Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

“I’ve been reading about him. After the Polaris, he used to go to Carimba Canyon sometimes and just stand out there and watch the sun go down.”

Alex’s eyes had become hooded. “He might have jumped into the Melony. Been carried out to sea.”

“It could have happened that way.”

“But there wasn’t a suicide note?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Chase,” he said, “I wonder if I could persuade you to do me a favor?”

Georg Kloski had been with the team of analysts that went over the Polaris when it was brought back. He had to be older than he looked. He could have passed for a guy in his midforties, but he was at least twice that age. “I work out,” he said, when I commented on his appearance.

He was about medium size and build, affable, happily retired on Guillermo Island in the Gulf. I introduced myself, told him I was collecting information for a research project, which was true enough, and asked whether I could take him to lunch. It’s always more convenient, of course, to ask questions over the circuit. But you can get a lot more out of people if you treat for tea and a steak sandwich.

He said yes, of course, he’d never decline lunch with a beautiful woman. I knew right away I was going to like this guy. I flew down next morning and met him at a waterfront restaurant. I think it was called the Pelican. There are, of course, no pelicans on Rimway, but Georg (we got quickly to a first-name basis) told me the owners were from Florida. Did I know where Florida was?

I knew it was on Earth somewhere, so I guessed Europe and he said close enough.

He lived alone. Some of his grandkids were nearby on the mainland. “But not too close,” he said with a wink. His hair was thick and black, streaked with gray.

Broad shoulders, lots of muscle, a helping of flab. Good smile. Every woman in the restaurant seemed to know him. “I was mayor at one time,” he said, by way of explanation. But we both knew there was more to it than that.

So we sat for the first few minutes, getting acquainted, listening to the shrieks of seabirds. The Pelican was located off a stone walkway that ran along the waterfront.

The island has a much balmier climate than Andiquar. Hordes of people in beachwear were strolling past. Kids trailed balloons and some folks rode in motorized coaches.

Guillermo was popular because it had real thrill rides, glider chutes, tramways, boat rides, a haunted house. It was a place for people who wanted something a bit more challenging than the virtuals, which induced the same heart-stopping effects, but were always accompanied by the knowledge you were actually sitting in a dark room, perfectly safe. Which some folks thought took the edge off things.

From the Pelican we could see a parachute drop.

“It was a terrible time,” he told me, when I finally steered the conversation around to the Polaris. “People didn’t know what to think.”

“What did you think?” I asked.

“It was the lander that really threw me. I mean, it would have been easy enough to imagine that they’d all decided to go for a joyride somewhere and gotten lost, or hit by an asteroid. Or something. At least it would have been a theoretical possibility. But the lander was still moored in the launch bay. And that last message-”

“ - Departure imminent - ”

“- Imminent. It still sends a chill down my back. Whatever happened, happened very fast. Happened within the few seconds between the time she sent the message and the moment she’d have initiated the jump. It’s as if something seized them, shut them down, cut off their comms, and took the people off.”

The sandwiches arrived. I tried mine, chewed on it for a minute, and asked whether he had any ideas at all how it could have happened, other than superior technology.

“Look, Chase,” he said, “it has to be something out there way ahead of us. I mean, on their own, it wouldn’t even have been physically possible for them to leave the immediate area of the ship. Not without the lander. Maddy had four pressure suits on board. They were still there when the Peronovski arrived on the scene.”

There was a tourist artist out on the walkway, sketching a young woman. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and smiled prettily for him. “Georg,” I said, “is it possible there could have been some kind of virus or disease that drove everyone insane?”

Two young women in see-through suits strolled past. Followed by a couple of guys. “Shocking what people wear these days,” he said with a smile. His eyes never left the women until they disappeared past the window. “Anything’s possible, I suppose. But even had something like that happened, had they been rendered incompetent by a bug of some sort that subsequently became undetectable to the cleanup crew, so what? It still doesn’t explain how they got off the ship.”

The tea was good. I listened to the roar of the surf. It was solid and real and reassuring.

“No,” he continued. “The suits were still there. If they went out one of the airlocks, they were either already dead, or they died a few seconds later. You ever been on a ship, Chase?”

“Occasionally.”

“The outer hatch won’t move until the air pressure in the airlock goes to zero.

Anybody trying to leave who doesn’t have a suit is going to be in pretty bad shape before the door even opens. But let’s say he holds his breath and doesn’t mind that things get a little brisk. He jumps out. It’s a good jump. Say, a meter a second.

The Peronovski gets there six days later. How far away is the jumper?”

“Not very far,” I said.

He pulled a napkin over, produced a pen, and started scribbling. When he’d finished he looked up. “I make it at most five hundred eighteen kilometers. Round it off to six hundred.” He tossed the pen down and looked at me. “That’s easily within the search range of the Peronovski ’s sensors.”

“Did they do a search?”

“Sure. They got zero.” He sighed, and I wondered how many times he’d thought about this during the past sixty years, whether he’d ever been free of it for a full day.

“If I hadn’t lived through it, I’d say that what happened to the Polaris wasn’t possible.” He ordered a lime kolat and sat staring at the window until it came.

“When they brought the ship back,” I said, “did you find anything you hadn’t expected to? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“No. Nothing. Their clothes were all there. Toothbrushes. Shoes. I mean, what it looked like was that they’d all stepped out for a minute.” He leaned over the table.

His eyes were dark brown, and they got very intense. “I’ll tell you, Chase. This was all a long time ago, but it still scares me. It’s the only really spooky thing I’ve seen in my life. But it makes me wonder if sometimes the laws of physics just don’t apply.”

Georg looked like a guy who ordinarily enjoyed his food. But he only nibbled at his sandwich. “We spent weeks inside the ship. We pretty much stripped it. Took everything out and labeled it and sent it to the lab. The lab didn’t find anything that advanced the investigation. Eventually, they put the stuff in a vault somewhere. Later the Trendel Commission came in and sorted through it. I was there for that, too.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but how thorough were you?”

“I was only a tech. Fresh out of school. But I thought we were reasonably thorough. The commission brought in outside people so nobody could claim coverup. I knew one of the investigators they brought in. Amanda Deliberte. Died early. In childbirth. You believe that? She’s the only case of a childbirth fatality we’ve had during the last half century. Anyhow, Amanda wasn’t given to screwing around. But they didn’t find anything more than we did. I’ll tell you, Chase, there was nothing there. Whatever happened to those people, it happened fast. I mean, it had to, right?