Echo

by Jack McDevitt

  He was usually alone in the ship. Occasionally, one of his wives went along. And Hugh Conover joined him for a few flights. During his early years in the Callisto, according to press reports, repeated failure did nothing to abate his enthusiasm. It was simply, he told one interviewer, a matter of time. He looked out across the sea of stars and could not believe they were not home to other civilizations. Could not believe other species had not risen from the dust and weren’t asking the same questions we were. Was there a purpose to it all? Was there to be in time a coming together of intelligences from across the galaxy, to bring forward a new level of existence? New technologies to make life better? And shared arts to make it richer?

  His critics, of course, pointed out that there’d been voyages to thousands of terrestrial worlds over thousands of years. They were, usually, sterile, completely devoid of life. And only once, in the long history of the species, had we arrived at a place where the lights were on.

  Only once.

  It was, Tuttle maintained, a failure of imagination. Later, he would argue that it was the enormity of the task that made the challenge worthwhile. “We wouldn’t recognize the significance of the gift if our neighbors were living on our doorstep.”

  Gradually, though, as the years passed, the certainty gave way to hope, and finally to a kind of desperation.

  “They are there,” he’d tell the audience at a graduation ceremony near the end of his career. “It is our part to find them.”

  After the turn of the century, he no longer talked about the urgency of the search, the need for it. There were few interviews, and Tuttle knew the interviewers were laughing at him. So he didn’t say much. Just that, no, he wasn’t ready to give up, but maybe the task would have to be passed on to the next generation.

  Occasionally, he responded to his critics: “If everyone had thought the way they did, we would never have left Spain.” I wasn’t sure what the reference was. Alex said, quietly, “Columbus.”

  Finally, his funding began to run out. His supporters had stayed with him for the better part of a century. They’d had enough. In 1403, he announced his retirement.

  “Same year that Rachel and Cavallero left World’s End,” I said.

  Alex nodded. “Something happened.”

  “What?”

  “Answer that, and you win an engraved piece of rock.”

  Audree was waiting at Skydeck when we docked. And a service clerk from the station’s florist arrived immediately behind her, with some roses for me. Robin had classes and couldn’t get away, but he would call later.

  We rode down in the shuttle. It was good to be home, but there was no getting past Alex’s disappointment that Tuttle’s logs had disappeared. “Well,” Audree said, “you can’t do much about a theft that happened a quarter century ago. Sounds to me as if it’s time to pull the plug on this whole thing.”

  The comment made me realize how little she understood Alex. “Audree,” he said, “it’s just one more indication that something is going on here.”

  I’d hoped the logs would be available, and that we would discover nothing, so we could get away from this entire business. Despite the way she’d dealt with us, I liked Rachel. And I would have preferred to let things be. But asking Alex to walk away from the tablet when we still had no answers—It just wasn’t going to happen.

  When we got down to the terminal, Alex spotted Peggy Hamilton waiting at the gate. Peggy was the producer of The Peter McCovey Show, and she was looking for us. McCovey was a talk-show host, and attacking Alex had become one of his favorite pastimes. Alex was, in fact, the perfect target. Robs tombs. Steals vases that should be available to the general public. Creates havoc in archeological sites. The sort of thing about which the average citizen couldn’t care less. Until McCovey made it sound as if Alex was stealing valuable items that belonged to his viewers.

  Alex did an uncomplimentary grunt. “Chase,” he said, “take care of her, will you? And tell her no.”

  “Who is she?” asked Audree.

  Alex didn’t have time to answer before Peggy stood before us, beaming pleasantly, saying how good it was to see us and asking whether Alex had found what he was looking for. “And by the way, what were you looking for?”

  Peggy had long legs and a kind of confident gallop. I don’t know how else to describe the way she walked in, circled round, and suddenly was striding along beside us. She tried hard to be friendly, casual, and sincerely interested in our welfare. She looked good, and reportedly had entertained early hopes for an acting career. She had the blond, innocent looks, but her problem was that she couldn’t act.

  “I’m pressed for time,” Alex said, glancing up at the giant clock on the wall above the gift shop. “Why don’t you talk to Chase?”

  “Alex,” she said, “I’ll only need a minute or two.”

  Alex looked my way and saw I wasn’t happy about his passing her over to me. So he stopped. “Peggy,” he said, “I’m not able to do the show right now.”

  “Why not, Alex? You’re one of our most popular guests. And Peter would be delighted to have you.”

  “I’ve been buried lately, Peggy. I’ll get back to you when I have some time.”

  He tried to move away from her, but she stayed with him. “Alex, just tell me: Did this flight have anything to do with Rachel Bannister?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Well, okay. That’s not what we’ve been hearing.”

  Alex didn’t like McCovey, and he hated Peggy’s artificial smile and round-the-clock display of good cheer. But Audree was there, and he didn’t want to look rude. “Whatever you’ve been hearing is inaccurate, Peggy.”

  “Well, why don’t you come on the show tomorrow evening and make that point? Professor Holverson will be there. And we expect Peer Wilson, as well.”

  “Sounds like a good show, but I really have to pass.” We were headed out the entrance, into the taxi waiting area.

  “Alex,” she said, “you understand that, if you refuse to participate, there’ll be no one to tell your side.”

  “Peggy,” he said, “I’m really too busy.”

  She turned to me: “Chase, how about you? We’d be delighted to have you sit in for your boss.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Thanks anyhow. But I have terminal stage fright.”

  She nodded. “Okay, you guys have it your way. If you change your mind, Alex, you know my number.” A smile flickered on and off. Then she sauntered away.

  “I think you should do it,” I told him when we were alone. It was the same position Audree took on the way home.

  “I don’t want to make any public statements until I know what I’m talking about.”

  “If you don’t, they’ll probably use the chair.” That had happened a couple of times when Alex declined invitations to the talk shows. Just put an empty chair out there to remind the audience who was too cowardly to show up.

  He was uncomfortable. “Seriously, I can’t see any way I could go on that thing.”

  “You could always just say you don’t have any answers yet, and you’ll let them know when you do.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to get away with it. McCovey would accuse me of stonewalling. ‘What are you hiding, Benedict?’ ” He did a passable imitation of the unctuous host. “And he’d drag Rachel into it.”

  “They’ll do that in any case,” I said.

  That evening Robin took me to one of his favorite nightspots, planning to dance the evening away. But that wasn’t going to happen because I couldn’t shake a dark mood.

  He looked especially good that night. Over the years, when Alex and I had run into trouble, I’d always been supported by the belief that we were justified in what we were doing. Or at least that we had a good argument. But this time I didn’t feel right about it at all. And it showed. Robin asked me what the problem was, and I told him. “And all you have is a few symbols on a rock?” he asked.

  A few symbols on a rock. I couldn’t get away from the sense tha
t we weren’t on a quest for an alien civilization so much as we were digging after a scandal.

  Alex was right, of course: McCovey would zero in on Rachel. And somewhere between eleven and midnight, I made up my mind about what we should do.

  I excused myself, went out on the balcony, and called Alex. “I think,” I said, “we need to let Rachel know we’re done with this. Warn her about McCovey, but assure her we had nothing to do with it. Tell her we have no intention of pursuing an investigation.”

  “We can’t do that, Chase.”

  “Sure we can. Just walk away from it.” I stood looking out at the city lights. Andiquar was a beautiful place, but in the late fall, it could get cold. It was cold that night.

  “Chase, I understand how you feel—”

  “I don’t think you do, Alex. Look, people are entitled to their secrets. There’s no evidence she’s harmed anyone. Or Tuttle. Probably, there’s nothing to any of this except some personal matter. Which is embarrassing to her.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she had the rock made up to celebrate an illicit affair. It would be just the sort of thing that would have appealed to someone like Tuttle. Maybe we should be checking the local stonecutters to see if anyone has a record—”

  “All right. I hear what you’re saying. This thing is not giving me any pleasure, either. But I can’t just let it go. If I did that, I’d be wondering about it the rest of my life.”

  “Alex, this isn’t about you.”

  A few branches hung over the balcony. A sudden wind stirred them.

  “Okay, Chase. Thanks for letting me know how you feel. I understand. But I don’t really have a choice here.”

  “Sure you do. But okay. You’ll do what you want regardless of what I say. But don’t expect me to defend the corporation’s actions.”

  The following evening, we made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the conference room and settled in to watch. Jacob switched on the show, and we caught the closing segment of Life on the Strip, where they talked about entertainers and the upcoming schedule. Then it was time for Peter McCovey, and the host walked onto his book-lined set, grinning in that unctuous, self-important way, his slightly corpulent features silhouetted against the leather-bound volumes he probably never read.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Tonight there’s reason to believe that the well-known anthropologist, Sunset Tuttle, may have discovered an alien civilization. Tuttle has been dead for almost thirty years, and the story is only now coming to light. Why? Is it that, as some experts think, the discovery was too terrifying to make public? Did it really happen? The eccentric antique dealer, Alex Benedict, who has a reputation for uncovering oddities, is on the job again. Is there anything to this? Are we possibly playing with fire? In just a moment, we’ll ask our guests.”

  They went to a clothing commercial, how to look good and feel good in Blavis lingerie, which no man can resist. “It looks as if it’s going to be a long hour,” said Alex.

  “It’s hard to see how it could be anything else.”

  McCovey’s paneled room expanded, and we saw that he had taken a chair. Three others were seated with him. And, no surprise, an empty chair had also been put in place. “With us tonight,” the host said, “are, from Andiquar University, the eminent language specialist Peer Wilson; Sunset Tuttle’s onetime colleague, now retired, Edwin Holverson; and Madeleine Greengrass, who found an interesting tablet in her garden.

  “We invited Alex Benedict to join us, but he says he’s too busy.” That was accompanied by a wink and a smile.

  They put up an image of the tablet, and Greengrass explained how she’d found it, and how Alex had shown an immediate interest, but someone else got there first. She looked much better than she had when I’d first seen her. More animated, more involved with what was going on. She spoke smoothly, with the easy confidence of a woman who spends much of her time leading discussions for tourists.

  Then a question to Wilson as they all looked at the tablet: “I’ve never seen an alphabet anything like this, Professor Wilson. Do you recognize it? Might the characters on the tablet actually have an alien origin?”

  Wilson smiled. Tall, recondite, with a quiet, calm demeanor, he was the aristocrat in the room. “Might they? Of course they might. Anything’s possible. But if there’s any other evidence, I haven’t seen it. I mean, it could easily be a creation of Looney-Pack. It’s only a piece of stone with a few unfamiliar characters on it. It doesn’t mean anything.” He went a bit further: “To understand what’s really going on here, you have to know about Benedict. Look, Peter, I’d be the last person on the planet to denigrate the solid contributions he’s made. I mean, what he’s done isn’t bad for a guy who sells antiques for a living. But he’s inclined to turn everything into the Holy Grail. Does somebody bring him a flowerpot that dates from the Time of Troubles? Well, it must have belonged to Andrew Koltavi. That’s the way he operates. He loves the spotlight. And I don’t mean by that to attack his character. A lot of people are like that.”

  Greengrass described her conversations with me, suggested I was “emotional,” and said how the tablet had always been in the garden. She didn’t know how it had gotten there.

  At that point, the host introduced a clip with Teresa Harmon, who’d bought the house from Basil Tuttle. She’d found the tablet in a cabinet and couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. “I’m the one who used it to decorate the garden,” she said in the clip.

  “Were you, at any time,” McCovey asked Greengrass, “offered money for it?”

  “I was.”

  “By whom?”

  “By Chase Kolpath.”

  “Representing Benedict?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they offer much?”

  “Yes. A lot.”

  “What was your feeling when that happened?”

  “I was shocked. And I’ll tell you, Peter, I was sorry I’d let it get away.”

  “Did you try to recover it?”

  “When I found out it had been taken by what’s-her-name, Rachel Bannister, I called and asked to have it returned.”

  “And what did Ms. Bannister say?”

  “She told me it had been dropped in the river.”

  “Dropped in the river?”

  “In the Melony.”

  “I should mention for our audience,” McCovey said, “that we also invited Ms. Bannister to participate. Like Benedict, she had other things to do.” He turned back to Greengrass. “Did she do that on purpose? Drop the tablet in the river?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why?”

  “She said she’d changed her mind and didn’t want it after all.”

  “Did you know that there’s been an attempt to locate it in the river? That no one can find it?”

  Greengrass looked annoyed. “Is that true? No, I wasn’t aware of that.”

  McCovey turned to Holverson, who looked as if he’d been sitting in his living room too long. He’d been around for a lot of years, and it showed. He was also overweight. And he had a self-important, methodical response time. Ask him a question and he’d lean forward, nod, suck on his lower lip, and thereby make it clear that here was the unvarnished truth. “Professor,” McCovey said, “a week ago, you were quoted as saying there was no possibility that Tuttle could have discovered an alien civilization and kept it secret. Do you still hold to that view?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve had time to think about it. And I’ve come to realize there are several reasons why, if he’d seen anything, he might not want to go public with it.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, the obvious one is that they could be very dangerous. Maybe it’s a society that would like to have us for dinner.”

  “What else?”

  “Once it gets out, you can’t control access. Every nitwit with a ship would want to go take a look. Maybe, if there were aliens, they simply asked to have their privacy respected.�
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  “Would Tuttle have gone along with that?”

  “It’s funny. There was a time I thought that being known as the discoverer of an alien civilization would have been more important to Sunset than the discovery itself.”

  “But you don’t think that anymore?”

  “No. So, yes, if he’d found aliens, and they asked to be let alone, I think he’d have honored their request.”

  “And you say that because—?”

  “He was an honorable man.”

  “Okay. Any other reasons to keep it secret?”

  “Oh, yes. The one that comes immediately to mind is the possibility that they’re a million years beyond where we are.”

  “You mean they’d constitute an existential threat?”

  “Not in the sense I think you mean. But what would happen to us if suddenly we were given their knowledge? So that we had a complete map of the galaxy, we knew where everything is, knew what’s there and what isn’t? Maybe they have the details about alternate universes. They can solve all our problems—”

  The host broke in: “You make that sound dangerous—”

  “What would we have left to live for? Another possibility: How would we react in the presence of a species who lived indefinitely? Who didn’t die? Who were enormously smarter than we are? Whose creations and accomplishments made ours look like children’s toys?”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Peer. “There’s the real danger.”

  Alex glared at the hologram. “So what would you suggest?” he demanded. “That we keep everybody home? To make sure we don’t find anything?”

  “Alex—” I said.

  “Idiots. What’s wrong with these people?”

  “It’s why you should probably have gone this evening.” We heard Bannister’s name.

  “So she bought the tablet and got rid of it,” said McCovey. “Is anything going on here?”