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

He passed her a jelly donut.

Kristi had been to the summit of Kilimanjaro four times before, but the sight of the base towers and the nanowire ribbon stretching up to infinity was as exhilarating as ever. “It hasn’t left yet?” she asked him.

“No. They’ve been waiting for you.”

It wasn’t critical that she be on site while her data were collected. But Greg had designed MEGASPEC and Kristi had written most of its software to confirm brown dwarf candidates, so a trip to recalibrate the million-object spectrograph was justified. And there would never be a time she’d pass on an opportunity to go up to the station, to see the home world from 36,000 kilometers. There was still a little kid in her somewhere. She’d commented along those lines once to Greg and he said it was true of everyone in the sciences who was worth a damn.

Kwame apologized that there was no time to shower and change. Have to do it in zero-gee.

“I’ll try to keep away from the other passengers,” she said.

“Ah. It is their loss.”

They pulled up at the front door of the terminal, and she thanked him for maybe the fifth time. Then she was hurrying through the reception area and someone came alongside to help with her bag and briefcase. Moments later she cleared the entry ramp, and hatches shut.

There were roughly a dozen other passengers. About half of them were tourists, including two kids. They looked curiously at her as the carbon nanowires stiffened and the elevator lifted away from Kilimanjaro. Minutes later she caught sight of Lake Victoria. They rose through the clouds, and the Atlantic came into view. And eventually she was looking down at the entire continent, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Nile delta.

Two hours out, at an altitude of 8000 kilometers, she got a sandwich and coffee from the convenience counter and settled down at one of the viewport tables to enjoy the ride. Closer to the chimeras, she thought. Well, not really, but the illusion was there as she soared ever higher.

She wished there were starships. She’d love to have an opportunity to go out and look at one of the things, close up. She knew how it would appear, of course. She had virtual brown dwarfs on call back home. They were Jupiter-sized spheres, red-brown, with mottled clouds floating in the atmosphere. The clouds were iron hydride, and of course the dwarf would be glowing, rather like a coal recently plucked from the fire.

She visualized it, and somehow she found herself thinking about Kwame’s police lights.

Someone came over and asked if he could share the table. Of course. He was a young man, and she realized immediately he was on the make.

“…Going to be pretty well tied up while I’m here,” she was saying.

He was a technician of some sort. Dull-looking. Thought well of himself. “Of course,” he said. “But all work—.”

She heard him out, and smiled when appropriate. “They pay to send me up here,” she said, as if she were making a major sacrifice. “…Don’t want me sitting around.”

The police lights. She stared through the young man into the deep night of the 5000-meter elevation, saw the soft orange glow, blinking on and off.

And suddenly she understood.

“ I don’t buy it, Kristi, ” Greg said. She had him on the vid relay, from his office. “ There’s got to be a natural mechanism at work. Maybe high pressure chemistry. Maybe magnetic fields. Maybe radiative levitation. Geochemical processes can concentrate minerals by orders of magnitude on Earth, so why not deuterium on the surfaces of brown dwarfs under far more exotic conditions? ” He sounded really concerned. It was why she liked him so much. He was worried about what would happen to her career if she tried to go public with her notion. She imagined it was hard for him not to say, You’re skating at the edge of academic disaster. Blow your reputation now and you’ll always be at the fringe.

“ I admit, ” he said, “ that fifty percent deuterium is far out. But whatever did this could also bury the helium. We just don’t know enough. ”

“I think it’s true,” she said.

“ It could be. Anything’s possible, Kristi. But think about what the professional price will be if you go off half-cocked, and then someone finds the real explanation. ” Then, more gently: “ I’ll go this far: Get two more pieces ofindependent evidence. If your idea stands up, Galileo will have to move over. ”

While the Earth dropped away, she worked on her computer. An hour later, still on the elevator, she raised a fist in triumph. The act drew the attention of several of her fellow passengers. She didn’t care. She had a match. In fact, the chimeras, almost the entire sample of two thousand, except two, showed up at the same sites listed in the all-sky X-ray source catalogs as black holes. That gave her a stunning 99.9% correlation. How much proof do you want, Greg?

For the next five hours she looked fruitlessly for other patterns. She was still engrossed in her analysis, and trying hard to keep her sense of exhilaration under control, as the elevator began its approach to the station.

An attendant asked her to return to her seat and buckle in. She felt indestructible at the moment, but she happily complied. Galileo was a piker.

An orange light was blinking on the link-up collar. It reminded her of Kwame’s beacon, and she smiled. A series of thuds reverberated through the hull as the elevator docked and the airlocks mated. Hatches opened and the passengers floated through into the connecting tube. The tourists would be headed for the hotel. The others scattered in different directions.

Jeff Fields, who ran the observatory programs, was waiting for her. “Jeff,” she said, “I want you to do something for me.”

“Okay,” he said. “What do you need?”

“Tomorrow, before we make any observations, I need you to change to the highest resolution grating.”

Standing at the lectern before her mentors and her peers, Kristi had deftly fielded a dozen questions about her analyses and catalog. The privilege of asking the final question traditionally went to the senior graduate student. Tim. She’d seen him writing while she spoke, scratching out lines, making faces, writing again. When the moment came, he stood. “Sorry, Kristi,” he began. “Nobody here is more anxious for you to be right. But I still don’t get it.” He glanced down at his notes, looked over at Greg, and plunged on. “Your high-res spectra and gravitational redshifts unquestionably prove that every one of your chimeras is eight Jupiter masses, and that each is orbiting something every year or so.” He took a deep breath. “The X-ray source coincidences are a convincing argument that the somethings are black holes. But black holes can’t concentrate deuterium or hide helium. Black holes were all once stars way too luminous to have formed with sub-brown dwarf companions in the first place. And, worst of all, your chimeras are too low in mass to ignite deuterium, yet they radiate like hot brown dwarfs.”

The others around the table were looking anxiously from Tim to her. A few whispers began. “In theory,” Tim continued, “your chimeras can’t exist, right? But they do. So what’s going on?”

You know, she thought, he really is good-looking. But not as quick on the draw as I’d thought.

He started to sit down, but got up again. “Kristi, you must have some idea how to explain these things?”

She looked over at Greg. He was gazing out the window at the beautiful autumn day. Then his eyes met hers. And he nodded. Do it.