“Hunter, you are clear to go.”
Kane warned his passengers they were thirty seconds from departure, and his harness locked in place.
Kim watched it all again: The launch of the Hunter, Kane’s warning to Kile during the early minutes of the flight that the vessel would need a general overhaul when it got back, the jump to hyperspace. She watched the passengers come forward one by one and she listened to the now-familiar conversations. She hastened through the periods when Kane was alone in the pilot’s room.
The Hunter team talked about what they hoped to find in the Golden Pitcher. The Dream.
Nothing else mattered.
Tripley’s recurrent assertions, “We’re going to do it this time, Markis; I know it,” took on special poignancy.
She saw again Kane’s infatuation with Emily. And hers with him.
She watched moodily, not expecting the record to deviate from the one she remembered until Hunter arrived off Alnitak. And probably even then it would not happen until just before they encountered the celestial. She was wrong.
It was almost three A.M. on day six when Kane, wearing a robe, appeared in the pilot’s room with a cup of coffee. He sat down, checked his instruments, looked at the time, and activated his harness. “Okay, everybody, buckle in.”
Voices broke in over the intercom.
Yoshi: “Would somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
Emily: “We have a surprise for you.”
Yoshi: “In the middle of the night?”
Tripley: “Yes. It’s worth it.”
Yoshi: “So what is it? Markis, what are we doing?”
Kim froze the picture, sat back in her chair, and stared at Kane’s image in the glow of his instruments. In the doctored version, this hadn’t happened.
No surprises for Yoshi.
And she knew now why Walt Gaerhard, the Interstellar technician, had been reluctant to talk about the jump engine repairs to which he’d signed his name.
There had been no repairs.
There’d been no damage.
28
We value Truth, not because we are principled, but because we are curious. We like to believe we will not tolerate manipulation of the facts. But strict knowledge of what has occurred often inflicts more damage than benefit. Mystery and mythology are safer avenues of pursuit precisely because they are open to manipulation. Truth, ladies and gentlemen, is overrated.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” It was Yoshi’s voice. But only Kane was visible, relaxed in his chair. He was looking off to his right, gazing out beyond the view of the imager. Kim, recalling the design of the Hunter, knew he was looking through large double windows. The overhead screen depicted the Alnitak region, the vast roiling clouds, the dark mass of the Horsehead, the brilliant nebulosity NGC2024, the giant star itself, and the sweeping rings of the Jovian world.
“We thought you’d not want to miss it.” Emily this time. “There’s nothing quite like it anywhere we’ve been.”
She came into the picture now and sat down in the left-hand chair. “I think,” she said, “we should have dinner tonight out on one of the terraces.”
“Precisely what we had in mind.” That was Tripley. Kim judged from the body language of Emily and Kane that their colleagues were not physically present in the pilot’s room. “In fact, we’ve made it a tradition to do that whenever we’ve been out here.”
Something on the control board caught Kane’s eye. He made adjustments, looked at his screens, and frowned. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“What is it, Markis?” asked Tripley’s voice.
“I don’t know. We’re getting a return—”
“What kind of return?”
“Metal. Moving almost perpendicular to the plane of the system.”
Emily leaned forward to get a better look at the screen. “Is that significant? I wouldn’t think a chunk of iron’s that much out of the ordinary.”
“This one appears to have some definition.” After a pause: “But don’t get excited. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Nevertheless, Emily’s face took on an aura of hope.
“Markis.” Tripley again.
“It’s on your monitor now, Kile. We’re still too far away to make anything of it.”
“You think it might be an artificial object?”
“I think it’s a chunk of iron.” He pressed a key on the control panel. “So everybody knows,” he said, “the Foundation requires us in any unusual circumstance to record everything that happens throughout the ship until we resolve the situation. Save for private quarters, of course. We will go to full recording mode in one minute. So get your clothes on back there, kiddies.”
“Can we get a picture of the thing?” asked Yoshi.
“It’s still too far away.”
“How far is that?”
“Seven hundred thousand kay. It’s in orbit, about to drift behind the planet. We’ll lose it in a few minutes.”
“Not altogether, I hope,” said Emily.
“No chance,” said Kane. They watched it drop down the sky, disappearing finally behind the rim of the big planet.
“Kile, I assume we want to take a closer look?”
Tripley laughed. “Sure. Why not, as long as we’re here?”
“How long before we see it again?” asked Yoshi.
“Don’t know. We didn’t get enough to plot an orbit.”
“Just stay with it,” said Tripley.
“All right.” Kane gave directions to the AI. “If we’re going to pursue we should get rolling. Everybody belt down.” Hunter rotated, realigned itself, and the mains fired.
They’d been running for almost three quarters of an hour when the object reappeared. Kane tried unsuccessfully to acquire an image. “It’s still too far,” he said.
“Markis.” It was the AI. “The object is in a long irregular orbit. It’ll decay quickly. Within about six weeks, in fact.”
“When will we catch up with it?” asked Tripley.
Kane put the question to the AI.
“Late tomorrow morning,” came the answer.
Two lamps burned dimly in the pilot’s room.
Rings and moons dominated the windows. At 2:17 A.M., the AI woke Kane. “We have definition, Markis.”
The object was smooth, not the rugged piece of rock and iron one would have expected. It was shaped somewhat like a turtle-shell.
Kane studied it for almost ten minutes, enhanced it, tapped his fingers on the console, nodded to himself. Eventually he opened the intercom. “Friends,” he said quietly, “we have an anomaly.”
They padded one by one into the pilot’s room, in bare feet, all wearing robes. All cautiously excited. Emily looked at the overhead, the others turned to the windows, into which Kane had placed the image. “It’s an enhancement,” he explained. “But I think this is close to what’s really out there.”
They stared quietly. Yoshi stood near Tripley and they seemed to draw together. Emily’s face shone.