Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

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That’s the starship that disappeared back in the last century, right?”

“The passengers disappeared. Not the ship.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. That was odd, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

“And they never figured out what happened?”

“No.”

Her eyes brushed mine. Okay, so she didn’t exactly know about the Polaris either. That’s not really big news in most people’s lives. “And you think there’s a connection with the fire?”

“We don’t know. Probably not, but the fire happened right after the Polaris left.”

Alex gave her the specific date.

“Well, let’s see what we have, Mr. Benedict.” She sat down in front of a display.

“Thermal events, 1365,” she said. Data appeared, and she began running down the list with her index finger. “You know, the problem here is that we’ve never kept very good records. Especially before 1406.”

“Fourteen oh-six?”

“Don’t quote me.”

“Of course not. What happened in 1406?”

“We had a scandal and there was a reorganization.”

“Oh.”

She smiled. “Well, here we are.” She studied the screen, brought up fresh displays, shook her head. “I don’t think we have anything that’s going to be much help to you, though.” She got out of the way for us, and we looked through the data. It was all technical details, when the fire started, its extent, estimated property loss, analysis of the cause of the blaze, and a few other details.

“What exactly,” asked the ranger, “did you want to know about the fire?”

What did we want? I knew Alex: He was operating on the assumption that he’d recognize it when he saw it. “It says here the cause was careless campers. How much confidence would you have in that conclusion?”

She flicked back and forth in the record, and shrugged. “Actually,” she said, “not much. We always determine the cause of a fire. In the sense that we announce a cause. But-” She paused, cleared her throat, folded her arms. “We’re a little more exacting, now. In those years, if they had lightning on a given night, and later there was a fire, lightning was ascribed as the reason unless there was some specific circumstance indicating otherwise. You understand what I’m saying?”

“They made it up as they needed to.”

“I wouldn’t want to put it quite that way. It was more like taking a best guess.”

She smiled, carefully distancing herself from those long-ago rangers.

“Okay,” Alex said. “Thanks.”

“I wouldn’t want you to think that’s the way we operate now.”

“Of course not,” said Alex. “You wouldn’t have any way of determining where the lab was located, I don’t suppose?”

“I can ask around.”

“It was somewhere along the riverbank,” he said.

She brought up the same news report we’d looked at earlier and zeroed in on a river. “That’s the Big. It’s about forty-five klicks northeast of here. I can give you a marker.”

The marker would allow the skimmer to find it. “Yes, please.”

“Something else. There’s a man you might want to talk to. Name’s Benny Sanchay. He’s been around here a long time. Kind of a regional historian. If anybody can help you, he can.”

Benny was well into his second century. He lived in a small cabin on the edge of town, behind a cluster of low hills. “Sure,” he said, “I remember the fire. There were some complaints later that the rangers let the lab go. Didn’t bother with it because they didn’t think it was important.”

“Was it important?” I asked.

He squinted at Alex while he thought it over. “Must have been. All these years later and here you folks are asking about it.”

Benny Sanchay was small and round. He was one of the few men I’ve seen who had no hair left on his skull. He wasn’t given to shaving, and his eyes were buried in a mass of whiskers and wrinkles. I wondered whether he’d spent too much time looking into the sun.

He invited us inside, pointed to a couple of battered chairs, and put a pot of coffee on. The furniture was old, but serviceable. There was a bookcase and a general-purpose table. The bookcase was sagging under the weight of too many volumes. Two large windows looked out on the hills. The thing that caught my eye was a working range. “That would be worth a fair amount of money,” Alex told him, “if you wanted to sell it.”

“My stove?”

“Yes. I could get you a good price.”

He smiled and sat down at the table. There were pieces of notepaper stacked on it, a pile of crystals, a reader, and an open volume. Down to Earth. By Omar McCloud. “What would I cook with?” he asked.

“Get some hardware, and your AI’ll do it.”

“My AI?”

“You don’t have one,” I said.

He laughed. It was a friendly enough sound, the kind you get when someone thinks you’ve deliberately said something silly. “No,” he said. “Haven’t had one for years.”

I looked around, wondering how he stayed in touch with the world.

He glanced at me. “I’ve no need of one.” He propped his chin on his elbow.

“Anyhow, I enjoy being alone.”

So we were in the presence of a crank. But it didn’t matter. “Benny,” Alex said, “tell me what you know about the loss of the lab.”

“It’s not good for you,” he continued, as if Alex hadn’t spoken. “You’re never really alone if you’ve got one of those things in the house.” I got the sense he was laughing at us. “What was it you wanted to know?”

“The lab.”

“Oh. Yes. Epstein.”

“Yes. That’s it.”

“The fire was set deliberately. It started near the lab. They did it when the wind was blowing east.”

“You know that? Know it for a fact? That it was deliberate?”

“Sure. Everybody knew it.”

“It never came out.”

“It didn’t become a story because they never caught anybody.” He got up, checked the coffeepot. “Almost ready.”

“How do you know it was deliberate?”

“Do you know what was going on at the lab?”

“I know what they were working on.”

“Eternal life.”

“Well,” I said, “I think they were talking about life extension.”

“ Indefinite. That was the term they were using.”

“Okay. Indefinite. What are we getting at?”

“There were a lot of people who didn’t think it was a good idea.”

“Like who?” I immediately began thinking about the White Clock Society.

He laughed again. His voice changed tone, and he began to sound as if he were talking to a child. “Some folks don’t think we were meant to live indefinitely. Forever.

We had a local church group, for example, thought what Dunninger was trying to do was sacrilegious.”

Now that I thought of it, I remembered having heard something about that. “The Universalists.”

“There were others. I remember people coming in from out of town. They were doing meetings. Writing letters. Collecting signatures on petitions. Getting folks upset. I always thought that’s why Dunninger took off.”

“You think he believed he was in danger?”

“I don’t know whether he thought they’d try to kill him or anything like that. But they were trying to intimidate him, and he didn’t strike me as a guy who stood up well to bullies.” He went back to the stove, moved the coffeepot around, decided it was okay, and poured three cups. “And religious types weren’t the only ones.”

“Who else?” I asked.

“Lamplighters.”

“The Lamplighters? Why would they care?” They were a service organization with outposts-that’s what they called their branches-in probably every major city in the Confederacy. They were a charity. Tried to take care of people who’d been left behind by the general society. The elderly, orphans, widows. When a new disease showed up, the Lamplighters put political pressure where it did some good and made sure the funding got taken care of. Several years ago when an avalanche took out a small town in Tikobee, the local government moved the survivors out and arranged to get everybody patched up, but it was the Lamplighters who went in long term, took care of the disabled, spent time with people who’d lost spouses, and saw to it that the kids got their education. Urquhart and Klassner had been Lamplighters.

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