Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

Shara stuck it out with Alex the first day. Until she couldn’t stand it anymore. Alex was simply too intense. On the second morning, she told him to let her know if they found something and retreated to the common room. I stuck my head in once in a while to see how she was doing, but for the most part I stayed with Alex. Out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, I suppose.

“Why does he care so much?” Shara asked. “He’s already made the big finds. So what if a few of them retreated to a base somewhere else? Right? Or am I missing something here?”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. I’ve never seen him like this before. I think it has to do with the Seeker. Full of kids. That really shook him up. I don’t think he buys the idea that they would have known what was going to happen to one world but not to the other. Of the two, they must have known Margolia was safer. He wants to know why they jumped into the lion’s mouth. He thinks he owes it to them to find out.”

“If in fact that’s what they did,” said Shara. “I’m not convinced.”

“Neither am I. But his instincts for things like this are pretty good.”

“Chase,” she said, “instincts are for things like food and sex. They don’t have much to do with logic.” She shook her head. “If they actually landed people on Balfour, the explanation will turn out to be that they screwed up the calculations.”

“But they should have been able to figure it out, right?”

“Sure.” She sighed. “But it’s not my call.”

We needed a change of subject. “Shara,” I said, “I was surprised to find out how common these things are. Brown dwarfs. Do we have the local ones mapped?”

“Surely you joke.” She smiled again. That mischievous, let’s-not-be-naive grin.

“There’s no reputation to be made looking for local brown dwarfs, so it doesn’t happen.”

“Maybe the Council should get on the stick.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it’s at the top of their agenda. I mentioned it to one of their reps one time, and he asked how much warning we’d have if one blundered into the system.”

“How much warning would we have?”

“Probably twenty or thirty years.”

“And what did he say?”

“Told me twenty or thirty years would be plenty of time to deal with it.”

“Is he serious? What would we do if it happened?”

“Wouldn’t be much you could do. Except evacuate the planet.”

“Evacuate the planet? We don’t have the facilities, do we? For that kind of effort?”

“Billions of people? I doubt it.” She was sitting with a book in her lap. “I don’t think math was his strong suit.”

I was asleep the second night when Alex knocked on my door. “We got a hit,” he said.

I woke Shara. She came out in a robe and sat down to look at the images on the screen.

There appeared to be two dim stars, side by side.

“That it?” I asked.

“There’s a decent chance. Kalu, what’s the range?”

“Point six-four,” he said. Fraction of a light-year.

“Recessional velocity?”

“Twenty-two kilometers per second.”

She scribbled numbers on a pad. “It’s a pretty good match. That’s probably it.”

“Probably?” said Alex.

“No way to be positive yet. We should reconfigure the telescopes’ optical trains to a higher magnification.”

“Why?”

“That’ll give us the transverse velocity. Allow us to get a 3-D picture, and pin it down for certain.”

“How long will it take?”

“About fourteen hours.”

“Okay.” Alex rubbed his hands. “Then you can figure out where the planet is, right?”

“If the sighting is confirmed.”

“That’s good. Shara, you’re a treasure.”

She smiled modestly. “I do what I can.”

I was standing around, pretty much irrelevant. “Anything I can do to help?”

“No. Thanks. I can take care of it. You might as well go back to bed.”

“Yeah. Okay, I’ll see you guys in the morning.”

I started for the door. Shara turned suddenly toward Alex. “But there’s something you can do for me.”

“Name it.”

“I’ve never seen a brown dwarf. From nearby. Instead of just sitting here, waiting for the numbers to come in, why don’t we go take a look?”

“All right,” said Alex. He hid it well, but he wasn’t excited at the prospect of going off on a side trip. Not at this point. But he figured he owed Shara. He looked my way.

“Chase?”

“Consider it done, boss.”

“I mean,” said Shara, “as long as we’ve come this far, it would be nice to see one.”

That surprised me. “You’ve never seen a dwarf star?”

“Actually,” she said, “no. I never really had the opportunity.”

“Well, we’ll rectify that.”

She looked delighted, a kid at a birthday party. “I mean, we pretty much take them for granted. There are a lot of them, and they don’t actually do anything.”

“Except barge around.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Except that.”

Shortly before we made the jump, we got a transmission from Brankov. They’d found what appeared to have been a museum set up to honor the original settlers. Not much was distinguishable. The objects that had been exhibited, as well as the cases in which they’d been placed, had all but dissolved. “We can make out some of the inscriptions.

And that’s about it. Some terrestrial dates. Some names we don’t recognize.”

During the course of the conversation, we told him we might have found the brown dwarf.

“Glad to hear it. So you can figure out where Balfour is? Are you headed there now?”

“We’re going to take a look at the dwarf first. We have a lady on board with a special interest in compact objects.”

“Okay. Good luck. Keep me informed.”

We sent a message to Windy, letting her know what was happening. It seemed like smart policy to keep Survey’s public relations officer in the loop.

We made a good jump and came out within a day’s travel time. The brown dwarf looked like a gas giant, except there was no sun nearby, so the glow it was putting out wasn’t reflected light. It packed about 5 percent of a solar mass beneath allencompassing clouds. “It’s a little bit light,” said Shara. “It needs about eight percent solar mass to ignite.” To become a legitimate star. There was a collection of moons, eleven of them altogether, and a wispy ring that wasn’t immediately visible.

The dwarf itself-a curious term for so monstrous an object-seemed to be simply a sphere of eerily lit mud-colored clouds, with a few reddish streaks and spots. Surface temperature checked in at 800 ?dm;K. “The spots are storms,” Shara said. She was luminous that day. I had never seen her so filled with sheer joy. She was face-to-face with, as she put it, one of the objects that formed the gravitational center of her life.

She stood by a viewport, bathed in its autumn light. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s a class-T,” she said. “Lot of methane. And it’s got water.”

“Water?”

She nodded. “Yep.”

I went over and stood beside her and she embraced me. “Chase,” she said, “I take it all back. I’m glad I came.”

“Good,” I said.

We were still there, exchanging pleasantries, when Kalu’s baritone got our attention.

“We have the transverse velocity,” he said.

Shara nodded and started back for the ops center. “Let’s see what it looks like.”

Kalu gave us a 3-D projection. Here was the brown dwarf. This was its track back to the time of impact, and over there, well toward the monitor bank, was Margolia and its sun. At the point of impact.

“They don’t intersect,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”