Jack McDevitt: Firebird

She looked pleased to have someone ask a straightforward question. “It's a dwarf star, Alex. Six and a half light-years from here. Maybe a little less.”

“Any planets?”

“A few. Nothing habitable. At least there wasn't the last time I looked.” We could hear laughter in the next room. The end of the evening was approaching. “And there's nothing unusual about it that I know of.”

“You have any idea what Robin was talking about?”

She shook her head. “None whatever. And neither does anybody else. I've seen this interview before, and I can't imagine what he's referring to. I'm not even sure he means the star. Maybe you need to ask an historian. Or a theologian.” She grinned. “Maybe the theologian would be your best bet.”

When the panels concluded, we retired to the ballroom for some drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Alex maneuvered us to a table occupied by Harvey Hoskin, the president of the Society, and Brandon Rupprecht, a biologist. Hoskin had bristly gray hair and a close-cut beard, and he was probably the oldest person in the Jubilee that evening.

We talked about the Society, how there would be a special meeting on the north coast later that year, and who was in line for the Chris Robin Award, which would be given out at the summer meeting in Andiquar. The award recognized “reaching beyond the parameters.” During a break in the conversation, Alex asked how the Society had gotten started.

“This is our twenty-seventh year,” Hoskin said. “It began here at the university after Jim Hovel did a dissertation on Robin's multiple-universe analyses. Jim was on one of the panels tonight.”

“Yes,” said Alex. “We were there.”

“Anyhow, as I'm sure you know-” Hoskin plunged into an account of the mathematics of time-space flexibility. At least, that's what I think it was. “He insisted, therefore, that alternate universes had to exist. I don't have the physics background to go into detail, but you can find it in his book.”

“We have a copy,” said Alex.

“Okay. Then you can imagine why a lot of people got interested. No one before had ever dared talk this way.” He looked across the table at Rupprecht. “At the time he disappeared, he'd become a figure of ridicule. Maybe a lot of people were jealous. I don't know. Anyhow, we- most of us-didn't learn to appreciate him until he was gone. Now, of course, he's a hero. Several of us went to a party one night, and we were talking about him, and I think we began to realize how much he meant to us. I mean, he wasn't afraid to be wrong. For him, it was nice to be right, but the important thing was to ask the right questions. You know what I mean?”

Rupprecht picked up the thread: “And that's how the Chris Robin Society was born.” Rupprecht was average-looking, average height, average everything. His was the kind of face you'd never be able to remember from one day to the next except for his eyes, which tended to freeze you in place.

“Is there really any possibility,” I asked, “any at all, that he might have been right? I mean, I know how crazy it sounds, but is there any chance that maybe you could walk into that closet over there in the corner and find yourself in another universe?”

Hoskin smiled. “It's not forbidden by the laws of physics, is it, Brandy?”

Rupprecht grinned, lifted his glass to his lips, and put it back with the drink untouched. “Above my pay grade,” he said.

I must have looked stunned.

Hoskin noticed. “We have to be cautious about ruling things out simply because they're counterintuitive, Chase. Who would have believed a particle could be in two places simultaneously?” Alex asked whether any members of the group had actually known Robin.

Hoskin passed the question to Rupprecht.

“I knew him,” he said, with a sad smile. “Chris was okay. Not the most patient guy in the world. But I was sorry to lose him.”

“What was he like?”

“He told jokes on himself. Took himself seriously but didn't expect anybody else to. If he had, I don't think he'd have survived as long as he did. He wanted to do blue sky science. That was all he really lived for. Find something new. Figure out how to travel backward in time. Find out what drives complexity. But that era was over long ago. All we do today is try to design a better engine and do studies on why life evolves in different ways on different worlds. If it shows up at all. So for a long time, nobody took him seriously. But he learned to live with that.”

Hoskin jumped in. “Something else that fascinated him was the occasional sightings of unidentified ships.”

“Unidentified ships?”

“You know, the sightings they have at the stations every once in a while? A ship will show up, cruise past, not identify itself, and just leave the area.”

“I've heard of them, sure,” said Alex. “But I never really thought much about the stories.”

“They're there. Something is. They're on the record. The sightings go back a long time. Centuries.”

“But that just means people get lost. Wander into the wrong system, and clear out again.”

“Well, there's something strange about some of them-” He turned toward me. “You're a pilot, Chase-am I right about that?”

“Yes, Harvey, that's correct.”

“If I watch a ship make its jump into transdimensional space, what do I see?”

I wasn't sure what he was asking. “Nothing,” I said finally. “It just disappears.”

“Exactly. Like turning off a light, right?”

“Yes.”

“But the ships involved in the sightings, some of them anyhow, don't just blink out. They fade out. It takes a few seconds, but it's a different process. They gradually become invisible.”

“So what did Robin think they were?”

“He never said. But they intrigued him. And I'm pretty sure I know what he suspected.'“

“Which was-?”

“That they were ships from another civilization. Or maybe another universe.”

I'd had enough to drink, so I let the AI take us home. It was a bright, cold evening, with a few clouds drifting across a moonless sky. “Well,” I said, “that was an interesting experience.”

“Yes. And a profitable one.”

“What makes you say that? I can't see any of those people, for all their enthusiasm, buying a book because Robin scribbled a comment in it.”

“Oh, that's probably true.”

“Then what-?”

“Chase, we can get a substantial price for the Robin artifacts.”

“Really? Why?”

“The guy is the stuff of myth. Ghosts. Colliding universes. Ships from other realities. Then he disappears.”

“I'm not sure I'm following you.”

“We won't get a good price for his stuff if only a few people are interested in him.”

“I agree.”

“And, of course, nobody cares about physicists. I mean, nobody understands them. But a mad scientist? Who maybe got carried off to another universe? Or maybe came from one himself?”

“Alex, I don't think I like where this is going.”

“It's all P.R., Chase. What we need to do is shape the public perception.”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

Two days after the Chris Robin conference, Alex showed up as a guest on Newscope, hosted by Leah Carmody. I was at home, shoes off, feet propped up, enjoying a nightbinder although I'd put too much lemon in it.

Leah's other guest was Arlen Adams. Adams could have been an Old Testament prophet. He was big and imposing, and probably a thousand years old, with judgmental eyes and a long white beard. He was also chairman of the physics department at Perennial College. He had never hidden the fact that he disapproved of Alex.