A dozen or more townspeople had recorded statements, showing the cameras pieces of burnt metal said to be from the intruder. Within the first twenty-four hours, the army had come and made off with the evidence. And according to townspeople, the ship itself.
And that was it.
FOR GEORGE, IT became a quest.
Specialists at the Academy of Science and Technology in Arlington assured him nothing had happened at Dolbeau. The Indiana hunters were a fable, they said. When Academy investigators looked into it and reported that there was no record they’d even existed, they in turn were accused of a cover-up. We’re out in the neighborhood now, they’d told him, meaning that they had actually set foot in hundreds of local star systems. And there was nothing remotely resembling intelligent beings.
But ten years later they’d found ruins on Quraqua. And less than six months after that, they’d found the Noks.
The Noks weren’t going to go visiting anybody soon. They were in an early industrialization phase, but they’d been up and down several times and had all but exhausted their natural resources. Furthermore, they did not seem to be bright enough to sort out their internal problems. They came in several sizes and shapes, they held strong political and religious opinions, and they seemed to have no talent for compromise.
Nevertheless, he was hooked by the Great Unknown. George Hockelmann became a familiar visitor at the Academy. He organized the Friends of the Academy and set them to supplementing the meager funds provided by the government and by private contributors.
It became his overriding ambition to find an intelligent alien, to establish communication, to create a common language, to make it possible one day to sit down with him, or her, perhaps beside a blazing fire, and talk about God, the universe, and how it had all come to be.
He’d heard the rumors about 1107 before Pete Damon got back, the mysterious signals in a remote place and the fruitless effort to hunt them down. When he’d inquired at the Academy, Sylvia Virgil had pointed out that there was no conceivable reason to believe anyone would have placed a transmitter out at the neutron star. It simply made no sense, she had insisted. A second mission would be expensive, would almost certainly produce no result, and would lead to charges that the Academy was squandering its money on wild-eyed projects.
But who knew what might make sense to a different kind of intelligence?
What had Pete thought?
Pete had declined to speak freely over the link, but had insisted on coming instead to see George personally. George had wondered if he feared being monitored by someone.
George had him over to his Bracken Valley retreat, and they went outside onto the upper deck to drink lime coolers and watch the sun set. “Nobody really cares about it,” Pete complained.
And George understood why he’d stayed off the link. It was too important to trust to long-distance communications. Pete had wanted to make his point in person, to force George to feel the intensity of the situation.
It was a late-summer evening, with a storm approaching and the wind beginning to pick up.
“Sylvia doesn’t think it’s anything other than an anomaly. A glitch in the computers,” said George. “Nearly as I can make out, neither does anybody else.”
“They weren’t there.”
“They’ve seen the evidence.”
“George, they don’t want to accept the implications. They’re too worried about their reputations.”
George took a long pull from his drink. “You really think they’d hide something like this?”
“No. They’re not hiding anything. They’ve convinced themselves there’s nothing to it because it entails risks if they don’t. They know if they put together an expedition, a lot of people will laugh. There’s a good chance they won’t find anything, and then the laughter will get louder, the politicians will start asking questions, and the board will start looking for a new commissioner. That would mean the end of Sylvia too.”
“So what really do you think? Is there anything out there?”
He leaned forward, his eyebrows drawing together. “George, she’s right: It might have been a glitch. We can’t deny that. But it’s not the point. There might really be something there. That’s the possibility we should be considering.”
“Somebody to talk to?”
“Maybe.”
Two nights later, George made a deal with Virgil. The Contact Society would fund a mission to investigate the anomaly, and it would even supply the ship. In fact, it would supply the investigators. All that would be asked was the Academy’s blessing, and a pilot.
FOR PETE DAMON, the evening with George had marked the culmination of a weary struggle.
There was no longer a future in scientific research, for the simple reason there was nothing much left to research. We knew in general how stars were born and how they died. We knew how black holes formed and what their neighborhoods were like. We knew the details of galactic formation, we understood the structure of space, and we had finally figured out, just a few years before, the nature of gravity. Quantum effects were no longer quite so uncertain, and dark matter had long since been brought into the light.
Newton and Einstein and McElroy had been fortunate: They’d lived in eras when much about the nature of things remained mysterious. But in Pete Damon’s age, no true mysteries remained. Other than creation itself, and the anthropic principle. What had started the universe? And why were all the myriad settings, gravity and the strong force and the tendency of water to freeze from the top down, why was all that tuned precisely in such a way to make possible the development of life-forms? Those two great questions had not been answered, but the consensus was that they would remain forever beyond the reach of science.
Pete agreed. Consequently, for an ambitious young researcher determined to make a contribution, what remained?
He’d met George Hockelmann at an Academy dinner years before he went out to 1107. It had been given to celebrate the success of an archeological team that had uncovered a vast storehouse of data on Beta Pac III, home of a race that had conquered the stars, left evidence of their presence throughout the Orion Arm, and then effectively vanished, leaving only a few near-savage descendants with no memory of their glory days. George, big and garrulous and enthusiastic and maybe a bit naive, had bought him a drink, and had argued that “they” were still out there somewhere, the Monument-Makers, somewhere among the stars. There was in fact evidence to support that notion, that there had been an exodus. Maybe it was true. Nobody knew.
Pete had demurred when George suggested he join the Contact Society. The group’s members were treated by the administration with the utmost respect, because they were a major source of funds. But behind their backs, they were spoken of openly as kooks, loonies, and nutcases. People with too much money and not enough to do. Having one’s name appear on the Society’s rolls was to ensure not being taken seriously by the scientific community as anything more than a cheerleader.
So it happened that, over glasses of brandy, Pete and George Hockelmann discovered they were kindred souls. It was natural then that, during the voyage back, when operations people at the Academy were already smiling politely and informing him there was surely a logical explanation for the transmission, let’s not go off half-cocked, how did the experiments turn out, he made up his mind to talk to George. And it was maybe even more natural that, before he arrived, George was already sending inquiries about the find.
The day after he’d gone to George’s Bracken Valley estate, he’d attended a party thrown by members of the Benny’s research team. That had been in Manhattan at Cleo’s. Most were going back to their normal work assignments. Ava was returning to the Indiana Center, Hal was headed for Berlin, Cliff Stockard for the University of Toronto. Mike Langley, their captain, was near the end of his two weeks’ leave, and would be getting his new assignment in a couple of days. He didn’t know where yet. And he didn’t care, thought Pete. Mike was bright enough, but he really had no interest in what lay over the horizon. He was strictly transport. Carry people to Outpost or Serenity, pick up a load of artifacts or samples, and bring everything back. It struck Pete that a million-year-old artifact would be perfectly safe in Mike’s hands. It would never occur to him to break into the package to see what it looked like.