They set up a buffet. The ship's best wines were uncorked. And Captain Nicholson announced that TransGalactic would pick up the tab. Passengers and guests were responsible only for whatever gratuities they might choose to leave.
Late in the evening, Hutch found herself alone on the dance floor with Marcel. When she'd arrived, fourteen standard days before (had it really been so recently?), he'd been only a colleague, an occasional voice in the cockpit, a person she'd seen at a seminar or two. Now she thought of him as the Gallant Frenchman. "I've got some news for you," the Gallant Frenchman said. "We got the results back on the scan of the shaft. It's three thousand years old."
She was in his arms, in the exotic style of the time. Everybody's arms felt good, his and Mac's and Kellie's and Tom Scolari's and Randy Nightingale's. Especially Randy Nightingale's, the man who would not let go.
Three thousand years. "So we were right."
"I'd say so. It was a rescue mission. The hawks were doing what they could to get a nontechnical people out of harm's way. Or at least to give their species a chance to survive elsewhere."
"Where, I wonder?"
Marcel placed his lips against her cheek. "Who knows? Maybe one day we'll find them."
Hutch recalled the predator appearance of the hawks. "They did not look friendly."
"No. I thought not either." Her lips found his. "Shows you how looks can deceive."
There was, inevitably, a sim. Hutch was played by Ivy Kramer, an actress of truly magnificent proportions. Mac appeared in a cameo, not as himself, but as Beekman. The drama portrayed Erik Nicholson as the true hero of the rescue. This interpretation of events might have been influenced by the fact that the production company was owned by the same multinational as TransGalactic.
It introduced persons on board the Star who tried actively to sabotage the effort for murky reasons never quite made clear, and it depicted the crew of the Boardman striving heroically to retrieve their lost lander so they could come to the rescue. Hutch and Nightingale were tracked relentlessly through the hexagon by a shape-changing thing.
There were books, other than Mac's. Action figures appeared and sold briskly. All four survivors were subjected to extensive interviews, and Kellie eventually became the official representative for Warburton, a company that manufactured sports equipment. E-cards featuring her with a set of golf clubs have since become a collector's item.
An effort was made to get Nightingale to run for governor of Georgia, but he declined. His onetime wife, the daughter of a retired Academy director, made several unsuccessful attempts to renew their relationship.
Mac continued to write scathing commentary on assorted hypocrisies in high places and low, without which hypocrisies, he cheerfully conceded, civilized life would be impossible.
Hutch remained in the service of the Academy.
They all profited from the action toys, from the games, from various kinds of sports clothes, and also from the sale of a line of Deep-six Four (the name change to Deepsix had been urged by the action toy company) long-stem glassware, which inevitably featured a female figure dangling from a tether that disappeared into a cloud-an artistic embellishment-and the motto, Nunquam dimitte. Never Let Go.
Never Let Go.
It is now the official motto of at least three specialized military forces in Germany, China, and Brazil.
They named a high school in New York Park South for Kellie, a mall in Toronto for Hutch, and a Lisbon zoo for Nightingale. There is now a Colt Wetheral Memorial Library off Fulham Palace Road in London, and a Toni Hamner Science Museum in Hamburg. The Winnipeg space flight school in which Klaus Bomar used to teach now has a wing named for him. Mac received no such accolades, although he claimed that the local bishop had wanted to put his name on the new Correlates Religious Studies Center in Des Moines.
Awards were passed to almost everyone involved in the rescue. The most heavily recognized was Erik Nicholson, widely credited with persisting during the darkest hours of the effort. Beektnan received the Conciliar Award for Science, usually reserved for those instances when humanitarian applications of a breakthrough can be shown. Marcel was given a formal commendation from the Academy and became a figure of interest to the corporate world. Within a year, he'd been offered, and had accepted, a director's post with TransGalactic. He's now a vice president, makes more money than he ever dreamed possible, and talks a lot about the good old days. When he's pressed, he admits to being bored.
Kellie, Hutch, Randy, and Mac continue to get together whenever occasion permits. They are frequently joined by Marcel, and occasionally by Janet Hazelhurst, the world's most famous welder, and by one or another of their rescuers. Last year they took eleven members of the Outsiders to dinner at Iceman's in Philadelphia.
Iceman's is more than simply the finest restaurant in the Delaware Valley. It's also on the ground floor.
AFTERWORD
Let me stipulate that, while the questions raised concerning the failure of the Athena Boardman to come to the assistance of the vessels at Maleiva III were legitimate, they were not initiated by me, as has been charged by officials at Kosmik, Inc. In fact, they grew out of a reaction to the sim, which portrayed the Boardman captain in heroic terms. This in turn sparked an investigation, originally for the implied purpose of handing out awards. My only connection with the proceedings arose from the fact that I happened to be one of the persons left to do as best we could when Boardman went missing in action.
The problem for Kosmik quickly became one of potential liability, and they consequently reacted to the initial inquiry by doing what large corporations always do: First they stonewalled, and then when they realized that wouldn't work, they found a mechanic at the Wheel and blamed the incident on him, citing failure to inspect a faulty RX-17 black box that rendered the launcher unstable. They gave him a formal letter of reprimand, fired him, and released his name to the media.
This was too much for Eliot Penkavic, the ship's captain, who called a press conference, admitted to lying about the incident, and blamed the entire unhappy episode on Ian Helm, Kosmik's new director of operations at the Quraqua terraforming unit.
Helm has denied everything, and Penkavic now faces prosecution.
But company spokesmen have had a difficult time explaining just what Penkavic hoped to gain by failing to assist when it was clearly in his power to do so, or why he had agreed to come to the rescue, then apparently changed his mind.
To get a clearer picture of what must actually have transpired, one has only to ask the basic question any policeman asks when faced with conflicting stories: Who stood to profit? The pilot to whom it made no difference whatever whether he went to Maleiva III or to Quraqua? Or the company big shot anxious to get to his new position with a shipload of time-sensitive personnel and supplies?
As I write this, Penkavic's trial is less than a week away I am pleased to report that, since the arrival on the case of Archie Stoddard, the lawyer hired by this publishing house and best-known for securing substantial judgments against corporate scofflaws, rumors have begun to circulate that the so-called in-house investigation by Kosmik has taken on new life. And that Helm may be thrown to the wolves to head off the legal action that would clearly follow a finding of not guilty in the Penkavic case.
The End