Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

  When I embark.

  —Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar,” 1889

  Theory indicated that if everything went as expected, they would return within minutes. Or maybe seconds. We held our breath.

  Richard started another countdown on the auxiliary screen. “Shut it off,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Chase. I was only trying to help.”

  “Just leave it alone.”

  Shara was holding tight on to the arms of her chair. I sat there looking out at the night, watching for the silhouette of the giant ship to reappear. Please, God. “We should do this more often,” said Shara.

  “You want some coffee?”

  “No. Not at the moment.”

  We sat, listening to each other breathe. We didn’t really know if, when the ship reappeared, we’d be close enough to see it. The vehicles that got tangled in the warp tended to maintain a direct course, so we could assume it would come back along that same vector. But it was possible that it would be several million kilometers away. Which meant that the news might come by radio.

  “Chase.” Richard’s voice. “I am scanning for it. Nothing so far.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Do you wish to receive periodic reports, Chase?”

  “No,” I said. “Just let me know if you see something.”

  I moved farther to port as a safety precaution, but otherwise maintained the same course and speed. I know this makes no sense, but my natural tendency was to assume the Grainger would show up in the same position relative to us that it had held when it went under. But the minutes dragged on, and no lights appeared.

  I began to notice that the sounds in the Casavant were a bit different from what they were in the Belle-Marie. The engines had a different tone, somehow more masculine, more inclined to growl. I heard more beeps and boops from the electronics than I was accustomed to. And the ventilators put out a louder hum.

  “Come on,” whispered Shara.

  The chairs squeaked.

  “I have it,” said Richard. “It’s on course, range approximately six thousand kilometers.”

  “Beautiful,” I said. “Open a channel to them.”

  “Done, Chase.”

  “Nick, we see you. Welcome back.”

  We got nothing but static.

  “Nick, answer up, please.”

  Shara was frowning.

  Still nothing.

  “Nick,” said Shara. “Say something!”

  “It must be at a considerable distance,” said Richard. “I can’t see any lights.”

  “Nick!” Shara again. Her voice tight with mounting desperation. “Are you there? Come on. Say something.”

  “Belt down, Shara,” I said. “Their power may have gone down. Let’s go find them. It shouldn’t be a problem.” I switched over to Richard. “Are we getting any kind of radio activity at all from them?”

  “Negative, Chase. I will let you know if I detect anything.”

  “Try the AI.”

  “I already have. That’s also negative.”

  “Not good,” said Shara. “We’ve got to get them off before it goes under again.”

  We sent a message to the SRF, informing them of the situation.

  * * *

  We had a reply within the hour. From Lynn Bonner, chief of the SRF presence on Skydeck. “Chase, do not take any unnecessary risks. Determine as best you can what has happened and report to us before taking any action.”

  The Grainger was still showing no lights when we pulled alongside. I moved in closer than was comfortable. But I wanted to be within a couple of minutes of the Grainger. Just in case. Shara was getting out of her seat to head for the lander when a second message arrived. It was from John Kraus: “Exercise extreme caution. What is the current situation?”

  I sent a picture of the dark ship. “No response yet. We are going over now.”

  “No,” said Shara. She got up and shook her head. “You stay here. I’ll let you know what’s going on.”

  “Forget it.”

  She paused in the hatch, turned, pointed an index finger at me. “Stay here,” she said.

  I had no wish to go with her and get into a vehicle that had become so unpredictable. “You can’t go over there alone.”

  “Chase, we need somebody here on the radio. To keep in touch with John.”

  “Richard can relay anything we need to send. We don’t know what’s happening, and you may need help. Anyway, I suspect I have a little more experience with starships and pressure suits than you do.”

  * * *

  We climbed into the suits and added wrist lamps and jet packs. We were so close there was no point taking the lander. I picked up a cutter to ensure we didn’t get stuck somewhere.

  We left the Casavant and floated across to the Grainger airlock. Usually, when you touch the hull of a ship, especially a big one, you can feel the power. There are engines and compressors and monitors and a thousand other devices that support life. This one felt dead. Shara looked at me with her eyes wide as I pressed the pushpad beside the outer hatch. The pushpad is supposed to work even in the case of a power failure. And it did. The hatch clicked, and I pulled it open and stepped inside. It was dark, and there was no artificial gravity. “Careful,” I said. Shara joined me, we closed up, floated off the deck, and switched on our lamps.

  The airlock began to pressurize.

  “That’s good,” said Shara. “At least they’ve got some power.”

  “It’s the backup system,” I said. “Not sure there’ll be much else.”

  The inner hatch opened into a passageway. Into three passageways, actually. One ran directly ahead across the ship; the others went fore and aft parallel to the hull. No interior lights came on.

  I didn’t trust what I was seeing, so I motioned Shara to leave her helmet in place while I removed mine. But the air was okay. I called out both names. “JoAnn.

  “Nick.”

  Shara, her helmet now off, joined in: “Anybody there? Hello—Where are you guys?”

  A dead silence rolled back at us.

  We took the passageway that led forward. It was lined with doors. We tried one. It opened, and we looked in at a small compartment. Couple of chairs. A display screen. A fold-up bed.

  I pulled the door shut. Shara looked frightened. God knows what I looked like. “Where the hell are they?” she said.

  The ship was cold. Seriously cold. How could that have happened? We put our helmets back on and adjusted the heat in our suits.

  The bridge figured to be up two or three decks. We kept going toward the front, passed one elevator, and stopped at the second. It wasn’t working, which didn’t matter because I wouldn’t have wanted to take a chance on getting caught in it. I called Richard. “Hypercomm for John Kraus.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “‘John, we are on board the Grainger. They have a power outage. Haven’t located JoAnn and Nick yet. Will let you know as soon as we have something.’” I looked at Shara. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Richard, tell John that it’s seriously cold over here. Hard to believe this thing was under power just a few minutes ago.”

  “I have it,” Richard said. “Will transmit immediately.”

  Eventually, we came across a ramp connected to decks above and below. It was steep, designed for low gravity. In zero gee, we could float up the thing. And we did.

  There was a theater on the next deck. We entered in the rear and looked past the seats up at a stage. There would have been a screen there somewhere as well, but it wasn’t visible. We played our lights across the chairs, hoping to see some movement.

  We had to take off our helmets to call their names. Which we did. There was no response.

  We went back out into the corridor
and continued the process. We were reaching a point at which I think if someone had answered, I’d have been seriously spooked.

  “I can’t believe,” Shara said, “that they didn’t mention the cold.”

  We went up another ramp into an area that included a large dining room. It had long portals, so occupants could have looked out and seen the stars. And one more deck took us, finally, within range of the bridge.

  It was dark, and empty, and didn’t look as if anyone had been there ever. I sat down in the captain’s chair, leaned over the controls, and tried to turn the power on. Nothing happened.

  “Look at this,” I said, pointing to the comm system.

  Shara’s brow creased. “What am I looking at?”

  “It’s an allcomm. The captain uses it to speak to the entire ship. Provided he has power.” I looked for an activator switch, found one, and used it. The panel lit up. Bingo.

  “JoAnn,” I said, “Nick. We’re on the bridge. Where are you guys?”

  * * *

  Our voices echoed through the ship. After a while, we shut the lights down again. Don’t ask me why. It seemed like the cautious thing to do, and that’s my middle name. We walked around some more, or floated around, really, and opened more doors. We came across a couple of storage rooms, places where they had blankets and pillows and dishware. A few cabinets were open, and some of the materials had been removed.

  We were sitting in a lounge area when Richard informed us we had another transmission from John: “Get off the Grainger immediately. If it goes under again, I don’t want you guys going with it. We have a team on the way. They’ll take it from here.”

  * * *

  The SRF vehicle arrived within hours. They told us they’d been instructed to give it another day. Then, if the Grainger still seemed stable, they would board and begin a shipwide search. We were to go home.

  So we started back. “I’m not sure how I let this happen,” Shara said, as we left the Grainger behind.

  “You’re not responsible.”

  “Chase, I knew the risk was greater than JoAnn was letting on.”

  “So did she, probably.”

  “She did. She hated taking Nick over there, but she had no choice. But I doubt she thought anything like this could happen.” She stopped and heaved a desperate sigh. “Damn it. There had to be a better way to do this. Or not do it.”

  * * *

  John and several of his colleagues were waiting when we arrived at Skydeck. They crowded around us, asking if we were okay, telling us how sorry they were. We retreated into a conference room, and they began looking for details. Had JoAnn changed any of the protocols? I had no idea. We had a record of everything she’d done until the moment when the Grainger went under and communication was lost. Shara insisted JoAnn would not have changed anything without letting her know.

  So the experts took over the Casavant to begin analyzing the data while we retired to a conference room and described the experience in painful detail to a group of about fifteen people. They asked a few questions and told us not to talk about it. And they ultimately fell into absolute silence, save for a couple of coughs.

  At the end, John sat with his head propped on folded hands.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?

  —Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, Hero and Leander, 1598 C.E.

  Alex was at the terminal when we got off the shuttle. He looked worried. “You guys okay?” he asked.

  “We’re all right,” I said. But I walked into his outstretched arms and hung on to him. He didn’t have the details, but enough had already gotten out to alert the media and the rest of the world that something had gone terribly wrong and that JoAnn and Nick were assumed lost. Shara joined us in the embrace and we stood in the concourse for a long moment while the crowd passed. “I’m sorry, guys,” he said. “What happened?”

  Shara just shook her head. “Let’s get away from here.”

  We walked out to the skimmer. The sky was gray and overcast. We took our seats while he put the luggage in back. “I assume,” he said, “they don’t want you to talk about it.”

  I looked up at him and nodded.

  “It won’t go any farther,” he said.

  Shara and I looked at each other. “No way,” she said, “we can keep this to ourselves.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We told him everything. We just sat in the parking lot and talked, tried to describe what it had felt like passing through that empty cruise ship. He listened quietly. Closed his eyes. Finally, when we were finished, he asked if we were okay.

  We both said yes. We’d lived to come back. But I, for one, knew I would never be the same.

  * * *

  Nobody wanted to go home, so we headed over to Bernie’s Far and Away. “Some of the people on HV,” Alex said, “were criticizing JoAnn for rushing things.”

  “Who was doing that?” asked Shara.

  “A couple of physicists. They were on several shows this morning. Saying she should have taken her time.”

  Shara made an angry noise in her throat. “We didn’t have any time, damn it. That was just a preliminary run. If it had worked, there would have been a lot more research to do before we could have tried using it on the Capella.”

  “Hey,” said Alex, “it wasn’t me talking.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just wish these idiots, when they don’t know what they’re talking about, would keep their mouths shut. Do you know who they were?”

  “I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

  She was still growling. “Ding-dong,” she said.

  * * *

  Alex wanted me to go home, but I had no interest in spending the rest of the day in my cottage. We invited Shara over to the country house. But she said she had calls to make, so we dropped her off and went back to the office. After we got inside, he waved me into a seat. “Can I do anything?”

  “No. Other than maybe change the subject. I need something else to think about.”

  He smiled. “I love you, Chase.”

  “Thanks. Me too.”

  “All right. Let’s try to do something else.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve been putting together a list of available artifacts we saw on Earth. If we get enough interest, we can go back and get some of them.” He showed me his notebook, where sixty-seven items were recorded. “Why don’t you take a look when you get a chance? No hurry. See if there’s anything you saw that we should add? Then we can talk about putting out some feelers.”

  But the truth was I couldn’t get my mind out of those empty corridors. I sat down at my desk and pretended to start. When he walked away, I don’t think I did much other than sit there and stare at the wall. Then, without warning, he was back, standing in the doorway. “Is there anything at all I can do?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s all right. I’ll be okay.”

  He offered to stay with me, but I told him to let it go. “Okay,” he said. “I’m exhausted. Going upstairs to crash.”

  After he left, I put the notebook down and turned on the HV, hoping for word about the Grainger. The networks were constantly announcing breaking news, but it always consisted of informing us that it was still being searched by the SRF team, and that JoAnn and Nick had not yet been found.

  I hadn’t had time to get to know either of them well. Just the two missions. But on that day, I’d have given anything to have them back. What would it have been like to party with JoAnn? And, of course, the dinner with Nick was not going to happen.

  Finally, I settled down to work. I added a couple of items to Alex’s list and had started putting together a sales pitch for them when Lawrence Southwick called. He was seated beside a virtual fireplace. Which contained a virtual fire. That probably meant he was calling from an a
steroid. “Alex is asleep,” I said. “Can I help you, Lawrence?”

  He smiled. “Hi, Chase. Just tell him that the person he should talk to about Zorbas is Marjorie Benjamin. She’s a researcher at the National Institute. She’s spent half her life doing Golden Age research. I’ve let her know you’re interested. Her code’s attached.”

  A few minutes later, Jacob informed me we had a transmission from Khaled. “Hi, Chase,” it said. “I’ve got a vacation coming up, and I’m going to head for Andiquar. I hope that’s okay. I don’t want to rush things, but there doesn’t seem to be any casual way to approach this. I’ll be there in about a month. Will give you more specific information when I have my reservation. I’d love to take you to dinner again.”

  He was obviously giving me time to think about it. As much as I liked him, and felt indebted to him, it was too much too soon. I wasn’t comfortable with the arrangement. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to back away.

  When somebody is crossing worlds to take you to dinner, and the guy has saved your life, it has already gotten serious. I needed the better part of an hour to put together a response that I hoped was appropriate: “Khaled, I enjoyed our time together. But I don’t think allowing ourselves to become emotionally involved right now is a smart idea.”

  * * *

  I went back to thinking about that empty ship while trying to explain why collectors on Rimway would love to acquire a seven-hundred-year-old bracelet worn by a woman who’d set out on a round-the-world trip in a cabin cruiser which was later found abandoned and adrift in the middle of the Pacific, with the bracelet lying on the deck. Or an ID chain that belonged to Chad Tappett, a European champion for animal rights whose career had been cut short when a lion got loose in an incident that many suspected had not been an accident.

  Eventually, I called Shara. She blinked on, wearing a robe and sitting on the edge of a bed. “You hear anything more about the Grainger?” I asked.

  “No. They’ve got six or seven people on board, but last I heard, they still haven’t found them.”

  “You’re crashing early.”

  “I’m wiped out, Chase. I can’t believe I spent so much time just sitting in the Casavant, but I’m exhausted.”