110 Dead; 300 Missing

FOXWORTH PROMISES TAX EQUITY FOR MULTIPLE-CHILD FAMILIES

CHINA MAY BE BUILDING NUCLEAR WEAPON

Hiao Denies VSE Charge Will Resist Inspection “by Force of Arms”

INDIAN FAMINE MAY HAVE KILLED MILLIONS

World Council Pledges Aid; Demands Cessation of Hostilities

PRICES CONTINUE TO CLIMB

CPI Hits Annual Rate of 11% Sloan: “Foxworth Neglects Economy”

POPE VISITS BRAZIL

Decries “Modern Life Styles”

BEWARE CHRISTMAS CON ARTISTS

Elderly at Risk “Real” Trees, Gift Subscription Funds Lead List of Scams

ATLANTIC CLUB PREDICTS GRIM FUTURE

”Great Famine May Have Been Only Prelude”

NEW E-SAT GOES ON-LINE

Network Near Completion

Will Provide Near-Unlimited Clean

Energy for Africa, Middle East

LEGION TRADES BOOM-BOOM FOR 4 PLAYERS, 5 DRAFT CHOICES

Chicago. Sunday, February 6; 2100 hours.

“You owe it to yourself.”

From his balcony on the thirty-fourth floor of the Tiara Marriott, Henry Jacobi looked out across a breathtaking view of Chicago and the lakefront. The crosstown glidetrain moved through the sea of light. “I don’t think so,” he said, without turning.

Carson had thought he knew the older man. Consequently he had come with full confidence that when presented with the facts, and the possibilities, Henry would relent, would cast his personal demons overboard. Would accept his responsibility to take command of what might become the epochal mission.

“No,” Jacobi said into the silence that drew out between them. “You’ll have to do this one without me.”

“Why, Henry?”

“My God, Carson, don’t you know what’s been going on at the Academy? You put my name on this mission and it’s dead.” He turned, came away from the railing. “I appreciate your coming. And God knows I appreciate the offer. But not this time. The Institute has a good job for me here. I’ll be doing what I like, and it’s low profile.”

The air off the lake was cool. Carson lifted his glass. The ice cubes clinked. “Good Scotch,” he said.

Henry sat down, grunting with the effort. “It’s not what you think. I can live with the events. But I want to see you succeed. That at least will give the events at the Temple some meaning.” His eyes were dark. “Have you picked your crew yet?”

“Yes,” said Carson. “I’d like to run it by you.”

“No.” He pulled his sweater tight. “It’s your call. You’ll have to live with it. How many are you taking?”

“We’ll have five. Counting me.”

“And Ed has approved it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. He needs something spectacular, or he’s going to be out here, in the adjoining lecture hall.” The broad, friendly-mutt features lit up. “Good luck, Frank. Give ‘em hell.”

Arlington. Monday, February 7; 1000 hours.

“I was hoping you’d ask.”

“How could you think we might not, Hutch?”

“I wasn’t really sure you’d want me.” She managed her game smile. “Thanks.”

Beta Pacifica was two hundred twenty-five light-years from Earth. Again, on the edge of the Void. Fifty-five light-years from Quraqua. “What’s the radio signal like?” she asked. They had been very secretive. Had in fact sworn her to say nothing of the pending mission.

“Continuous repetitive patterns. Every few seconds, sometimes. No long segment ever completely repeats, but there are patterns that seem to be variations of each other. Coming from a single transmitter.”

“A single transmitter?”

“Yes. As far as we can tell, the sender never gets a response.”

“That seems odd. Maybe we just can’t hear it.”

“Probably. Ed thinks it’s a beacon. Incidentally, the source of the transmission is probably not on a planetary surface.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s several AUs from the star, and it’s in a polar orbit. A polar orbit, Hutch.”

They hugged. “It was put there,” she said, squeezing hard.

Langley Park, Maryland. Monday, February 7; 1930 hours.

The entry bell sounded, the display blinked on, and Maggie looked at Frank Carson. He knew, of course, that he was on camera, but he still could not entirely conceal his impatience. Carson never changed: he liked things to happen according to schedule, disliked even the slightest delay. He wore a yellow wool pullover and cuffed dark-blue skims. She thought of him as a good detail man, somebody who ensured that equipment was maintained and supplies arrived on time. But the price of that kind of talent seemed to be a kind of overwhelming grayness. Carson was impossibly dull. He was well-meaning, even indispensable. But he was dreary company. She keyed the downstairs lock.

“Door’s open, Frank,” she said. She pushed back from her notepads and sketches, blanked the monitor, which resumed its wall-panel appearance. She’d lost track of time. It was too late to do a cleanup now, but the room was cluttered rather than dusty. She could live with that. Maggie had no idea why Carson had asked to see her. It couldn’t be social, and it wouldn’t be connected with the Oz inscription; she had already solved that for them. What was left?

Possibly, they were planning some sort of formal expression of appreciation for her. If that were so, she’d be happy to accept. And they might have sent Carson to arrange it, try to get her to show up at the appropriate place without giving away the game.

Maggie was still luxuriating in the afterglow of having deciphered the horgon lines. (That she had found the final elements of the solution among texts already present in the data banks, that the last-minute material sent up by Henry and Richard had helped, but might not have been necessary, she had told no one. The fact tarnished her achievement slightly, and left her vaguely resentful, but against whom or what she was not entirely certain.) She had been working on her notebooks since their return, and was now in the process of deciding what she would do next. Academy policy was to rotate field and home assignments, and she had offers from Oxford, Harvard, CIT, and the Institute for Advanced Studies.

The door opened to reveal Carson. “Hello, Maggie,” he said.

She extended her hand. “Hi, Frank. Good to see you.”

Conversation had always been difficult between them, and she felt the thickness in the air already. Carson was a master of the inconsequential; she had no use for small talk.

“I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

“It’s okay.” There was an odd sense of worlds coming together. Carson belonged light-years away. She indicated a chair, and sat beside him. “Frank, what can I get you?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” he said. “Nice apartment.”

“Thank you.” She was proud of it. Tasteful furniture, walls lined with technical texts and novels, framed ideographs and poetry from the Knothic Hours, in the original.

“D.C. changed while we were away.” He went on for some minutes in a superficial vein, commenting on the unseasonal warmth; the likelihood of rain; the local outbreak of CORE, the African virus that induced a kind of super rickets.

Maggie sighed and waited. When she saw her chance, she asked what was happening. Translation: Why are you here?

His gaze intensified. “Maggie,” he said, “we’re going out again.”

That surprised her. “Who is?” she asked. “Out where?”

“The inscription points to Beta Pacifica. It’s in the same area, along the edge of the Arm.”

Maggie had not really believed they would pin down a candidate. At least not so quickly. She’d expected the effort would take years. “Why not let a survey ship take a look at it?”

“Because we think they’re still there.” He paused for effect. “Maggie, we’ve picked up radio transmissions.” His eyes were big and round and very full. Maggie Tufu had never been given to emotional demonstrations. Particularly not with Frank Carson. But now she jabbed a fist in the air. “Magnificent,” she said. “Am I invited?”

The Academy. Wednesday, February 16; 1345 hours.

Ed Horner looked up as Carson entered. “Good to see you, Frank,” he said. “Is everything ready?”

Carson nodded. “Yes. We’re all set.”

“Very good.” He rose, came around the edge of the desk. He looked hard at Carson, as if he were trying to see past him, to calculate odds. “Since there is a signal, we are going to find something. But I want to impress on you that your task is limited to establishing whether there is anything there that warrants a full mission. If they actually exist, I do not want details. Do you understand? I want you to make the determination and come back with a recommendation. If they’re there, keep in mind we know nothing about them. Don’t stop to chitchat. Don’t let them see you. Get in and get out—”

“We will,” said Carson.

“Incidentally, your departure time has been moved up. You’ve got forty-eight hours.”

Carson opened his mouth to protest.

“You’ll need to let your people know,” the commissioner continued. “I know this puts you on a short schedule, but we’re under pressure. Hard questions are being asked in high places. I’m not sure how long we can hold the lid on this operation.”

Carson’s mouth clamped firmly on whatever it was he was going to say. “Thank you,” he said, finally.

“Don’t bother.” Horner held out his hand. “Just come back to us.”

Hutch and Carson left Atlanta Launch at sunset. The shuttle was filled with passengers, mostly wealthy sightseers who would be outward bound tomorrow on the Estrata. Interstellar tourism was developing into a growth industry. Those wealthy enough to pay for the privilege could sail past neutron stars; watch from short range the deadly dance between Delta Aquilae and its massive companion; cruise past the Great Maelstrom on Beta Carinis IV; navigate the smoking marble flatlands of Lesser Culhagne, the Cold Star. And end the voyage with dinner in the shadow of Holtzmyer’s Rock on Pinnacle.

They were mostly couples, middle-aged and older, well-dressed, excited by the views of Earth and Moon. There were a few children, some station personnel, and two men who turned out to be theoretical physicists working on artificial gravity.

One was a tall, garrulous black with a gray beard and knife-sharp features. His colleague was a taciturn Japanese who watched Hutch with eyes that were full of suggestion.

The black man’s name was Laconda, and he reminded Hutch of her old high-school algebra teacher.

She commented that she’d always understood that artificial gravity was impossible, and Laconda responded with talk about high-energy particles, guide paths controlled by magnetic fields, and local space warps. Hutch got lost quickly, but she understood enough to ask whether the method, if it worked, could not also be used to produce anti-gravity?

Laconda smiled, pleased by the aptness of his student. “Yes,” he said. “That should follow. And the critical point is that very little energy would be needed.”

“Cheap anti-gravity?” Carson’s eyebrows rose. “Makes you wonder where it will all end.”

The physicist glowed with satisfaction. “The future is coming very quickly,” he said, glancing toward Hutch to gauge her reaction, “and we need to be prepared for it.” He oiled through the phrase with smooth precision.

Hutch was still considering the possibilities when they began their approach to the Wheel. True anti-gravity. Not the parlor magic stuff of superconductivity, but a real low-cost system that would negate mass and resistance. The power needs of the world would plummet. “You could,” she told Carson, “move a sofa with the flick of a wrist. Sail over New York without an aircraft. We’d no longer be tied to the ground, and our individual strength would go to infinite.” She grew thoughtful. “It would be a new kind of life.”

“It’s science fiction,” said Carson. “It’ll never happen.”

The Japanese looked up from his computer, glanced around to assure himself that Laconda was out of earshot, and said quietly: “Your friend is right, young lady. It’s a crock. The thing’s a government grant, it’ll never work, and Laconda knows it.”

Hutch was glad to see the Winckelmann again. She strode down the access tunnel, entered the main port, which was at the top of the ship, crossed the bridge (a technician was running queries on the navigation systems), dumped her bags on the deck, and began an inspection tour. She was not so pressed for time that she could not have gone to her station quarters, but she enjoyed the sense of security and comfort within the familiar bulkheads.

There was a framed picture of Cal on her worktable, taken two years ago. Shortly after they’d met. He was wearing the outsize green golfer’s hat that she’d once thought so charming. Still did, actually. She picked the picture up and slipped it face down into the upper right-hand drawer. Long past time—

Maintenance people were wandering through the ship. Hutch went down to C ring to check supplies. The inventory showed food and water for six people for eight months. She conducted a physical check, and signed off.

Two hours later, she met Carson in Vega South. He was every bit as anxious as she was to be away. “I would hate to get shut down now,” he said.

“Relax. We’ll be fine.”

They sat at a corner table sipping drinks. “This is all happening pretty fast,” he said. “We need to think a little about how this expedition should be run, what we want to accomplish, where things might go wrong. For example, what do we do if there actually is a functioning supercivilization?”

“We get out as quickly as we can, and come back and report. I thought you said Homer made that clear.”

“But we can report without physically coming back. Are we really sending a team of researchers all that way just to push an alarm?”

“I assume he doesn’t want another disaster.”

“But how do you avoid risk? Look: if we come back and say somebody’s out there, and it’s somebody who had star flight twenty thousand years ago, how is anyone going to approach them safely? No. What he really wants is some hard data. But he can’t tell us that flat out. He has to assume we’ll be smart enough to understand. If they’re there, we bring back enough details to make it possible to plan a follow-up mission. But how much is enough?”

Earth glowed softly in sunlight.

“Is this the same conversation you told me about?”

“You’ve got to read between the lines a little, Hutch. He doesn’t want us losing the ship, or letting them know we’re around.” He looked better than she’d ever seen him. He had lost weight, his energy level was up, and he was grinning like a big kid. “But he needs more than a go/no-go.”

Well, whatever, she thought. In any case, she expected to enjoy herself. It was, after all, the flight that Richard had always hoped to make.

Janet Allegri and George Hackett arrived shortly after 0715. They came together, arm in arm. Janet looked fresh and enterprising, ready to go. She wore a blue and white jumpsuit with a Quraqua mission patch. Her blond hair was cut short, military style, and she moved with her customary flounce. Hutch was surprised by a jealous twinge.

George walked easily at her side, one stride for every two of hers. A sweater was knotted round his neck, and he swung an imitation leather athletic bag. They might have been headed for an outing in the park.

Hutch met them at the top of the exit ramp. Both had been out of the D.C. area since their return from the Temple, and she had seen neither. They embraced and exchanged greetings. “You said you weren’t going to do any more field trips,” she told George. “Get tired of the home front that quickly?”

He grinned. “No,” he said. “Frank asked me to come, so I came.” He hesitated. “I also knew you’d be along.”

Hutch caught Janet’s Oho,-what-have-we-here? expression. “Thank you,” she said, enjoying the moment. It was good to know she wasn’t completely overshadowed.

She led them into the Wink, showed them where to stow their bags, and distributed mission patches and mugs. They featured an eighteenth-century four-master under full sail through an ocean of clouds, beneath a prominent star. The legends Beta Pacifica appeared at the top, and Onward at the bottom.

When they were settled, they wandered casually through the ship, talking about what they’d been doing, and about the mission. Hutch explained how they’d tracked down Beta Pac, and put a diagram of the signal on a monitor. “Hard to see a pattern anywhere,” said Janet.

“It’s there.” Hutch said.

George watched for a while. “Who else knows?” he asked.

“We’ve kept it quiet,” Hutch said. “Hardly anybody, other than the commissioner.”

“And he’s letting us go after it?”

“I think he feels that since we tracked it down, it’s ours.”

“More likely,” said Janet, “he figures it’s a long shot, and he wants the results in hand before he mentions it to anybody. No point looking foolish again.”

Flight luggage arrived. They all went down to get it and were dragging it back to their quarters when Carson charged through the main airlock. “Hello, George,” he said, shaking hands. “Is Maggie here yet? We need Maggie.”

“We haven’t seen her,” said Hutch. “What’s the problem?”

He looked flustered. “The results from the Tindle were routinely passed to higher authority.”

Hutch shrugged. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“No. But apparently somebody actually read them. It looks as if they figured out what the implications are. Horner’s people learned that they are about to be told Beta Pac is off limits until further notice. If that happens, he’ll have no choice but to stop the mission.”

“How’d you find out?” asked Janet.

“The commissioner’s private secretary.” He was looking at his watch and an empty approach tunnel. “He wants us out and gone.”

Hutch was trying to think it through. “They can’t communicate with us in hyper. How much time have we got?”

“Don’t know. We’d better assume it could come at any time.”

“The ship’s ready to go. I’ll only need a few minutes to run through the checklist. If we can get clearance from Flight Ops.”

“See if you can reach Maggie,” said Carson.

Janet pointed to the monitor. “No need,” she said. Maggie Tufu was outside carrying an overnight case.

Hutch called Flight Ops. While she was getting departure information, Maggie made her entrance. Stern and striking, she was an intimidating presence. She greeted them, and her dark eyes glanced perfunctorily around the room, hesitating momentarily when they encountered Janet. She did not seem to notice Hutch.

The Traffic Controller gave Hutch a choice. “If you can get out at 0810, it’s a go.” That gave them fifteen minutes. “Otherwise, we don’t have another post until 1630 hours.” That wouldn’t be much better than the original departure time.

“We’ll be ready,” she said. “Put us on the log.”

Maggie turned toward Hutch. “Have my bags arrived yet?”

She saw no activity in the luggage chute. “No.”

“You may have to leave them,” said Carson.

“You’re kidding.” Maggie’s expression changed, but it did not grow dour, as Hutch had expected. Instead, it took on an impish quality. “I’ll be a little short of clothes.” She showed them the overnight case.

“We’ve got plenty of coveralls on board,” said Hutch. “Several sizes.”

Maggie did not object, but looked ruefully at the over-nighter. “I didn’t realize we were in that much of a hurry. Don’t we have several hours yet?”

“They’re trying to cancel the mission,” said Carson.

“Hutchins,” she said, “can you determine when my luggage will get here?”

Not this side of Christmas, honey, I hope. ”It’s still in the sorter,” she reported gravely. Too bad. Have to do without.

Maggie looked for sympathy. “Any possibility we can wait?”

“First contact in the nude,” Janet said, grinning.

“It’s in the pipe,” said Hutch. “There isn’t anything we can do to hurry it along.”

Carson looked uncomfortable. “How long?” he asked Hutch.

“Maybe a half hour.”

“Have to do without, then,” said Carson.

The console chimed. “Preflights check out.” Hutch said. “We have permission to depart.”

Maggie took a long deep breath. “Let’s go,” she said, turning toward Janet. “You’re close to my size. A little hefty, maybe. But if we take your stuff in a bit, we should do fine. Right?”

17.

On board NCA Winckelmann.Friday, February 18; 1025 GMT.

They rode outward from the sun. Winckelmann’s twin Hazeltine engines were fully charged, and she could have made the insertion into transdimensional space at any time, but regulations set minimum standards to avoid backwash. Her flight plan called for a jump in twenty hours.

Carson sat with Hutch on the bridge. He was an odd mix that day: delighted that they were finally on their way, fearful that the recall might come, uneasy about the nature of the mission itself. “It’s hard to plan for,” he said. “I hate going into a situation blind.”

“That’s what makes it interesting,” said Hutch. The atmosphere was thick. They had both been glancing frequently at the communications console. “Maybe we ought to take out some insurance against getting canceled.”

“How can we do that?”

“We should probably have a communication malfunction.” She checked the time. “We’re due to file a movement report in a few minutes. I’ll garble it. That’ll establish the problem for official purposes. After that, we don’t respond to anything. Once we’re in hyper they can’t talk to us in any event. When we get to Beta Pac, we can effect repairs, or not, depending on events.”

“Do it,” he said.

“Okay. Now I have a question for you. If we get positive results from this trip, is it likely to help get Henry off the hook?”

Carson didn’t think so. “It can’t hurt. But the Academy is in a comer. If they don’t act against him, then they’re in effect condoning his action. They can’t afford to do that. No. Maybe history will do right by him. The Academy won’t. And the media won’t.” He looked at her, and she could read the pain in his eyes. “And maybe they’re right. He is responsible.”

He fell silent, took out his notepad, and drifted away from her. After a while, he began writing. Hutch had detected a change in Frank Carson since the Temple. Like Henry, he seemed to have aged. He was more reflective, less optimistic. Despite the bravado talk about going beyond the mission parameters, she sensed he would be more cautious than he might have been a few months earlier.

She caught a glimpse of a title in his notebook, and smiled: carson at beta pac. It sounded like Napoleon in Egypt, Schliemann at Troy, Costikan at Pinnacle. I hope you make it, Frank.

She turned her attention to the movement report, brought it up on her screen, and garbled the back half of it. No way they could misunderstand: Wink has a communications problem. She hit the Transmit button.

The response was almost immediate.

WINCKELMANN: SAY AGAIN YOUR MR08.

Okay, she thought. We’re in business.

A few hours later, while Hutch was making final enhancements for the transdimensional insertion, the message board chimed again. Hutch assumed it would be another request for a communication status check. But this was altogether different:

WINCKELMANN FROM ACADEMY: ABORT MISSION AND RETURN. ABORT REPEAT ABORT. PLS ACKNOWLEDGE. HORNER.

She cleared the screen and switched on the ship’s intercom. “We’ll be making our jump in eleven minutes. Everybody belt down. Please respond to the bridge.”

She showed the message to Carson. “We never received it,” he said.

Still, they both felt better when the stars went out and the fog closed around the ship.

That evening, after dinner, Carson held a general briefing. The first question: What was known about Beta Pac? “Not much,” he admitted. “No survey ship has visited it, or been anywhere close for that matter. Class G star, about three billion years older than the Sun. Located along the edge of the Void.”

“So we have no idea,” said Janet, “what’s waiting for us?”

“None,” said Carson.

Maggie pressed her fingers together. “This signal,” she asked, “started on its way at about the beginning of the twentieth century. Have we made any attempt to find out whether the source is still active? Did we check with any other stations?”

Carson nodded. “We asked Nok to try to get a reading for us, and the Ashley Tee, which is our closest survey ship. Neither heard anything, but that could be because they’re out of effective range for their receivers. The signal the Tindle picked up wasn’t much more than a whisper.”

“Three centuries is not a long time,” said George, “if these are the people who built Oz eleven thousand years ago.”

“So what’s the plan?” asked Janet. “What do we do when we get there?”

Carson was all business. “We’re homing on the signal. We’re going to make the jump back into standard space as close to the source as we can. It’s hard to formulate a strategy beyond that. We’ve been directed not to make contact, if they’re there. And not to allow ourselves to be seen. But we want to find out who’s home. And bring back whatever details we can. To that end, by the way, we will make no transmissions while we are in the Beta Pac system.”

Maggie leaned forward attentively. They were gathered around a table. “Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. We may be talking about a civilization with twenty thousand years of development. Possibly a lot more. Does anyone really believe we can sneak in, take a look, and leave undetected?”

“We don’t know they’ve had twenty thousand years of development,” said Janet. “They could be frozen in place. Or in a dark age.”

Carson agreed. “We can imagine all kinds of possibilities. Let’s just take normal precautions. And play the rest by ear.”

Maggie looked annoyed. “Why would an advanced race care whether we wandered in or not? That seems a trifle arrogant to me. I suggest we sail right up to the front door, and show the flag. No pussyfooting around. That might get their respect right off the bat.”

“You could be right, but that’s a direct violation of my instructions. We won’t do it that way.”

Hutch was not officially a member of the expedition, and consequently not entitled to express an opinion. Still, she was responsible for the safety of the ship. “I think,” she said, “we should take the possibility of hostile response seriously.”

“They won’t be a threat,” insisted Maggie.

Janet peered at her over the top of a teacup. “Why not?”

“If they’re advanced, they’re rational. Unprovoked hostility is irrational. And if they’re not advanced, we don’t have to worry about their hostility.” Her tone was that of a harried instructor.

George listened quietly through most of the discussion. Eventually, he asked about the Academy’s view. “Who does Horner expect us to find? Is there a real chance these are the Monument-Makers?”

“Ed doesn’t know any more than we do,” Carson said.

“I’ll give you a straight answer,” Maggie told George. “If there’s anyone at Beta Pac, it won’t be the Monument-Makers.”

Hutch was surprised and irritated by the conviction in her voice. “How can you be so sure?” she asked.

“It might be the same race” Maggie explained. “But the Monument-Makers are gone. Just as the classical Greeks are gone. I mean, no one seems to be running around making Monuments anymore. Haven’t for thousands of years. But the Monuments do imply that a long-lived, stable civilization once existed. Anybody want to speculate what happens to a culture that survives for twenty thousand years? Does it become highly advanced? Or moribund? Does it develop in some oblique way?”

“Check out China,” said Janet. “Or Egypt. Or India. Our experience is that durability is not necessarily good.”

Later, Hutch took Carson aside. “Let’s talk worst-case scenario for a moment. What happens if we arrive and are promptly attacked?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Give me an answer first.”

“We clear out.”

“Okay. But you should be aware, for planning purposes, that after we jump into Beta Pac space, we will need a minimum of fourteen hours to recharge the engines. We are not going to be able to clear out on a moment’s notice. No matter what.”

He nodded. “Okay. Let’s hope we don’t have a problem.”

Hutch had not forgotten Maggie’s willingness to sacrifice her comrades. She didn’t like harboring grudges, and her professional responsibilities militated against allowing her feelings to show. She made a pact with herself, to accept Maggie Tufu, with the reservation that, in a crisis, she would not trust the woman’s judgment.

Of her four passengers, Maggie was the only one who still qualified as a stranger. Hutch had not had an opportunity to spend any time with her at the Temple, or on the flight from Quraqua.

She was polite enough. But the woman saw everything as simplistic or ironic, and seemed to take nothing seriously other than the professional issues raised by her work.

Despite her presence, this group, unlike others Hutch had carried, showed no tendency to fragment. No one hung back, no one spent inordinate amounts of time in a compartment, no one got buried in the cybernet to the exclusion of all else. Even Maggie came around after a few days, shedding much of her arrogance. She took time to engage in occasional small talk, although it was clear she found it not particularly stimulating. She also revealed an uncommon skill at poker. Gradually, Carson discovered that she had an interest in military affairs. George commented that she was much more sociable here than she had ever been on Quraqua, and Hutch wondered whether they were being driven together by the approach of the unknown.

They gathered every evening after dinner, and the conversations ranged over a world of topics. Somehow, out here, terrestrial problems seemed more clinical, more amenable to solution. Plans were brought forward to combat starvation and reduce population, to stop wars and perhaps end international rivalry once and for all, to deal with teenage sexuality, and improve the public schools. They agreed that all the plans, however, had something of a fascist ring. There was a tendency, between the stars, to lose patience with disorder.

They debated whether it was really possible for a social structure to survive intact for tens of thousands of years. Janet argued that that kind of stability would necessarily imply “damn near absolute rigidity. The place would be a literal hell.”

They talked about the Monument-Makers, and about the discontinuities. And eventually they began to talk about the things that really mattered to them. Hutch learned that the woman in Carson’s photo had run off with a securities dealer, that Maggie was morbidly afraid of death, that Janet had trouble attracting reasonable men. “I don’t know why,” she confessed, and Hutch suspected it was true. Most men she had known would have felt threatened by Janet Allegri, would never have felt comfortable in her presence.

George, she decided, wanted to excel so that a young woman who had walked off years ago would regret her choice.

And Hutch? She wasn’t sure what she gave away. She was careful not to mention Cal, and she didn’t talk about Richard. But Janet told her years later that she had first come to understand Hutch when she described her fear and humiliation while Janet took on the strider. “I promised myself I would never stand by again,” Janet quoted her as saying. And she added, herself: “I liked that.”

As for the mission, one series of questions was central: if these were, indeed, the Monument-Makers, would they remember their visit to the solar system? Would they remember their own great days?

“Oz,” said George, when asked to produce a question for the aliens. “I want to know why they built Oz.”

The evening gatherings quickly took on a ceremonial aspect. They toasted one another and the commissioner and Beta Pac. Mission symbols and patches, worn on Academy blue, became de rigueur. Whatever reserve was left drained away, and they relaxed in each other’s company. They joked, and laughed, and required everyone to produce entertainments. There were magic tricks and monologues and sing-alongs. Maggie, reluctant at first to join in, demonstrated an ability to impersonate the voices and mannerisms of everyone on board. She’d captured Carson’s military demeanor and George’s back-country accent; she caught Hutch’s trick of tilting her head when puzzled, and Janet’s slightly voluptuous stance.

They staged a dance (ties for gentlemen, skirts for ladies), and they began running an improvisational comedy, Great Excavations, in which a group of misfits at a mythical dig took turns trying to fleece and bed one another.

Hutch enjoyed the fun and games, which always seemed to work well within the closed belly of a starship where human companionship counted for so much. Night after night, they talked into the early hours, and Hutch felt the bonds among them strengthening.

Near the end of the third week, Maggie took her aside. “I wanted you to know,” she said, “that I’m sorry about Richard.”

“Thank you,” Hutch responded, surprised.

“I didn’t know you were so close, or I would have said something earlier. I think I was a little stupid.”

“It’s okay.” Hutch felt a wave of regret. Not sure why.

Maggie looked uncertain. “I know a lot of people think Henry is getting a bad deal. They think I’m responsible for what happened.” Her dark eyes found Hutch, and held her. “I think they’re right.” Her voice caught. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “We did the right thing. Richard knew that. That’s why he was there. But I wish it could have turned out differently.”

Hutch nodded. Maggie hesitated, opened her arms, and they embraced. Maggie’s cheek was warm and wet.

Hutch lived by her rule; she maintained a cautious demeanor toward George. She had been delighted at his inclusion in the mission, but she also recognized that his presence necessarily created a difficult situation. His eyes lingered on her through the long evenings, darting quickly away when she looked back. They brightened when she spoke to him, became animated when she asked his opinion about the topic of the hour. His voice softened noticeably in her presence, and his breathing downshifted.

She would have liked to talk frankly with George, explain why she was not responding. She did not, after all, want to discourage him. But she could say nothing until he provided the opportunity by making an overt move.

When it came, she blew it.

They had fallen into the habit of pronouncing each session formally closed with a midnight toast, and marking off another day on the mission calendar which Carson had constructed and placed on a bulkhead in the lounge. (The ever-present four-master loomed above the five weeks and two days allotted for the outbound flight. On the twentv-sixth evening, George had seemed especially vulnerable. He had seated himself across from her, where he could demonstrate monumental unconcern. But color went to his cheeks early in the session, and stayed there.

When the group broke up, he approached her. “Hutch,” he said in his most serious manner, “can we walk?”

Her pulse fluttered. “Of course.”

They descended into the lower reaches of the ship. The configuration had changed for this mission. She was still carrying three rings, but they were smaller. The vast cargo areas had been removed; the living quarters were reduced. There was still ample space to store artifacts, should the need arise, but Hutch no longer felt she was walking into an aircraft hangar. This Wink would present a considerably smaller target to scanners.

“Hutch,” he said almost timidly, “you’re one of the loveliest women I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“When we get back, I’d like to have an evening with you. Just us.”

Yes. ”We can do that.”

He was very near, not quite touching her, his breath warm and uneven. She steered them toward a viewport. Outside, the mist of the interdimensional world drifted slowly past. They might have been in an old house on the edge of a moor.

“It’s like you” he said, watching the fog. “You can’t see into it, you can’t quite get hold of it, and it keeps moving.”

She laughed. They both did. And she made the first move. It was subtle enough, and would not have been noticeable to a bystander: she leaned in his direction, a mere centimeter or so. A signal passed between them, and she sensed his body make its own decision.

“Hutch—”

He reached out, tentatively, and touched her hair. His lips were very close.

Hutch felt her tides begin to run. Fingertips touched. Flanks brushed. His eyes held her. His hands curled around her shoulders, and her cheek touched his. It was warm. She was up on her toes, lips parted, open, waiting.

The moment expanded. Her breathing, her heartbeat, melted to his. Breasts, protected only by the flimsy material of her work uniform, touched him. He bent to her, met her mouth with his own, not pressing her. She accepted him, let him explore the thrust of her lips. Her heart hammered, and she lost her breath. When finally he broke away, she caught the nape of his neck, softly, firmly, and drew him back.

She had one final moment of clarity, of reluctance, and then folded herself against him, inviting him, becoming part of him. She had to get up on her toes to reach him, but she loved it. His fingers brushed her right breast, lingered, drew away.

She’d been on flights which featured people padding between rooms in the middle of the night. She didn’t want any part of that. “Come with me,” she said.

He moved silently behind her.

“Only tonight,” she said.

His hand settled on her shoulder, touched her throat. And then he stopped. “Hutch,” he said, “do you really want to do this?”

Yes, you fool.

She led him into the shuttle bay. The Alpha lay in its cradle, shadowy, silent, potent. The cockpit windows glittered in the uncertain light. (They had replaced the damaged tread, bent by the tsunami.)

He swung her easily off the floor, strode across the deck, and paused at the shuttle cargo door. He jabbed at the release mechanism, but nothing happened.

She did it for him; there was a maintenance seal that had to be removed.

He ducked inside with her, found a blanket, and spread it out.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said as he bent to her again. “Because I don’t want to spoil anything. I love you, Hutch.”

She kissed his cheek. Drew his head down. “Be careful what you say. I might hold you to it.”

“Now and forever,” he said. The response was sufficiently artificial that she almost laughed. But he added, solemnly, “I mean it, Hutch.”

What waited at Beta Pac? Maybe they were being invited to join the Galactic League. Or to receive a history and detailed atlas of the Milky Way, with its civilizations and its points of interest and its rest stops. Carson sprawled comfortably in his chair, feet propped up. “How do you suppose an individual in such a culture would define fulfillment?” he asked. “What would they want out of their lives?”

“Same as us,” said Janet.

George sipped dark wine. “What would that be?” he asked.

“Power,” she said. “And love.”

“It’s impossible to know,” said Carson. “That’s why they’re alien.”

Hutch sat with a book open on her lap. “But we are able to understand alien mythologies, at least the ones we’ve encountered so far. Which means we are motivated by the same drives.” She thought once again about the footprints across the ridge on Iapetus. “I would guess they’d live, as we do, for achievement. To do something. And to want others to know what they’ve done. That’s the whole point of the Monuments.”

The wall panels were open, and the internal lights played off the fog. There was always a sense of something just beyond the limits of vision. Hutch remembered an old story that pilots who had gone outside during transdimensional flight occasionally heard voices.

George kept their bargain and stayed at a distance. She was pleased that he understood the need for discretion, and that he refrained from demonstrating the possessiveness which was so often the immediate downside of a sexual encounter. There was no second event. Both had been around long enough to recognize the damage that pairing up does to a small team on an extended mission. So they strove for the same pleasant amiability with each other that they displayed toward each of their colleagues. In Hutch’s case, at least, it required no small effort.

Unlike her personal life, Wink glided placidly through the veils. It never trembled, never quivered, never accelerated. No inner systems quickened, and of course it received no messages from outside.

Hutch enjoyed doing simmies with this crew. She portrayed a series of love interests attached to cynical antiheroes, like Margo Colby in Blue Light and Lisa in Casablanca. George charmed her as Antoine in the one, and Carson was appropriately vulnerable as Rick in the other. (It showed her a side of his personality that she had not anticipated. And she was moved almost to tears when George/Antoine left her behind and rode to his death near Moscow.)

Carson had a taste for open-air historical spectaculars. He looked dashing, if a little beefy, as Antony at Actium, astride a white charger, the sun glittering against his horsehair helmet. Maggie was, they agreed, sensational as Cleopatra.

When it was her turn to choose, Maggie inevitably went for the Maclver Thomson cliffhangers, in which she excelled as the quintessential damsel in distress. (It struck Hutch as odd that their most intellectual member would opt for thrillers.) And, by God, she was good: she screamed her way through Now the Dawn, hunted by the members of a bloodthirsty cult; fled the maniacal clown Napoleon through the deserted amusement park in Laugh by Night; and fought off Brother Thaddeus, the murderous monk, in Things That Are Caesar’s, while her would-be rescuer, the globe-trotting adventurer Jack Hancock (George), tried to recover from a vicious whack on the head and an attack in the rook tower by a pair of eagles.

Janet specialized in women gone wrong. She portrayed Lady Macbeth with such pleasure and malevolence that Janet herself, seated beside Hutch, was chilled. (Watching acquaintances in the classic roles added an extra dimension to the experience, provided they were good. It all depended on the energy level and passion that one could provide to the mix.) Janet was also the scheming Mary Parker in Roads to Rome, and Katherine in Bovalinda. “You have a taste for power,” Carson remarked while she was seizing control of a metals consortium and simultaneously plotting to murder an uncooperative husband.

“Yeah.” Her face glowed. “Damn right.”

Hutch discovered something about herself during the evening they watched Things That Are Caesar’s. There is an all-out, no-holds-barred love scene in a rock pool within an abandoned monastery. And it was with an uncomfortable stirring in her breast that Hutch saw George, her George, close in on Maggie for a long aquatic grapple. It wasn’t really George, of course, any more than it was really Maggie. It wasn’t even their bodies: the subjects had supplied only fully clothed images and personality ranges; the computer had generated the rest. But Hutch felt a rising heat all the same, and she could not avoid a sidewise glance at Maggie, who was enjoying herself. As was George, sitting with a silly smirk.

Beta Pacifica was somewhat smaller than Sol, and slightly cooler. The radio source was located fifteen AUs from the star. “We should materialize within fifty thousand kilometers of the target,” said Hutch as they began waiting for Navigation to signal that a jump was imminent.

“We won’t hit it, will we?” asked Janet.

“Chances are thin.” Hutch grinned. “Fifty thousand kilometers is a lot of space. There’s a better chance that both Hazeltines will fail.”

“That’s not necessarily reassuring,” said Janet. “You’re assuming it’s a station. What if the source is on a planet?”

“There’s no appreciable probability of that,” said Carson. “Anyhow, the mass detectors would pick up any significant gravity well and cancel the jump. Right?” He looked toward Hutch.

“Right,” she agreed.

Carson brought up a star chart. “We’re back in our old stomping ground,” he said. That was approximately true: Pinnacle, Quraqua, Nok, and the Beta Pac system were all located along the rim of the Orion Arm.

“Party time’s over,” said Janet as they closed to within a few hours of their ETA. “Time to go to work.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

(Scene 221 from Things That Are Caesar’s: Ann Holloway is carried by the giant monk, Brother Thaddeus, through an underground passage into a rock chamber. She is stunned, and only begins to recover consciousness as he sets her down. She is wearing an evening dress, but it has been partially ripped away, exposing a shoulder and the upper curve of one breast. Brother Thaddeus, in obedience to his vows, shows no interest. He removes his sash and uses it to tie her wrists. When he has finished, he drags her across the stone floor toward an iron ring in the wall.)

THADDEUS

(Starting to secure her to the ring)

No need to pretend, little one. I know you are awake.

ANN

(Stirring, confused, most of the fight now out of her)

Please don’t.

(Looks around wildly.)

Jack? Where are you?

THADDEUS

He is past helping you, child. He is past helping anyone.

(Opens a panel in the wall, revealing a switch. Zoom on switch.)

ANN

(Tries to cover herself)

Let me go. Let me go, and I’ll tell no one.

THADDEUS

I’m not afraid of what you can tell, Ann Holloway.

ANN

Then why kill me?

THADDEUS

(Pulls the switch. We hear the sound of running water.

A stream begins to gush into the chamber from above.)

I have no intention of killing you. It is your past that condemns you. Your long nights of illicit pleasure cry out for atonement.

ANN

No! It’s not true. You’re crazy.

THADDEUS

(Sounding genuinely sorry; water gushes over her.)

Have courage, child. God’s cleansing waves will save you yet. It is your only path to paradise.

ANN

(Strains at the chain. The torn blouse falls open, revealing still more, but she is well past worrying about it. Camera in close as she struggles.)

Jack—

THADDEUS

(Pauses at the entrance to the chamber, prepared to close the heavy stone door.)

Pray, my dear. It will ease your passage.

(She screams. He begins to close the door. Water pours into the chamber.)

The peace of the Lord be with you.

(Bows his head. Camera in close. He hears something behind him, turns. Camera looks past him, down the passageway. Jack stands silhouetted in flickering torchlight.)

JACK

Where is she, you madman?

THADDEUS

(Surprised to see him.)

Hancock? Do you really still live?

ANN

(Desperate)

Jack! I’m in here.

THADDEUS

You should have accepted the grace the Lord gave you, and stayed away.

JACK

(Advancing)

Hang on, Ann.

THADDEUS

(Closes the door behind him, sealing off Ann, and blocking the passageway.)

You cannot help her. Best prepare for your own judgment, which is very close.

(Touches the crucifix which hangs on a thin chain about his neck.)

The wicked are like the chaff which the wind drives away. The wicked shall not stand.

(Moves forward. They close in combat, and Thaddeus’ greater size gives him an immediate advantage. He quickly forces Jack back, removes a cord from his robes, and loops it around Jack’s neck. Meantime, cutaway shows water rising rapidly in the chamber. Ann struggles, etc. Holding Jack temporarily helpless, Thaddeus hauls him back along the corridor until he reaches the torch. Here, there is a lever in the wall. He pulls it, and a pit opens at their feet. A few rocks drop into the dark, and it is a long time before we hear them land. He drags Jack toward the edge of the pit. Jack breaks free, and the struggle rages while the water rises around Ann.

THADDEUS

For you, O God, delight not in wickedness; no evil man remains with you; the arrogant may not stand in your sight.

(The water passes Ann’s waist. She is thoroughly drenched, of course, and thoroughly revealed. Outside, Jack seizes the torch and uses it to break away. The men struggle at the edge of the pit. Ann’s shoulders go under, and her screams fill the chamber. Jack is down on one knee, forced relentlessly into the pit.)

THADDEUS

Ask forgiveness, Hancock. This is your last chance to save your immortal soul.

JACK

You crazy son of a bitch.

THADDEUS

Then I ask pardon in your name. The Lord forgive you.

(Secure in the knowledge he has won, Thaddeus releases the pressure on Hancock’s windpipe, and clutches his crucifix. The water is now cutting off Ann’s screams. Jack sees his chance, and seizes the crucifix, ripping it free. He jams it into Thaddeus’ groin, and the giant folds up in agony. He seizes Jack and both fall into the pit. We hear a long scream, and then we see a hand rise over the edge of the shaft. Jack climbs painfully out, unbars the door, and casts the bar aside. Theme swells as water pours out of the chamber, and he moves quickly to rescue Ann. He turns off the water, cuts her bonds, and lifts her, choking and gasping, into his arms.)

ANN

Jack, thank God you got here. He said he killed you.

JACK

I think he missed. You okay?

ANN

Sure. Dragged up a few flights of stairs. Punched out a bit. Half drowned. Otherwise, I’m fine.

JACK

Good. Because the evening’s young.

“How long?” Carson watched the mist drift past. He pushed back in his chair, trying to look calm, dispassionate, but he was excited. Damned near ecstatic.

All gauges on the jump-status indicator had gone to a bright amber. “Coming up on three minutes.” Hutch began to divert power to the fusion plant. “The jump should be smooth. But buckle down anyhow.”

Systems lamps went green. The power levels of the Hazeltines were beginning to rise. Real-space mass was showing zero.

Maggie, closeted with George and Janet in the passengers’ cabin, said, “Please, God, let them be here.”

Red lamp. Unsecured hatch in one of the rear storage areas. Hutch opened it, closed it again. The light went green.

Janet said, “This is going to be a terrible disappointment if Beta Pac is a radio star, and the analysts were wrong. They’ve been wrong before.”

“Two minutes,” said Hutch. The comments around her receded to background noise. Only George’s voice got through. But no one really had anything new to say. They were talking to create a web of security, impose a sense of familiarity on a condition they’d experienced before but which was nevertheless potentially quite different.

They floated forward.

“One minute.”

Lights dimmed.

The real-space navigational systems, which had been in a power-saving mode, activated. The fusion plant went to ready status. External sensors came on line. Shields powered up.

Someone wished her luck.

Navigation came to life.

And, with scarcely a bump, they slid out into the dark. Stars flowered in the deeps, and she felt a brief flash of vertigo, not unusual during transition. They sailed beneath an open sky.

“I’m always glad to be out of there,” said Carson, releasing his restraints.

“Maybe not,” said Hutch. She jabbed a finger at the main navigation screen. An enormous black disk lay dead ahead. “Everybody stay belted in, please.”

Fusion was about to ignite. She stopped it.

“What’s wrong?” Maggie hadn’t missed the strain in Hutch’s voice.

Hutch gave them the image. “Talk later. I’m going to throw on the brakes.”

“What is it?” George asked.

“Not sure.” She went to full mag. It looked like a world. “That can’t be right. Mass detectors show zero.” She reset, but nothing changed. “Don’t know what it is. Hold on.”

Carson stared out the forward screen. “Son of a bitch—”

“Braking,” said Hutch softly, “now.” She engaged the retros, didn’t ease into them as she normally would, but hit them hard.

“It’s just an area with no stars,” said Janet. “Like the Void. Maybe it is the Void.”

“If it is, it’s in the wrong place.”

The thing ahead reflected no light.

“Hutch?” Maggie’s voice had risen a notch. “Are we going into that thing?”

“It’s getting bigger,” said George.

“It can’t really be there.” Hutch’s fingers moved across keys. “Self test okay.”

“It’s not a sphere,” said Carson. His beefy features had hardened, and the eager-to-please archeologist had been replaced by the old colonel. Military bearing front and center. In an odd way, it was reassuring.

“What else could it be?”

Carson was squinting at the images. “It looks like a football” he said.

Worried sounds were coming out of the passenger cabin.

“Hang on,” said Hutch. “We’re going sharp to port.” She punched in a new set of values, maybe more thrust than they could stand, and hit the button. Again, they were thrown against the webbing.

A haze had risen before her eyes, and it was hard to talk against the push of the thrusters.”Collision,” she said. “Imminent.” The words hung in the frantic air.

Carson took time to breathe, steady his voice. “How long?”

Hutch felt cold and empty. “Seven minutes. And change.”

The object filled the sky. To their eternal credit, the three in the cabin kept their heads, and did not distract her. She even heard them trying to laugh about their situation. She opened a channel. “You can see what’s happening,” she said, speaking as though she were describing an interesting view. “We have a problem.”

“How serious?” asked Janet. “Is it as bad as it looks?”

Hutch hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

She eased off on the thrusters, and killed the course change. “What are you doing?” asked Carson.

They were in free fall again. “No point torturing everybody.”

“What do you mean?” said Maggie. “We aren’t going to give up, are we? Just like that?”

Hutch didn’t respond. Didn’t know how to.

“How about jumping back?” George suggested.

“Can’t.”

“Try it.”

“There’s no point.”

“Try it. What’s to lose?”

The black football was growing. Carson said, “Not good.” In the passenger cabin, someone laughed. Janet.

“I’ll try to reinsert when we get closer,” Hutch said. “Give the engines a chance to breathe. But don’t expect anything.”

Maggie whimpered.

Carson, strain finally locking his voice somewhat, asked, “How fast will we be going when we hit?”

Hutch was tempted to dodge the question. Throw back some facile response like fast enough. But they deserved better. “Almost fifty thousand.”

What was the damned thing? She decided they weren’t quite dead-on after all. They would hit a glancing shot. Not that it mattered.

“Goddammit, Hutch,” said George, “we ought to be able to do something.”

“Tell me what.” Hutch had become deadly calm.

No way out. The object was vast and dark and overwhelming. An impossible thing, a disk without light, a world without rock.

“No moons,” said Carson.

“What?”

“It has no moons.”

“Hardly seems to matter,” someone said; Hutch wasn’t sure who.

Four minutes.

A terrible silence took the ship as her passengers settled into their own thoughts. Janet looked subdued and frightened, but managed a resigned smile; Maggie, tougher than Hutch would have expected, caught her looking, wiped her eyes and nodded, seeming to say, not your fault. George’s glance turned inward and Hutch was glad she hadn’t waited. And Carson: he wore the expression of someone who had absorbed a prank, and was taking it all quite philosophically. “Bad luck,” he told her. And, after a long pause: “It happens.”

“Did we get a message off?” Janet asked.

“Working on it.”

“How big is it?” asked Maggie. “This thing?”

Hutch checked her board. “Forty-three hundred kilometers across. Half again as wide as the Moon.”

It crowded out the stars.

Hutch saw a blip on her status board. “It’s putting out a signal,” she said.

“Same one they got at the Tindle?” asked Maggie, breathless.

“I think so. It’s fifteen-ten. That’s the right frequency. Computer’s doing a match now.”

“That’s a pretty fair piece of navigation,” said Carson. “We hit it right on the button.” They laughed. And in that moment Hutch loved them all.

“Transmission’s away. They’ll get a full set of pictures. And it is the same signal.”

“What now?”

“Time to try the jump. On a count of ten.” She set up, and shook her head at the energy level for the Hazeltines, which was around six percent of minimum requirements. “Okay.” She hit the “Go” button.

The engines whined.

And shuddered.

Whined again.

She shut it down. “That’s it.”

They were beginning to see features in the thing. Ribs. The void became a surface: blue-black, polished like plastene, or an ocean. “You know what’s crazy about this?” said Carson. “We’re still not getting gravity readings. What is this thing? Anything that big has to have a gravity field.”

“Detectors have a glitch,” said George.

Under a minute. Hutch stopped watching the clocks. In the cabin, she heard the sound of a restraint opening. “Stay belted down.”

“Why? Why bother?” It was Janet.

“Just do it. It’s the way a well-run ship does things.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her training screamed at her to hit the retros. But she only shut down the screens, locking out the terrifying perspective.

She closed her eyes. “Damn,” she said, not quite able to stop the tears. She felt oddly secure in the sealed bridge, as if the lone plunge had somehow been arrested. She loved the soft leather texture of the pilot’s chair, the green radiance of the gauges, the electronic murmur of Wink’s systems.

“Hutch?” Carson’s voice was calm.

“Yes?”

“You’re a hell of a woman.”

In the dark behind her eyelids, she smiled.

18.

On board NCA Winckelmann. Thursday, March 24; 1103 hours.

Hutch listened to the familiar sounds of the bridge. To Carson’s tense breathing, to whispers from the passenger cabin, prayers maybe, wishes, things undone.

She felt terrified and helpless and humiliated, but for all that, she did not want it to be over—God, she did not want it to be over—

She squeezed her eyes shut. Squeezed the rest of the world down to her heartbeat and the soft curve of the chair. And the countdown that some inner voice maintained—

Three. Two . ..

A hammerblow struck the hull.

The ship shuddered. Alarms exploded. The electrostatic hum of power in the bulkheads changed subtly, deepened as it sometimes did when the vehicle was responding to crisis. Carson shouted something unintelligible.

But she was still alive.

They had problems. The navigation board was on fire; black smoke poured into the air. Warning lamps blazed across the banks of consoles. Two of the monitors died. Computer voices spilled from the commlinks. Deep within the ship, systems sighed and shut down.

But oblivion did not come.

She looked at the gauges and could not believe what she saw. Their altitude was a hundred forty kilometers. And rising.

Rising.

She silenced the klaxons and stared at her status board. The power plant was going unstable. She shut it down, and switched to auxiliary.

Then she let out her breath.

“What happened?” asked Carson in a tentative voice.

“Damned if I know. Everybody okay?”

They were rattled. But okay.

“Is it over?” Janet asked.

Someone began to laugh.

In the passenger cabin, a cheer broke out.

“We seem to have gone through it,” Hutch said. “Don’t know how—”

“Son of a bitch, Hutch,” said Maggie. “That was beautiful!”

Hutch’s hands trembled.

“What did you do?”

“Damned if I know.”

She killed the fire, and sent out a distress call. Carson reached over and clapped her on the back. “I don’t think I want to do that again,” he said.

They passed through three hundred kilometers.

“Hutch,” said George, “that’s the finest piece of piloting I’ve ever seen.”

They were all laughing now. She joined in, and if the celebration had a hysterical edge to it, she didn’t care. No one cared.

The ground was receding. It glowed softly. The illumination might have been internal. Or possibly reflected starlight.

“Maybe,” said Maggie, laughing and crying simultaneously, “it was just smoke.”

The sky had developed a distinct roll. “We’re tumbling,” Hutch said. “That’s all right. We can fix that”

“Are we okay?” asked George. His voice trembled.

“Yeah. We’re fine.” Hutch was running through her checklist. Seconds after impact, the fusion plant had sent a blast of energy through the ship. There were systems in place to guard against the effects of a surge, but they were not, could not be, entirely effective. Who knew what might have burned out? She would need a walk-through to assess damage. “We’re in good shape,” she said. “We’ve got some power problems, but nothing we can’t handle.” Their situation was uncomfortable, but she saw no reason for alarm.

Auxiliary power consisted of a net of batteries and solar collectors. Several of these were also down. Not good. “We can maintain life support. And soin. But we can’t fire the main engines, and the Hazeltines can’t recharge, so we have no stardrive. We are dead in the water.” Navigation readouts implied altitude adjustment systems were out of line. Water pressure had dropped precipitously, but was now holding steady. That meant a tank had burst. The Hazeltine flux detection system was putting out a flat line. Even if she had power to go hyper, she’d have no real way to control their point of re-entry. But we could be worse, she thought. Damned lucky. Her hands were trembling.

They were getting far enough away now that the object was regaining its ovoid shape. “Could it be water?” asked Maggie.

“Even that would’ve wrecked us,” said Carson. “Unless it was just a couple of centimeters deep.”

“Hey.” Janet sounded surprised. “Why do I keep trying to fall out of my chair?”

“Because we’re tumbling,” said Hutch. “Our gravity’s off center.”

Carson was preoccupied with the ovoid. “It’s thin. Micro-thin. Has to be.”

“Can we straighten out?” Maggie looked unhappy. “I’m getting sick.”

“Trying.”

The number four thruster showed negative. She disabled it, and set up a bypass firing sequence. “Heads up,” she said. “We’re going to have a little movement.”

“We have power to spare?” asked Carson.

“Enough. We’re going to be here a while, and we don’t want to have to deal with all this rolling—” She executed, and felt the satisfying push of the rockets, felt the ship respond.

The firing sequence was long and complicated, but the stellar dance slowed, changed direction, changed again, and almost stopped. Almost. There was still a mild lateral motion.

“Best I can do,” she said. “You can stand up now. But be careful, we have a wobble.”

“You want to try it again?” said George.

“No. Too much drain. We’ll live with this.”

“What do we do next?” asked Janet.

“Take a look at the damage to the fusion plant,” Hutch replied.

Carson shook her hand. “Thanks,” he said.

“Not my doing. We were lucky.”

“I suppose. Thanks, anyway.”

The others crowded onto the bridge. The exhilaration was subsiding.”Can we restore power?” asked Janet.

“I’m running the diagnostics,” said Hutch. “But I can tell you the answer. Fusion plant repair is not something you do on the run. We should proceed on the assumption that we will not have it available. Which means we are stuck here.” She released her restraints.

“Then we need to get help.” Maggie took a long deep breath. “Somebody’s going to have to come and bail us out. First thing to do, I guess, is get off a distress call.”

“We’ve already done that.”

Maggie had arrived on the bridge, and was walking unsteadily across the deck, testing her balance. “Nobody’s going to want to do any drinking,” she said. “The floor runs uphill.”

“Where would rescuers have to come from?” said George. “Nok?”

“Probably.” Hutch was looking at flight schedules. “There isn’t much else in the region. Unless you want to ride with Kosmik. They’ve got a ship at Quraqua.”

“We’re going to be laughingstocks,” said Janet. “We go out looking for an artifact, and crash into it.”

“The Valkyrie’s at Nok. Just got in, if we can believe the schedule. They normally stay about four days. We’re two days away, transmission time. So it’ll still be there when our SOS arrives.”

“It does mean,” said Maggie, “that we lose the mission. Everybody’ll want in now; we’ll be squeezed out, and the credit will go elsewhere.” She looked desperately at Hutch. “Do you have any ideas?”

“No, Maggie. All we can do is wait to be rescued.”

“How long will it take?” asked Janet. “The trip from Nok, I mean.”

“The packets are fast. If they leave as soon as they hear the distress call, the Valkyrie will be here in eleven days.”

“We can live with that,” said George. “Maybe in the meantime we can figure out what that thing back there is.”

The real problem surfaced five hours later. Hutch was still trying to reroute and reprogram her status board when Janet strolled in, blowing conspicuously on her hands. “It’s getting cold in here.”

It was chilly. Hutch’s board showed 103° Celsius. Hot enough to boil water. She ran a diagnostic, and got a Negative. No problems. She shook her head, got up, and walked over to one of the ducts. “It’s pumping cool air.”

“It’s not really cold,” Janet said. “But it isn’t room temperature either.”

“We better go down and take a look. The programming is probably scrambled. But I can’t get at it from up here.”

They collected George in the passenger lounge, and crossed over to C ring, Life Support and General Maintenance. They walked halfway round the long outer passageway, picked up a repair harness, and entered Engineering. The bulkheads were lined with housings, casings, cabinets. The metal was cold.

“We should have brought sweaters,” said Janet. “Let’s make this quick.”

Moving about was difficult because of the tumble. There was a tendency to lurch anti-spinward. As they moved toward the spine of the ship, it translated into an affinity for strolling into left-hand walls, and falling down easily. They stumbled past the fusion power unit, a set of teardrop cylinders framed within a series of tori. A yellow status lamp and the pale light from the control panel provided the only illumination.

“You sure you don’t want to try to fix this?” asked George.

“Yes,” she said. Fusion units were strictly dockyard work. Not to be touched by operating personnel. Hutch’s training was clear on the point: switch to auxiliary systems, cut back wherever possible on power usage, and go home. By the shortest route. Here, of course, with the Hazeltines exhausted, they weren’t going anywhere. In that case, send for help.

They inspected the series of tanks and drums which housed the ventilation system. Nothing obvious suggested itself. Hutch brought the air flow schematic up on the control terminal.

Four recyclers, operating in series, maintained the appropriate carbon dioxide/nitrogen/oxygen mix. These were large cylinders from which air was pumped into three enormous pressurized tanks, where it was stored until needed. The recyclers and tanks were interconnected. Prior to re-entering the ventilation system, air passed through a series of four convectors, which heated (or cooled) it to the proper temperature. The four convectors all showed “Nonfunctional.”

They removed one of the hatch covers and looked at a charred ruin. “So we replace them. Right?” asked George hopefully.

“We can replace one of them.”

“You only have one spare?” Janet sounded skeptical.

“One spare,” said Hutch. “These things don’t give out. And this sort of damage is not supposed to happen.”

“Right.” said Janet.

“How much good does one spare do us?” asked George.

“I don’t know. We’ll have to figure it out. But it should mean that we’ll freeze a little more slowly.”

“I’ll tell you what I think it is.” Maggie, wrapped in a blanket, jabbed a finger at the ovoid. It was blown up, and spread across a wall-length screen in the lounge. It looked somewhat like a spider web, half-seen on a moonless night. They could make out a fine network of lines, a sense of fragile beauty. “It’s the ultimate Monument, and if this is not the home system of the Monument-Makers, at least it suggests we’re on their track.”

Carson was wearing a sweater and had a spread draped over his legs. “Are we agreed we went through it?”

“Had to,” said Maggie. “Say—” She brightened. “Maybe we’ve got some samples aboard.”

Carson’s eyes met hers. “On the hull.”

“Could be.”

He looked up at one of the air ducts, walked over to it, and held his hand in front of it. “It’s colder,” he said.

A door at the rear of the compartment opened. Janet came in, followed closely by Hutch and George. All had acquired jackets, and they looked discouraged.

“Not so good, huh?” said Carson.

Hutch described what they had done. The new convector was in. “We’ll get a little heat,” she said.

“How about diverting the air flow?” said Maggie. “Put the air from the working conductor in here.”

George shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. The air passes over all four conductors and then exits into the individual ducts.”

“Then cut off the other spaces altogether,” suggested Carson. “I’d think a smaller volume of air will cool down more slowly because less of it is exposed to the outer bulkheads.”

Hutch nodded. “We thought so too. But we’re limited as to where we can cut down. Anything that freezes over, we lose. Data banks in B ring, for example; food and water and life support in C.”

“How cold will it get?” asked Maggie.

Hutch took a deep breath.”Cold.” She patted Carson’s wool-clad shoulder. “You’re going to need more than that. Let me see if I can get my systems back on-line, and maybe we can figure out some options.” She passed through the cabin, headed for the forward door.

“Before you leave,” said Carson. “I’ve got a question on a different matter. We keep getting further away from that thing. Is there any chance of turning around and going back? To get a closer look?”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” said Janet. “It would give us something to do while we’re waiting for help to arrive. And we wouldn’t look quite so silly when this is over.”

Hutch shook her head. “We don’t even have the power to stop our forward motion, Frank, let alone reverse it. No, Wink isn’t going anywhere except straight ahead for a while. Sorry—” And she was gone.

The obloid floated on a wall-sized screen. George frowned, turned his head sidewise, used his hands to frame a picture, frowned again. “Anybody mind if I reduce this?” It was at five mag. Nobody objected, and he took it down, stage by stage. He played with it awhile, back and forth, and turned suddenly to Maggie. “You know what I think? It’s a bowl. Look at it: it’s a big, curved, planet-sized bowl.” He cupped his hands, and tilted them so they could see. “You come in at the right angle, the football looks like a bowl. See?”

“You’re right,” said Carson. “So what is it?”

Maggie sank deeper into her blanket. “We know it puts out radio signals. It’s apparently a big dish. A relay station, maybe. Certainly a beacon of some kind.”

“Why would you want a beacon that big?” asked Janet.

“Maybe they never developed the TD band,” said Carson. “Is that possible? That they could have FTL travel, but not FTL communications?”

“I guess it’s possible” said Maggie. “But it makes no sense. Why would anyone with a stardrive want to send a message that would need decades, or centuries, to get to its destination?” Her nose was cold. She rubbed it. “You know,” she said, “this place is starting to get downright drafty.”

ARCHIVE ZZ 03/241611

XX EMERGENCY EMERGENCY EMERGENCY TO: GENERAL DISTRIBUTION FROM: NCA WINCKELMANN  SUBJECT: GENERAL DISTRESS

GENERAL DISTRESS CALL ALL SHIPS/STATIONS. UPDATE 01. REQUIRE IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE—LIFE THREATENING SIT/BETA PAC. LIFE SUPPORT FAILURE. WILL MAINTAIN ALL-CHANNEL SIGNAL, STANDARD SET. THIS IS A FIVE ALPHA EMERGENCY, EXTREME DANGER, EXTREME NEED FOR HASTE. MESSAGE WILL REPEAT AT EIGHT-MINUTE INTERVALS.

On the bridge, Hutch faced the bad news. The lone convector would prevent the temperature from falling below -36°C. That in itself would not be comfortable, but it was survivable. The problem was that the system that supported the convector would start to freeze up at twenty below. It was then likely the convector would fail. If that happened, it was going to get very cold.

How long would it take?

She was unable to measure current heat loss. It appeared to be somewhat more than a degree per hour. At that rate, they could expect to hit zero sometime tomorrow. There would be other hazards as it got colder: air pumps would fail, food dispensers would cease to work, the power system might give way altogether, trapping them in a frigid, dark shell.

She had six Flickinger belts to fall back on, but there were only twenty-four hours of air for each. Once the power went, there would be no way to refill the breathers.

My God. She sat and stared at her instruments.

She needed an idea. And no reasonable possibility presented itself. A sense of her culpability began to take hold. Not that she had erred in any way that a board of inquiry could bring a finding against her; but she was ultimately responsible for the safe delivery of her passengers. Whatever that took. At the moment, she was not sure what it might take—

When she felt she’d postponed the confrontation as long as she could, she pushed away from the console, took a deep breath, and returned to the cabin.

Carson was absorbed in his notebooks when she entered. The others were talking, a conversation that immediately faded.

“Okay,” she said, “here’s where we are.” She outlined their situation, trying not to seem alarmed, speaking as if these were merely complications, trivial inconveniences. But the inevitable conclusion was that they would freeze before help could come. Carson watched her without putting down his pen, as though prepared to take notes. Janet remained impassive, blue gaze fixed on the deck; George and Maggie exchanged glances freighted with meaning.

When she finished, they were quiet. Maggie tapped an index finger thoughtfully against her lip. Hutch sensed disbelief. “What do we do?” asked George.

Janet looked up. “Can we build a fire? Keep it going in here?”

“There’s nothing to burn,” Hutch said. Even their clothes were fire-resistant.

George looked around as if he expected to find a stack of logs. “Got to be some stuff somewhere.”

“If there is, I don’t know what.”

“And we can’t expect help earlier than eleven days?”

“At best.” Everyone looked at the calendar. Rescue might arrive sometime April 4.

“It’ll be pretty cold by then,” said Maggie.

Carson was writing again. He didn’t look up. “How about abandoning ship? Take the shuttle? Is there any place we can reach from here?”

“No,” said Hutch. “We’ve got about a week’s air supply in the shuttle. There’s an oxygen world in the biozone, but we couldn’t get close in the time we have.”

“Do you have any suggestions?” asked Maggie.

The crunch. “I’ll think better in the morning. But yes: maybe we can reconfigure the micro-ovens that cook our food to put some additional heat in here. Actually, we can probably manage that fairly easily. It won’t be much, but it’ll be something. The problem is that the rest of the ship will freeze.”

“Which means?”

“The recyclers will stop, for one thing. That’ll be the end of the air supply.” She looked at them. “Listen, we’re all exhausted. I’m sure we can work out something. But we need to sleep on it.”

“Yes,” said Carson. “Let’s give it a rest. We’ll come up with some ideas tomorrow.”

Hutch huddled under three blankets during the night. She rolled and tossed and stared into the dark. Where else could she get heat? The first priority was to keep the convector going, but she could see no way to do that.

By first light, she was still awake, and exhausted. But it was time to stop beating herself up. She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, grabbed fresh clothes (she had not undressed), and padded across the cold floor to the bathroom. They still had hot water. One of the first tasks this morning would be to salvage a water supply from C ring.

She closed the door behind her, and opened the faucets. When she judged the room was warm enough, she dropped the blanket, stepped out of her clothes and into the shower. It felt good, and she soaped herself down thoroughly. But she was cataloging places where they could find containers. Damn, this was a nightmare.

George was in the main cabin, brewing coffee. He was wrapped in a thick robe. “How we doing?” he asked, holding out a cup for her. His usual optimism had vanished, and she knew that he too had lain awake much of the night.

She took the cup. The coffee was good, and imposed a sense of routine. “Okay, I guess.” Her nose and ears were cold.

He looked glad to have company. “This is scary,” he admitted.

“I know.”

Hesitantly, he asked: “Any ideas?”

The reluctant criticism stung. “Not yet.”

Deep in the ship, a hatch closed.

George’s gaze met hers. “Who’s wandering around back there?”

She checked her board. “Lower level. One of the supply rooms.”

“Maybe somebody else can’t sleep.”

Hutch opened a channel. “Hellooo?”

Nothing.

“Ghosts,” he said.

“I think we’re hearing a computer glitch.”

He could not entirely keep the emotion out of his voice.

“Hutch, you know the ship pretty well. What are our chances?”

She took a minute to drink him in. Despite his size, there was something of the eternal child in George. He was boyishly good-looking, enthusiastic, careful of her feelings in a situation which he understood must be especially painful to her. And he was striving manfully to hide his fears. Somehow, it was for George she was most anxious. “We’ll find a way,” she promised.

“I’ve got something else to tell you.”

Hutch didn’t think she wanted any more news. “What’s that?”

“I’ve been up on the bridge. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” she said. “Why would I?”

He nodded. “There’s no radio noise out here anywhere. Except what comes off the star. And the signal we followed.”

“None at all?”

“None. No electronic radiation of any kind.” In the press of events, the reason they’d come to Beta Pac, on the track of an artificial radio broadcast, had got lost.

“But we’re still picking up the signal from the Football?”

“Yes. It’s still there. But that’s all there is. Hutch, I don’t think anyone’s here.” His eyes looked away. “I’ve got a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“We’d all like to find out what it is. The Football, I mean. We can’t turn the ship around, but what about going back with the shuttle?”

“No,” she said quietly. “We could do it. But we wouldn’t be able to get back to the ship.” She finished off the last of her coffee.

He studied her for a long moment. “Does it matter? Whether we can get back?”

The question jolted Hutch. “Yes,” she said. “It matters.”

Someone was coming.

It matters.

Janet appeared in the doorway, shivering. “Cold,” she said. “Hutch, we need some ideas.”

Hutch was still thinking about the shuttle. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. They had no place to go. But that didn’t mean they shouldn’t use Alpha.

Hutch woke Maggie. “Let’s go.”

She pulled her blankets more tightly around her and did not look up. “Go? Where?”

“The shuttle. It has a heating system. Get whatever you need.”

Hutch hurried to her own quarters, grabbed clothes, towel, toothbrush, comb, whatever she could carry. She’d come back later for the rest. Now, with the prospect of warmth imminent, the temperature seemed to plummet. Her teeth were chattering when she entered the shuttle bay. Carson arrived at the same time.

She opened the hatch with her remote and they climbed in. The pilot’s seat was stiff and cold. She switched on the heater and waited. George appeared, hauling a suitcase. “Good idea,” he said.

He threw the bag into the rear. The blowers kicked on, and warm air flowed into the cockpit. “Hallelujah!” he said. The others arrived, and hurried inside.

“Shut the hatch,” said Janet, trying to find room. “Keep it warm.”

“Why didn’t we do this last night?” Maggie grumbled from a rear seat. “Or didn’t we think of it?”

Janet blew on her hands. “It feels good. I’m not leaving here until help comes.”

“Cargo area in back will be warm in a few minutes,” said Hutch. “We can set up living quarters in there.”

They passed clothes and overnight bags back and then crowded into the cockpit and shut all the doors. Hutch handed out coffee.

She felt better now than she had since they’d come out of hyper. She wasn’t sure yet they were safe, hadn’t taken time to think it through, but for the moment at least, life was good again. The hold was gray and cramped and utilitarian. It would provide little privacy. But it already looked like the best accommodation she’d ever had.

“What’s our situation exactly?” asked Carson. “We’re getting our power from Wink, right? That’s not a very reliable source.”

She nodded. “We should have all the power we need. We can switch to internal if we have to, but we won’t be using much other than heating and lights. The shuttle’s batteries are designed for a much heavier workload. I suspect we’d be okay for six months or more on internal alone. Not that we’ll be here that long,” she added hurriedly.

“How about air?” asked Janet. “How much air do we have?”

“For five people?” Air was their potential problem. “If we used only the shuttle tanks, we’d be limited to about a week. But we’re getting our air from Wink. We’ll continue to do that as long as it’s available. When it freezes out there, we’ll switch to our own system. But we should be fine. There are a lot of things we need to do though, and we have to get to them before it gets too cold outside.”

“Food,” said Janet.

Hutch nodded. “That’ll be your job, okay? We’ll assume rescue will be late.”

“Where do we put the food?” asked George. “Space is limited in here. We know where to get more if we need it. Why not leave it outside? It’s not as if anything will spoil.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Hutch. “We’re talking cold. Better we have it in here where we can control temperatures. I don’t want to leave anything to chance.”

“Okay,” said Carson. “What else?”

“Water. Frank, you take care of that.” She told him where to find containers, and then turned to Maggie. “Cargo area divides into three sections. There’s a washroom at the rear. We’ll expand that, and use the other two sections as living quarters. See what you can do in the way of furnishings. Oh, and if you can get us a supply of towels, soap, dishes, that would help.” She glanced around the cabin. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Where are you going?” asked Carson.

“The bridge. We have to tie into the ship’s communication system. Back here, we won’t know what’s going on.”

“We’ll need the Flickinger belts, too,” said Carson.

“Right. We’ve got six in storage. I’ll bring them back. You guys should take a few minutes and make a list of what we need. Try not to miss anything.” She opened the hatch and climbed out. The air seemed less cold than it had.

She went only a few steps before she smelled something burning. “We’ve got a fire somewhere,” she told the link. That brought everyone boiling out of the shuttle.

It was coming from one of the ducts. They traced it to the food processors, and minutes later they were all on the scene.

One of the units had overheated and burned out its wiring. They tried to shut it down, but the override didn’t work, and they ended by disconnecting it.

The temperature was now near freezing, and no one had anything heavier than a light jacket. They were thoroughly chilled when they returned to Alpha.

“I’ll go with you to the bridge,” said Carson. “I don’t think anybody should go anywhere alone anymore.”

That made sense to Hutch, but before she could reply, Janet held up her watch, and pointed out the window. “It’s still dark,” she said.

It was by then almost 7:00 A.M., GMT. Ship’s time. The lights should have brightened in their simulation of the day-night cycle.

Hutch took care of her technical chores first, ensuring that she had full control of Winckelmann’s communication systems. For good measure, she also connected routine shipboard controls. She wondered how long her circuits would last after the starship froze over. It occurred to her that Wink might suffer a complete communications blackout. Maybe, if that happened, she could launch Alpha at noon April fourth, on the assumption that Valkyrie would be in the area. But that was risky: if the rescuers failed to arrive, there would be no guarantee they could reconnect with the ship’s air supply. Furthermore, she wondered whether the shuttle bay doors would respond when the time came.

She consulted the computer:

Q. AT CURRENT RATE OF HEAT LOSS, AT WHAT TEMPERATURE, AND AT WHAT TIME, WILL SHUTTLE LAUNCH DOORS BECOME INOPERABLE?

A. AT 284 DEGREES CENTIGRADE. 031903Z.

“Uh-oh,” said Janet. “The nineteenth? Wasn’t that last week?”

“I think we can write off the computer,” said Hutch.

Daylight arrived at 1010 sharp. It snapped on, bright, intense, noon at sea. They were spread out through the ship, foraging what they could, and they greeted the sudden illumination with cynical cheers.

They set themselves up as comfortably as conditions allowed. They disengaged chairs and tables from the main cabin, found three divans, and anchored them in their living quarters. They even mounted a few prints. Maggie put a crystal dolphin on one of the tables, and Janet tried to rescue the occasional plants that were scattered around the ship. But it was much too late for them.

As a safety precaution, Hutch shut down all unnecessary systems. The rings no longer turned, and their simulated gravity ceased. Everything had to be bolted down. Drinks were taken through straws, and the shower was an adventure.

On Monday the 28th, the fourth day after the collision, they received a reply from Nok. Hutch read it, and then handed it around:

RECEIVED YOUR 03/241541Z and 03/241611Z. UNFORTUNATELY WE HAVE NO SHIP TO SEND. HAVE PLACED YOUR REQUEST ON GENL BROADCAST TO NEAREST VESSEL, SURVEY SHIP ASHLEY TEE, CURRENTLY IN HYPER. ESTIMATED ARRIVAL TIME BETA PAC APR 11 RPT APR 11. GOOD LUCK.

“My God,” said Janet, “that’s two weeks. What happened to the Valkyrie?”

Hutch slumped into her seat. “Maybe they canceled the run. They do that if there’s no reason for a flight. Maybe it needs maintenance. Who knows? What difference does it make?”

LIBRARY ENTRY

During my entire career, which has embraced a number of notable successes (if I may be allowed the indulgence), along with some spectacular failures, I know of no single event that has so frustrated me as being sealed inside Winckelmann and its shuttle craft, within a few million kilometers of an archeological puzzle of overwhelming dimension. And being able to do absolutely nothing about it.

My companions share my concern, although they are distracted by life and death issues. I’m scared too. But I’d still like to get a look at the Football. What is that thing? Incidentally, I should record here that I’m glad we have Hutchins along. She is something of a jerk. But I know she’ll pull us out of this. If it can be done.

—Margaret Tufu’s Journals, dated March 29, 2203

Published posthumously by

Hartley& Co., London (2219)

(Edited and annotated by Janet Allegri)

19.

On board NCA Winckelmann.Tuesday, March 29; 1218 hours.

“We’re going to have to come up with something else.”

Ship’s temperature had dropped to -30°C. Electronics systems had begun to fail. Water lines had long since frozen. Hutch, concerned that a hatch somewhere might freeze and cut them off from other parts of the ship, left everything open.

Janet found an auto-kitchen on C deck and carried it back to Alpha. It was capable of making sandwiches, coffee, and snacks. They also commandeered a refrigerator.

The day after the bad news had come from Nok, Wink’s lights went out. Hutch thought she could restore them, but saw no point in making the effort. So they huddled in their warm, illuminated cocoon, in the belly of the dark ship.

And they worried about the air supply. They were still breathing from the ship’s tanks, and tapping the ship’s power. But the loss of the lights had shown them the future. Any time now, the voltage that drove the recyclers would fail, or the pumps would freeze, or any other of a dozen misfortunes would shut down the oxygen supply. Then they would have to switch to the onboard tanks, and from that time they would have one week left. Plus roughly twenty-four hours with the Flickinger belts. The Ashley Tee was due, at best, in thirteen days. Which meant that if the ship’s air supply failed any time within the next five days, they would not make it.

A green light glowed on her status board, confirming the flow of air from the Wink into the shuttle. If it stopped, when it stopped, the lamp would blink off and an alarm would sound.

She looked out into the darkness. Illumination from the shuttle windows etched the decks. “Not much fun, is it?” asked George, breaking a long silence.

She shook her head. “Not much.”

“We’ll be okay.” He squeezed her shoulder. “It’s always hard when you can’t do anything except sit and wait.”

Several minutes later, the remaining convector quietly died.

The Football was no longer easy to see at zero mag. It was a small patch of night with indefinite boundaries, an empty place among the stars. A well in a city of light. Its radio pulse played across a monitor that Maggie had set up. Carson sat watching it intently. A second screen displayed telemetry. He was absentmindedly scooping cereal out of a bowl in his lap. Beside him, Maggie dozed.

Hutch and George played chess, the board balanced on a water container. Janet was dividing her attention between a book and the game. (She would play the winner.) George munched a chocolate cookie. They had adjusted reasonably well to the lack of amenities. The shuttle had almost come to feel like home.

Exercise was of course feasible only outside in the bay. They could still walk through the ship protected by the Flickinger energy fields, but that would stop when they lost the external air hookup, because it would then become impossible to refill the breathers without draining the shuttle’s supply.

They didn’t talk much about the dangers of the situation. But in the pointedly irrelevant conversations that had become the order of the day, Hutch noted a tendency to lower the voice and speak in hushed tones, the way one does in church. The fiction that escape was only a matter of time was maintained.

And they continued to speculate about the Football. They had tracked the signal source to the center of the object.

“It has to be an antenna,” said George, stabbing the air with a rook. “And a standard radio transmission would have to be intended for someone in this system.” He set the piece down to support the queen’s bishop pawn, which was under pressure. It was early yet, but the game was turning against him already. As usual. “I wonder whether anyone’s listening?”

“Someone must be,” said Janet. “Somebody would have to come out here once in a while to do the maintenance.”

“Maybe it doesn’t need maintenance,” said Hutch. She sailed into a line of pawns with a black bishop. Sacrifice. George could not see the point. “Don’t underestimate an unknown technology,” she continued.

Carson picked up the cereal bowl and tilted it so that it lay at the same angle as the Football. “Hutch,” he said. “Was there a blip of any kind when we went through the object? Did it seem to notice we were there?”

“Don’t know. I wasn’t recording the signal. I couldn’t see any reason to at the time.”

Janet grinned politely at George, and shook her head. “Resign,” she said.

“Why is it so big?” asked Hutch.

“Maybe it’s more than a relay,” George suggested.

“What else could it be?”

“A telescope, maybe. Something like the Tindle. But bigger.”

“A lot bigger,” said Carson. “With a telescope that size, you could see someone strike a match across the Void.”

“Your move,” said Hutch, smiling.

George pushed back from the board, shrugged, and pushed over his king.

“If it were a telescope,” said Janet, “it would have to be solid, right? We were doing, what? Fifty thousand klicks? We’d have disintegrated.”

“Depends,” said Carson, “on how it’s made.”

Janet set up the pieces, and turned the board to give Hutch black. “Something else,” she said. “Assume you had a bowl that big. How would you turn it?”

“What?”

“If it’s a telescope, how would you turn it? I would think that any attempt to move it would wreck it.”

“Maybe you don’t turn it,” said George. “Maybe it was preset to observe something that doesn’t move much. Very little apparent motion.”

“I can’t imagine how the thing would hold together.” The voice was Maggie’s.

“I thought you were asleep.” Carson’s smile was almost paternal. “If it’s a telescope, and if it’s permanently aimed, what do you suoppose it’s looking at?” He cleared his screen, and directed the question to the computer.

Maggie got up and stretched.

Janet, who was a decent match for Hutch, opened as she always did, with c4, the English Game. Hutch wondered how it happened that a woman who was so aggressive, so careless of her own safety, would become enamored of an opening that was deliberate, methodical, and cautious.

“Nothing,”said Carson. “There’s nothing at all in its line of sight.”

“It’s been there a long time,” said Maggie. “Back it up to about 10,000b.c. and take a look.”

George picked up Janet’s book. It was a historical novel, set immediately after the collapse of the U.S. He paged through.

Carson got a result, and smiled. “The Lesser Magellanic Cloud. That’s interesting.”

“Why?” asked George.

“Closest extragalactic object,” said Hutch.

“Hard to believe,” said Janet, “that anyone would build that kind of monster to look at one astronomical target. It seems like overkill.”

George frowned. “I thought the nearest galaxy was Andromeda.”

“Andromeda’s the nearest big one,” said Hutch. “It’s two million light-years out. But the Magellanic Clouds—there are two of them—are only about a tenth as far.”

Maggie rubbed her eyes. “I’m more interested in what’s at this end. You said there’s an oxygen world in the biozone. What does it look like?”

“We don’t have much detail,” said Hutch. “The sensors are pretty badly skewed. Temperatures are earthlike. There are water oceans. It’s got life. But it’s putting out no ECM. And that’s about all we know for certain.”

Janet opened her mouth to say something, but the lights in the room dimmed. They did not quite go out.

Hutch peered into the cockpit. The warm green glow of the oxygen lamp still burned. “We’re okay,” she said.

Moments later, they came back up.

No one was sleeping well. Everyone tossed and turned, and made pointless trips to the washroom, and read late into the night. They had three divans to stretch out in. That created problems. At first the men had insisted they would sleep on the deck. Hutch, feeling the weight of tradition, refused the divan, and declared her intention of sleeping up front in the pilot’s chair; Janet and Maggie announced they would accept no special consideration. Eventually, they agreed to a schedule. Everybody would get a divan three nights out of five, and spend the other two in the cockpit.

Despite the limited fare, there was a tendency to overeat. They stayed closer to the shuttle now, rarely going out for walks. The long unlit passageways of the starship had an unsettling effect.

Hutch learned that Janet had been a peace activist during the Arab Wars, had picketed the World Council regularly, and had been jailed in New York and Baghdad. “In New York, we whitewashed the cells,” she said, “and the cops got irritated. We had good P.R. NewsNet was always there next morning to take pictures. Eventually, they had to do something. Didn’t look good having all these straight A types getting locked up. People got excited a lot easier in those days.”

Hutch came to realize that Frank Carson, for all his bravado, and his considerable accomplishments, was unsure of himself. He needed the approval of those around him, and he was not entirely comfortable in his role as mission director. She sensed that he was relieved that the crisis had come on shipboard, in Hutch’s area of responsibility. For that reason, perhaps, he was especially sympathetic to her, whom he perceived as having, to some degree, failed. Hutch found it difficult to mask her annoyance. She questioned her own competence, but didn’t care to have others participating in the exercise. Furthermore, her tolerance for sympathy was low.

George was drawing closer to her. Periodically, while he joked about the lack of privacy or the advantages of celibacy (“Keeps the mind clear”), Hutch detected passion in his eyes. Her own emotions churned. She loved being near him, but it was frustrating that they could be alone only if they took walks together. Which was to say, advertised that there was something going on.

Maggie made no secret of her reservations regarding male intellectual capacities. “They’re okay when they’re alone,” she might say, “but put a woman in the room and their IQ drops thirty points.” She masked these comments as light banter, but everyone suspected there was a wound that had not healed. No one took offense.

At 1106 GMT, Thursday, March 31, precisely one week after the collision, the alarm sounded. Hutch unbuckled, but Carson pushed her back. “Relax. I’ve got it.” And he floated forward to the instrument panel.

No one said anything. They could hear him up there, could hear the play of electronics. “Air pressure’s down,” he said. “We’re not getting much.”

“Let’s go take a look,” said Hutch.

The line that connected Alpha with the starship’s pumps had cracked. A stream of vapor fountained out, turned to crystals, and floated away.

“I would have thought,” said Carson, “that everything in a shuttle bay would be impervious to the cold.”

“There are limits,” Hutch told him. “This place isn’t supposed to be constantly frozen.” The decks, and the equipment, were covered with frost. When she flashed her light around, the beam filled with fine white particles. Hutch examined the line. “We’ve got a couple of spares. We’ll replace it.”

It was now -77°C.

They got up a bridge game that night, taking turns sitting out. It lasted longer than usual, and when it was over no one wanted to sleep.

Hutch had one of the divans. It was more comfortable than the web-chair up front, but she still had to tie herself down to avoid floating off.

“Eventually,” George said, “we’ll all sit around at the Mogambo and reminisce about this.” He didn’t explain what the Mogambo was.

“I hope so,” she said. The lights were out.

“Wait and see,” he said. “The day will come when you’d do anything to be able to come back here and relive this night.”

The remark surprised her. It was out of character. “I don’t think so,” she said. She thought he wanted to say more, but was leaving her to fill in the blanks. Their third occupant was Maggie. No dummy she: Hutch knew she would have liked to shrink into her blankets. Damn. “Goodnight, George,” she said, and whispered, too low for anyone to hear, “maybe.”

The line to the pumps gave way again the following morning just as she was getting up. Carson was in the cockpit waiting for her.

They went out into the bay, carrying lamps, and removed the line a second time, with a view to putting in another replacement. While they were working on it, Hutch became uneasy. “Something else is wrong,” she said.

“What?” asked Carson.

It took a minute. “Power’s off.”

The electronic murmur that normally filled the starship was gone.

“Hey.” George’s voice came from the shuttle. “We got red lights in here.”

“On my way,” said Hutch. And to Carson: “That’s it for the pumps. We’ll have to switch to internal air.”

“It’s too soon,” said Carson.

“I know.”

“Okay,” said Maggie. “As things stand now, we will use up the last of the shuttle’s air April eighth. Give or take a few hours. The breathers will carry us over to the ninth. The cavalry gets here two days later.”

At best.

Ship’s communications had switched over to a backup power cell. Beyond that, the vessel was dead.

“Wink’s tanks are full,” said George.

Hutch nodded. “That doesn’t help us without a working pump.”

George, perhaps for the first time, saw things going terribly wrong. He looked pale. “Can we go manual?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Janet. “If we’re not going to survive this, I don’t want to die in here. Why don’t we launch, and get away from this mausoleum?”

“We could,” said Hutch. “But if help comes, Wink will be a lot easier to find than the shuttle.”

She too looked rattled.

George’s eyes locked on Hutch. “There’s got to be a way.”

“How about Kosmik?” said Maggie. “Quraqua’s closer than Nok.”

Hutch pulled her knees up under her chin. “I requested help from them ten minutes after we got the response from Nok. They should have seen the original distress calls. And they’ve probably also seen Nok’s reply. Assuming best outcome, that they realized we were in trouble, that a ship was available, and that they dispatched it immediately after Nok backed off, they will probably arrive a little earlier than the Ashley Tee. But not by much. Travel time on the jump is eight days. They’ll need another day to find us after they get here. At least.”

“We’d still be dead,” said George.

Maggie had been drawing arcane symbols on her lightpad. “I’m not anxious to suggest anything radical.” She pronounced each syllable precisely, as if she were reading lines. “But we have a total of forty days of air to divide any way we please.”

Carson’s eyes came into sudden, sharp focus.

“I’m not recommending anything,” she said again. “But it’s something to think about.”

Four people could last ten days. There would be a chance.

She must have read Hutch’s expression. “I’m sorry. We don’t seem to be having any luck this time out,” she said.

“There’s a possibility we haven’t tried yet,” said Carson. “The Monument-Makers. We know their address. Maybe we haven’t been asking the right people for help.”

The antenna clusters did not respond. Hutch and Carson went out onto the hull and found what they had expected: the units had been scraped off in the collision. They jury-rigged repairs and installed a guidance system stripped from the bridge. They had brought out a portable transmitter and a booster, and tied everything together. The signal was prerecorded. It would be a simple SOS on the multichannel, centering on frequencies used by the Football. If there were aliens abroad in the system, they might not be able to read the signal, but it would clearly be artificial, and it would have to arouse their curiosity. And, maybe, bring them running. These were desperate measures, and no one had any real hope they would succeed. But it was all they had left.

They looked out across the same schizoid sky that one found all along the edge of the Orion Arm: a tapestry of stars to port, and a black river to starboard. Across the river, they could see the glow of the far shore.

“Ready?”

Carson’s voice shook her out of her reverie. She activated the transmitter.

Carson nodded. “Okay. I hear it.” Above them, light from the open shuttle bay hatch illuminated the underside of the A ring.

She tucked her equipment into a pouch. Carson had straightened, and stood watching the constellations rise and set around the curve of the ship. Silhouetted against the moving stars, he should have been a heroic figure. But he wore a white pullover with a little sail on the breast pocket, and a pair of fatigues. Despite his surroundings, he looked like a man out for a stroll.

Through the entire operation, her mind was on Maggie’s arithmetic. Four people might make it.

That evening, Hutch sat up front watching the communication lamps on the main console. Distracted, discouraged, frightened, she felt overwhelmed, and was unaware she wasn’t alone until she smelled coffee beside her.

Maggie.

“You okay?” Maggie’s voice was controlled. Deliberately calm.

“I’ve been better.”

“Me, too.” She had something to say, but Hutch knew she’d get around to it in her own good time.

They stared out into the dark bay. “The Monument-Makers know about us by now. If they exist.” Maggie held her cup to her lips.

“That’s true.”

“You know this is the first functional artifact we’ve found. Anywhere.”

“I know.”

“This is a historic trip.” Another pull from the coffee. Maggie was nervous. “People will be reading about us for a long time to come.”

Hutch didn’t think she would look so good. She would rank right in there with the captains of the Titanic and the Regal.

“You ever been in serious trouble before?” asked Maggie. “Like this?”

“Not like this.”

“Me, neither.” Pause. “I don’t think we’re going to come out of it.”

Hutch said nothing.

Maggie’s eyes shaded away from her. “I can understand this has been harder on you than on the rest of us.”

“It hasn’t been very easy on anybody.”

“Yeah.” Her face was masked in the shadows. “Listen. I know you’re blaming yourself.”

“I’m okay.” Hutch’s voice shook. Tears were coming. She wanted to tell Maggie to go away.

“It isn’t anybody’s fault.”

Maggie’s hand brushed her cheek, and it was more than Hutch could stand. “I feel so helpless,” she said.

“I know,” said Maggie.

Janet Allegri, Diary

——— April 2, 2203 This is an odd time to start a diary. I’ve never done it before, never even considered it, and I may be down to my last few days. Still, I watch Maggie writing into her lightpad every evening, and she always looks calmer when she’s finished, and God knows I’m scared silly and I need to tell somebody. I feel as if I should be doing something. Writing a will, maybe. I’ve neglected that, but I can’t bring myself to begin it. Not now. Maybe it’s too much of an admission.

I should probably make some recordings. There are people I need to say goodbye to. In case. But I’m not ready for that yet either.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my life the last few days, and I have to say that it doesn’t seem to have had much point. I’ve done well professionally, and I’ve had a pretty good time. Maybe that’s all you can reasonably ask. But tonight I keep thinking about things not done. Things not attempted because I was afraid of failing. Things not got around to. Thank God I had the chance to help Hutch throw her foamball. I hope it gets out. It’s something I’d like to be remembered for.

(No second entry to the “Diary” is known to exist.)

We will have to pitch somebody over the side. Hutch had one of the divans that night, but she remained awake. If it had to be done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly. And, though she shrunk from the necessity, though tears rolled down her cheeks, and cold fear paralyzed her, she understood well enough the ancient tradition: save her passengers, at whatever cost to herself. Without her, they had a chance.

Every moment she continued to breathe, she lengthened the odds against them.

Midway through the night, she found herself back in the pilot’s seat, unsure how she had got there. Outside, the bay was black. Silent. Dimmed lights from the cockpit threw a glow across one of the cradle bars. Snowflakes drifted through the illumination.

The ship’s air supply was freezing. Do it now. Get it over with. End it with dignity. Alpha had two air tanks. One was full, the other had already dropped off by an eighth.

Maybe she should wait until morning. Until her head was clear. Maybe then, somebody would find a way to talk her out of it. Maybe someone else would volunteer. She shook the idea away. Do it.

A pulser bolt would end it quickly. She got up, opened the storage compartment behind the rear seats. Two pulsers gleamed in the half-light. They had orange barrels and white stocks, and they were not too heavy even for a woman of Hutch’s size. They were used primarily as tools, but had been designed so they could double as weapons.

She picked one up, almost casually. She charged it, and when it was done, and the little amber light pinged to green, she set it on her lap. Bright metal and black handgrips. She raised it, not intending to do it now, just to see how it felt, and pressed the muzzle beneath her left breast. Her index finger curled round the trigger. And again the tears came. Do it.

The drifting snow blurred. Be careful. If you make a mess of it, you could slice a hole through the shuttle. Kill everyone else too.

She realized suddenly that would happen anyway. The weapon had no setting low enough to ensure the vessel’s safety. She would have to gc outside into the bay to do it right.

George, where are you?

She put the weapon down.

They had talked about their options before the lights went out. By now everyone understood that four people had a good chance at survival. And five had none. Hutch had said little. Carson took the moral high ground: I don’t want to be rescued at the expense of seeing someone else die. No one disagreed, but she knew what they were really thinking. Really hoping.

Maybe they would get lucky: maybe the SOS would bring the Monument-Makers; maybe they could sleep a lot and use less oxygen. If anyone harbored resentment against Hutch, there was no hint. But she felt the weight of their eyes, of the occasional unguarded inflection.

Janet suggested a lottery. Write everybody’s name on a piece of paper, put the pieces in a box, and draw one.

They looked guiltily at each other. And George’s eyes had found Hutch, and she’d read what was in his mind: Don’t worry. It won’t come to this.

And Maggie: If we’re going to do it, we need to get to it. This is a window that’s going to close fast. And then two of us will have to go.

In the end, they postponed the discussion until morning.

But there was no way Hutch could face that tribunal. She pushed herself from her chair, picked up one of the Flickinger harnesses, sealed off the inner cabin, cycled the air out, and opened up.

Snow flakes floated before her eyes. Not snow flakes, really. Frozen atmosphere. The temperature had dived further, faster, than they had expected.

Holding the pulser, clasping it close, she stepped out of the shuttle. The deck crunched beneath her magnetic boots; some of the flakes clung to metal surfaces. It would have been easy to imagine she was back home, beneath a heavy sky, the white ground cover extending off into the dark.

She used her remote to seal the cockpit. Lights blinked on and off, signaling the return of heat and air.

Goodbye.

She crossed the bay. Behind one of the storage containers would be best. Somewhere out of the way. Good form. Don’t want to be lying out in plain view. She managed a grin.

Equipment lockers and overhead struts and consoles retreated into the dark swirl. She turned on her wrist lamp, and kept its beam low. Her imagination carried her into the Pennsylvania woods where she had played twenty years before.

There were no stars, and the storm pressed down on the trees, heavy, and wet, and quiet.

She moved slowly across the deck, and stopped behind a row of storage cabinets. Here.

Just pull the trigger.

Don’t damage the Flickinger harness. Or the air tank. Stay away from the chest. Head is best. Maybe she should kill the energy field. It wouldn’t stop the pulser beam, but it might deflect it.

The snow drifted through the lamplight.

She looked at her wrist controls and raised the weapon.

Push the button, pull the trigger.

Snow.

Snow!

The idea washed over her. Yes. She held both hands out to the flakes. They swirled and danced. Some landed on her palm. They did not melt, of course, but remained white and soft against pink flesh.

Yes!

A few hours later, Hutch and George came outside and opened the shuttle bay doors. (Whenever they touched, their fields flashed.) Since all other partitions and hatches and doors throughout Wink were already open, whatever remained of the starship’s heat escaped quickly into space.

It was a glorious day, and Hutch loved everybody. She did a pirouette as they walked back toward Alpha, bringing Carson’s admonition that she be careful, zero gravity, magnetic boots, and all that.

George noticed her tracks of the morning, prints that seemed to go nowhere. He frowned and looked at her darkly, but asked no questions.

And while Hutch, in later years, often described herself as having been monumentally obtuse on the Beta Pac flight, she never told anyone she had been outside the shuttle. In her own mind, she was never sure whether she would actually have pulled the trigger.

Three days later, when the shuttle’s starboard air tank had been exhausted, Hutch brought the port tank on line. Everyone except Maggie (they had by now established a policy that someone stay with the shuttle at all times) picked up whatever empty containers were available, and advanced on Wink’s maintenance section. They used buckets and bowls and plastene housings. They took frames off consoles and uprooted lockers and hauled everything back and set it down before the three main starship air tanks.

Hutch chose the middle one, and dwarfed by the installation, took up a position at its forward end, where the connection valve to the recyclers was located. “Everybody stand back,” she said. “There’ll be some pressure here.” She took a pulser out of her tool belt and aimed at the base of the connection, in close to the tank. With a sense of considerable satisfaction, she pulled the trigger. A yellow beam ignited, and sliced through the metal. White mist spouted and formed a pale cloud. “That it?” asked Carson.

“Let’s hope so.” Hutch walked around to the side of the tank and pressed the firing stud again.

George eased in beside her. “Hold it a second,” he said. “If we didn’t get rid of all the pressure, this thing could explode in your face.”

She nodded. “We should be all right.”

He reached for the device, but she held it away from him. “Let me do it,” he said. “You stand over by the door.”

“Forget it. Back off, George.” She pulled the trigger. The beam touched the plastene, which bubbled and began to peel away. Hutch watched with equanimity. It was going to work.

She refocused the pulser, and fired again. The tank hissed, and a long split appeared. She cut it wider, and someone put a light to it, into it.

It was filled with heaps of snow. Frozen atmosphere. The snow was blue-white, and it sparkled and glowed.

They filled their containers and returned to the shuttle bay and passed them into the Alpha through the cockpit. They dumped the snow into their empty starboard tank. When they had measured out enough, they closed the tank. Several containers remained on the outside deck.

Then they had a party.

And when it was over, and they thought everyone else was asleep, George and Hutch went up to the cockpit and took one another for the second time.

Of course, everybody knew.

LIBRARY ENTRY

I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind, New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find; Many fair lands and headlands appeared, And many dangers were there to be feared; But when I remember where I have been, And the fair landscapes that I have seen, Thou seemest the only permanent shore, The cape never rounded, nor wandered o’er.

— Henry Thoreau from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

(Copied into his notes by George Hackett, April 5, 2203.)

20.

In the vicinity of Beta Pacifica. Friday, April 8; 2110 hours.

Melanie Truscott came to the rescue on the fifteenth day after the collision. She arrived in the Catherine Perth, a sleek new transport, and dispatched a shuttle to pick them up.

The transfer craft was one of the new Trimmer types, designed primarily for hauling heavy equipment. Because it was too big to enter Wink’s bay, the pilot brought it alongside the main door, where they rigged up a cable. No one was sorry to leave. Maggie, on her way out, commented that it was a good thing they hadn’t had to depend on the locals.

The shuttle pilot was a weathered, middle-aged man, jaunty in Kosmik green. He waited in the cargo hatch, grinning and shaking hands with each of them as they came aboard. “Good to see you. You folks okay?” His voice had a vaguely Midwestern accent. “Jake Dickenson. Let me know if I can do anything to help. Coffee up front.”

When they were all in and belted down, he asked their names, and recorded them on a lightpad. “Only a short flight,” he said, tucking the pad under one arm, and retreating to the cockpit. Hutch was trying to pick the Perth out of the starfield, and having no luck, when they pulled away from Winckelmann.

They disembarked a half-hour later, and found Harvey Sill waiting. Sill wore an open-necked white shirt two sizes too small. He looked not quite as tall as he had on Hutch’s overhead monitor. But in every other way, he was bigger. There was something of the rhino, both body and soul, about him. His voice was big, and he oozed authority. He made no effort to hide his disgust at being called out to rescue incompetents.

He delivered a perfunctory greeting to Carson and Janet, whom he knew, frowned at Hutch as if he recalled having seen her but couldn’t remember where, and ignored the others. “Please come with me,” he growled, and strode off.

The Perth was returning about a hundred members of the Project Hope crew, and their equipment, to Earth. It dwarfed the scaled-down Winckelmann, and had the feel of a small city. Its cabins and lounges were filled with people. “You were lucky,” Sill said. “Ordinarily, we wouldn’t have had a ship available.” He sounded as if they deserved a less happy conclusion.

“No justice anywhere,” said Hutch, drawing a frown.

They followed him into a board room. The decor was far more luxurious than the Spartan furnishings of Academy vessels. The bulkheads were tastefully paneled in stained walnut. Portraits of stiff-looking elderly men and women ringed the room. The Kosmik seal was mounted between a pair of corporate flags. A carved door was set in the bulkhead on the other side of a broad conference table. Sill waved them into seats around the table. “Wait here,” he said. “The director wants to talk with you, and then we’ll assign you quarters.”

He spun on his heel and left.

“I’m not sure,” said Janet, “I wouldn’t prefer to go back to the Wink.”

Minutes later, the carved door opened, and Melanie Truscott came in. She wore a Kosmik worksuit, without ornamentation. She faced Carson, smiled politely, and offered her hand. “Good to see you again, Frank,” she said.

Carson’s expression was masked, but Hutch knew he was embarrassed. “We appreciate your assistance, Melanie.”

Her gaze flicked across the others. “I know you had a difficult time. I’m glad we were able to help.” She moved on to Janet. “Do I know you?”

“Dr. Janet Allegri. I don’t think so. I was with the Temple group.”

“Welcome aboard the Perth, Dr. Allegri.” She gave the name just enough of a twist to suggest that the formality was amusing.

Maggie was next. “I’ve seen you somewhere. Maggie—”

“—Tufu.”

“You’re the cryptologist.”

“Exophilologist.”

“Same thing.” Truscott’s eyes narrowed. “You were the reason they stayed too long.”

To Hutch, it seemed as if everyone stopped breathing. But the statement was delivered as if it were a simple, obvious fact rather than a judgment.

“Yes,” said Maggie. “That’s probably true.”

Truscott took a seat, not at the head of the table, which they had unconsciously left empty, but between George and Janet. “Things don’t always work out as we’d like,” she said. And, looking across at Hutch: “And you are the pilot.”

“I am.”

“I know you, too. Hutchins, I believe.”

“Yes. You have a good memory, Dr. Truscott.”

“My job is largely political.” She peered into Hutch’s eyes. “What happened to your ship? To the Wink?”

“We jumped in at the wrong place.” She glanced at Carson. Do we want to tell her any more?

“How do you mean?”

Carson encouraged her. “There’s an object out there that registers no mass,” she said. “We showed up in front of it.”

Truscott nodded. “That would be one of the telescopes.”

“One?” asked Maggie.

“Oh, yes. There are eight in all, we believe, although we’ve only located five so far. It’s an array.” If she had said she’d encountered a flight of wild turkeys, Hutch could not have been more surprised. It had never occurred to her that the monster was anything other than unique.

“Where are the others?” asked Hutch.

The light shadowed and softened Truscott’s features. She must have been breathtaking when young. “All in the same orbit.” A steward entered with a tray heaped with sandwiches, wine, and fruit drinks. “A remarkable engineering project. Certainly well beyond our capabilities. Wouldn’t you agree, Frank?”

“Yes,” said Carson. “Have you seen one up close?”

“No. You were our first priority.”

“Thank you for that. They must be very thin.” Carson let his curiosity show. “I wonder how they hold together?”

She regarded him with interest. “Tell me, Frank, how did you know something like this was here?”

“An accident,” he said. “We’re on a routine survey.”

Truscott’s eves glazed. Of course. “If you like. Do vou want to see the object you hit?”

“Yes, we would. Very much.”

“I’ll give the word to the captain. The Perth was about to leave for home when we heard your distress call. We came this way with every intention of continuing that journey after we ensured your safety. But the damage you’ve sustained can’t be repaired out here.” She swung her attention to Hutch. “Do you concur?”

“Yes,” said Hutch.

Truscott smiled at her, as if they shared a secret. “When is the Academy vessel due?”

“About three days.”

“You understand we cannot wait. I intend to examine the artifact, and then we will proceed home. Ah, you don’t approve.”

And leave the Monument-Makers to others? Damn real.

“We need to talk,” said Carson.

“I’ll be happy to listen.”

“Frank—” Hutch used a warning tone. If there were discoveries of a technical nature to be made at Beta Pac, they did not want to allow Kosmik any claim to them.

Carson’s hesitation was evident. The room fell silent for several beats. Then he said “We have reason to believe there are ruins in this system. We would like very much to be put down near them.” Hutch smiled to herself. He was making it up as he went along.

“What is the nature of the ruins?”

“We don’t really know yet, Melanie. Relatively primitive.”

“Of course.”

“Can you take time to do that?” asked Carson. “Give us a pod and some supplies, and we’ll wait for the Ashley Tee on our own.”

She shook her head. “I won’t risk your lives.” She seemed to be watching Hutch closely, gauging her reaction.

Carson sat back in his chair and tried not to look uneasy. “Let me reassure you that we would not be at risk. The Ashley Tee will be here within a few days. At most. You could land us and be gone within twenty-four hours. And we’d be fine.”

Truscott’s tone softened. “Travel delays are expensive. I don’t see how we could manage an extra day. In any case, mv passengers are anxious to get home.” She tented her fingers, and appeared to dismiss the idea. “I am neither inclined, nor at liberty, to leave you.”

Hutch decided to try her luck. “Dr. Truscott,” she said. “This might be a major find. You have a chance to make a contribution.”

She looked curiously at Hutch. “Would I, really?”

“Like the old days. You haven’t given all that up, have you?”

Truscott registered surprise, and her eyes stayed on Hutch for a long moment. “No, young lady, I haven’t.” She got up, went to the door, and opened it. “Let’s see what the telescope looks like. Then maybe we can talk some more.” She rose. “We’ll see. Please help yourselves to the food.” And she left the way she had come.

Hutch climbed out of her clothes, showered, and collapsed on the bed without bothering to dress. Gravity felt good. She was asleep within minutes.

She was still asleep several hours later when someone knocked.

“Just a minute,” she said. Her robe was still packed in her luggage. She grabbed a pair of slacks, pulled on a blouse, and opened the door. Melanie Truscott stood in the passageway.

“Hello,” said Hutch.

“Hello, Ms. Hutchins.” Truscott’s voice was level. “I hope you’re comfortable.”

“Yes, thank you.” Hutch made way. “Won’t you come in?” She used the remote to clear the bed out of the room, and turned on a table lamp. The apartment still looked moderately untidy, but the director didn’t seem to notice.

She smiled, and found a seat. “I’ve been talking with Dr. Carson. You had a close call.”

“Yes,” she said. “We were lucky to come out of it.”

Truscott’s hair was swept back, her brows neatly arrowed. She spoke, and moved, with graceful economy. “You were lucky. There’s no question about that. But you did pretty well,” she said.

Hutch thought she’d performed poorly. Moving into the shuttle, and transferring the snow, had both been good ideas. But she’d been slow coming up with them. “Thanks,” she said.

Truscott shrugged. “I’d fly with you any time.” She looked quite placid, a neighbor who had strolled in for a friendly visit. “I came by because I thought you and I should talk.”

“Really? Why?”

“Clear the air.” Her tone changed. “You sent over the foamball.”

It wasn’t a question. And the directness of the statement took Hutch unaware. “Foamball?” She met the older woman’s eyes. Oddly, she saw no rancor in them. She would not ordinarily have hesitated to own up, take this woman on. But there was the question of Academy liability. Furthermore, Truscott seemed likable, and her manner suggested that Hutch’s deed was ill-mannered. Rude. Perhaps even irresponsible. “That’s true,” she said. “But I’ll deny it if you quote me. How did you know?”

The smile came again. “Obvious. No one else had the opportunity. And I’m a decent judge of character.”

Hutch shrugged. “You deserved it. You were playing hardball.”

“I know.” She looked pleased. “I assume you’ll be happy to know that no permanent damage was done. You gave me some bad moments. Made me look silly. But after a while, my people noticed that I stayed. That I got as many off as I could. I think they compared me to some of the other management types they’ve known. I gather I came away looking pretty good. Anyway, I wanted to say hello to you properly, and let you know there are no hard feelings.”

Hutch thought of Richard clinging to the end of his lifeline while the wave took him. “Easy for you to forgive,” she said.

Truscott nodded. “I know. And I’m sorry. But you knew it was coming. Why the hell didn’t you get him out?”

“Don’t you think I would if I could have?”

Hutch stared angrily at the older woman, and Truscott said quietly, “There’s some brandy in the cabinet beside the monitor. Will you have a drink with me?”

Hutch hesitated.

“If you refuse, I understand. And I would be very sorry.” She got the bottle, and filled two glasses. “If it helps, Corporate feels the same way you do. They’re blaming me for Wald’s death. I’m to be fed to the court of public opinion.”

Hutch didn’t care much for brandy. “I’m not sure whose fault it was,” she said, reaching for a glass. “At this point, it hardly matters.”

Truscott looked somber. “Nobody wanted it to happen.”

“Of course not.” She couldn’t quite keep the sting out of her voice. “We’re all well-meaning.”

The director nodded. “To Richard Wald,” she said.

They drank, and Truscott refilled their glasses.

“So what happens now? With you and Kosmik?”

“Board of inquiry. They’ll find culpability on my part if I let it go that far.”

“Can you stop it?”

“I can make a public apology. Take the blame. I don’t mind doing that. It happened on my watch, and I can’t really evade responsibility. Did I tell you I was directed to see that no one was hurt?”

“No—” Hutch felt a new surge of resentment.

“It’s true. I thought I’d arranged things pretty well. But I blundered.”

“How?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What will happen to you?”

“They’ll get my resignation, I’ll drop out of sight for six months, and then I’ll start a new career. I’ll be fine. I have friends.”

Hutch was silent for a long time. Finally she said, “Losing him was such a waste.”

“I know. I’ve been reading his books.” She sighed. “Hutch, you have a job with me any time you want it.”

They drank to that. They drank to Perth, and to Alpha.

Then, amused, Truscott proposed a toast to Norman Caseway. “God bless him,” she said. “We couldn’t have got here without him. And you’d still be waiting for the Ashley Tee.”

“How do you mean?”

“The Perth brought out the people who are going to implement phase two of Project Hope. It also brought the directive for me to go back and face the music. Caseway did not send my recall on ahead. Instead, he arranged to have it handed to me by the ship’s captain. An insult. But, as a result they had to wait around a few days while I finished with loose ends. If that hadn’t happened, the Perth would have been on its way home when your SOS came through. There would have been no ship to send after you.”

Hutch drained her glass, refilled it, and refilled Truscott’s. “One more,” she said. Hutch did not have a lot of tolerance for alcohol. It didn’t take much to loosen her inhibitions, and she knew she should not propose this new toast. But she couldn’t help herself.

“To whom?” asked Truscott.

“Not a whom, Melanie. You don’t object if I call you Melanie? Good. Not a whom, Melanie. A what. I give you, the foamball.”

Hutch raised her glass.

Truscott’s aristocratic features darkened. She looked hard at Hutch, and the cloud lifted. “What the hell,” she said. “Why not?”

It was clearly a bowl. Carson’s team gathered in an observation lounge during the approach, where they had access to a wide-screen display and communication with the ship’s operations center. Harvey Sill joined them, announcing that he had been assigned to assist. “Don’t hesitate to ask for anything you need,” he said, with marked lack of enthusiasm.

Perth moved in on the open side of the object. It broadened, and mutated into an inverted world, a world whose landscape sank, and whose horizons rose. They glided below the rim, and their perspective shifted again: the surface flattened, became a blue-black plain, stretching to infinity. The horizon rose, and the lower sky went black. They passed beneath an enormous arch, one of a network tied in to strong points across the face of the object. “This is the only one of the telescopes,” Sill said, “that’s still transmitting.”

“Have you tried to translate the signal?” asked Carson.

“We don’t really have the means to attempt it. But we can tell you that they were aimed at the Lesser Magellanic.”

There was a young male crewman with them, wearing earphones. He reported precise physical specifications as they came in—diameter, angle of curvature, declination. “And thin,” he said. “It’s very thin.”

“How thin?” asked Carson.

“At the rim, they’re saying a little under six-tenths of a centimeter.”

“That’s still thick enough to have ripped us up,” said Hutch. “How did we get through?”

“There’s an antenna at dead center,” said the crewman. “And it looks as if that’s where the transmitter is.” He listened to his earphones and nodded. “Operations reports it is rotating around its axis. They say one complete rotation in seventeen days, eleven hours, twenty minutes.”

“What holds it together?” asked Maggie. “It seems too fragile.”

“It’s not metal or plastic. We’re getting odd readings: potassium, sodium, calcium. Heavy concentrations of calcium at the center construct.”

“Do we have a picture of it yet?” asked Sill. “The center?”

“Coming up now.” The crewman glanced at the screens.

The bulkhead opposite the window changed colors, went dark, and revealed a cluster of black globes, a group of small dish antennas, a few domes. “The signal source,” said the crewman.

Carson glanced at Sill. “We’d like to get a good look at it,” he said.

“We’ll take you in close.”

“Is there a way we can date this thing?” asked Hutch.

“Maybe if we had a sample,” said Janet.

“I don’t think we want to do that.” Carson looked uncertain what he wanted to do. “How about scrapings? Can we do it with scrapings?”

Janet thought about it. “Maybe.”

“It’s even thinner away from the rim,” said the crewman. “Scanners indicate that thickness in this area is less than two millimeters. There’s a latticework of thicker material, providing support. But for the most part, the object is micro-thin.”

Nobody noticed Truscott until she spoke. “Now we see why Wink survived,” she said.

She was accompanied by a narrow, uniformed man whom she introduced as Captain Morris. His eyes were the color of water, and his hair was black and cut close in a military fashion. He acknowledged their names and shook hands with an irritating air of self-importance.

They were approaching the cluster of antennas.

“Historic moment,” Truscott said. “We are getting a look at the first piece of alien high tech. We’ll try to do an analysis, see if we can figure out precisely what we’re looking at. How about you, Frank? Do you have an expert along who can give us some answers?”

Carson looked at his colleagues. He received no encouragement. “We’re a little short on experts,” he said.

Perth glided over the featureless blue-black terrain. Her lights played on the surface, producing muted yellow blurs. The ship might have been moving across a burnished marble floor.

“How does it get power?” asked Janet. “Solar?”

“Probably,” said George.

Truscott looked at Carson. “Do you want a sample?”

“Yes,” said Maggie.

Carson nodded. “Try not to damage anything.”

The captain showed irritation. “We’ll take care of it,” he said coldly. He spoke into his commlink, listened, and looked puzzled. “Melanie, we can’t find the collision site.”

“Were we looking for it?” asked Carson.

Morris nodded. “We tracked your course backward, as a navigation exercise for my junior officers. There’s no hole anywhere in the impact area large enough to run a starship through. Or anywhere else for that matter.”

“Your junior officers flunked,” said Carson.

Morris responded with a superior smile. “My junior officers are quite good. And we’ve checked the numbers. There is no error.” He looked at Hutch. “You did not change course, I understand.”

“That’s correct,” she replied. “But we did take some damage. I had to adjust for a tumble, and it’s possible that when I terminated the burn the thrusters didn’t shut down simultaneously. That could have resulted in a new heading.”

Morris shook his head. “There is a hole in the impact area. But it’s not big enough to accommodate a shuttle, let alone Wink.”

“That’s odd,” said Truscott.

“That’s all there is,” said the captain.

“Why don’t we take a look?” Hutch suggested. “At the hole we did find.”

The site was plowed up, exploded outward. They floated above it, in Flickinger belts, looking down through the open space at stars on the other side.

“It’s less than seven meters across at its widest point,” said the Ops officer, a young woman named Creighton.

“Well, we certainly didn’t come through here,” said Hutch. “There must be another one somewhere.”

“No.” Morris spoke from the bridge. “There is no other hole. We’ve looked everywhere.”

“There has to be,” Carson insisted.

Lights played across the damage.

“This is strange.” George was holding his hand over the hole. He pushed it through, and withdrew it. And pushed it through again. “There isn’t clear passage here,” he said.

Janet, who’d been examining the membranous material of which the Bowl was constructed, directed her lamp into the hole. “He’s right,” she said. “There are threads or thin fabric or something in it—”