Jack McDevitt - Infinity Beach

They reviewed Kane’s conversations with the other crew members, listening, moving on. Kim watched Emily as the days ran down, thinking how luminous her sister looked, how energetic she was, how driven by the great search. And she was within days of losing her life.

But gradually an inconsistency emerged. She watched the interplay between the captain and Emily, went back to their conversations in the first part of the mission, and compared the earlier with the later. “Do you see it?” she asked Solly.

He leaned forward and squinted at the screen. She’d frozen the images, a few days from the end of the voyage. Kane and Emily had been talking about getting more serious about their physical conditioning programs on the next flight.

“What?” said Solly. “I don’t see anything.”

“What happened to the passion?”

“ What passion?”

“Do they sound like lovers to you?”

“They never sounded like lovers to me.”

“Solly, they were hiding it before. Maybe from the others, or from the imager. Maybe from each other. Now it’s just not there.”

“Maybe they had a fight. We can’t really see very much, you know.”

“No, it’s not like that. There’s no tension between them on the return flight. This isn’t the kind of behavior you’d see in the aftermath of a breakup. It’s simply a cordial relationship between congenial colleagues. Not at all the same thing.”

The train was pulling into the outskirts of Eagle Point.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

Kim shut down the program but she stared at the screen until the train stopped moving. “I’m not sure,” she said.

They checked into the Gateway and Kim stayed up most of the night replaying the conversations between Kane and Emily. Outbound, the captain’s depth of passion was quite evident. He loved her sister. She could see it in his eyes, in his tone, in his every gesture. She wondered what the interaction between the two was like when they were away from the recording devices.

But it had changed during the return. Not because, as Solly had suggested, they’d had a falling-out. In that event they’d have been cold in each other’s company. The body language would be exaggerated. She’d see resentment in one or the other. Or both.

But none of that was present. Their mutual regard was precisely what one might expect from good friends. Nothing more, nothing less.

Again and again, she listened to their final conversation, recorded during the approach to Sky Harbor:

“ Thanks, Markis. ”

“ For what? ”

“ For getting us back. I know we put some pressure on you to continue the mission. ”

“ It’s okay. It’s what I would have expected. ”

They were on the night side of Greenway. The space station looked like a lighted Christmas ornament. Its twin tails were also illuminated, one reaching toward Lark, the other dipping into the clouds.

“ As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you. ”

Kim shook her head. The remark was artificial; the voice contained all the passion of a cauliflower.

“ You too, Emily. But I guess we’ll be back at it in a couple of weeks. ”

“ I hope so. I’m getting tired coming home empty all the time. ”

The station grew larger in the screens and then the Hunter was approaching one of the docks. People were visible in the operational sections and a spacesuited technician waited for them with an umbilical. There was a slight bump as the ship came to rest. A bank of console lights blinked furiously before settling on amber.

“ Time to go home, ” said Kane. They unbuckled and left the pilot’s room, Emily leading the way. If they said anything else to each other, it was lost.

Solly had come out of his bedroom during the last minutes. He was wrapped in a muted yellow robe. “So now,” he said, “Kane stays with the ship for a few hours to take care of the paperwork. Then he goes down to Terminal City and checks into a hotel. Tripley flies home. Yoshi and your sister flag down a cab, tell it to take them to the Royal Palms, but they don’t arrive.”

“That’s the scenario.”

“But we think Yoshi somehow or other got to the Severin Valley. Which probably means Emily was there too.”

“Probably.”

“Okay.” It was still dark outside. “If we’re going to go looking tomorrow, we’d better get some rest.”

They used the network to rent diving gear and a collapsible boat from the Rent-All Emporium, and a flyer from Air Service. Then they went down to a late breakfast. The flyer, with the equipment inside, was waiting for them when they finished.

Kim tied the gold sensor to an input jack, through which it would interface with the onboard tracking systems, displaying results on an auxiliary screen.

At a few minutes after noon they lifted off the roof of the Gateway and turned south toward Severin. The day was cold and cloudless.

“How’d it happen,” Solly asked as they flew through bright skies, “that both Kane and Tripley lived in the same small town?”

“Tripley didn’t live there,” Kim said. “Severin was a tourist spot, and he vacationed there. He also used it as a retreat during the off-season. He liked the solitude.

“Kane moved there in 559, when he inherited a villa from a relative who’d admired his war exploits. He was already beginning to make a name for himself as an artist, and he decided it would be an ideal place to work. The town only had a thousand or so people then, so it’s no surprise that the two eventually met. When Tripley went looking for someone to pilot Hunter , Kane was at hand.”

Mount Hope dominated a group of peaks to the southwest. They were coming down the Severin, flying low, barely a thousand meters off the ground. This stretch of the river wasn’t navigable: it descended toward the dam through a series of cataracts. On either side, thick forest advanced to the water’s edge. They saw an occasional farmhouse, inevitably dilapidated. The landscape was deep in snow.

Kim watched a freight train moving west. It was gliding just over the treetops, and the trees reacted to its passing in the manner of a bow wave, parting in front, closing behind. It was headed toward the Culbertson Tunnel, which would take it through the solid wall of mountains. The tunnel wasn’t visible from her angle, but she saw the train begin to slow down as it made its approach.

She hadn’t been able to give the flyer the exact coordinates of Tripley’s villa, so she switched to manual as they glided out over Remorse. The lake was a sheet of glass.

Solly activated the sensor. The display gave them groups of configuration data, blanked, and then went green. Negative return.

Ahead, Tripley’s villa sat on its lonely hilltop.

The place felt as if it were pinched off from the real world, like a black hole, a singularity where the laws of physics were slightly warped. Where footprints vanished.

They descended to treetop level and moved in directly over the roof. The display remained green.

The utility building showed nothing.

She circled the immediate area, keying off the villa. Most of the old Tripley property was new-growth forest and heavy underbrush. Its fences were down, and a group of spruce trees on the east side looked dead.

Next she extended the search several kilometers west, flying a Crosshatch pattern, scanning as far as the ridge that had protected the town on the night of the explosion. She checked along the summit, surveyed the far slope and the woods beyond until the ground got rocky.

Using the map, she came back and flew over the town. The center of Severin Village was in the water. She went down until the treads got wet. The display remained green.