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

“Kamiokande IV is reporting eight hours of right ascension, minus forty-seven degrees of declination,” said Ana tensely. “Somewhere in Vela.” It had taken her just a minute to reach the duty technician of the world’s largest neutrino telescope. Its cubic kilometer of ultra-pure water was two miles underground to prevent false signals from cosmic rays. Most neutrinos raced through the entire Earth without being stopped. But a tiny fraction crashed into protons in Kamiokande’s water, generating miniscule flashes of light. Many of the Japanese telescope’s trillion photo-detectors had saturated during the neutrino onslaught, but the neutrino flash’s position in the southern Milky Way was firmly in hand. “Plus minus two degrees is their guess, near Gamma Velorum. Roughly an hour before they can refine the position, but at 810 light-years, Gamma’s the closest Wolf-Rayet star in the sky. I wish that helped.”

Maybe. At the moment, Greg had other priorities. “Okay, Ana. Thanks. It means I have a few minutes more. When Marnie gets back, if you could send the shuttle PDQ, I’d be grateful.”

She was silent a long time.

And he knew. “What’s wrong?”

“Greg, Shuttle One is scrap.” She added a few details as she finished sealing the shelter doors. She was trying not to lose control in front of the bewildered tourists.

“No chance at all?” Greg asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

They were on a visual hookup, so she could see him. He nodded and pressed his lips together. Sometimes things like this happen. Nobody’s fault. “It’s okay, Ana,” he said. “Thanks for trying.”

He pushed back in his chair, as if it might be possible to draw it around him, to hide in it. Not exactly my day. I hope it isn’t too painful when it comes. There was nowhere to run. He’d put on his spacesuit for the shuttle trip, but it couldn’t protect him from a gamma ray burst. Vela was visible through the portside hatches. He moved as far starboard as possible, behind some computer racks. Tying up the loose strands of his life took just a few minutes online. He was finishing when the comm link suddenly roared with static and his visor blazed like the midday sun.

As they suspected, it had been Gamma Velorum. The star had undergone core collapse, producing a supernova brighter than the full moon. Kristi Lang was shattered by the news from Clarke. Greg was the only casualty, thank God, but he had been her mentor and friend, and had provided encouragement and support three years earlier during her Ph.D. research. She now had an international reputation for outside-the-box thinking, and a bit of media renown to boot. She’d concluded, on strong evidence, that a class of brown dwarfs, failed stars, were being used to mark black holes. They were being pressed into service as interstellar lighthouses. It was a wild idea, of course. And, like all wild ideas, it was still not widely accepted. But it would be one day.

Greg would not be there to see it.

Ana called her within an hour, although the story was all over the media by then. The director had been fighting back hysteria, and Kristi had lent her strength. Hang on, Ana. He had a good life. Our lives are richer because he lived.

Words. What the hell good were they at a time like that? And in the morning, when she was able to get herself together, the found the e-mail from Greg.

It was routine stuff. How much he was enjoying himself on the Weber. How he was at that moment watching a shuttle filled with tourists headed his way. And there was a P.S.: There’s big news in Sagittarius. A Clyde Tombaugh special. Gotta go. More later.

Clyde Tombaugh was the guy who’d discovered Pluto. What the hell was Greg talking about?

More later.

She gave it a few weeks, and then tried to reach Ana. But she was in transit on her way to Baltimore. Kristi located her on a glide train and arranged to meet her for dinner.

Ana could not have been called beautiful, but she was an attractive woman, with blue-green eyes, lush chestnut hair, and the kind of presence you associate with leading ladies. Kristi was shocked by how much she’d changed over the few weeks since they’d last seen each other. Ana looked gaunt and her skin was sallow. She was bitterly unhappy and it showed. Kristi gave her a hug. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Ana shrugged. “Not really.” Her eyes avoided Kristi, and wandered instead around the interior of the Crab Pot. It was early, and there were only a few customers present. Piano music was being piped in. “I finally got all the reports,” Ana began. “Greg got an awful dose. Around 90 sieverts. Five is fatal.” Her voice caught, and tears began running down her cheeks. She managed a smile and wiped her eyes. “It took us over a day to get him out of Weber. He was horribly burned, comatose, and—. Well, the details don’t matter.”

“Ana, there’s no need to talk about this.”

“I need to, Kristi. I really need to.”

A waiter appeared. His name was Richard, and could he get anything for the ladies?

They ordered Maryland microbrews and crabcakes.

Ana took a deep breath. “He’s in cryosusp and his daughter won’t let the doctors pull the plug.”

“Pity. But I can understand it.”

“Did you know we’re getting sued, too?”

“No. By whom?”

“The tourists. They’ve launched a class action claiming negligent design and inadequate radiation protection. A wonder they aren’t suing God for setting off Gamma Vel so close to us.”

“Any of them get sick?”

“As far as I know, they’re fine. They’re claiming mental trauma, or that their health was put at risk, or some damnfool thing.”

The beers arrived. Kristi was used to touching glasses when she dined with old friends. But Ana simply swept hers up, gazed at it sadly, and took a long swallow.

“Don’t they sign a legal release before they go up?”

“Yes. We’re not responsible for acts of God. And if a nearby supernova isn’t an act of God, I’ve no idea how you’d define the term. But it’ll be at least a year before we can bring back tourists. No tourists, no money. So Neugebauer and Weber and all the other telescopes are mothballed. Everyone is on unpaid leave.”

Kristi tried her own beer. “What are you going to do in the meantime, Ana?”

“I don’t know. A couple of places have offered me temporary positions. The University of Maryland wants me to come on board permanently.”

“I’d consider it.”

“You know, Kristi, I don’t think I realized how much I was going to miss him.”

Salads came. Kristi’s was a Caesar. “I got an e-mail from him,” she said. “Right at the end. And I can’t figure it out.”

Ann frowned. “Why not?”

Big news in Sagittarius. A Clyde Tombaugh Special. “You have any idea what he might have meant?”

Ana gazed at the ceiling, and then poked a fork into her salad. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t have a clue.”

“Nothing you’re aware of that he was looking at in Sagittarius?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Odd.”

“There is something, though. I’d forgotten.”

“What’s that?”

“He told me to make sure you read your e-mail.”

Kristi nodded. “The center of the Milky Way,” she said, “is in Sagittarius, so that part of the sky is choked with stars. I don’t know where to begin, Ana. I don’t know what he was talking about.”

Their dinners arrived. Ana paid no attention to the food. The door opened and eight or nine people came in, an office party. The hostess showed them into the next room. Lots of laughter and, almost immediately, a round of applause. Ana took a deep breath, and those dark intelligent eyes finally found Kristi. “I’m sorry. Whatever it was, I think Greg’s taken it with him.”