Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

That was a fairly bleak appraisal. But there was a degree of truth to it. Toxicon and Earth and a couple of other Confederate worlds were suffering from crowding.

I spent an hour or so with it, and, had I been able to keep one of the objects, that would have been my choice.

Some of his comments were sardonic. “I am going the way of all the earth,” from the Book of Joshua, was accompanied by his scrawled notation, As are we all.

“His family,” Alex said, “didn’t really want him to make the flight because they thought it was dangerous. Deep space, unknown country.”

“He should’ve listened.”

“Originally there were only to be two ships going to Delta Karpis. Then somebody at Survey, apparently Jess Taliaferro, the operations chief, got the idea of a VIP flight. Send out a few people who had made extraordinary contributions.

Recognize their accomplishments by providing the show of a lifetime.”

“It must have seemed like a good move at the time,” I said.

“They had people come in for the launch and make speeches. They even had a band.”

“How old was Urquhart?”

“In his sixties.” Still relatively young. “He had one son.”

In Ecclesiastes, “Be not righteous overmuch,” Urquhart had written, All things, even virtue, are best in moderation.

“He served two terms on the Council,” said Alex. “One of the best we had, apparently. But he was defeated in 1361. It seems he wanted people to stop having babies.”

I showed him the passage in Genesis.

Alex nodded. “I’m not surprised. He was concerned about unrestrained population growth. You don’t see it here, of course, but there are a lot of places that have serious problems. He grew up destitute in Klymor. His closest boyhood friend developed anemia and never really recovered, his mother died in childbirth when he was four, his father drank himself to death. Read his autobiography when you get a chance.”

And St. Luke: “Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee.” A caution to authors.

And politicians.

In the Book of Ruth, he’d marked her famous promise: Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge… Under the circumstances of his disappearance, an eerily appropriate line.

“He made a lot of enemies in his time,” Alex said. “He didn’t like special interests. He couldn’t be bought. And he apparently couldn’t be intimidated.”

“Sounds as if he should have been chief councillor.”

“He was too honest.”

I was still turning pages. “Here’s another one from St. Luke: ‘This night thy soul shall be required of thee.’ ” He’d underscored the passage but left no comment. I wondered precisely when he’d done that.

“One of his biographers,” said Alex, “quotes him as telling Taliaferro that having the opportunity to watch a sun get destroyed had forced him to think how different the scales were between human and cosmic activity. Given time, he’d said, who knew what Delta Kay might have produced?”

Garth Urquhart had piqued my curiosity. I looked through the record and watched him in action during his years as a senator and later on the Council, watched him campaign for himself and for others, watched him accept awards for contributions to various humanitarian efforts, watched him lose an election because he refused to budge on principle.

In 1359, six years before the Polaris, he’d been invited to address the World Association of Physical Scientists. He’d taken advantage of the opportunity to sound a warning. “Population continues to expand at a level that we cannot absorb indefinitely,” he said. “Not only here, but throughout the Confederacy. At current rates of growth, Rimway will be putting a serious strain on planetary resources by the end of the century. Prices for food and real estate and most other commodities continue to rise while demand increases. But there’s a limit, and beyond that limit lies catastrophe. We do not want to repeat the terrestrial experience.”

It hadn’t happened. Technological applications in agriculture and food production had combined with a growing tendency to keep families small. The socalled ‘replacement’ family had become the norm not only on Rimway, but through much of the Confederacy. The general population had increased, but by no more than two or three percent.

If he was wrong in his predictions, Urquhart was nevertheless an able speaker.

He was persuasive, passionate, self-deprecating. “Too many babies,” he’d said. “We need to slow down a bit. And let nature catch her breath.”

Corporate Rimway had wanted a growing population precisely because it brought rising prices. And they’d gone after him with a vengeance. “Urquhart Doesn’t Like Children!” became the battle cry of his opposition in 1360. Organizations like Mothers Opposed to Urquhart arrived on the scene. He refused to back down, and he was beaten.

My kind of guy.

I shipped everything off to the new owners, except the vest and the etui. Calder and Gold lived nearby and preferred to come to the Rainbow office to pick up their prizes.

Under the circumstances, Alex could have renegotiated the prices with his clients. Everything had multiplied several times in value as a result of the attack. But he charged only his cost plus the usual commission. Ida responded with a bonus that didn’t begin to cover the new value of the jumpsuit. Alex tried to refuse it, but she insisted. “We did the right thing,” Alex commented afterward. “We held no one up even though the opportunity was there, and nobody would have blamed us.” Of course, Rainbow’s demonstrated integrity wouldn’t hurt its reputation in the least.

Marcia Cable sent us a recording of herself appearing on a talk show in her area, showing off Maddy’s blouse. She was literally glowing.

Meantime Alex found some assignments for me and sent me off around the globe to represent the company in a couple of auctions, to do some negotiating with a few Neeli who had found some curiosities in the Neeli Desert, and to fill in for him at the annual World Antiquities Convention. I was gone ten days.

When I got back, I heard there’d been talk that Survey would make an effort to restore some of the artifacts damaged in the explosion. But there’s an odd thing about antiquities and damage. If you have, say, a vase that’s been scorched by a laser, and it happened during the useful days of the vase, it might actually enhance the value of the object. Especially if we know whose troops were firing the lasers and who was holding the vase. There’s nothing quite so priceless as a pistol that came apart while its heroic owner, say Randall Belmont, was using it to fend off the Hrin during the Last Stand. (The pistol exists, as you probably know, but I doubt there’s enough money on the planet to buy it.) But inflict the damage after the object is recovered from the soil, maybe by a careless archeologist cutting too close to it, and the value does a crash dive.

So the attempt went nowhere. Shortly after the restoration rumor first surfaced, Survey announced that it was abandoning the effort. And a few days later, the entire lot of mangled pieces was sold for a song.

Harold Estavez was delighted with White’s bracelet.

He was tall, solemn, a man for whom a smile seemed painful. An initial impression suggested he’d never learned to enjoy himself during a long life. He was overcast and gloomy, always awaiting a storm that never arrived, convinced the worst would happen. Alex told me that Estavez felt he’d lost the one great love of his life. I suspected every other woman in the area would have bolted as well.