Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

They even look better.

Neither Margaret nor Adam had submitted an avatar, but Jacob told us he had enough information on both to provide credible mock-ups.

Margaret blinked on first, near the door. Her black hair was cut short in a style long since abandoned. Clearly a woman of the nineties. She stood looking around like the person in charge, which was a good thing when you were a pilot and might run into problems a thousand light-years from home. She wore a dark blue jumpsuit with a shoulder patch marked Falcon.

Adam appeared moments later in the center of the room. He was formally dressed, red jacket, gray shirt, black slacks. He was in his midforties, with a long face and a set of features that looked as if they didn’t smile much.

Alex did the introductions. Chairs appeared for both avatars, and they sat down. There were some comments about the weather, and how nice the office and the house looked. That sort of thing happens all the time. Obviously it’s of no significance to the avatars, but Alex seems to need the process to get into the right frame of mind. He’s used avatars on several occasions to confirm or negate data regarding the existence and/ or location of various antiquities. But there’s a method to it, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you that you have to go the whole route, accept the illusion you’re talking to real people and not just to mock-ups.

The country house was positioned atop a low hill, where it got a lot of wind. We were getting strong cold gusts out of the northeast, rattling windows and shaking trees.

There was a taste of more snow in the air. “Storm coming,” said Margaret.

The trees were close to the house, and on some days the wind was so bad that Alex worried that one of them would come down on the roof. He said something to that effect to Margaret and moved on to the missions. How long had Adam been employed by Survey? “Fifteen years,” Adam said. “I was part of those projects for fifteen years. I held the record for most years in the field.”

“How much of that time,” Alex asked, “did you actually spend in the ship?”

He looked at his wife. “Almost all of it. We did a mission a year, on average. A mission generally lasted eight to ten months. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

Between flights, I usually accepted academic and lab assignments. Sometimes I just took the time off.”

“Obviously, Margaret, you weren’t always his pilot. You’re too young.”

She smiled, pleased with the compliment. “Adam had been making the flights for four years before he showed up on the Falcon.”

“That was your ship all along?”

“Yes. I had the Falcon from day one with Survey. I was in my second year with them when I met Adam.”

“On our first mission together,” Adam said, “we decided to get married.” He exchanged glances with her.

“Love at first sight,” Alex said.

Adam nodded. “Love always happens at first sight.”

“I was fortunate,” said Margaret. “He’s a good man.”

Alex looked my way. “Chase, when you were with Survey, did you ever think about marrying any of your passengers?”

“Not a chance,” I said.

He grinned and turned back to Adam. “You say nobody has spent more time than you in Survey’s ships. Fifteen years out there, usually with only one other person on board.

Nobody else is even close. The runner-up is at eight.”

“Baffle.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Emory Baffle. He was the runner-up.”

“Did you know him?”

“I met him.” Adam smiled. “He was a hard worker. And I know what you’re thinking.

You and Chase over there.”

“What are we thinking?”

“That we’re antisocial. But it’s not so.”

“Never thought it was,” I put in.

“Look. The truth is, I liked company. We both did. Especially Margaret. But I had a passion for the work.”

Margaret nodded. “He was the best they had.”

Most pilots don’t stay long with Survey. You go in, get some experience, and go elsewhere. Money’s better in other places, and you get more company. Long flights with, at best, a handful of people on board can be wearing. When I was working for them, I couldn’t wait to transfer out.

“Were you both skiing enthusiasts?” Alex asked.

“I was,” said Margaret. “God help me, I talked him into going to Orinoco-”

“The ski resort?”

“Yes. We’d been there before. A few times. For how little skiing he did, he was quite good at it.”

“What actually happened at Orinoco?”

“It was an earthquake. It was ironic. They were putting out avalanche advisories, telling us to stay off the slopes. Conditions were bad. But the quake hit instead.”

“No advance warning?”

“No. They’d never had a problem there, and nobody was paying attention, I guess.”

“How long had you been retired from Survey at that time? When the accident happened?”

“Six years.”

“Why did you leave?”

They looked at each other. And here was the crunch. If the Wescotts had been hiding something, they’d not have made it available on the net, and the avatars wouldn’t know.

“We just decided we’d had enough. We were ready to stop. To go home.”

“So you pulled the plug.”

“Yes. We settled down in Sternbergen. It’s outside Andiquar.”

Alex sat quietly for a moment, drumming his fingertips on the arm of the sofa. “But within a short time after leaving Survey, you were making more flights.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Adam, who’d been quietly watching Margaret field the answers, took that one: “We missed the old days. We both loved going out alone like that. You know, until you’ve cruised past some of those worlds, you don’t really know what it means. We started feeling earthbound.”

“It looks,” said Alex, “as if you started feeling earthbound right after you moved into Sternbergen.”

Margaret grinned. “Yes. It didn’t take long.”

“We discovered,” said Adam, “we couldn’t just go out and sit on the porch. We both loved what we’d been doing for a living. We missed it.”

“Then why not come out of retirement? Let Survey pay the bills?”

“Yeah,” said Adam, “we could have done that. But I think we liked just being able to do things at our own pace, without clearing projects with anyone. Without needing permission. We had the resources to do what we wanted, so that’s what we did.”

“I think, too,” said Margaret, “we wanted Delia to see what was out there.”

“She was very young.”

“That’s right.”

“Too young to understand.”

“No,” said Adam. “She was old enough to see how beautiful it is. How tranquil.”

“She could have gone along on the Survey missions.”

“Actually, she did,” said Margaret. “She made two with us. But we felt it was important to be able to manage our own schedule.”

Alex looked from one to the other. “Is it possible you were searching for something?”

“Like what?” asked Margaret.

“Like Margolia.”

They both laughed. “Margolia’s a myth,” she said. “There’s no such place.”

“No,” said Alex. “It’s not a myth. It happened.”

Both of them protested that we couldn’t be serious.

“When you were running the Survey missions,” Alex continued, “did you ever discover anything unusual?”

“Sure.” Adam lit up. “We found two suns closing on each other in the Galician Cloud. They’ll impact in less than a thousand years. Something else, too, during, I think, the next mission-”

“Hold it,” Alex said. “I’m talking about artifacts.”

“Artifacts?”

“Yes. Did you ever come across any artifacts? Anything from another age?”