Jack McDevitt - Infinity Beach

“How do you know?”

“Rev up an engine and then turn it off, just like that, you risk an explosion. Damn near a fifty-fifty chance. They won’t use it without getting permission first from the Institute. And that’ll take time. Anyway Agostino would never agree to it. He doesn’t want to lose a ship.”

The comm system was crowded with incoming voices: the Patrol warning them again to stand down; the supervisor at Marlin insisting they return; and, oddly, Webley, demanding what in God’s name did they think they were doing?

“Just relax,” Solly said, “and enjoy the ride. In the meantime, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to tell me precisely where we’re going.”

“Zeta Orionus. Alnitak. Or rather, I want you to pick a spot twenty-seven and a fraction light-years from Alnitak.” She dug in her pockets and pulled out a data disk. “Here,” she said. “Put us anywhere on the bubble.”

“Alnitak,” he said. The easternmost star in the belt of Orion. “Why? A guess? Or do you know something you haven’t told me?”

“You remember asking if I knew how long the trip would take?”

“Sure. You gave me a fairly specific answer.”

“Forty days, seventeen hours, twenty-six minutes. It’s the total elapsed return-trip time on the Hunter logs.”

“The bogus ones?”

“Yes. But I couldn’t imagine any reason why they’d change the elapsed time from the originals. The time frame, if it’s correct, gives us Alnitak. And there’s something else.”

She showed him a blowup of Kane’s mural. “See this?” She pointed at the Horsehead.

“Yep.”

“It’s visible from Alnitak.”

The Patrol moved into a parallel course on their starboard side, at a distance of only a few hundred meters.

Solly shut down the comm system and the voices died. “Makes me nervous,” he said.

“You think that’s a good idea, right now?”

“Depends on whether you want to listen to the threats.”

He set the timer to count down to jump status. Kim stared at it, willing the numbers to hurry along.

They were still several minutes out when the AI announced an incoming transmission from a new source. From one of the satellites. “ From the Institute. ”

“It’ll be Agostino,” said Kim.

“You want to talk to him?”

“No,” she said. “We’ll talk when we come back. When we have something to negotiate with.”

The patrol vessel was still there when power began to flow to the jump engines, and Solly took them out of their range.

Solly’s analysts thought the Hunter logs were accurate to the point where the vessel experienced engine trouble. Allow approximately a day or so for Kane’s repair work, and that puts Tripley and his party at Alnitak roughly February 17 or 18. Those estimates also fit with the timing of the return to Greenway. “If all that’s correct,” said Kim, “then getting proof should be easy.”

It was now January 28 in Seabright. Assuming February 17 as the base date for the event, for the contact between the Hunter and the celestials, and assuming further that radio transmissions would certainly have been involved, she had calculated precisely where the radio waves would be at this moment, and had derived an intercept course for the Hammersmith . All very simple.

“There’s really only one feasible scenario,” she told Solly. “They ran into another ship out there. That means there would have been at least an attempt at radio communication.”

“You’re hanging an awful lot on the fact that the turtle-shell showed up in the mural. There could be other explanations. They might have found a ground-based civilization.

Maybe preindustrial, no lights, no radio, nada. Just torches and the local equivalent of horses. In that case—

“It couldn’t have happened that way,” she said. They were seated in the mission control center, chairs angled toward each other, drinking coffee.

“Why?”

“Alnitak’s too young, for one thing. It’s not ten million years old yet. So no local life. And it puts out too much UV. Millions of times what Helios does.”

“Oh.”

“Right. It would fry everything in sight. Anybody they ran into out there would have had to be star-travelers.”

A survey ship had looked at Alnitak two centuries before. As planetary systems went, it didn’t have much: one world, a captured gas giant far out in the boondocks.

“It’s been a long time for a radio transmission,” Solly said. “You get a lot of spread over three decades. FAULS is a good system, but it might not be good enough to pick up a signal that weak. Or to sort it out from the general babble.”

But Kim had spent time with the specs for the flexible array. “If it’s there,” she said, “we’ll find it.”

They spent the first day housekeeping, arranging their quarters, exploring the ship. Solly was already familiar with it, of course, but he enjoyed showing it off to Kim. She wondered whether her initial failure to be impressed with the vehicle might have insulted him. But it did remind her of the Institute’s Special Quarters, where non-VIP visitors were housed.

They wandered from floor to floor, and he demonstrated the features of the recreational facilities and the VR section. They inspected the two sets of engines, the mains, which propelled the Hammersmith through realspace, and the Transdimensional Interface, the jump engines. The TDI was small enough to hold in her hands.

Kim was pleasantly surprised to discover that the transition into hyper had come with no side effects.

She’d never experienced transdimensional flight as an adult. She was aware, as she hadn’t been as a child, that some people got ill during the jump; that others experienced changes in perspective, that walls seemed less solid, that the grip of artificial gravity lessened or tightened, that people claimed to become aware of the thoughts of those around them. There were accounts of unearthly dreams and severe bouts of depression and of sheer exhilaration. Solly told her there was some truth to it. All interstellars, he said, carried a generous supply of antidepressants and sedatives. He had seen people stricken with severe headaches, stomach cramps, toothaches, all deriving from no discernible physical cause. “But it’s never been more than an irritant,” he said. “Like seasickness.”

“Some of the effects, though,” he added, “can be eerie. Dreams can be extraordinarily vivid. And I’ve seen other odd stuff. I remember a woman who thought she’d regressed to her childhood, and a man who claimed to have seen through to the end of his days. Alternate personalities show up sometimes. One elderly passenger swore she’d become possessed. Another insisted he’d been followed on board by a werewolf.”

“A werewolf?”

Solly’s blue gaze locked on her. “You haven’t been seeing anything out of the ordinary, have you?”

“I’m fine, thanks.” She was quietly proud of herself.

“Tell me about Alnitak.”

Kim pushed back in her chair. “It’s a class O. Pretty hot, about thirty-five thousand times as bright as Helios.”

“Wear your sunglasses.”

“I’d say. It has two companion stars, both a long way out, but close enough to ensure that planets will probably never form. Or if they do, that they’ll be unstable.”

“But you said there is a planet.”

“ Captured, ” she reminded him.

“ Alnitak. ” He tasted the word.