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

Ana listened and paled. “Are you sure?” Her voice trembled.

“I need to do some more checking. But yes, I don’t think there’s much question.”

“Thanks, Kristi,” she said. “I’m glad you told me. It’s helpful to know what he did.” She took a deep breath. “Do you need more data? What can I do to help?”

Kristi nodded. “The radial velocities are crucial.” She was trying hard not to sound excited. “The variations were tiny. Greg must have missed them. I need a set of high dispersion observations every six hours for a month. Can you do it?”

Ana could. “You bet. I’ll get started tomorrow.”

The Neugebauer data accumulated on her computer for three weeks before Kristi allowed herself to inspect it. The direct images were saturated, just as she had expected. No wonder it’s so bright. But the spectra were exquisite.

And they confirmed her suspicions.

She called Ana. “It’s what we thought,” she bubbled with enthusiasm as she described the results.

“Now what?” asked Ana.

“We need access to the coronagraph.” The coronagraph was designed to block the glare of a distant sun, allowing its planets to be seen. “Joel,” Kristi said.

Ana nodded.

Joel Dayan had designed and built the coronagraph at Clarke. He was on the staff at Caltech, just down the hall.

Joel blinked in surprise as she walked into his office and shut the door. “Tongues will wag, Kristi,” he smiled.

“You wish, big fella.” Joel was one of the brightest people Kristi had ever met. He had done breakthrough work on instrument design, was a superb classroom instructor, and had won a Shaw Foundation Prize four years earlier for his imaging of terrestrial planets in nearby star systems. In his spare time, he partnered with an airline pilot as the California state bridge champions. He was also pretty good-looking.

“I need your help, Joel,” she said.

He sighed. “What can I do for you, Kristi?”

“I want to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” She described her discovery, told him yes there was no question, and no she wasn’t kidding. She showed him the new data from Ana.

He listened, looked skeptical, nodded. “Greg’s work, you say?”

“Yes.”

“I never got to meet him.” He sat quietly, considering what she’d said. “My loss.”

“Can you help?”

“You’re asking me if the coronagraph is available.”

“Yes.”

“Not really. It’s never available, Kristi. You know how that is.”

She knew. People were lined up for months ahead.

“We’d have to get somebody to give up their time.”

“I know,” she replied. “But you have seven days, beginning this Friday.”

“You’re offering me a junior partnership in a risky enterprise that might be in the textbooks for centuries.” She smiled and nodded. “Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.”

He walked into her office an hour later. “Okay,” he said. “We can do it.”

“This Friday?”

“Yes. But there’s a price.”

“Sounds like the end of my virtue.”

He laughed. “I’ll take it if it’s available. In any case, I want to go with you.”

Three years earlier, Kristi had almost frozen to death in a snowstorm when her car slipped off the Kilimanjaro summit road. This time it was sunny right to the top. The auto-drive let them both enjoy the view. They relaxed and laughed and snacked as the pressurized car climbed more than five kilometers above the surrounding savannah. The Yuri Artsutanov Space Elevator was celebrating its thirtieth year of operation. Large banners hailing the international consortium lined the road. This would be her sixth trip up, and his tenth. Security had been beefed up since her last visit. The guards put their suitcases through X-ray, terahertz, and pion imagers. She hated being swabbed for a DNA sample. Joel just shrugged. “Standard operating procedure where I come from. Better than a lunatic bringing a polio-smallpox cocktail onboard in her own body.”

The cable seemed to hang from infinity, contrary to the laws of common sense. Yuri’s base towers were surrounded by enormous structures extruding new nanowire ribbon. The lifting capacity was being doubled to one hundred tons. Competition from the rival elevator, the Bradley C. Edwards , anchored due south of Hawaii, remained fierce. Joel and Kristi were the only passengers, so the steward ushered them into the first-class section. Nice , she thought. This is how the other half lives. They strapped themselves in as the hatches clicked shut. The carbon nanowires stiffened and the elevator lifted away from Kibo, the summit crater. Minutes later they spotted Kigali and Kampala across Lake Victoria. The Indian Ocean came into view and the Earth became round. Venus and Saturn appeared as the sky turned dark blue, then black. Their eyes adapted to the night, and the star clouds in Sagittarius became visible. They talked, drank coffee, and enjoyed each other’s company. Toward the end of the nine-hour ride, she fell asleep on his shoulder. He stroked her cheek to wake her just before the clamps on Clarke locked the elevator in place. “Hey, kid,” he said, “it’s showtime.”

Ana was waiting for them. She hugged Kristi and shook hands with Joel. Kristi had warned her to wait for dinner, and Ana laughed when she saw the crabcakes. A complex Stellenbosch Chenin Blanc with a hint of citrus enlivened the evening.

Joel had stenciled HARSH MISTRESS (HM) on his coronagraph, because of the sub-nanometer precisions required to make it work. He’d anchored the core of the device to carbon-silicon nanorods in liquid helium to eliminate flexure. Cooling and testing the alignment was a three-day blur of activity. The instrument was trivial in principle—it used a small metal disk to occult the glare of a star. Its ten-billion-times-fainter planets could then be seen. Detailed images of Jupiters and Neptunes around nearby stars were like shooting fish in a barrel for HARSH MISTRESS. Joel had built HM for his Ph.D., to take the first resolved images of Earth-like exoplanets. A decade later, he had a hundred discoveries to his credit. All were like Mars or Venus, with atmospheres utterly devoid of oxygen. Religious fundamentalists were using this to “prove” that life on Earth was unique and divinely created. He rolled his eyes when Kristi teased him about it. “Nutcases,” he said. “I’ll need a bodyguard when I find an oxygen-dominated terrestrial world.”

A few months earlier, Joel had serendipitously detected two Ceres-sized asteroids orbiting Barnard’s Star. They were the first exo-asteroids known. The precious observing time they were going to use now had originally been awarded to look for more asteroids around other nearby stars. Greg and Kristi’s discovery took precedence, so Joel was going to sacrifice all seven days of his hard-won Neugebauer time to make the necessary observations. A small price for astronomical immortality , he thought. If it works. And he didn’t mind having a very attractive redhead like Kristi Lang feeling indebted to him.

Caltech’s press officer reminded Kristi of a bulldog. His cylindrical body and stubby legs supported a square head with sad brown eyes, short golden hair, and a white beard over large jowls. Alan Boxer loved his job and the eclectic scientists whose work he publicized. This morning promised to be a high point in his career. Two hundred media representatives were munching donuts and downing coffee in Feynman Hall, waiting for him to begin the press conference. He nodded, and the Astrophysics chair of Caltech stepped to the podium.