Ben Bova - New Earth

“He won’t miss you,” Aditi said.

Jordan agreed with a nod. He kissed Aditi lightly on the lips and headed for the door.

“Dinner tonight?” he asked her.

“Of course,” she said.

Jordan whistled happily as he strode briskly through the city’s bustling streets toward the observatory. It works, he thought. The brain stimulation works and there aren’t any bad side effects. None that I could see, at least. Mitch seems as happy as a little boy on Christmas morning.

His phone buzzed. Yanking it from his shirt pocket, he saw Adri’s lined face on its tiny screen. The old man was beaming brightly.

“Aditi tells me that Dr. Thornberry’s download went very well,” he said.

“It did indeed,” Jordan said cheerfully, without breaking stride.

“I am pleased.”

“I’m overjoyed.”

“Apparently Dr. Rudaki is finding what she came for among the astronomers.”

“That’s where I’m heading now,” Jordan said.

“Yes, I know.”

Of course you know, Jordan said silently. You know every move we make.

Aloud, he replied to Adri, “Will you join us for dinner this evening?”

Adri chuckled softly. “Your affinity for mixing sociability with meals is putting weight on me.”

Jordan laughed. “A couple of kilos won’t hurt you.”

“Perhaps not,” Adri agreed, smiling back at Jordan. “This evening, then, in the dining hall.”

“Seven o’clock?”

“Seven will be fine.”

Jordan snapped the phone shut and slipped it back into his shirt pocket. He saw the observatory no more than two blocks ahead.

Entering the observatory was like entering a cathedral. Even though the telescopes were not working in the daytime, once he stepped into the main section of the building, with its domed roof and skyward-pointing instruments, Jordan felt an almost religious kind of awe and majesty.

He remembered a line of Galileo’s: Astronomers seek to investigate the true constitution of the universe, the most important and the most admirable problem that there is.

As he stood there gaping, a young man in a comfortably loose white tunic and dark blue slacks hurried across the observatory’s stone floor toward him.

“Mr. Kell! Welcome.”

Jordan dipped his chin a notch. “Thank you. May I ask what your name is?”

The young astronomer hesitated a moment, looking blank, puzzled, but at last answered, “In your language, my name is Mitra.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mitra.”

He was a pleasant-faced young man, a shade taller than Jordan yet somehow softer-looking, as if he had not yet outgrown his baby fat. His hair was a light brown color, sandy, so wispy that the slightest waft of air sent it flying.

“You’re here to see Dr. Rudaki, I presume,” Mitra said, smiling brightly at Jordan.

“Yes. Can you take me to her?”

“With pleasure. She’s in the conference room with the top staff.”

Mitra led Jordan across the hushed observatory, past the slanting gridwork of the resting telescopes, and up a steel stairway that clanged echoingly with every step they took. He stopped at a closed door, tapped on it with a knuckle, then slid it open.

There were ten people seated around a long table, with Elyse at its foot, Brandon sitting beside her. They both looked grim. Five other men and three women, Jordan saw. One of the men, chunky and barrel-chested, with short-cropped dark brown hair, was on his feet at the head of the table. The wall screens displayed astronomical images from ceiling to floor, swirling clouds of stars, vast glowing streams of gas, dark veils of obscuring dust.

“Mr. Kell,” said the standing man. “Welcome to our little colloquium.” He gestured to an empty chair at the foot of the table, next to Elyse and Brandon. They’ve been expecting me, Jordan realized.

The astronomer introduced the men and women seated around the table, then ended with, “I am Hari, chief astronomer.”

Jordan nodded a hello to each of them in turn as he went to the chair and sat in it.

“We have been showing Dr. Rudaki and Dr. Kell images and data concerning the gamma ray eruption at the galactic core.”

As Hari spoke, the images on the walls changed. Like a slide show, Jordan thought.

“Most of these images are more than twelve thousand years old,” the astronomer went on, just the slightest bit pompous. “I’m afraid their quality has degraded a bit over time, but they are still useful.”

Hari explained that the images looked inward, toward the heart of the galaxy, where the stars were so thickly clustered that they showed as one bright continuous glow. The images shifted, and Jordan guessed that they were showing the same field of view in different wavelengths: optical, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray and finally—

“And this is the gamma-ray view,” Hari intoned.

The background of the galaxy’s heart disappeared in the final view, smothered by a blazing wave of gamma radiation. The images flicked every few seconds; the wave grew bigger with each change, like a menacing tsunami growing, surging, coming closer.

“That’s the most recent image we have,” said Hari, as the pictures froze on the walls. Jordan felt surrounded by an almost palpable menace.

Elyse said, “All these images were taken from Hari’s homeworld, before the Predecessors sent out the mission that arrived here.”

“Before Hari and Adri and all these people were created,” Brandon added.

“Yes,” Hari answered, from the front of the room.

“And what happened to your homeworld when the gamma burst engulfed it? What happened to your ancestors?”

Hari looked slightly uncomfortable, but he answered, “They had already gone extinct. Our homeworld was occupied by inorganic entities. Had been for many thousands of years. Your years.”

“Inorganic—you mean, like the Predecessor.”

One of the women across the table replied, “Not precisely. More like our predecessors.”

Jordan blinked and shook his head. “Your history goes back a long way.”

“More than thirty million of your years,” said Hari.

“And this gamma burst?”

“It’s real, Jordy,” said Brandon. “Elyse has been going over the evidence with these people all morning. Not merely imagery, but measurements of the energy intensity in the eruption.” His face was somber. “It’s like a wave of death hurtling toward us.”

“Toward you, and dozens of other intelligent species in your section of the Orion arm,” said Hari. “Most of those species have not yet reached the level of high technology. Most of them have no way of knowing about the coming disaster—unless you reach them and save them.”

Fixing his gaze on Elyse and Brandon, Jordan asked them, “Are you certain?”

Brandon nodded, his lips a tight, rigid line. Elyse said, “There’s no denying it.”

Jordan thought about how many apparent truths had been denied in the past. How many human beings had died because some men made up their minds to ignore the truth, to overlook the data, to denigrate those who warned of impending problems. Wars that could have been stopped before they started. Diseases that spread because people denied their reality. The greenhouse warming that was changing Earth’s climate: it could have been averted, or at least mitigated.

He shook his head, trying to focus on the here and now.

“Absolutely certain?” he repeated to Elyse.

Very solemnly she replied, “Absolutely.”

Jordan pulled in a deep breath. “Then we’ve got to decide what to do about it.”

Brandon said, “Right. And the first step is to convince Meek.”

They were a subdued group as they rode the buggy back to the camp the following morning. Longyear drove, as usual, with Jordan sitting beside him. Thornberry and de Falla occupied the second row, Elyse and Brandon the third.