Jack McDevitt: POLARIS

It reminds me every day of Klassner’s rejoinder when I told them I wasn’t going to sit on everything for them. Then you doom everybody. Over the top, I’d thought.

People never really talk like that. And I’d assumed he meant Alex and me as well as the four of them, and the entire human race. But I don’t think that was it at all. We were in the office, and he was talking about the device they’d planted in the skimmer, that they planned to use if the meeting didn’t go well.

It hadn’t gone well.

“But I think we’ve answered one question,” said Alex.

“And what’s that?”

“Maddy was an aberration. The mere fact of having your life prolonged doesn’t cause you to become something other than human.”

“-Because the more sensible thing for them to do would have been to blow us up-”

“Absolutely. Instead they found an elegant solution to their problem.”

“ Elegant? You call committing suicide elegant?”

He was grinning. Big, wide, ear-to-ear. “Are you sure they died?”

“Alex,” I said, “that had to be their skimmer. They never got back to Morton, and nobody else is missing.”

He nodded at Maddy’s jacket. “Chase, don’t forget-these are the same people who disappeared out of the Polaris. ”