Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

They were looking frantically for surviving text. There was some, but not much. “You know,” said Alex on our private channel, “I am having seriously dark thoughts about Baylee.”

Lawrence realized what was happening and guessed why it was being kept from him. “Nobody got hit harder than he did, Alex.”

“I know.”

“Okay. We need to have a team come up here and take a serious look around. There might still be something that can be salvaged.”

“You’ve spent a lot of time on the home world, Lawrence. You have people here you can trust?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d start with Heli.”

“When we put it together, Alex,” Lawrence asked, as we lifted away from Larissa, “do you want to be part of it?”

“No,” he said. “I’d like to be informed what you find. Other than that, it’s your project.”

“All right. Thank you. I appreciate it.” He was silent for a minute. Then: “I have one more question. When you get back to Rimway, what will you be saying about this find?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I’d prefer you say nothing.”

“We’ve already been through that.”

“I know. Can I ask you to leave Garnett out of it? Just say you discovered the wreckage here and that you don’t know how it happened?”

Alex looked straight ahead. “No,” he said. “I’m not comfortable lying. I understand you want to protect him, but you’ve done all you can. It’s out of your hands now.”

Lawrence took a deep breath. He looked resigned. “All right,” he said.

“What about Bill Garland?” I asked.

“Who’s he?” asked Southwick.

Alex responded: “A reporter who was helpful. I promised I’d let him know if we found the artifacts. I should be able to manage that without going into too much detail. I’ll go this far, Lawrence. I won’t mention Baylee’s name if I can avoid it. But we’ll have to inform his family. Marissa is the one who came to us. She deserves to know what happened. But if the word gets out, and I don’t see how that could not happen, I’ll have to tell what I know.”

“All right.”

Alex turned toward me. “Is that okay with you?”

I doubt that I looked very happy. “I can live with it.”

“Were you planning on doing another memoir, Chase?”

“Of this incident? Sure.”

Lawrence’s bewilderment was obvious. “Chase has written several memoirs of our efforts to locate lost artifacts,” Alex said.

They both looked at me. “All right,” I said. “I won’t release anything until it becomes public knowledge. Okay?”

Lawrence nodded.

Alex was still watching me. We both had a pretty good idea how long that would take.

So it was over. We took Lawrence back to Galileo Station, had dinner there, and wished him well. Then Alex called Bill Garland, gave him an account of what we’d found and left him with the impression that no one knew precisely how it had happened. Then we started for Rimway. We kept the coffee cup from the Gumdrop . Lawrence had everything else. It had been a remarkably unsatisfying conclusion.

“Well,” Alex said, “sometimes things just don’t work out real well.”

“Yeah.”

“When do you expect to publish the memoir?”

“What memoir?” I said. “This thing didn’t go anywhere. After all this running around, we needed to find something. All we have is a coffee cup.”

He was obviously thinking that I’d been as upset by the outcome as he was. To a degree, I suppose he was right. But I shrugged it off. It wasn’t the first time I’d lost a narrative that had started out with an intriguing setup. There had been, for example, the discovery of the lost tomb of Michael Truscott, the bloody-minded Director of the Lenola colony. Truscott’s remains, when examined, turned out to be female. All kinds of theories had come out of the woodwork, including a faked death to mislead his numerous enemies after several assassination attempts. In reality, Truscott had been a woman. The truth was revealed by the discovery of a diary while Alex was looking in a different direction.

Then there were the Lima Pearls, which had belonged to the beautiful theater star of the last century, Mora Volanda. She had been wearing them on the night she vanished, and there was some hope their discovery would lead to information on what had happened. But the investigation went nowhere. Mora’s fate remains unknown.

And Allen Penrose, a beloved fourteenth-century physician, had gone with his wife and another couple to a resort in the Achean Isles, where all four had vanished. His personal belongings had become collectors’ items, and Alex had gotten involved when several reports surfaced that the doctor had been seen at the annual Spook Fest celebration in Malachia.

So we relaxed and talked about other things en route back to Rimway. I was still in a kind of trance, and I remember telling Alex that I was going to use my next vacation to go back to Earth and spend more time. Just hang out in the place where it had all begun.

I wondered what Yuri Gagarin would have given for a ride in the Belle-Marie ?

Alex never really talked a great deal, but he was unusually withdrawn on the way home. He expressed concern about neglecting his clients and that a substantial amount of work was waiting for us. But it was more than that. I couldn’t decide whether it was Baylee’s unhappy end or the loss of the Apollo artifacts that hung over his head. Or possibly Gabe.

He admitted he’d be glad to get back to the country house. “I’m going to bring Woody in to do some restoration work on the place,” he said. “I’ve kind of let it go a bit. I wouldn’t want Gabe noticing that when he walks in.” Then he waved it away. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

We came out of jump a quarter million kilometers from Skydeck and checked in. The comm op was Josette St. Pierre, with whom I’d shared a few lunches. “Chase,” she said, “where’ve you guys been? They’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Who has, Josette?”

“John Kraus. The Capella ’s back.”

She passed me to her supervisor. “We don’t have much in the way of details,” he said. “They got hypercomm signals yesterday from her. Confirmed. So yes, it is back. Last I heard, we had no explanation, and no idea whether the situation would remain stable. But the big news is that after nineteen hours, it’s still on the surface. We’ve scrambled everything in sight. There must have been sixty ships left here in the last ten hours.”

Hypercomm signals. That indicated, at least, that they were still alive. “Where are they?”

“It’s a little farther out than last time. Do you want me to forward the data to you?”

“Please.”

There was a brief pause. Then: “Done.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Where’s John?”

“On the Isabella Heyman . It’s a yacht. He grabbed the first thing available.”

“Roger that. And you have no idea how long it will stay up?”

“They’re hopeful.”

“Why?”

“The last line in the message. It said: ‘Robert asked us to say hello.’” He paused. “They’re talking about Dyke. I assume you’re going, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “Changing course now.”

“Good luck, Chase. Skydeck out.”

Actually, I hadn’t reacted yet. I opened the allcomm: “Alex? You there?”