Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

Consequently, all the stars on the itinerary were old.

I visited every system with them. I looked at the images, paged through the details of each sun, its gravity constant, mass, temperature ranges, whatever. And of course I got to see the planetary families. During their joint career, they’d found four living worlds, one their first time out together, one on the third mission, and two on their seventh. I heard their voices, his low in the register, the voice of a professional researcher, always calm and methodical, hers soft and subdued, much in contrast, I thought, to her take-command appearance.

I heard them on the one occasion when they thought they’d discovered evidence of intelligence, in a forest that looked remarkably like a city. They’d retained the professional tone, but I could feel the electricity. Until, a few minutes later, they realized they were looking at something quite natural. Then the disappointment was evident.

There probably is somebody else out there. Other than the Mutes. But there are just so many places to look. Some experts think that, by the time we find a third player, we’ll have evolved away from being human.

Nowhere was there any mention of a derelict, or of Margolia.

I made a copy of the record. Next I needed somebody with some insight into Survey procedures.

Shara Michaels was an astrophysicist, employed on Survey’s analytical staff. Her responsibility was to advise upper management about submitted projects: which were worth pursuing, which could be put on the waiting list, and which could be safely dismissed.

I’d gone to school with her, partied with her, and even introduced her to a future husband. A future ex, as things turned out, but we’d remained friends through it all although in recent years we hadn’t seen much of each other.

She’d been the queen of the walk in those early days, the woman you didn’t want your date to see. Blond hair cut in an elfin style, sea-blue eyes, and a talent for mischief. Everybody loved her.

She still looked good when she came to the door of her office. But the old cavalier attitude had disappeared. She was all business. Polite, glad to see me, commented how we needed to get together once in a while. But there was a level of reserve her younger self had never known.

“You should have called,” she said, showing me to a chair and taking one herself.

“You almost missed me. I was on my way out the door.”

“I hadn’t expected to come by today, Shara,” I said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

“For you? Sure. What’s going on?”

“Alex has had me on the run. I was over at the archives.”

“Still doing slave labor?”

“Pretty much.” We did several minutes’ worth of small talk. Then I got down to cases.

“I need your help.”

She got drinks for us. Wine from the islands. “Name it.”

“I’ve been looking at some old mission reports. From forty years ago.”

“Why?” she asked. “What are you looking for?”

“Survey used to have a husband-and-wife team, Adam and Margaret Wescott. There’s a possibility they found something unusual on one of the missions.”

“People often find unusual things on the missions.” She meant planets with odd orbits or gas giants with unusual mixes of, say, carbon and methane.

I looked at her over the rim of my glass. “No,” I said. “Not like that.”

“Like what, then?”

“Like an artifact. A derelict ship. Connected with Margolia.”

“With what?”

“Margolia.”

She still had a great smile. “You’re kidding.”

“Shara, a woman showed up at our place a week or so ago with a drinking cup that might be from the Seeker.” When the frown reappeared, I explained.

When I’d finished, she looked amused. Maybe disappointed that I could jump to an obviously silly conclusion. “Chase,” she said, “anybody can manufacture a cup.”

“It’s nine thousand years old, love.” Her eyes widened. “We’ve been able to trace it back to Wescott. It was taken from his home in the 1390s. By a burglar.”

“But you don’t know where Wescott got it?”

“No.”

“He probably bought it somewhere. Do you have reason to suspect it actually came off the ship? Or from”-she couldn’t suppress a smile-“Margolia.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“A remote one.”

Her office was on the third level. The walls were decorated with pictures of stars in collision. That was her specialty. She’d done her thesis on interstellar traffic accidents and remained disappointed that she’d come along too late to see the crash between Delta Karpis and a dwarf star sixty years earlier.

One image was particularly striking. It was a computer graphic done from behind and above a yellow star that was about to do a head-on with a white mass of some sort. A dwarf, probably. “How often do these things happen?” I asked.

“Collisions? There’s always one going on somewhere. There’s one happening at this moment. Somewhere in the observable universe.”

“Well, the observable universe is pretty big.”

“I was just trying to answer your question.”

“It’s still a lot of wreckage,” I admitted. “I’ve only heard of one in my life.”

“The Polaris incident.”

“Yes.”

She smiled again, letting me know how uninformed I was. “They happen all the time, Chase. We don’t see much of it around here because we’re pretty spread out. Thank God. Stars never get close to one another. But go out into some of the clusters-” She stopped and thought about it. “If you draw a sphere around the sun, with a radius of one parsec, you know how many other stars will fall within that space?”

“Zero,” I said. “Nothing’s close.” In fact the nearest star was Formega Ti, six lightyears out.

“Right. But you go out to one of the clusters, like maybe the Colizoid, and you’d find a half million stars crowded into that same sphere.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I never kid, Chase. They bump into one another all the time.” I tried to imagine it.

Wondered what the night sky would look like in such a place. Probably never got dark.

“I have a question for you,” I said.

She tucked a wisp of hair back in place. “I thought you might.”

“If I want to do a mission, I come to you with a plan. You look at it, and if it’s okay, you approve it, assign me a ship and pilot, and I’m on my way. That’s the way it works, right?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the essence of it, yes.”

“Okay. The plan I submit tells you which star systems I want to look at. It includes a flight plan, and, if there are special reasons for the mission, it mentions those also. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“I used to do the preliminary missions. And I know there were follow-up flights, with specialists.”

She nodded.

“How often? If I came back from a mission on which I’d visited, say, a dozen systems, what are the chances somebody would actually go back and look at one them?”

“Usually, you could expect maybe half of them would get follow-ups.”

“Really? That many?”

“Oh, yes. Sure.”

“So if I found something and wanted to keep it quiet-”

“You’d want to leave that system off the mission report. Substitute something else.”

“But if I did that, you guys would notice, right?”

Shara looked uncomfortable. “I doubt it. I don’t know how we were doing things thirty, forty years ago. But there’s no reason to backcheck the report against the proposal. Nobody has a reason to lie about any of that, and to my knowledge there’s never been a problem.”

“Do the proposals still exist?”