Omega к-4

by Джек Макдевитт

  He produced an opener, wrestled the cork out of the bottle, and filled two glasses. She was tempted to embrace him. But the formality of the occasion overwhelmed the impulse. “To you, Hutch,” he said. “Never let go.”

  It was an echo of the now-celebrated comment by Randall Nightingale, when, with bleeding and broken hands, he’d pulled her out of the clouds over Deepsix. I’d never have dropped you, Hutch. It had become a kind of informal Academy watchword.

  Their eyes met over the rims of the glasses. Then the moment passed, and it was back to work. He handed her a disk and a sheaf of documents. “You’ll want to look at these,” he said. “It’s all administrative stuff, position description, personnel considerations, and so on. And there are a few operational issues in there you’ll need to do something with.”

  Hutch was no connoisseur, but she knew good wine when she tasted it. He held out the bottle for her. Did she want more?

  Yes! But she was too well bred to drink up the man’s expensive store. As a compromise, she accepted a half glass. “Michael,” she said, “did you know one of the clouds has changed course?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I heard.”

  “I’m concerned there might be somebody out there.”

  He beamed. Not to worry. “Let’s wait and see,” he said.

  “If there is, would the Academy support intervention?”

  His face wrinkled and he made growling noises in his throat. “That could get a little uncomfortable, couldn’t it?”

  “We’d probably have to violate the Protocol.”

  He waved the problem away. “No,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. There’s no one there.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “There’s never anybody there.” He smiled paternally at her and studied his glass. “I’ve been in this office, or otherwise associated with the Academy, for more than twenty years. Do you know how many times we’ve gotten reports that somebody thought they’d found someone? And you know how many times it actually happened?”

  “Twice,” she said. That would be the Angels. And the Hawks.

  “That’s right. And you were there for one of those. Now if we go back another twenty-five years, there are two more. That makes four. In all that time. Out of thousands of systems visited. Four. I suggest we put it aside and find more important things to worry about.”

  The door opened behind her, as if by magic, and he was ushering her out of the room.

  “If it happens,” she persisted, “we’re going to be pressed for time.”

  “We’ll worry about it when it does, Priscilla.” His smile disappeared as if someone had thrown a switch.

  HUTCH CALLED UP the archive files on the Pasquarella, the first vehicle lost researching the clouds. That had been twenty years before. It was a voice-only, the voice belonging to Meg Campbell, the only person on the ship. Hutch had seen Meg once, from the back of a lecture hall. She’d been a tall woman, dark hair, lots of presence. Very sure of herself.

  Hutch played it through, listened to the voice she remembered, not from the long-ago presentation, but because she’d played that same record any number of times. Meg had gone three times into the cloud, each descent deeper, each time encountering more electronic interference.

  She hadn’t come back from the third descent. A search had revealed nothing, and on July 14, 2211, the Pasquarella was officially designated lost.

  In the middle of the recording, Barbara’s voice broke in. “Transmission for you, ma’am. From Serenity.”

  She switched off the recording. “Put it up, Barb.”

  As soon as she saw Audrey’s face, she knew there was bad news. “Hutch,” Audrey said, “we lost contact with the Quagmor at 0014 hours 24 February. The AI went down without warning. They found an artifact yesterday in the vicinity of the Bumblebee and were investigating. The Heffernan has been diverted and will arrive in the area in three days. Record from Quagmor is attached.”

  Her stomach churned. It was possible there was nothing more to it than a communication breakdown. Then she watched the attached report.

  NEWSDESK

  PITCHERS, CATCHERS REPORT TO SPRING TRAINING

  Forty-six Teams Start Today

  STRANDED ORCA RESCUED IN PUGET SOUND

  AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS STILL LOSING GROUND

  Who Was Churchill? Nobody Knows

  GOMORRAH COUNTY RESIDENTS SUE TO CHANGE NAME

  MASKED ROBBER WEARS NAME ON ARM

  Tattoo Leads to Arrest

  ORBITAL AMUSEMENT PARK GETS OKAY

  ZeroGee Will Open in Two Years

  UNN SURVEY: HALF OF ALL AMERICANS BELIEVE ASTROLOGY WORKS

  WHO WILL BE ONE-HUNDREDTH PRESIDENT?

  Campaign Gets Under Way in Utah, Ontario

  BASEBALL: MOVE TO OUTLAW ENHANCEMENTS GAINS STEAM

  Evidence Mounts of Long-term Damage

  GREAT GATSBY FIRST EDITION SELLS FOR 3.6 MILLION

  IBC WARNS OF STRONGER HURRICANES

  Southern Coast Overdue for Big One

  chapter 4

  On board the William B. Jenkins.

  Tuesday, February 25.

  EXCEPT FOR ONE person, the research team on the Jenkins was delighted to be diverted. The fact that an omega had veered into a planetary system might mean they were close to finding the grail, a living alien civilization. A real one, something more exotic than the Angels, who were pretechnological barbarians, or the Noks, who were industrial-age barbarians. The exception was Digby Dunn, who would ordinarily have joined in the general elation. But Digby was in love with the captain. Her name was Kellie Collier, and Digby’s passion for her was both intense and unrelenting.

  On the whole, it had been a painful experience. Love affairs always include an element of discomfort; it is part of what makes them life-changing ventures. But this one had been extraordinarily difficult. Passengers may not touch the captain. Bad for morale and all that. Impossible situation, Digger. We’ll just have to wait until we get clear. Be patient and everything’ll be fine.

  She smiled, that gorgeous, alluring smile, rendered even more seductive because she was trying to make it impersonal, friendly, understanding. Lose my job, she’d added on occasion when he’d tried to press her.

  They’d been headed back to the station when the call came. We’ve got an omega changing course. Turn left and find out what’s going on. See what it’s after.

  So Digby, an anthropologist by trade, but riding as a volunteer with a survey mission that was gathering information about local stars and planetary systems, pretended to be pleased, exchanged platitudes with everybody, and aimed pained glances at Kellie.

  “Sorry,” she told him. “But look, it’ll be quick. In and out, see what’s there, and then back to Broadside. We’re only talking a couple of extra weeks.”

  She was tall and lovely with soft black skin and luminous eyes and she made every other woman in his life seem hopelessly dull. Ah yes, how he’d like to take her out on an expedition to unearth a few ancient cookpots. But he resigned himself to making an occasional grab, which she usually—but not always—declined with stern disapproval. “Be patient,” she told him. “Our time is coming.”

  The Jenkins was more than three thousand light-years out, and they held the current record for going farther from Earth than any other ship. They’d been away from Broadside almost a year. It had been a long and lonely voyage by any standard, broken only by an occasional rendezvous with a supply vessel.

  A rendezvous was always a special occasion. There had been a push at the Academy to automate replenishment, to send the sandwiches in a ship directed only by an AI. Asquith had been unable to see the point of sending a captain along since it cost a great deal more, and it was hard to visualize a situation in which human judgment might be needed. But somebody apparently understood what seeing a fresh face could mean when you were out in the deeps.

  Jack Markover had thrown his weight into the fight by threatening to quit and hold a news confere
nce if they took the human captains off the run. The commissioner had backed down, pretended it had been someone else’s idea, and it had been quietly put aside.

  Jack was the chief of mission. He was a little man with a hawk face and too much energy. He loved his work and, if he’d been forced to follow through on his threat, would not have survived. He talked about retirement a lot, usually during the gray hours when the Jenkins was in hyperflight, and the hours were long and quiet. But Digger knew he’d never step down, that one day they’d have to haul him off and lock him away.

  Digger had never quite figured out what Jack’s specialty was. He was from the American Midwest, a quiet, dedicated type with doctorates in physics and literature. There seemed to be no field of human knowledge in which he did not speak as an expert. Acquainted with all, he was fond of saying, knowledgeable in none.

  The comment could hardly have been less true. Where Digger knew the ground, the man inevitably had his facts down. He was the only person Digger knew who could explain Radcliffe’s equations, quote Paradise Lost, discuss the implications of the Dialogues, play Mozart with panache, and hold forth on the history of the Quraquat.

  Kellie loved him, Digger thought of him as the grandfather he’d never known, and Mark Stevens, who usually piloted the supply ship, was fond of saying the only reason he agreed to keep doing the flights was to spend a few hours with Jack Markover every couple of months.

  The fourth member of the research team was Winnie Colgate. Winnie had been through a couple of marriages. Both had expired, according to Winnie, amiably under mutual agreement. But there was an undercurrent of anger that suggested things had not been so amiable. And Digger suspected that Winnie would be slow to try the game again.

  She had begun her professional life as a cosmologist, and she periodically commented that her great regret was that she would not live long enough to see the solutions to the great problems: whether there was a multiverse, what had caused the Big Bang, whether there was a purpose to it all. Digger thought they were adrift in a cosmic bingo game; Jack could not believe stars and people had happened by accident. Winnie kept an open mind, meaning that she changed her opinions from day to day.

  She was blond, quiet, affable. It was no secret that she was entranced by Jack, would have taken him into her bed, but Jack was something of a Puritan about sex, didn’t believe you should do it outside marriage. In any case, he behaved like Kellie, apparently convinced that his position as head of mission would in some way be compromised if he started sleeping with the staff.

  Digger wished for it to happen, because it would have eased his way with Kellie. But, unhappily, Jack held his ground and respected Wendy’s virtue.

  JACK MARKOVER HAD spent half his career on these missions, and had come to doubt the wisdom of his choice. He’d staked everything on the glorious possibility of making the first major contact. There was a time when it had seemed easy. Almost inevitable. Just get out there and do it. But that had been during an era of overt optimism, when the assumption had been that every world on which life was possible would inevitably develop a biosystem, and that once you got a biosystem you would eventually get tribal chiefs and math teachers. It was true that the habitable worlds orbiting the sun’s immediate neighbors had been sterile, but that had seemed like no more than a caprice.

  Now he wondered whether they’d all simply read too much science fiction.

  He knew what his reputation was. Hi, Jack, find any little green men yet? He had, after each of the last two missions, gone home determined not to come out again. But it was like a siren call, the sense that he might quit just one mission too soon. So he knew that, whatever happened this time, whatever he might think about retiring to Cape Cod, he’d be back out again, poking a new set of worlds. Hoping to find the big prize.

  To date, during the past year, they had looked at seventy-nine systems, all with stable suns. The stated purpose of the mission was strictly survey. They were accumulating information and, especially, noting planets that might become future habitats without extensive terraforming. They’d found one life-supporting world, but the life-forms were microscopic. In his entire career, across thirty-five years, Jack had seen only nine worlds on which life had gotten a foothold and been able to sustain itself. There’d been two others on which conditions had changed, an atmosphere grown too thin, a passing star scrambling an orbit, and the life-forms had died out. And that was it.

  On each of the living worlds, the bioforms were still microscopic. He had never gone to a previously unvisited world and seen so much as a blade of grass.

  The omega was approximately 41,000 kilometers through the middle, big as these things went. It had turned, had adjusted course, was still turning. It was also decelerating. You could see it because the cloud had lost its spherical shape. As it decelerated, sections of mist broke loose and fountained forward.

  The turn was so slight as to be barely discernible. Jack was surprised it had been detected at all. Observers must have been watching the object over a period of months to make the determination. Then he realized that, because it was approaching a planetary system, the Academy would have been paying special attention.

  The Jenkins spent several days doing measurements and collecting readings, sometimes standing off at thousands of kilometers, sometimes pushing uncomfortably close to the cloud front. The numbers confirmed what Broadside had: It was angling into the planetary system.

  It wasn’t hard to find the target.

  If the braking continued at the present level, and the turn continued as it was going, the omega would shortly line up on a vector that would bring it to a rendezvous with the third planet.

  The Jenkins was still too far away to see details. But Jack reported to Broadside. “Looks like a December 14 intersect, Vadim,” he told them. “We’ll head over there and take a look.”

  IT WAS THEIR custom to name each terrestrial world they investigated. Although the names were not official, and each planet would continue to be referred to in formal communications by a numerical designator attached to its star’s catalog number, unofficially it was easier to think in terms of Brewster’s World, or Backwater, or Blotto. (Brewster had been Winnie’s companion in her first foray to the altar. The world got its name because it had achieved tidal lock, so the sun, viewed from the surface, “just sat there, doing nothing.”)

  It was Kellie’s turn to name the new one. “This might turn out to be a special place,” she said. “When I was a kid we lived near Lookout Point in northern New York. I loved the place. We used to go there and have picnics. You could see the Hudson in the distance.”

  “So you want to call it Lookout Point?”

  “Lookout would be good, I think.”

  And so Lookout it became.

  The ship made a jump to get within an AU, and began its approach. They were still much too far for the telescopes to make out any detail. But they discovered immediately that no electronic envelope surrounded the world.

  That news produced mixed feelings. Like everyone else, Digger would have liked to see a world with an advanced civilization. It had never happened, and it would be a huge achievement. On the other hand, there was the cloud. Better, he told himself, it should be empty, and the cloud being drawn by unusual rock formations. Or by ruins, like at Moonlight.

  By the third day, the disk that represented Lookout was still only a bright sprinkle of light to the naked eye. In the scopes, however, it was covered with clouds. The only visible surface was blue. An ocean. “It has a big moon,” said Winnie, watching the data come in from the sensors. “Two moons, in fact.”

  The presence of a large moon was thought to be critical to the development of civilizations. Or, for that matter, of large land animals.

  The filters reduced the reflection and they were watching two disks and a star, the larger several times the diameter of its companion. The star was the second moon, which was probably a captured asteroid. They brought the images up to full mag and concentrated on
the big moon, looking for signs that someone had been there. But they were still too far away. A building the size of Berlin’s Bergmann Tower would not have been visible at that range.

  It was a strange feeling. How many times had they approached worlds like this, literally praying for an earthwork, for a wall, for a light on the sea? And tonight—it was just short of midnight GMT—Digger hoped they would see only the usual barren plains.

  The clarity of the images grew. Lookout had white cumulus clouds. Continents. Archipelagoes.

  The continents were green.

  They shook hands when they saw that. But it was a muted round of celebration.

  The poles were white, the oceans blue.

  “Looks like Earth,” Wendy said, as if she were pronouncing sentence.

  ON THE FOURTH day they were able to pick up physical features, mountain ranges, river valleys, large brown patches that might have been plains. A section of the night side was visible, and they searched it eagerly for lights, but saw nothing.

  They slept in shifts, when they slept at all. Usually, they dozed off in the common room, and left only to head for the washroom or to get something to eat. They began imagining they saw things. Someone would sit before a monitor tapping it with a pen, observing that there are lines here, looks like a building, or something there, in the harbor, maybe improvements. At one point, Winnie was convinced she could make out a mountain road, and Digger claimed he saw wakes at sea, maybe from ships. Kellie wondered whether she hadn’t spotted a dam on one of the rivers, and Jack saw changes in the color of the land that suggested agricultural development.

  But in the growing clarity of the telescopes, everything faded, save forest, jungle, rivers, and coastline. The arc of the night side remained dark.

  THERE WAS A substantial cloud cover, and storms were everywhere. Blizzards covered the high northern and low southern latitudes, a hurricane churned through one of the oceans, and lightning flickered in the temperate zones. Rain seemed to be falling on every continent. Bill did the usual measurements and posted the results. The planet was about 6 percent smaller than the Earth. Axial tilt twenty-six degrees. (Axial tilt was another factor that seemed to be significant if a world was to develop a biosystem. All known living worlds ranged between eighteen and thirty-one degrees.)