Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

“ Belle-Marie , this is operations. You are clear to go.”

“Acknowledge, ops.” I warned Alex. Belle released us from the dock, and we eased out toward the exit. It looked as if sun, Moon, and Earth were lined up. I wondered if they were getting an eclipse groundside.

We made our jump and surfaced a short time later. “How’d we do?” Alex asked.

“Not bad,” I said. “We’ll need about two days to get to it. We can make it a little quicker if you want, but it’ll be an uncomfortable ride. And suck up a lot of fuel.”

“No reason to hurry, Chase,” he said. “Whatever’s there has been sitting around for more than eleven years. A few hours one way or the other won’t make much difference.”

We relaxed and read the books we’d picked up at the Maui Museum, watched some comedy shows from the library, and kept up a decent workout schedule. Sometimes we just sat and talked. The main topic of conversation was inevitably the Capella , and my reaction to seeing Gabe again. We didn’t speculate much on what we expected to find on the asteroid, which led me to suspect that, despite his denials, Alex had a theory. But he didn’t bring it up, so I let it go.

I’d thought a lot about it, of course. The only explanation that seemed feasible to me was that the whole Larissa thing was a missed communication somewhere. That Baylee had never found the Prairie House artifacts. That when he’d come across the transmitter, it had been by itself somewhere. Probably, someone had found the artifacts thousands of years ago, had sold everything off, and it simply never made the history books. Or, like so much else, everything had simply gotten lost. If Alex had asked me what I expected to find when we arrived at KL-4561, I’d have told him there’d probably be nothing.

Belle woke me on the morning of the third day. “We’re close,” she said. “KL-4561 is about two hours away.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Belle. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Do you want me to wake Alex?”

“No,” I said. “No need to.”

I got up, showered, dressed, and headed for the bridge. Alex was moving around in his cabin. Asteroid belts are not rare, but this would be my first visit to one. I’m not sure what I expected to see, but it wasn’t the progressively brighter glow in an otherwise-empty sky. “It’s the Gegenschein ,” said Belle.

“What’s a gegenschein?” I asked.

“It’s sunlight backscattered from the dust in the ecliptic.”

“Okay. Where are the asteroids?”

“They’re hard to make out. They don’t reflect well.”

“Just the dust,” I said.

“The asteroids are out there.” She adjusted one of the scopes, and a dark, lumpy rock appeared on the navigation screen. “There’s one now. It’s at a range of about four thousand kilometers. Too small to see with the naked eye, of course.”

“How big is it?”

“Can’t be certain at this range, but not more than forty meters across.”

“All right. You’re keeping a watch in all directions, right? We don’t want any collisions.”

“Yes, Chase.” She was taking a tolerant tone. “But you needn’t be concerned. We could roll through it with the scanners and scopes turned off, and the chances of our hitting anything would be minimal.”

We’d arranged our arrival so that as we entered the belt, we’d be moving not only to penetrate it, but also in the same direction as the orbiting asteroids. That, of course, reduced the chance of a collision. But it did look empty out there.

Eventually, Alex showed up. “See anything?”

“Just a couple of rocks,” I said.

“It doesn’t look like what I expected.”

“I thought so, too. Belle tells me we could go through it blindfolded and be pretty safe.”

“Really? You told her that, Belle?”

“Not precisely in those words.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it. Have we locked onto Larissa yet?”

“Belle?” I asked.

“Not yet. But we should see it anytime now.”

We went back into the passenger cabin and had breakfast. I’d gotten into the habit over the past few years of watching the morning news shows. I missed them when we were on the road. Alex had suggested I record a few before leaving Rimway, so I could watch them during the flight.

“They’d be old news,” I’d told him.

“They’re always old news,” he’d said. “There are no good journalists anymore.” Alex didn’t like journalists, or at least he didn’t like talk-show hosts because they’d made a living for years inviting people onto their shows to criticize him.

Alex had always pretended to ignore the tomb-robber comments, but I could see that sometimes they stung. I suspect there was an echo in there somewhere from Gabe’s efforts to win him away from the career he had chosen. Gabe, he’d explained, had never let his anger show, but his disappointment had come through. And it lingered. By the time Gabe got back, in 1440, I suspected Alex would have found a way to construct a rapprochement. He’d discovered that life without his uncle was not fulfilling. He would have denied that he craved Gabe’s blessing, but it was hard to miss.

My mom hadn’t cared much for Alex, and she’d been uneasy when I went to work for him. She’d have tried to talk me out of it except that she was too smart for that. She understood there would have been no better way to lock me into the country house than to show her disapproval. So she’d concealed it as best she could, and I saw it only on those rare occasions when the subject surfaced because of some news coverage, or my misbegotten attempts to explain how he was performing a public service. She had to work hard not to roll her eyes. There’d been only one occasion I could remember that she’d actually said something directly, and that was after the near disaster on Salud Afar. I can’t quote her, but she commented that people would always remember him as a hero, and she couldn’t deny that it was fortunate he’d been there on that occasion, but that it didn’t change the fact that he saw the world in terms of cash flow. He pretended to love historical objects, she’d said, but that passion was always tied to their sales value.

I knew Alex better than she did. He had no objection to making money from artifacts. What lay open to the world, in his view, belonged to the world. If he could recover it, he saw no moral imperative that required him to turn it over to a museum. He supplied artifacts to collectors, to people who appreciated their value. To people like Linda Talbott, who could plan a major celebration around a chair.

I’ve seen Alex’s clients take more pleasure out of an artifact than I’ve ever seen anyone display walking through a museum. And okay, I know how that sounds. But that was running through my mind on that flight, when we confronted the very real possibility that we were about to uncover a find of historic proportions. Consequently, it was no surprise that I almost fell out of my chair when Belle’s voice broke through: “All right, Chase. The asteroid’s in sight.”

She put it on the display. It was only a light in the sky, indistinguishable from the stars. But, as we watched, its position gradually changed.

“How long?” I asked.

“About forty minutes.”

The tension rose. Even Belle seemed to become nervous as we closed on it. She didn’t, for example, set up her usual countdown when something big was in the works.

We rode in near silence for about fifteen minutes before Belle spoke again. “It has lights.”