Jack McDevitt - Infinity Beach

The captain suggested he leave the list. “ I don’t see any problem, Kile, ” he said. “ We’ll need to work out what it’ll do to the duration of the flight. Otherwise— ” He held out his hands to indicate he’d go along with whatever Kile preferred.

During the balance of that first day, and for much of the time following, the pilot’s room was empty. The clock leaped forward over durations of several hours at a time. The calendar began to click off numbers. At precisely 8:00 A.M. daily, Kane entered, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or another of the crew, and studied the control panel. He talked to the AI, in effect asking it whether there were any anomalies, whether it foresaw any difficulties, whether there were anything it wished to call to his attention. The interactions acquired a ceremonial quality.

“It’s a precaution,” Solly said. “Required by the regs. They’ve built in a lot of redundancy, so it’s hard to imagine any sequence of events that could lead to trouble without alarms going off in plenty of time. Still, we all go through the same routine. Truth is, I think it’s intended to make the pilot feel as if he’s got something to do.”

Here for the first time Kim saw the living Yoshi Amara. She was vibrant and alive and full of enthusiasm for the mission, absolutely convinced that they would not come home without success. She was, Kim thought, a gorgeous young woman. Dark hair, dark eyes, offset by a gold chain and a gold bracelet.

“She must have had money,” said Solly.

Kile Tripley seemed to enjoy the pilot’s room. Other than the pilot, he spent more time there than anyone, often slumped back in the right-hand chair, his long legs crossed, usually reading, sometimes making notes. When Kane was present, or one of his colleagues, he tended to talk about what it would be like to round the curve of a new world, gliding into the night, and see patches of light across its continents. Kim understood that he’d made that run countless times, and that the night had always remained unbroken. As it had through the whole of human history.

“ Can you imagine what it would mean, ” Tripley said over and over, “ if we can find them? ” Not whether they’re there , but if we can find them .

Kim saw what Tripley apparently did not, that Kane did not believe there was anything to find; or if there was, that it was so thoroughly lost among the stars that there could be no realistic hope for success. We could continue crossing the terminators without result, his dark eyes implied, until we get tired of it and find a more useful outlet for the Foundation’s resources.

But he must have seen no point in actively discouraging his employer. Yes, he said, the Golden Pitcher’s rich with class Gs, yellow suns like Sol and Helios. Travel time among them would be relatively short. They could cover a lot of ground in a year.

We will cover a lot of ground, Tripley would say. And: “ We’re going to do it this time, Markis. I know it. ”

Kane inevitably responded with a nod and an abstract gaze, agreeing with Tripley but informing Kim that this was the conversation they always had. And nobody had ever found anything.

She was looking for an indication of tension between the two, but there was nothing to imply they did not get along, even though the personalities of the two men were vastly different: Kane was cool, deliberative, skeptical, methodical. Tripley was a believer, inclined to follow his emotions. But his instincts were good, and he was generally rational, other than his fixation on celestials. He had his own vision of the world and did not allow reality to intrude. Had he been devoted to religion, he would have been among those who argued that there was a God and a heaven, because otherwise what would be the point of life? Kim’s overall impression was that he was a man who had never quite grown up. But it was clear he was utterly devoid of malice. She discarded the possibility that he might have killed Yoshi. Or anyone.

She glanced at his record. He had completed twenty-nine missions in search of his grail, totaling almost twenty-five years off-world. That qualified him as a fanatic, an Ahab . No wonder Hunter’s motto was Persistence .

Later, to Emily, Kane delivered a more realistic assessment: “ We’d need a hundred of these boats, ” he said. “ A thousand. Headed every which way. Then there might be a chance. ”

Emily too had understood the odds.

This was the first time Kim had seen her sister in private interactions. They were three days into the flight before she came into the pilot’s room and Kim was finally able to observe her. Kane was already there, doing his morning routine. She strolled up behind him and squeezed his shoulder. Kane looked back at her and Kim understood that the presence of the imager, recording everything, was an impediment to them.

Solly glanced over at her but said nothing.

Emily slipped gracefully into the right-hand seat. She wore the mission jumpsuit, open at the neck just enough to reveal the curve of her breasts.

Kane commented that everything was going well. It was a nondescript remark, small talk, but his voice had dropped an octave. “They’re lovers,” Kim said, more to herself than to Solly.

There was nothing overt, of course. Kane and Emily gazed at each other with the kind of forced indifference that can only be displayed by people in love who are trying to hide the fact.

Yoshi was just out of her teens. Her grades had suggested promise, but she too was caught up in chasing the Dream . Kane took time whenever the opportunity offered to caution her that the missions had gone out many times. That it looked easy when there were hundreds of class Gs within a narrow field. That, despite the assumption that it was just a matter of finding the right one, there was no guarantee that there was a right one. No assurance that any star anywhere, other than Sol, had produced life. Accept the possibility, he told her. “ We may be alone. ”

“ It could not be, ” she said. “ It’s a basic scientific principle that nothing is unique. ”

Kim noticed that the crew of the Hunter never talked about finding an amoeba . Judging from all the conversation about how to handle a first encounter, what kind of technology to look for, what dangers might be posed by an immensely advanced celestial, she saw that the discovery of a blade of grass, everybody else’s ambition, would have been a distinct disappointment to this outfit. At the very least, they hoped to unearth ruins somewhere, evidence that another intelligence had existed.

“ Until we show that it can happen somewhere else, ” said Kane, “ we have to accept the possibility that the human race was divinely created. ”

She laughed at the idea, but Kane smiled back. “ How else would you explain it? ” he asked. “The universal silence?”

She had no answer.

Kim listened as they discussed their strategy. First step was to calculate the area of a given sun’s biozone, and then to find the elusive blade of grass. Once they had done that, had found a living world, then they would proceed to hunt for evidence of intelligence, past or present.

It was all very optimistic. But after all, Tripley said at one point, that’s what makes it worth doing. “ It wouldn’t really be very sporting, would it, if there were life in every other system? ”

By four A.M. Kim and Solly had reviewed the first six days of the mission, looking for hostility among the members of the research team, for indications of anything that might lead eventually to murder. It might have seemed a handicap that they were barred from overhearing conversations anywhere other than the pilot’s room, that in fact those who spoke for the record knew they were doing so, yet it was evident that the crew members got along well. Kane was almost always present during these dialogues, and there was never more than one other person with him, except on one occasion when Yoshi and Tripley arrived with sandwiches and beer.