And so matters stood as we went through our eighth and final point and emerged barely eight hundred thousand kilometers from the thriving colony world Taimyr... and found it deserted. —
"Still nothing," Alana said tightly, her voice reflecting both the remnants of cascade depression and the shock of our impossible discovery. "No response to our call; nothing on any frequency I can pick up. I can't even find the comm satellites' lock signal."
I nodded, my eyes on the scope screen as the Dancer's telescope slowly scanned Taimyr's dark side. No lights showed anywhere. Shifting the aim, I began searching for the nine comm and nav satellites that should be circling the planet. "Alana, call up the astrogate again and find out what it's giving as position uncertainty."
"If you're thinking we're in the wrong system, forget it," she said as she tapped keys.
"Just cheeking all possibilities," I muttered. The satellites, too, were gone. I leaned back in my seat and bit at my lip.
"Yeah. Well, from eighteen positively identified stars we've got an error of no more than half a light-hour." She swiveled to face me and I saw the fear starting to grow behind her eyes. "Pall, what is going on here? Two hundred million people can't just disappear without a trace."
I shrugged helplessly. "A nuclear war could do it, I suppose, and might account for the satellites being gone as well. But there's no reason why anyone on Taimyr should have any nuclear weapons." Leaning forward again, I activated the helm. "A better view might help. If there's been some kind of war the major cities should now be big craters surrounded by rubble. I'm going to take us in and see what the day side looks like from high orbit."
"Do you think that's safe? I mean—" She hesitated. "Suppose the attack came from outside Taimyr?"
"What, you mean like an invasion?" I shook my head. "Even if there are alien intelligences somewhere who would want to invade us, we stand just as good a chance of getting away from orbit as we do from here."
"All right," she sighed. "But I'm setting up a cascade point maneuver, just in case. Do you think we should alert everybody yet?"
"Crewers, yes; passengers, no. I don't want any silly questions until I'm ready to answer them."
We took our time approaching Taimyr, but caution turned out to be unnecessary. No ships, human or otherwise, waited in orbit for us; no one hailed or shot at us; and as I turned the telescope planetward I saw no signs of warfare.
Nor did I see any cities, farmland, factories, or vehicles. It was as if Taimyr the colony had never existed.
"It doesn't make any sense," Matope said after I'd explained things over the crew intercom hookup. "How could a whole colony disappear?"
"I've looked up the records we've got on Taimyr," Pascal spoke up. "Some of the tropical vegetation is pretty fierce in the growth department. If everyone down there was killed by a plague or something, it's possible the plants have overgrown everything."
"Except that most of the cities are in temperate regions," I said shortly, "and two are smack in the middle of deserts. I can't find any of those, either."
"Hmm," Pascal said and fell silent, probably already hard at work on a new theory.
"Captain, you don't intend to land, do you?" Sarojis asked. "If launch facilities are gone and not merely covered over we'd be unable to lift again to orbit."
"I'm aware of that, and I have no intention of landing," I assured him. "But something's happened down there, and I'd like to get back to Earth with at least some idea of what."
"Maybe nothing's happened to the colony," Wilkinson said slowly. "Maybe something's happened to us."
"Such as?"
"Well... this may sound strange, but suppose we've somehow gone back in time, back to before the colony was started."
"That's crazy," Sarojis scoffed before I could say anything. "How could we possibly do something like that?"
"Malfunction of the field generator, maybe?" Wilkinson suggested. "There's a lot we don't know about Colloton space."
"It doesn't send ships back in—"
"All right, ease up," I told Sarojis. Beside me Alana snorted suddenly and reached for her keyboard. "I agree the idea sounds crazy, but whole cities don't just walk off, either," I continued. "It's not like there's a calendar we can look at out here, either. If we were a hundred years in the past, how would we know it?"
"Check the star positions," Matope offered.
"No good; the astrogate program would have noticed if anything was too far out of place. But I expect that still leaves us a possible century or more to rattle around in." "No, it doesn't." Alana turned back to me with a grimly satisfied look on her face. "I've just taken signals from three pulsars. Compensating for our distance from Earth gives the proper rates for all three."
"Any comments on that?" I asked, not expecting any. Pulsar signals occasionally break their normal pattern and suddenly increase their pulse frequency, but it was unlikely to have happened in three of the beasts simultaneously; and in the absence of such a glitch the steady decrease in frequency was as good a calendar as we could expect to find.
There was a short pause; then Tobbar spoke up. "Captain, I think maybe it's time to bring the passengers in on this. We can't hide the fact that we're in Taimyr system, so they're bound to figure out sooner or later that something's wrong. And I think they'll be more cooperative if we volunteer the information rather than making them demand it."
"What do we need their cooperation for?" Sarojis snorted.
"If you bothered to listen as much as you talked," Tobbar returned, a bit tartly, "you'd know that Chuck Raines is an advanced student in astrophysics and Dr. Chileogu has done a fair amount of work on Colloton field mathematics. I'd say chances are good that we're going to need help from one or both of them before this is all over."
I looked at Alana, raised my eyebrows questioningly. She hesitated, then nodded. "All right," I said. "Matope, you'll stay on duty down there; Alana will be in command here. Everyone else will assemble in the dining room. The meeting will begin in ten minutes."
I waited for their acknowledgments and then flipped off the intercom. "I'd like to be there," Alana said.
"I know," I said, raising my palms helplessly. "But I have to be there, and someone's got to keep an eye on things outside."
"Pascal or Sarojis could do it."
"True—and under normal circumstances I'd let them. But we're facing an unknown and potentially dangerous situation, and I need someone here whose judgment I trust."
She took a deep breath, exhaled loudly. "Yeah. Well... at least let me listen in by intercom, okay?"
"I'd planned to," I nodded. Reaching over, I touched her shoulder. "Don't worry; Bradley can handle the news."
"I know," she said, with a vehemence that told me she wasn't anywhere near that certain. Sighing, I flipped the PA switch and made the announcement.
—
They took the news considerably better than I'd expected them to—possibly, I suspected, because the emotional kick hadn't hit them yet.
"But this is absolutely unbelievable, Captain Durriken," Lissa Steadman said when I'd finished. She was a rising young business-administration type who I half- expected to call for a committee to study the problem. "How could a whole colony simply vanish?"
"My question exactly," I told her. "We don't know yet, but we're going to try and find out before we head back to Earth."
"We're just going to leave?" Mr. Eklund asked timidly from the far end of the table. His hand, on top of the table, gripped his wife's tightly, and I belatedly remembered they'd been going to Taimyr to see a daughter who'd emigrated some thirty years earlier. Of all aboard, they had lost the most when the colony vanished.