Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

You’re a pilot?”

“Yes,” I said. To my surprise, I got a round of applause.

“Chase, help us here. Is it possible to assign limits to where starships can be at any given time?”

“Even with the quantum drive,” I said, “there are limits. But during the period you’re talking about, they were much more pronounced. Then, government and commercial carriers were required to send movement reports to the controlling station every four hours. If a report went missing, alarms went off. So they always knew where you were. Private vehicles-and there just weren’t very many of those-could participate if they wanted. Some did, some didn’t.

“So it’s easy enough to rule out the vast majority of the fleet. With the ships that are left, you can look at their ports of call and determine whether it was possible for any of them to get close to the target area. My understanding about the Polaris incident is that Delta Karpis is too far, and the commission was able to eliminate any possibility of another ship.”

The audience stirred. Someone said, “I told you so.”

One session employed an avatar of Jess Taliaferro, the Survey operations chief who had organized the mission. He talked about how pleased he’d been at the opportunity to give something back to Klassner and the others, how carefully they had planned everything, and how devastating the news had been.

I was standing beside an elderly couple loaded down with items from the souvenir shop. They had books, chips, a model of the Polaris, a Polaris scarf, and pictures of Maddy and her passengers.

I said hello, and they smiled. “I remember when it happened,” the man said, trying not to drop anything. “We didn’t believe it. Nobody did. Thought the early reports were mistaken. That they’d turn up belowdecks or something.”

The formal part of the presentation ended. It had been almost over when I walked in. “Unfortunate man,” said the woman.

She meant Taliaferro. “I suspect,” I said, “the experience marked him the rest of his life.”

She had gone gray and seemed frail, yet she possessed a robustness of spirit that flashed in her eyes. “Of course,” she said. “Look at what happened to him afterward.”

“What happened afterward?” I asked.

Both seemed surprised at the question. “He disappeared, too,” she said. “Never got over the shock, I suppose. Two, three years afterward he walked out the front door of Survey’s operations center, and nobody ever saw him again.”

They’d opened the floor for questions, and the audience couldn’t resist asking where Taliaferro had gone that afternoon fifty-seven years ago. “It was a bright summer day,” the avatar said. “Nothing out of the ordinary had been happening. I cleared off my desk, cleared everything, which was unusual for me. So it was obvious I knew that would be my last day on the job.”

“So what happened to you, Dr. Taliaferro?” asked a man in front.

“I wish I knew.” The avatar had Taliaferro’s personality, and whatever knowledge the data systems had been able to load into him, and whatever Taliaferro himself had chosen to impart. “But I honestly have no idea.”

There was a collector’s room, filled with books about the event, Polaris uniforms, models, games, pictures of the captain and passengers. And there again was Ormond’s painting of Dunninger gazing across the country graveyard. Several dealers had lines of clothing emblazoned with the ship’s seal. The most interesting item, I thought, was a set of four books certified as being from Maddy’s personal library. I’d have expected treatises on navigation and superluminal maintenance. Instead, I saw Plato, Tulisofala, Lovell, and Sim’s Man and Olympian. There was more to the lady than a pilot’s license and a pretty face. Had the asking price been reasonable, I would have picked them up.

My sense of the convention was that the attendees treated the entire business as a means of escape rather than a serious exercise. They weren’t really as caught up in the historical Polaris as they would lead an outsider to believe. Rather, it was a means to make the universe a bit more mysterious, a bit more romantic, and maybe a lot less predictable than it actually was. I concluded that nobody there really believed in the alien wind. But it charged them up to pretend, for a few hours, that it just might have happened that way.

The evening was mostly hyperbole. It was part celebration, part speculation, part mythmaking. And part regret.

The Polaris convention provided just what I needed: a rationale to get away from my usual routine and an evening so full of whimsy and nonsense that it became pure pleasure. When the scheduled presentations ended, the attendees threw a round of parties that extended well into the night. I got home close to dawn, slept three hours, got up, showered, and staggered over to the office. It was my half day, and I knew I could make it through to lunch. But I hoped nothing would come up that would require me to think clearly.

More calls were coming in, mostly from people outside our regular circle of customers, asking what Polaris artifacts we possessed, querying prices or, in some cases, making offers. The word had gotten around.

The bids were, I thought, on the high side. Even accounting for the loss of the rest of the exhibition. But Alex nodded sagely when I reported the numbers to him.

“They’ll be through the roof before it’s over,” he said. “By the way”-he looked innocently at the ceiling but couldn’t restrain a smile-“how’d it go last night?”

“It went fine.”

“Really? What did they decide about the Polaris? That the ghosts got them?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.” He saw that I wanted to ask something.

“What?” he said.

“You’re sure you want to hang on to these?” I was talking about the jacket and the glass. “We could get a lot for them. Guarantees your bottom line for the quarter.”

“We’ll keep them.”

“Alex, this is a period of peak interest. I agree that they’ll go still higher, but that’s probably a long time away. In the short term, there could be a falloff. You know how these things are.”

“Keep them.” He walked over and looked at the glass, which was front and center in the bookcase.

Next morning, CBY announced that the Mazha had been assassinated. Apparently by his son. With a knife, while the guards watched.

“Just as well,” Alex commented. “Nobody’s going to miss him.”

I hadn’t said anything about the call. It was embarrassing to have been a social contact of sorts with a monster. But when the news came, I told Alex everything that had happened.

“You must have made an impression,” he said.

Despite myself, I was sorry for him.

Alex was a good boss. I was responsible for day-to-day operations, and he left me to take care of things without trying to give a lot of directions. He spent most of his time entertaining clients and sources, but he always made it a point during the middle of the week to pull me out of the office and take me to dinner.

A couple of days after the convention, we went to dinner at Molly’s Top of the World, which is located at the summit of Mt. Oskar, the highest peak in the area. He was excited because he’d located an early-German coal stove. The thing was worth a fortune, and the owner needed the money and wanted to make a quick sale. Usually, we simply put buyers and sellers together, but the price was so good, Alex was thinking of buying the unit himself.

We spent the hour talking about stoves and European antiques. He solicited my opinion, and I told him sure, buy it, what can we lose? The decision made, we fell into small talk. It was late when we finished, and normally he’d have taken me home, but I had work to do, so we rode back to the office.