Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

She had discovered a new type of astronomical body. A special kind of brown dwarf. They were calling it a chimera now, but Greg had told her yesterday that they’d eventually be referred to as Lang Objects .

Greg was tall and thin, with an angular jaw, angular nose, dark hair, intense eyes. His students referred to him as Sherlock Holmes because of his world-class problem-solving skills and his intensely mediocre abilities with a violin. “All right,” he said, signaling for quiet. “Let’s pull ourselves together.” That brought laughter. “I wouldn’t want to cancel the wine and cheese.”

The people around her were reaching for Kristi’s hand, patting her on the back. Tim Rodgers, tanned and good-looking and brilliant, gave her an approving smile. He was impressed. Maybe even envious.

The time honored Q and A had to be observed. Greg called for questions. Hands went up. He stepped aside and gave her the lectern.

Tim remained standing while the others took their seats. He was finishing his own thesis, and had been, until recently, at the top of everybody’s list of People Who Would Go Somewhere. Now he was a distant second.

“Okay, Kristi,” he said, “you’ve established the existence of a new class of object. How’d it happen?”

The explanation was simple enough. She’d been doing analyticalstudies of billions of brown dwarfs and had noticed a few anomalies. Way too much deuterium. But that wasn’t the big news. She was holding that for later.

“We eventually found two thousand oddballs,” she said. Brown dwarfs were failed stars. The chimeras, the Lang Objects, were anomalous. Odd. And not easy to account for with conventional physics.

“You briefly mentioned actinides,” came another question. “But I don’t see the connection. Please elaborate.”

Kristi smiled and tried to look modest. “Think DNA,” she said. “Common origin. Common purpose.”

The comment puzzled everyone. Brows furrowed. They whispered to one another and waited for her to explain herself.

In fact, her inspiration had come that past summer from a set of police blinkers mounted over a cabin on Kilimanjaro.

Hemingway’s mountain. Now the site for the Yuri Artsutanov Space Elevator. Kristi had been on her way to the Clarke Research Station, poised overhead in geosynchronous orbit. She was hunting for the photons that she hoped would help explain the existence of the anomalous chimeras .

There were nearly two thousand of them, all young, concentrated in the spiral arms of the Milky Way, interlopers, deuterium-rich freaks that had no business existing. Clad in shorts and a Columbia University t-shirt, Kristi drove a Jeep across the savanna. The sky was heavy with clouds, and the smell of cool moisture hung in the late morning air. Storm coming, and she was already late. If she didn’t hustle, she stood a good chance of missing her ride. The weather guy had said clear, bright and sunny, beautiful weather. She’d spent the last few months completely absorbed by her research, had analyzed a million images, looked for the needle in a billion haystacks, written a killer proposal that even Greg Cooper in his Holmes role couldn’t fault. But here she was going to be left standing at the station. Scheduling rides on the Yuri was no easy proposition.

Not that it would matter in the end. Jeff would make the observations and deliver the petabytes to her account. They’d be perfectly de-biased and flat-fielded, even if she never floated through the observatory hatch. Still, the karma would be wrong. It was once in a lifetime, and she needed to be there when the evidence came in.

The rim of Kibo, the summit crater, popped momentarily into view as she passed three thousand meters, and then promptly vanished into the gathering clouds. Raindrops began to spatter against the windshield. She started the wipers. The road was wide and designed to take heavy traffic, but it was still uphill all the way, sometimes at an almost impossible angle. The rain intensified, and pounded on the roof.

She slowed down as visibility dropped to about fifty meters. A truck passed going the other way. A burst of wind pounded the Jeep and water blasted across the windshield.

Her cell phone chimed. “ Kristi. ” It was Kwame Shola, the chief of operations at Yuri.

“How you doing, Kwame?”

“ Not so good. Where are you now? ”

“On the way.”

“ Okay. But take it easy. We got snow like mad up here. Weathermen missed it completely. ”

Great. Just what she needed. “All right,” she said.

“ No heroics, please. If you need it, we have a climber cabin at five thousand meters. Combo is 2718. ”

“Twenty-seven eighteen.”

“ Remember ‘e’. ”

‘e,’ of course, lower case always, was the base of the natural logarithms, equaling 2.718281808…on into an infinity of digits. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

Greg had been ambivalent about her working with the chimeras. Don’t know where you’re going to go with them, he said. You could wind up producing a lot of data and still have to throw up your hands and admit you don’t have a clue about what they are or why they even exist. Put the idea on hold, he told her. Confine the research to more conservative areas, at least until you’ve wrapped up your doctorate and gotten an appointment somewhere. He was right, of course. The path of guaranteed success. But she was fascinated by the objects. Her father had always told her to follow her instincts. And her instincts took her right into the shadow of the deuterium dwarfs. They were so intriguing, so difficult to explain, that she simply could not resist.

She had never wanted to be anything but an astronomer. Her father, who’d been a high school science teacher, had brought home a pair of image-stabilized binoculars from the third Gulf War. When he gave them to the little redheaded six-year-old, she was transfixed. The moon had craters and tall mountains. Jupiter was a tiny disk with moons of its own. And the Milky Way was a glittering pathway of stars. Distant suns, her father had explained. Countless millions of them. Some just like ours, some a lot smaller.

Why, Daddy, why are some of the stars different from the Sun?

He’d smiled and told her he didn’t know, but that she could figure it out if she wanted when she grew up.

And one evening, in the Big Dipper, she’d discovered Mizar. Her father had been on the porch with her and she’d screeched at him, “Daddy, they’re touching !” Twin stars. Over the next twenty years, her father could always get a laugh from her by repeating the phrase in a rising falsetto. But in fact, as she learned later, there were five stars in the Mizar system. By her first year in graduate school she’d found a brown dwarf companion to the five. And used it as a clock to age-date the system. Her Astrophysical Journal letter hung framed in his den. But he got nervous whenever he knew she was going up to the Clarke Station.

The rain turned to sleet and Kristi slowed the Jeep to a crawl. Her defroster was rapidly losing its battle with the Tanzanian snowstorm. She could no longer see the summit. A burst of wind shook the Jeep.

She tried to call Kwame for a weather update, but he wasn’t answering. Something big with lights roared past her, going down the mountain. She jerked the wheel hard, hit the brakes, spun across the icy muck, and slid off onto the shoulder.

Maniac.

She sat listening to the sound of the retreating truck. Then she pulled carefully back onto the highway. It was getting dark.

She picked her way uphill, past boulders and patches of lichen. Occasionally the road emerged along the edge of a precipice and she could look out through a hole in the clouds across the savanna. Then the clear patch was gone and the road was winding up through the night while rain and sleet whipped across the windshield. She began to wonder whether she’d missed the 5000-meter signpost when her headlights swept over it. She didn’t see a cabin anywhere, but it didn’t matter because she had no interest in missing her ride. There was still a chance, if the weather broke, that she could make it.