Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

I can tell you that your perspective changes on a lot of things once you get the idea that somebody’s out to kill you. It’s bad enough, I suppose, if you’re caught up in a war, and they want to take you out because you’re wearing the wrong uniform. But when the situation comes down to where you’re a personal first-name up-close target, you just don’t sleep so well anymore.

I was scared. I wouldn’t admit it, especially since Alex was describing me to everybody he knew as a daredevil. “You should have seen her climbing around out there,” he told Fenn. And Windy. And one of the guys I was dating. And probably every client within range. And everybody else who touched base with us over the next couple of days. “She was outstanding.”

Oh, yes.

In any case, that was how, for the second time in two weeks, we went into the ocean. Well, into Goodheart Bay, actually. But that’s a technical point.

We came out of it okay. Rescue pulled us from the water. The power went off in the new skimmer, and it headed for the same neighborhood where the other one was.

We filled out another round of forms, answered more questions, probably made the patrol’s list of people to look out for. One of the Rescue guys suggested that next time we drive over water, if we’d let them know in advance they’d keep a unit ready.

It was too much for Universal, Alex’s insurance company, which informed him he was henceforth persona non grata. Me, I went down to Broughton Arms to buy a scrambler. I gave them my link, and they ran the record. When it cleared, I picked up a small nickel thirty-volt Benson. It was efficient-looking, shaped, of course, like a pistol, capable (according to the manual) of putting somebody on the ground for a half hour or so by knocking out his circuitry.

Scramblers could, of course, be manufactured to resemble comm links or compacts or virtually any other kind of metal object. But my philosophy is that if someone has a weapon pointed at him, he should know about it.

Fenn lectured us again. “I wish you’d stop the nonsense,” he told us. “Either stay home, where you’re safe. Or clear out altogether until we settle this matter. Don’t you have anything planned that would get you away from here for a while?”

Actually we did. But eventually we’d have to come back. And there was no reason to believe that Fenn would be any closer to a solution in six days or six months. The problem the police have is that there are almost no crimes. So when one happens, they’re more or less at a loss. I doubt they can resolve anything unless they happen to be in the neighborhood when the lawbreaking happens, or the perpetrator makes the mistake of bragging to the wrong people. Or does something equally stupid.

“I have a couple of specialists,” he continued, “who aren’t doing a great deal at the moment. It might be prudent if I assigned them to look after you. But you’d have to abide by their judgment.”

Alex made a face. “You mean bodyguards.”

“Yes.”

“That’s really not necessary. We’ll be fine.”

Speak for yourself, big fella. Fenn looked at me. Personally, I’d have felt more comfortable with a cop at my side. But I took Alex’s lead. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”

Fenn shook his head. “I can’t force you to accept them.”

“We haven’t been in a situation,” Alex said, “where having a bodyguard would have changed anything.” We were all sitting in the Rainbow office. “Has the investigation been making any progress?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Did the exhumation order for Crisp go through?”

“Yes. I told you it would.”

“Are they going to dig him up?”

“No. They didn’t even take it to a hearing. They told us the case was closed a quarter century ago.”

I took to reading and watching everything I could find about the Polaris and the people who had ridden her on that last mission.

Nancy White was possibly best known for her fireside forays into the natural world. Her living room (or the set, whichever it actually was) looked extraordinarily cozy, comfortable, snug. White customarily sat in an oversized armchair, in the soft glow of an antique lamp on a side table. She was usually sipping a drink and talking to the viewer in a tone that implied we were all good friends, enjoying an evening together. There was inevitably a storm beating at the window, sometimes thunder and lightning, sometimes heavy snow. But it added to the warmth and good feeling inside.

This was a living room, she liked to remind us in one of her signature comments, that looked out on the cosmos. “Like your own.” She specialized in drawing parallels between natural processes and the human condition. Nothing is forever, not even a black hole. Springtime on Qamara, a world with (as she put it) too much ellipse in its orbit, was brief and quickly buried beneath a years-long winter, but the flowers were all the more valued for that reason.

Early in each of the White conversations, we leave the living room and sail among galaxies, or watch the fierce harridans of Dellaconda glide through the valleys of that distant world, or plunge into the fiery interior of Regulus, or soar through the churning atmosphere of a newly born world. If there was a recurrent theme, it was the significance of the moment. Life is not forever. Take the cup and drink. Seize the day.

Enjoy the jelly donut.

One of her more moving shows used the ancient outstation Chai Pong as its central symbol. During the golden days of the Kang Republic, twenty-six hundred years ago, several successive heads of state engineered a major push into the Veiled Lady. The Kang set themselves an ultimate goal of mapping the nebula, a task that would take centuries, even for an exploration fleet many times the size of the fortyplus ships they had available. But they made the commitment and devoted their wealth and energy to the enterprise. They built outstations (one of which was Chai Pong) and established bases and for centuries they moved among those far suns, discovering and recording living worlds, including the one at Delta Karpis. In a show recorded exactly one year before the Polaris departure, she observed that the Kang had established an outstation, since lost, somewhere in the Delta Kay region. (It was the Kang who initially found the incoming white dwarf and predicted the eventual collision.) Locating another technological species had not been their stated mission. They simply wanted to know what was out there. The habitable worlds were too far to establish settlements, even had the Kang been of a mind to make the effort. But the point that White stressed was that in all those years, amid all those missions, no living civilization was ever discovered.

“It has always been argued that placing ourselves at the center of creation is an act of supreme arrogance,” she said from the Chai Pong control room. “But in a very real sense, it is nonetheless true that humans are central to the scheme of things.

Cosmologists tell us that we cannot ask why the universe exists. We cannot ask about its meaning. These are misleading questions, they say. It exists, and that is the sum of all we know on the subject.” She stops at this point and lifts a cup to her lips. “Maybe, in a narrow sense, they’re right. But in a broader context, we can argue that all the workings of the cosmos seem designed to produce a conscious entity. To produce something that can detach itself from the rest of the universe, stand back, and appreciate the vault of stars. Birds and reptiles are not impressed by majesty. If we were not here, the great sweep of the heavens would be of no consequence.”

In the end the Kang, exhausted in spirit and treasure, abandoned their outstations, gave up, and went home.