A Voice in the Night

by Jack McDevitt

  “It had military implications.”

  She folded her arms and Holmes sat waiting. “Mrs. Daniels,” he said finally, “can you be more explicit?”

  “He said that it could be used to develop a single bomb that would have the capability to destroy London. And I know how that sounds. I didn’t believe it either. I still don’t. But he did.”

  “I see,” said Holmes.

  “Please,” she said. “Keep this to yourself. I’ll deny it if it gets out.”

  “We won’t reveal any of this unless it becomes necessary.”

  “He would not want you to say anything, Mr. Holmes, even if his reputation was at stake.”

  “It’s not likely to matter because the research was completed by Albert Einstein. Mrs. Daniels, thank you for your assistance.” Holmes looked my way. “Well, Henry, I think we’re done here.”

  “Mr. Holmes,” she asked. “What do you plan to do?”

  “A single bomb capable of destroying London? I think perhaps whatever would later bring on the stroke was already making Addison delusional. It hardly seems like something we need worry about.”

  I went on to Germany, did some sight-seeing, and visited relatives. When I got back to Baltimore, a letter was waiting for me. It was from Holmes. He said he’d passed the information on to his brother Mycroft, who has a position high in the British government. “Mycroft checked with Einstein,” he wrote. “We’ve been advised there’s no reason for concern.”

  BLOOD WILL TELL

  Written with Tom Easton

  Andy Pharon didn’t know why he spent an hour every morning on FaceBook. Scandal! Outrage! Funny pussycats! More outrage! He might have been reading a tabloid, except that FaceBook was more respectable. Which mattered since he was in Larry’s.

  Martha came over. “Everything okay, Andy?”

  “Excellent.” He gave her his standard thumbs-up.

  He was relieved moments later when his email dinged. Sarah Mills, Chief Development Officer at BioFutures Labs, wanted more ideas. Meeting at ten. Be there!

  He finished his sweet roll and sipped his coffee. More ideas. He had nothing, but he couldn’t say that, could he?

  That was when the old guy with the roller bag squeezed between tables and stopped beside his chair. He was too well dressed to be a drifter but Andy still shook his head as he turned away for another sip of coffee.

  “I thought I remembered this place,” the guy said. “Came here every morning for five years.”

  Andy concentrated on his coffee cup and said nothing. Give ’em an inch, and they’ll take a mile. Ten miles.

  The guy looked down at him. “Hi, Andy. How’s it going?”

  “You know my name?”

  “Sure. I’m you.”

  “What?” His face was lined and seamed, age spots, hardly any hair. Fifty years older than Andy. “Would you please go away?”

  “We’ll get time travel in about thirty years.” He smiled. “I need a favor.”

  If this had been an email, he would have hit delete. “Go away, gramps!”

  The guy sighed. “I knew you would react that way. That I would. That I had. But I’m not a scammer. I don’t want your money. And I already have your ID.” He pulled out a chair and lowered himself into it. Then he produced a wallet. “See?”

  Driver’s license. His picture with the name Andrew Pharon. Birth date was correct. Issue date: 2072. That would make him over eighty.

  Andy stared at him. The guy was smiling. “What do you want?”

  The smile faded. “Some of your blood.”

  Andy sat frozen. Had his life turned into a vampire fantasy?

  “Just some plasma, actually.”

  “Why?”

  “Your people are already working on it. Putting young plasma into an old body can turn the clock back.”

  Andy nodded. It was true… “But why me?” Even as he spoke, he knew the answer. His own young plasma would work better than anyone else’s. He really was a time-traveler.

  Andrew grinned and delivered his standard thumbs-up, removing all doubt.

  “Andy!” Martha waved at him. “You gonna be late!”

  He waved back. This was one reason he liked Larry’s. They cared.

  The old guy was still sitting there, waiting for his response. But it was ridiculous. Time travel wasn’t possible. “You have got to be pulling my leg.”

  The guy shook his head. “No. I just need a couple of pints today, and again next week and the week after.” He looked at his bag. “The equipment’s right here.”

  “I’m sure it is. But there’s no way I’m letting you stick needles in me. And I’ve got to run.” Andy tucked his tablet into his briefcase and stood.

  “But…!” He looked stricken, as if he had never dreamed that his own self would turn him down. “But I’m you! We’re even closer than blood kin!”

  “Pardon me. I have to leave.” Incredibly, the guy was smiling as Andy went out the door.

  He glanced over his shoulder and headed down the sidewalk, barely noticing the fumes of the remaining gasburners or the fragrance of the vagrant at the corner. The old guy wasn’t following him. Thank God. Maybe he should switch coffee shops for a few days. But then the guy might just show up on his doorstep. That would freak the hell out of his girlfriend.

  Okay. Now he had to come up with an idea for Sarah.

  BioFutures focused on the microbiome. Their last big success was a probiotic ointment for getting rid of acne. Lately they’d been working on figuring out how to manipulate bacteria in the gut to control obesity. They were close, which was why they needed new ideas. Had to keep the pipeline flowing.

  Maybe the old guy had something? Not time travel. But he recalled reading something about plasma and aging. It wouldn’t take long to check.

  Once in the building, he went directly to his cube and started the search. And yes, they were working on it, testing it on people, and making slow progress. The idea went back a century, when someone spliced the veins of a young mouse and an old mouse together. The old one got perkier, healthier, younger. The young one aged.

  And plasma could be frozen.

  He almost laughed.

  It took him an hour to write the proposal: Start with some research into whether one’s own young plasma is really better than a stranger’s. Use mice, since the difference between young and old isn’t great. If it checks out, then start collecting plasma, freeze it, store it, and when the donor turns into an old guy…

  He thought Sarah would like it. It was the perfect business plan, complete with references and links. Sell a promise, much like the old cryonics scam. Collect the money now, and worry later about whether the product actually works. Though this one seemed a much more likely success than cryonics ever had.

  He would be among the very first to bank his plasma. And his older self knew how it had worked out. No wonder he’d sat there smiling when Andy walked out.

  BLINKER

  The second shock hit as Ward stepped off the ladder onto lunar rock.

  “Look out.” Amy’s startled voice rang in his earphones.

  The ground swayed. Dust rose. He looked up at her.

  “Twice in one day,” she said. “Is it always like this?”

  “Didn’t used to be.” Ward had lived here almost five years, before they’d automated everything, and moved everyone back to Moonbase. Or Earth. He didn’t think there’d been more than a dozen quakes during that whole time.

  “Glad to hear it. Maybe we need to do a seismic survey.”

  “I hate to put it this way, but it’s your problem now.” As of noon, Amy Quinn had become the new director of the NASA/Smithsonian Farside Observatory. Ward was officially on his way home.

  The ground steadied.

  The observatory, a dome and a smaller saddle-shaped building and a field of eighty-six radio telescopes on tracks, had been humanity’s most remote penetration, unless you counted computers and robots. And Ward never counted them.

&nb
sp; It was located on the far side of the moon just south of Moscoviensse. A place its one-time inhabitants had cheerfully called World’s End.

  The complex lay atop a group of low gray hills. The dome was sixty-one meters high, roughly fourteen stories. The outer lens of the magnificent twenty-seven meter multiple-mirror Schramm reflector penetrated its polished surface, black and smooth. The Schramm was the biggest optical telescope in existence.

  The saddle-shaped building had provided living quarters and technical support for the crew and staff of seven. This was the annex, and it was connected with the dome by a ground level passageway. Starlight shone through the passageway’s walls.

  Solar collectors crowded the roof of the annex. A laserburst antenna turned slowly on its axis, tracking a comsat. Its windows were dark and empty. Beyond, the tracked telescopes pointed their dishes toward the radio galaxy Perseus Alpha.

  Home.

  Amy climbed cautiously down the ladder, and dropped to the ground. “It feels depressing,” she said. “You actually lived out here?”

  “Five years.”

  Her expression registered sympathy, admiration, and astonishment.

  “It was a good experience,” Ward said. “We had top people, and we were in on everything that was happening.” Moreover they had all liked one another, and they were away from the bureaucratic pressures and monumental egos one normally found in terrestrial facilities. Ward had never understood how it happened that so exemplary a staff would be assembled at one site: Bentwood and Kramer and the two Andersons and Mau-Tai and Ali. And when they retired or moved on, the replacements also seemed extraordinary: people with talent and a sense of humor and a willingness to jump in and do any kind of job.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, doubtfully.

  The first quake, eight hours earlier, had hit while she and Ward were admiring the sharp clarity of the image of the irregular galaxy NGC-1198. One of the technicians was pointing out a Cepheid variable when the Cepheid abruptly faded back into the river of light, and the river dimmed to a smudge.

  Monitors indicated almost no damage to the complex, save for the Allison amplifier, which was ironically the guts of the Schramm.

  Ordinarily, Ward would simply have sent out a tech to fix the problem. But he wanted to see World’s End one more time before he went back to Earth. Furthermore, he told himself, Amy should be exposed to the facility she was about to direct.

  He carried the replacement amplifier in a canvas bag slung over his right shoulder. It bounced against his side as he walked uphill. It was good to be back. The air in his helmet was cool and fresh. It moved across his face, tasting of ozone, as if there had just been a thunderstorm. The suit was bulky, but not burdensome in the light gravity.

  The complex loomed ahead dark and vaguely gothic in the starlight. “It has a lot of atmosphere,” Ward said.

  Amy chuckled. “You got that right.” And it may have been that something in his voice caught at her. “You’re really attached to this place, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. It’s the last outpost.” He slowed down for her, mindful that she was not used to the gravity.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Everything’s unmanned now. The Titan mission will be unmanned. Mars is unmanned. They even pulled us out of here.”

  “But, Edgar, there’s no point keeping anyone here now. You can sit back at Moonbase and run things just as easily.”

  “I know. And there’s no point sending people to Titan either. But what’s the point of going if we don’t really go?”

  They crunched up a mild incline and stopped in front of the annex. Ward raised a remote. Lights blinked on inside. He touched it again, and the connecting passageway to the dome lit up. The airlock door swung open.

  “I envy you,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m glad I’m leaving.”

  They passed into the lock and he started the cycle.

  “You’re right,” she said. “We are entering an exciting period.”

  He nodded. They were closing in finally on the great questions. Was the universe open or closed? Flat? Or twisted? What had happened to the quantum energy of the original vacuum? What was the nature of the force that had called the cosmos into being? Why did the galaxies recede only at discrete velocities?

  In better days, he and his small band of colleagues, isolated on the far side of the moon, had enjoyed the illusion that they were at the front of the wave, that they were in fact virtually alone in running the universe to ground, inhibited only by the demanding voices from Greenwich, Harvard, and Sidney.

  She gazed at him thoughtfully. “What are your plans, Edgar?”

  “CalTech. I’ll be working with Lasker.”

  “You don’t sound all that enthusiastic.”

  “Oh, it’s a good situation.” Maybe there was a sense that his life had peaked and started downhill. Maybe it had to do with returning to the scratching and clawing of workaday cosmology. Maybe he was just tired.

  The annex was more sterile than he remembered it: a large two-story open well not unlike a garage. Offices ringed the upper level. A rover, a crane, and a pair of motorized dollies were parked in their stalls. Cabinets and cases and empty pallets lined the walls. Life Support was off to their right.

  Ward struggled out of his pressure suit and hung it in the rack. The temperature, which was usually maintained a few degrees above freezing to protect the equipment, had been raised to a balmy sixty-eight.

  Amy was a slender woman, in all senses of the word. On the moon, she weighed maybe seventeen pounds. She appeared to be approaching fifty, but Cal Wilkin, who had worked with her during her Harvard years, said she’d trampled that figure long ago. Her eyes were green and animated. There was something of the aristocrat about her: he suspected she had been born into money. He knew she had gone to the best schools, and was accustomed to being treated with deference. He grinned at the thought of the demands, whines, and threats she would have to deal with in parceling out time on the big scope.

  He pointed to a heavy door in the rear of the building. “Back there,” he said, “are the old living quarters. Room for eighteen people. Although we never had that many. But we did get a lot of visitors.” At one time, World’s End had been the lunar showcase. VIP’s always swung by the great observatory, to look through the eyepiece, and drink coffee with the recluses.

  The passageway to the dome connected on their left. Ward touched a presspad. Circuits bleeped and sighed. The door retracted into the overhead. He heard her catch her breath: the walls were transparent and seemed to open out into the moonscape. The lighting was soft, and the shadows of the rocks blended with those of the furnishings. Padded chairs and worktables were neatly arranged in clusters. Several wooden tubs were set off to one side. “We had a lot of greenery here at one time,” he said. In those days this lounge area had been filled with blossoms and potted trees. One of the tables was still set for poker, which had been the game of choice.

  They stepped through, and the lock sealed behind them.

  He dimmed the lights, and they might have been standing on the naked surface. The stars blazed overhead. It was a stunning effect.

  Amy stared out at the sky. “It’s gorgeous,” she said.

  “Like nowhere else.”

  He opened up the air lock at the far end, and they strolled into the dome. Ward had always been proud to show off the Schramm. It tended to awe the dullest of visitors. It was the instrument of Jhard’ahl and Pierce and Brandenberg. “A lot of history has been made here,” he said.

  The telescope dwarfed them. It was as big as a jumbo jet. But it was far lovelier. Its cream-colored casing was smooth and tapered and exquisitely balanced in a network of struts and braces and beams. It was enormous, and its power and beauty stirred his soul. Magnificent.

  The observer’s cage was mounted on the side of the telescope, seven stories overhead. It was accessible from one of the two turrets that supported t
he instrument. Deep within the reflector, tiny motors whirred. The Schramm was moving, the entire dome was moving, adjusting to the motion of the Moon, tracking a target. Ward took out a notebook. “4C-1651,” he said.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “It’s tracking Keeler’s quasar. Do you know Keeler? He’ll be one of your biggest problems. At this moment he’s getting a screwed-up image. He’s not happy, and he’s probably on the circuit screaming at Ops.”

  “Well, I suppose he has reason to be upset.”

  “He upsets at a low level.” Ward was about to launch into a Keeler story when the third shock hit.

  A ripple rolled through the floor, and the lights dipped. He tightened his grip on the amplifier. Before he was quite certain what had happened, the sensation was gone. The internal motors seemed to kick up a notch. That might mean the telescope had been jarred out of position, and they were making adjustments.

  “That was a big one,” said Amy. She glanced around uncertainly. “Are we okay?”

  “I think so.”

  The observer’s cage suddenly looked desperately high. Not a place to be during a quake. Damn. He wondered whether any more jolts were coming. It almost seemed as if the old place was irritated with him.

  He went into the operations office, and activated the commlink. “Moonbase,” he said, “this is Ward.”

  “Go ahead, Edgar.” Bill Clayton’s voice. The duty officer.

  “We are going offline with the Schramm.”

  “That’s a roger. How long do you expect to be down?”

  He looked at Amy. “Hard to say.” He might need only to reset the present unit. An hour or so. On the other hand, the amplifier could be wedged in tight. “Could be a few hours,” he said. That would be more than enough time. But it would upset a lot of people who were using the scope.

  “Roger. We copy.”

  He signed off.

  The Schramm coded its images, which were then transmitted by laserburst to the sensors of a comsat. The comsat converted the signal to radio, and broadcast to Moonbase, which handled relay to Earth. Now Ward broke that link.