this, but—”

“What?”

“I was thinking about human nature. They’d be worth more if things go badly, and nobody survives from the Capella . In fact, the value would go through the roof.”

“Yes,” he said. “It would. It’s the darker side of the business.”

“Yeah. While JoAnn and Nick—” My voice caught, and I couldn’t go further.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “we have short memories. Most heroes are forgotten by the next news cycle.”

Alex restored Gabe’s office. He moved the artifacts up to the second floor and took all the stuff he’d been collecting back there down into the basement. The walls had been filled during Gabe’s years with plaques and pictures, most of which had been taken down. I know that sounds a bit coldhearted, but I think the truth was that they were a painful reminder of a time Alex didn’t want to think about. He told me once that he’d never thanked Gabe, who had taken him in at a critical moment in his life and had cared for him for almost twenty years. Anyhow, everything was now back on the walls. Alex had also located a photo of Gabe and himself at about ten years old and my mom at a dig site somewhere. It had been framed and now rested on the desk.