Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

The rest of the ship, launch bay, main storage, and engine access, all below, was normally maintained in vacuum to preserve resources. There was also a parts locker and systems access area immediately beneath the bridge. “Control units are there,” I explained to Shara, “in case anything needs tweaking. And the black boxes for the AI are there.”

I went through my preflight checklist and set our jump for nine hours post departure.

Then I strolled back to the ops center, where I found Shara seated in front of a display.

“Good,” she said. “I was just coming to get you.”

“You want to talk about our target?”

“Yes.” She showed me a star and a lesser light. “Tinicum 2116,” she said. “And Margolia.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s back Tinicum up nine thousand years.” Coordinates rippled along the lower right-hand corner, slowed, and stopped. The star moved halfway across the room.

“During the period since the event, it traveled somewhat more than a half light-year.

This is where it was when impact occurred.

“We know from the effects of the disruption that the intruder came through on an angle close to the plane of the planetary system. We also know that, by now, it will have gone about the same distance that Tinicum did. A half light-year, more or less.”

“Okay.”

“Keep in mind that’s an estimate. But it should be reasonably accurate. What we don’t know is which way it was traveling.”

“Okay. So we can draw a ring around the point of impact, a half-light-year radius-”

“-And the intruder is somewhere along the circumference. Yes.” She drew the ring.

“That’s our search area. The target might be on the far side, or on the interior, probably a bit above or below the plane. But it’s there.”

“That looks like a big neighborhood,” said Alex. I hadn’t seen him come in.

“It is,” she admitted. “But it’s small enough that it makes a search feasible.”

“How fast is the dwarf likely to be moving?”

“About the same velocity as Tinicum. Roughly twenty kilometers per second.”

“So,” said Alex, “it’s possible the thing might still be close to the system? Traveling with it?”

“Close is a relative term. It passed through the system, so we know there’s some deviation.”

“All right. Where do we start?”

“We make for the point of impact. Once there we deploy our telescopes on opposite sides of it. At a range of”-she hesitated, considering it-“let’s make it five AUs. We want the telescopes ten AUs apart.”

I spent the next few hours boning up on brown dwarfs. Shara was right when she said there are a lot of them. According to Survey there were hundreds in the immediate vicinity of Rimway’s sun. That didn’t make me comfortable. But then it’s a vicinity that incorporates a lot of empty space. Modern technology makes travel virtually instantaneous, and it causes you to forget just how big everything is. As I think I remarked somewhere else.

Brown dwarfs are not massive enough to burn hydrogen, so they don’t ignite, the way a full-fledged star does. But they still give off considerable heat, more or less from tidal effects. They can be observed through infrared telescopes, in which they will appear as a faint glow.

Get close enough to the average brown dwarf and it’ll look like a dim star. It’s only.00004 times as bright as the sun, either ours or Earth’s. Still, according to the book, they’re pretty hot. Temperatures on the surface range up to 3,200 degrees C. At that level, substances like iron and rock occur as gases.

During the cooling process, they generate methane. The gases condense into liquids and form clouds, which contain some of the heat. But continued cooling results in storms, which in turn clear off the clouds. When that happens, infrared light from the heated atmosphere escapes, causing the dwarf to brighten.

Shara wasn’t kidding that there were weather patterns. Some dwarfs, the hotter ones, have iron rain. Others, which have cooled sufficiently, may produce rain that is ordinary water.

They come in a variety of classifications based on spectral features. “But any of them,”

I asked Shara, “would be visible to our telescopes?”

She nodded. “Actually,” she said, “this whole exercise should be pretty easy. At least I hope so.”

“Why?” I asked. “You got a hot date?”

“Chase,” she said. “I’m an astrophysicist. But it doesn’t mean I want to spend my weekends out here.”

We made the jump on schedule, but emerged several days away from our target area.

She wasn’t unduly happy about that. “Seems as if we could use some improvements in the technology,” she told me.

I checked in with the Gonzalez, the mission command ship, to let them know we’d arrived in the area. Alex took advantage of the link to talk to Emil Brankov about the latest findings at the excavation sites. There were, Brankov said, “a lot of artifacts.

And some human remains. Not much left of them, but they’re there.”

While we cruised into position, we spent time talking, watching sims, working out.

Shara enjoyed role-playing games that involved blowing things up. I wasn’t sure whether she was trying to send me a message or whether it reflected a naturally combative spirit. I became more aware how much she had changed since our days together at college. When I mentioned that sometimes I felt as if I barely knew her, she asked if I was aware how different I’d become.

“In what way?” I asked.

“You were shy. Unsure of yourself. And, as I recall, you took authority figures pretty seriously.”

“I’m still shy,” I said.

She laughed. “I have no doubt.”

We also enjoyed Conversations with Caesar. If you haven’t tried it, it gives you a chance to sit and talk with avatars of historical personages. Shara had a taste for the ancients, so we spent the better part of two days discussing religion with Cleopatra, women’s rights with Thomas Aquinas, and public relations with Henry VIII. Marinda Harbach explained why we have such a bloody history. “Serious predators,” she said, “do not kill one another. Never have. A tiger understands, for example, it’s dangerous to attack another tiger. It’s not at all certain who will end up dead.” But humans had never been serious predators. On the contrary, they’d been innocuous creatures, had eaten whatever came to hand, and never developed the instinct to avoid quarrels.

“After all,” she said, “when a fight breaks out between two monkeys, somebody gets a few lumps, but that’s about all. They actually enjoy it. Brain scans make the point beyond question. By the time the monkeys discovered advanced weaponry, it was too late.”

We talked about war and peace with Winston Churchill, and bumping universes with Taio Myshko. Kalu, the AI, did impressions of each character. Nobody knew, of course, how Churchill had actually sounded, but Kalu had Myshko down cold.

He also did impersonations of us. He seemed to enjoy himself commenting in Alex’s deliberate and studied manner on the advantage of antiquities as an investment. He did Shara talking about how stars go bump in the night. And he was forever ordering snacks using my voice.

“I don’t eat that much,” I told Alex. But he just laughed.

When we got close to the impact point, Shara decided it was time to inspect the telescope packages. Rather than pressurize the cargo deck, we put on suits.

Cargo was divided into three sections, the middle being the largest. It was our launch area, and it contained the packages. The lander, which was a bilious yellow color with DEPARTMENT OF PLANETARY SURVEY AND ASTRONOMICAL RESEARCH stenciled on its hull, was secure in the lone bay.