That brought some wisecracks, and Nightingale waved and grinned. “Somebody that gorgeous,” he said, “only an idiot would let go.”
“Alyx Ballinger,” continued Hutch, “came all the way from London to be with us tonight. She is one of the first people ever to set foot in an alien starship. She’ll be appearing in the fall in Virgin Territory, which, I understand, will have a run on Broadway before opening at home. Am I right, Alyx?”
Alyx flashed the smile that had won the hearts of two generations of guys. “That’s right, Hutch. Opening night is September 17.”
“Finally,” Hutch said, “the first guy to understand what the omega clouds were, and to engage with them: Frank Carson.”
All eight were on their feet now, and the audience was having a good time. People who’d been outside in the lobby and in an adjoining meeting room crowded in to see what was going on. Eventually the place quieted, and Hutch made her pitch for donations. When she’d finished, volunteers moved out among the diners and took pledges while she thanked them for their help, explained how the money was going to be used, and warned them it was a gamble. “But everything worthwhile involves a gamble,” she said. “Careers are a gamble. Marriage is a gamble. Think about that first guy to try a parachute. If we wait for certainty, life would be terribly dull.”
She thanked the audience, invited them to stay for the party to follow, and turned it back to the president.
Matt had a hard time getting near her afterward. When finally he got to her side, he thanked her and told her she should have been a politician. “The way you orchestrated that thing in there,” he said, “you’d have gone to the Senate. Easily.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Matt, I didn’t say anything in there I didn’t mean.”
“I know that. That’s not what I was trying to say.”
“Good,” she said. “You probably need a drink.”
“Bringing your friends was a stroke of genius.”
“Thanks. It was Eric’s idea.” She glanced over at Samuels, who was waving his arms as he described the attack at the Origins Project. “He’s a PR guy. He worked for the Academy at the time. Now he helps politicians get elected.”
“Oh.”
She shrugged.
People had clustered around each of the guests, and he found him-self wandering from one group to another. Digger Dunn was entertaining Julie and a few others with a description of unearthing what had appeared to be a television broadcasting station on Quraqua. “We actually had the tapes, but we couldn’t lift anything off them.”
“How old were they?” asked the superintendent of the Arlington school district.
“Thirteen hundred terrestrial years. Give or take. When I think what might have been on them.” He laughed. “An alien sitcom, maybe. Or the late news.”
“Maybe a late-night comic,” said Julie.
“Listen.” Digger became suddenly serious. “We’d have loved to know whether their sense of humor matches ours. Whether they even had a sense of humor.”
“Is there any reason,” Matt asked, “to think they might not?”
“The Noks don’t have one,” he said. “Other than laughing at creatures in distress.” He grinned. “You’d love the Noks.”
“It probably explains,” said a communications technician, “why they’re always fighting with each other.”
Alyx Ballinger was talking about Glitter and Gold, which she’d produced. Somebody changed the subject by asking her how it had felt to go on board the chindi. “Spooky,” she said. “But good spooky. I loved every minute of it.”
Adrian Sax, the teenage son of a restaurant entrepreneur, asked what was the most alien thing she’d seen.
“The Retreat,” she replied.
“I’ve been there,” said Adrian. “It didn’t seem all that alien to me. Oversize rooms, maybe. The proportions are a little strange. But otherwise—”
She nodded. “Well, yes. You’re right. But it’s overlooking the Potomac now. It used to be on a crag on one of the moons circling the Twins. Two big gas giants orbiting each other. In close. You’ve seen them, right? Three systems of rings. A gazillion moons. You go out and sit in that living room there, and you’d feel differently.
“Remote doesn’t quite do it, you know what I mean? They were a hundred light-years from anywhere. People walk around talking about what it means to be alien, and they start describing the physical appearance of the Monument-Makers or how the Goompahs stayed in one part of their world and never spread out. You know what alien means to me? Living in a place like the Retreat and not going crazy.”
Somebody asked Randall Nightingale about the sea lights on Maleiva III. “According to what I read,” he said, “you guys were doing mathematical stuff with something out in the ocean that kept blinking back. Was it a boat?”
“I don’t think so,” Nightingale said. “It was night, but we still could see pretty well. Neither of us saw anything that looked like a boat.” He was referring to MacAllister, who’d been with him that evening.
“So what were you looking at? A squid that could count?”
Nightingale sighed. He was discouraged, not by the question, Matt thought, but by not having an answer. Matt wondered whether people asked him all the time about the lights in the sea.
“We’re not ever going to know,” he said. “Something more valuable than we’d been aware of was lost when Maleiva III went down.”
Matt talked with Frank Carson about that first encounter with the omega clouds. “Hutch figured out it was trying to destroy the lander,” Carson said. “That it didn’t have anything to do with us personally.”
“So what did you do?”
“We landed, got out of it, and ran for the woods.” His face shone as he thought about it. “She’s also the one who put things together about the omegas,” he said. “She’s always more or less given me credit for it, but she was the one who discovered the math patterns.” He hadn’t been young at the time, and a half century had passed. His hair was white now, and he’d gained a little weight, and added some lines around his eyes. But he seemed to grow younger as he thought about those earlier years. “It was a good time to be alive,” he said.
When the evening finally ended, and the guests had gone, and the first tallies came in, the Liberty Club was pleased to discover they’d exceeded their objective by a considerable amount. Matt was now in a position to trade a laboratory for the Jenkins lander.
“What’s wrong, Matt?” asked one of the volunteers. “We couldn’t have done much better.”
“Just tired,” he said. Just a real estate agent.
Hutch is as persuasive as ever. Pity she can’t see reason. The last thing we need is starships. The problems are along the coastlines and in the agricultural areas. Until we get the greenhouse situation under control, this other stuff is a waste of resources. I was embarrassed being there tonight. Still, there was no way I could say no when she asked me to come. And she knew that. Sometimes I think the woman has no morals.
Chapter 13
Matt brought in technicians to inspect the MacElroy High School lander and get it ready for flight. They spent several days working on it, seated an AI and a new antigrav unit, replaced the attitude thrusters, installed a pair of what Jon called Locarno scramblers on the hull, and upgraded life support. When they’d finished, Myra arranged a brief Saturday ceremony. It rained, and they had to move the proceedings indoors. A lot of kids came anyhow. Some media arrived, and that was what Myra cared about. She took advantage of the occasion to comment formally on the proposed state sales tax, which she opposed. She hoped to ride that opposition to the senate. When she’d finished, she summoned Matt to the lectern and formally handed over the keycard. “Bring it back to us, Matt,” she said. And everyone laughed and applauded.