Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

The two telescopes were cubes with rounded edges, not much taller than I was.

Plastene sheets protected them. Working in zero gee, we moved them onto the launch track.

We stripped the plastene from one of the packages to get a good look. The unit was a shoulder-high black metal dish, with several minithrusters attached.

“It’s a two-meter scope,” Shara said. “Equipped with a thirty-two thousand times thirty-two thousand infrared-sensitive imaging array. It can cover three by three degrees of sky.” She circled the thing and clicked a remote. Lamps blinked back. She compared them with a checklist.

“Okay?” I asked.

“Yes, indeed.” We walked back to the second package, pulled off the wrapping, and repeated the process. When she was done, we inspected the launcher. “I guess we’re all set,” she said at last.

We went back up an ascent tube, passed through the airlock onto the bridge, and climbed out of our suits. Shara commented it was good to feel some gravity again.

Kalu announced we were one hour from the impact point.

We sat down and, for whatever reason, began reminiscing. We discovered we’d both dated the same guy, and both had the same reaction. We talked about instructors I hadn’t thought of for fifteen years. And ambitions, some fulfilled, some abandoned.

“You became a pilot,” Shara said. “When I first met you, when you were still a kid, you told me that was what you wanted to do.”

That was true. I also wanted to be a sculptor at one time, but that didn’t go very far.

“Yeah,” I said. “I always liked the idea of coming out here. Thought it was romantic.”

“And it wasn’t.”

“It wears off.”

She laughed. “I remember when that guy Jerry Whatzisname was going to be the father of your children.”

“That’s a long time back.”

“Whatever happened to him?”

“He became a banker,” I said. “Or a financial advisor. Something like that.”

“You ever see him?”

“No. Not for more than ten years.” And, after a moment: “He’s married. Two kids, last I heard.”

“I can’t imagine you married to a banker.”

“Me, neither.” Still, I thought of him on occasion. I wouldn’t have minded running into him some evening. By accident, of course.

When Kalu announced we were within seven minutes of our destination, we retreated to the ops center, where Alex was waiting. Shara sat down in the operator’s chair.

“Kalu?”

“Yes, Shara. I am here.”

“Prepare to launch the Alpha package.”

“On your direction.” There was a bank of monitors. One provided an outside view of the launch doors. We watched them open.

“Who the hell is Kalu?” asked Alex.

“The AI,” I said.

“I know that. But who was he?”

“When the government wanted to shut interstellar exploration down two centuries ago,” Shara said, “he was the guy who dissuaded them. It cost him politically because people didn’t want to pay for it. One opponent asked him where does it stop?”

“What was his answer?” asked Alex.

“ ‘You stop, you die.’ He was the first secretary of the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research.”

“The first secretary?”

“This is a while back. They didn’t have directors then.”

“Okay.”

A stellar cloud was coming into focus on one of the monitors. “Up there,” she said.

“That’s Virginium. Lots of hot, young stars. Come back in a few billion years and it might be a nursery for new civilizations.” She smiled at Alex. I was getting the impression he was taken by her. “Time to launch. You want to do the honors?”

“You go ahead,” he said. And that generosity of spirit convinced me. Alex loved drama and ceremony.

“Kalu,” she said. “Launch Alpha.”

The package went out through the hatch, its thrusters fired once, twice.

“Alpha away,” said Kalu.

The package dwindled and vanished in the night.

My turn. “Everybody strap down. Kalu, prepare to depart.”

Kalu acknowledged. Shara talked with the Alpha telescope’s onboard AI, giving it final instructions.

Moments later, Brankov’s image blinked on in the ops room. He looked tired. “We found some inscriptions on stone,” he said. One of them appeared, a large marble block with English symbols. We couldn’t read them, but he translated: McCorby Health Labs. Beneath it, a date. The name of the month was March. It was the fourteenth day, and the year was 11.

“We’ve got a city hall down the street. And what was once the Chalkoski Botanical Gardens a half klick away.” I could see the intensity in Brankov’s eyes. This was the mission of a lifetime.

A few hours later we jumped one and a half billion kilometers to the far side of the impact point and deployed Beta.

“What we’re going to do,” said Shara, “is to run a full survey of the sky, three hundred sixty to latitudes twenty degrees above and below the orbital plane.”

I was tempted to ask what orbital plane because we were in the middle of nowhere.

But of course we were working with the plane of the planetary system as it had been nine thousand years earlier. “The units will run in parallel,” she continued. “We need to look at a total of fourteen thousand four hundred square degrees. That means we need sixteen hundred image pairs. Each image will require five minutes of exposure plus dither time.”

Alex was glazing again.

Shara understood. “It means,” she told him, “we should be able to do the complete survey in about six days.”

“Excellent,” he said. “And at some point during all this, we’ll spot the brown dwarf.”

“We should. Yes. We’ll overlay the images from the telescopes on the screen.” She tapped the central monitor. “Everything’s framed against the stars. The stars won’t show any appreciable movement from one image to the other because they’re too far.

But anything close by will appear to jump. And that, Mr. Benedict, should be our dwarf.”

“How much of a jump?” I asked.

“I’d say thirty to sixty arcseconds.”

Alex grinned. How much was that? “It’s okay,” Shara said. “Just look for a separation. Now, when it happens, we’ll want to measure the radial velocity. That’ll allow us to figure out approximately where it was when the impact happened.”

“But we already know that.”

“Confirmation data. And the more exact our information is, the easier it’ll be to locate Balfour.”

“Okay,” said Alex. “Good.”

“The hitch is that we don’t know the temperature of the dwarf, so we’ll run the survey at wavelengths of two to ten microns. That’ll allow for fairly hot or very cool dwarfs, and everything between.” She held up a remote. “Are we ready to start?”

“By all means,” said Alex.

They exchanged glances. “Thanks,” he said. “I will.” Without another word he took the remote and started the operation.

There are worlds enough out there for all. Go, and you will see canyons to make your head spin, and solitary beaches, and rings of light, and iron rivers. But wear a topcoat.

- Tavron Hamm,

There and Back, sixth millennium Once the survey started, Conversations with Caesar stopped. Alex never left the ops center except from necessity. He watched relentlessly as the images shifted every few minutes, showing a new patch of sky. If one of the points of light seemed a trifle blurred, he leaned forward expectantly, hoping Shara would react, or that Kalu would declare a hit.

Occasionally, he talked with Brankov, who said he was fascinated by what we were trying to do. “I wish you all success,” he said. “Let us hope you find it. And that your speculations prove correct.”