Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

“White looked pretty good.”

“White didn’t lose her passengers. Take my word for it, Chase.”

He’d always been right before on such matters. So we added one of her uniform blouses (there were two available), and paused over a dark green platinum etui decorated with flowers and songbirds. It came with a certification that it had been the personal property of Madeleine English. Alex picked it up and opened it. Inside were a pen, a comb, a wallet, a string of artificial pearls, a set of uniform bars, and two pairs of earrings. “This all included?” he asked Windy.

She nodded. “It had cosmetics in it, too,” she said. “But they were rotting out the interior.”

They agreed on a price that I thought was high, but it was a nice package, and Alex smiled benignly, the way he did when he wanted you to think he’d paid too much and was already having regrets. He gave it to Windy, and she handed it over to the aide, who showed us that we’d used up our allotment.

We wandered through displays of furniture and equipment across the back of the room. The captain’s chair, a conference table, display screens, even a vacuum pump.

VR gear. But these kinds of items, except the chair, were impersonal and would provoke less interest.

“You got the pick of the lot,” Windy said. She looked as if she meant it.

When we left, the Mazha was in the process of examining a wall plaque depicting the ship’s schematic. “How many is he getting?” I asked.

She cleared her throat. “They didn’t put a limitation on him.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“He’s a head of state.” She allowed herself a smile. “When you take over a government, we’ll do the same for you.”

We headed finally into an adjoining room, followed by the young man with the case. He wasn’t much more than a kid. Nineteen, at most. While Windy tallied up the bill I asked him where he was from.

“Kobel Ti,” he said. West coast.

“Going to school here?”

“At the university.”

While we talked, Alex transferred payment. The aide told me how happy he was to have met me, made a self-conscious pass, and handed over the items. I decided it was my night.

Windy gazed down at the case and asked whether we wanted her to have it sent over to the office. “No,” Alex said, “thanks. We’ll take it with us.”

I noticed the Mazha leave the exhibition room, surrounded by his people, and pass quickly into the corridor. He looked worried.

We were starting for the exit when a security guard appeared in midair. A projection. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we’ve received a warning that there may be a bomb in the building. Please evacuate. There is no cause for alarm.”

Of course not. Why would anyone think there was cause for alarm? Suddenly I was being swept along by Alex. He had me in one arm and the container in the other.

Windy, trailing behind us, called out that she was sure there was a mistake somewhere. Who would put a bomb in Proctor Union?

It became a wild scramble. The exit was through a doorway that would accommodate no more than three people at a time. A few of the less mobile ones went down. Alex told me gallantly to have no fear, and when we stopped to try to help a woman who had fallen, the crowd behind us simply pushed us forward. I don’t know what happened to her.

“Stay calm,” the projection was saying. Easy enough for him. He was probably in another building.

The crush in the passageway was a nightmare. People were yelling and screaming. I was literally carried through the front door without my feet touching the ground. We exploded out onto the portico. Alex briefly lost the case, and he risked getting trampled to retrieve it.

Security officers kept us moving. “Please stay well away from the building,” they were saying. “Keep calm. There’s no immediate danger.”

Nobody needed persuading. The crowd was scattering in all directions by then.

The security force directed the flow toward the bridges across the Long Pool.

But they’d already jammed up as we came down the stone steps. So they changed tactics and moved the rest of us across the face of the buildings, out past the wings. I noticed Ponzio ahead of me. Windy, to her credit, was one of the last people to come out through the doors. And she barely got clear before Proctor Union shuddered and erupted in a fireball.

The warning had come just in time. It helped that everything in the place was flameresistant, so after the initial blast there was no fire. Nevertheless, it was a bad moment. The blast knocked us all off our feet. Hot debris rained down on us. A big piece of something hissed into the Long Pool, and a statue of Reuben Hammacker, one of Survey’s founding fathers, was decapitated.

Emergency vehicles arrived within minutes and began picking up the injured.

Other units showed up and sprayed water or chemicals on what remained of Proctor Union. A large cloud of steam formed overhead. I heard later that the Mazha was bundled into his skimmer and lifted away within seconds. We didn’t know what kind of condition he was in, but at that point no one was thinking much about him.

The building was demolished. A smoking ruin. My first thought was that there had to be ten or twenty dead. We staggered around in a kind of daze. Everyone was in shock. I’d twisted a knee at some point during the panic and collected a couple of burns. Nothing major, fortunately, but it hurt. Alex complained that his jacket was torn, something I really needed to hear. He seemed otherwise okay. When I got myself together I went looking for Windy. But the place was boiling with confusion, people wandering around screaming and crying, searching for friends, trying to figure out a way to get home, asking one another what had happened.

I couldn’t find her, although I found out later she was okay. Knocked down by the blast, but she came away with a few cuts and bruises and a broken ankle. One of the rescue workers corralled me and asked if I was all right and when I told her I was fine she insisted on looking in my eyes and the next thing I knew I was being loaded into a skimmer along with several others, and we were hauled off to a hospital.

They did an exam and told me everything was superficial, don’t worry, gave me some painkillers, and suggested I have someone come get me.

Alex had followed the emergency vehicle, and he came to my rescue. While he filled out the forms, I talked on the circuit with a trim, blond, impeccably dressed man who identified himself as an agent from the NIS. Wanted to ask about the explosion.

What did I recall? “Just the bang,” I said.

“You didn’t see anyone suspicious?” He was good. He operated in low key, and he seemed sympathetic.

“No.”

“Are you okay, Ms. Kolpath?”

“Just bumps and bruises,” I said.

“Good. Did you happen to notice whether anyone left early?”

What the hell. “We were all leaving a bit early.”