I waited but she didn’t supply any more details.
“Well? What kind of big find?” I prompted.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s not just you, Joey,” Penny said. “I can’t tell anybody. This is big. This is the biggest thing in archeology ever and the whole crew of us are sworn to absolute secrecy. It involves the Phinons and if Professor Towner found out I told anybody he’d skin me alive. If this isn’t handled right, instead of making our careers, we might just get ourselves ostracized from archeology!”
“How do you get ostracized from—”
“It happens, Joey. It happens. You don’t find what you’re supposed to find and the journals won’t publish you and the other archeologists gang up on you. Dr. Towner says he’s so far out on a limb right now as it is that it might break all by itself even if we do everything right.”
I couldn’t get any more out of her about the find. Everyone has heard about the Phinons. We defeated them in a war a century back, and the hyperdrive came out of that war. But the Phinons never came inside Hague Limits unless it was to wipe out civilizations just getting close to star travel. They dwelt among the cometary haloes and they’d been doing it for about a billion years. I didn’t know what in the world one could dig up on Earth that would have anything to do with Phinons, and press as I might, Penny wouldn’t tell me.
“OK, OK,” I said, giving up the interrogation. “But the bottom line is that we have to try to convince Dad to let you stay but we can’t tell him why it is you have to stay now. He’s going to want to know why you can t just take a year off same as I wondered.”
How to convince Dad? I didn’t have a clue as I went to work the next morning, though Dad was going to be coming up to the station to see just what it was I did now (I’d had different, better, jobs each time my folks had visited). Still, it made me feel good to “play” the big brother for Penny as well as just being one.
The control station is a big sphere atop the main tower. Though it can be made transparent, when we’re working the interior of the sphere is all projection, and though we stay safely on the surface of Cameron, it looks like we’re flying through space.
My way to travel!
I was figuring out assignments for the loading of Ashley’s Charm when it occurred to me that maybe the best thing to do was just to show Dad how successful I was becoming on my own, and then start hinting around about how Penny deserved the same chance. I had doubts about it working, though. Promising to help and being able to are very different things.
I had Ashley’s Charm about a third loaded before Dad showed up. The first third is always the easiest—we load up the tail end with all the smaller ships which pretty much all mass the same and so there’s very little jiggering around to do.
Dad walked into the globe and gave that most satisfying double-take that people do when they come out of the dark elevator and find themselves apparently floating kilometers out in space. He stared around, taking everything in, and I knew I’d just gone up in his estimation simply by virtue of where I work.
“Boy, Joey, I can see why you like your job so much. I could get used to this pretty fast myself,” he said.
“It is magnificent,” I admitted. “Look over there, Dad. Our pilots are just starting to berth some of the bigger ships on Ashley’s Charm.” A pretty cruiser almost as big as Dad’s was positioning itself for insertion into the landing bay, looking like a gnat preparing to land on an elephant.
“Wow! Is the owner piloting that boat, or is one of your guys doing it?”
“One of our guys, always,” I said.
“But I was hoping to dock Miss Michiko myself.”
“Sorry, Pop. Our insurance won’t cover it. It’s not only your ship we have to worry about, it’s the liner, too. If we let a thousand different owners do their own docking, how long do you think it would be before one of them blew it? I trained for months before I got to berth my first tiny launch. And I don’t even want to think about the possibility of some terrorist deliberately flying his boat into the liner.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?”
“Not everyone loves the stars like you do, Dad. There are plenty of people who don’t think we should be going at all. They think the Phinons and the Hague Limit are God’s quarantine.”
“Nuts,” Dad said. I wasn’t sure if he meant the people I was characterizing or if he was just disappointed at not getting to berth his own boat.
“I’m glad you realized that I’m not like you and Mom, Dad. I was afraid when you told me you were going to stop here it was to try to get me to go along.” Even as I said it, I felt I was being entirely transparent. I wanted to segue into Penny’s situation, but I was half afraid Dad was suddenly going to say, “Penny’s going and that’s it.”
But he didn’t. “That’s OK, Son. Mom and I knew you were different very early on. You never wanted to go on trips, even when you were a little kid. You completely ignored my science fiction books. That’s one of the reasons we had Penny. We wanted to see if we’d have better luck the second time around.” Then he turned to look at me, both smiling and serious. “You do realize I’m joking, don’t you? Your mother and I are proud of you.”
“I know. But how was Penny so much different from me?”
“Oh, we knew immediately that she was like us. Penny always wanted to go along. You couldn’t take a walk with her without her wanting to round just one more curve or look over just one more hill. She always needed to see what was on the other side of the horizon. Problem with her was that Mom and Dad always had to come along. If she’d gotten a little more of your independence and you a little more of her romantic streak….” he trailed off.
“What?”
“Then I’d have somebody else’s children. Anyway, your Mom and I couldn’t love either of you any more than we do.”
“Me and Penny know that. But what I was trying to say is that Penny is studying to be an archeologist. Does she really want to interrupt her studies to see the stars?”
“She’s young, Joey. She has lots of time to finish up. She’s years ahead of her friends. Besides, she hasn’t said a word to us about not going along. I mentioned she could probably continue her class work on the ship and she went right out looking for study files to take along.
“No, Joey, you’re reading your own feelings into your sister. She’s not a little girl anymore. I find it hard to believe that if she didn’t want to go, she wouldn’t have said something.”
At that point I knew there was nothing else I could say to Dad to convince him that Penny wanted to remain behind. Penny was either going to have to tell him herself before tomorrow morning or she was going to the stars.
Later that day Miss Michiko was flown up to her berth. Dad didn’t get to pilot, but he insisted on being aboard when she went up. I had a chance to tell Penny that I’d gotten nowhere with Dad during his visit to the control center before she and Mom went shopping one last time, passing the time while waiting for Dad to return on the shuttle from Ashley’s Charm. I was too busy to give the issue much more thought, anyway. I knew I’d be supportive of Penny tonight at our parting dinner, but my saying anything would depend upon whether or not she found it in herself to tell Dad she wanted to stay.
She hadn’t been too good at that yet.
I had just come off shift and was heading back to my apartment to clean up before dinner when I ran into Mom and Penny.