Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

Alex shook his head. The name was not familiar. “Did you ask how he came to know you had the blouse?”

“I think everybody knew. I told most of my friends, and I was on the Terry MacIlhenny Show with it.”

“That’s the one you sent us?” I said. I’d noticed it in the queue, but hadn’t really gotten around to watching it.

“Yes.” She was trying to decide whether she should be worried. “I was wondering if he was trying to pin down where we keep it. Maybe he’s going to try to steal it.” I told Alex, out of range of the link, that I hoped we weren’t getting people upset for no reason. “I asked him,” Marcia continued, “if he knew you, Alex. He said he did.”

“What did he look like?” Alex asked.

“He’s a young guy. Not very big. Midtwenties. Auburn hair cut short. Sort of old-fashioned style.”

“Did he leave contact information?”

“No.”

“Okay. Marcia, I have a favor to ask.”

“Sure. Alex, what’s this about anyhow?”

“Probably nothing. Just that somebody’s showing unusual interest in the Polaris artifacts. We don’t know what’s going on. But if you hear from him again, try to find out where he can be reached and get in touch with us. Right away.”

Young. Not very big. Midtwenties. Auburn hair cut short. Old-fashioned style.

“Maybe he’s legitimate,” I said. “Just wanted to look and changed his mind. No big deal about that.”

A call to Paul Calder confirmed that Davis, the purchaser of Maddy’s vest, fit the description of Bake Toomy. It seemed to be the same person.

Marcia lived in Solitaire, on the northern plains. Paul was a local. “Whoever this guy is,” Alex said, “he gets around.” He instructed the AI to check the listings in Solitaire for anyone named Toomy. “Can’t be many,” he said. “The population’s only a few thousand.”

“Negative result,” said the AI.

“Try the general area. Anywhere within a six-hundred-klick radius.”

“I have eighteen listings.”

“Anybody named Bake, or any variation like that?”

“Barker.”

“Any others?”

“Barbara. But that’s it.”

“What do we have on Barker Toomy?”

“He’s a physician. Eighty-eight years old. Attended medical school-”

“That’s enough.”

“Not our guy, Alex.”

“No.”

“Bake Toomy might be unlisted.”

“He might. But that would be unusual for a collector. Or a dealer. Check our clients. You won’t find any of them who aren’t listed.”

“Alex,” I said, “you think this is the same guy who did the break-in?”

“I don’t think it’s much of a leap.”

“I wonder if he’s connected with the woman who gave the bogus award to Diane?”

“I suspect so. Maybe not directly, but they’re after the same thing.”

“Which is-?”

“Ah, my sweet, there you have hold of the issue. Let me ask a question. Why did our intruder find it necessary to open the display case, but not the bookcase?”

I watched a taxi rise past the window and swing out toward the east. “I have no idea. Why?”

“Because the glass was in the bookcase. And you can’t hide anything in a glass.”

“You think somebody hid something in one of the artifacts?”

“I don’t think there’s any question about it.”

I was trying to digest it. “Then the thief took the coins and books-”

“-As a diversion.”

“But why not keep them? It’s not as if they weren’t valuable.”

“Maybe he didn’t know that,” he said. “Maybe he doesn’t know anything about collectibles.”

“That can’t be,” I said. “This whole thing is about collectibles.”

“I don’t think it is. This whole thing is about something else entirely, Chase.”

We sat looking at one another. “Alex, if there’d been something in the pockets of the jacket, Maddy’s jacket, do you think we’d have noticed?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I always inspect the merchandise. I even examined it for the possibility that something had been sewn into it. In any case, we know they didn’t find what they wanted at the house, or they wouldn’t still be hunting for it.”

My apartment building is a modest place, a privately owned three-story utilitarian structure that’s been there a hundred years. It has four units on each floor and an indoor pool that’s inevitably deserted in the late evening. We came in over the river and drifted down onto the pad. I heard music coming from somewhere, and a peal of laughter. It seemed out of place. We sat in the soft glow of the instrument lights.

“You looked through the Bible?” he said.

“Yes. There was nothing there.”

“You’re sure?”

“Well, I didn’t check every page.”

“Call Soon Lee and ask her to look. Let’s be certain.”

“Okay.”

“And talk to Ida. She has the jumpsuit, right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her to look in the pockets. And check the lining. Let us know if she finds anything. Anything at all.”

I opened the door and got out. Something flapped in the trees. Alex joined me.

He’d walk me to the door and see that I got safely home. Ever the gentleman. “So who,” I asked him, “had access to the artifacts? Somebody at Survey?”

He pulled his jacket around him. It was cold. “I checked with Windy a day or two after the burglary. She insists they’d been secured since the Trendel Commission, until the vault was opened a few weeks ago and they were inventoried for the auction.

That means, whatever they’re looking for, it had to have been placed during the period of time between the opening of the vault and the attack. Or during the first months of the investigation, in 1365.”

“There’s another possibility,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “I didn’t want to be the first to say it.” Someone on the Polaris might have left something.

Soon Lee called to report there was nothing in the Bible. She said she’d gone through it page by page. There was no insert of any kind, and she could find nothing written on its pages that seemed out of place. Ida assured me there was nothing hidden in the jumpsuit.

The only thing we had in our inventory with a direct connection to any of the Polaris victims was a copy of Pernico Hendrick’s Wilderness of Stars. It had once belonged to Nancy White. I had some time on my hands, so I dug it out and began to page through it. It was a long history, seven hundred-plus pages, of environmental efforts undertaken by various organizations during the sixty years or so preceding publication, which took it back to the beginning of the fourteenth century.

There weren’t many notations. White was more inclined to underline sections that caught her interest and draw question or exclamation marks in the margins. Population is the key to everything, Hendrick had written. Unless we learn to control our own fertility, to stabilize growth, all environmental efforts, all attempts to build stable economies, all efforts at eliminating civil discord, all other courses, are futile. Three exclamation marks. This was the precursor to a long series of citations by the author. Despite advanced technology, people still bred too much. Hardly anybody denied that. The effects were sometimes minimal: There might be too much traffic, not enough landing pads. At other times, states collapsed, famines struck, civil wars broke out, and off-world observers found themselves unable to help. It doesn’t matter how big the fleet is, you can’t ship enough food to sustain a billion people. The book detailed efforts to save endangered species across the hundred worlds of the Confederacy, to preserve the various environments, to husband resources, to slow population growth. It described resistance by government and by corporate and religious groups, the indifference of the general public (which, Hendrick maintains, never recognizes a problem until it’s too late). He likened the human race to a cancerous growth, spreading through the Orion Arm, infecting individual worlds.