chapter 4
On board the William B. Jenkins.
Tuesday, February 25.
EXCEPT FOR ONE person, the research team on the Jenkins was delighted to be diverted. The fact that an omega had veered into a planetary system might mean they were close to finding the grail, a living alien civilization. A real one, something more exotic than the Angels, who were pretechnological barbarians, or the Noks, who were industrial-age barbarians. The exception was Digby Dunn, who would ordinarily have joined in the general elation. But Digby was in love with the captain. Her name was Kellie Collier, and Digby’s passion for her was both intense and unrelenting.
On the whole, it had been a painful experience. Love affairs always include an element of discomfort; it is part of what makes them life-changing ventures. But this one had been extraordinarily difficult. Passengers may not touch the captain. Bad for morale and all that. Impossible situation, Digger. We’ll just have to wait until we get clear. Be patient and everything’ll be fine.
She smiled, that gorgeous, alluring smile, rendered even more seductive because she was trying to make it impersonal, friendly, understanding. Lose my job, she’d added on occasion when he’d tried to press her.
They’d been headed back to the station when the call came. We’ve got an omega changing course. Turn left and find out what’s going on. See what it’s after.
So Digby, an anthropologist by trade, but riding as a volunteer with a survey mission that was gathering information about local stars and planetary systems, pretended to be pleased, exchanged platitudes with everybody, and aimed pained glances at Kellie.
“Sorry,” she told him. “But look, it’ll be quick. In and out, see what’s there, and then back to Broadside. We’re only talking a couple of extra weeks.”
She was tall and lovely with soft black skin and luminous eyes and she made every other woman in his life seem hopelessly dull. Ah yes, how he’d like to take her out on an expedition to unearth a few ancient cookpots. But he resigned himself to making an occasional grab, which she usually—but not always—declined with stern disapproval. “Be patient,” she told him. “Our time is coming.”
The Jenkins was more than three thousand light-years out, and they held the current record for going farther from Earth than any other ship. They’d been away from Broadside almost a year. It had been a long and lonely voyage by any standard, broken only by an occasional rendezvous with a supply vessel.
A rendezvous was always a special occasion. There had been a push at the Academy to automate replenishment, to send the sandwiches in a ship directed only by an AI. Asquith had been unable to see the point of sending a captain along since it cost a great deal more, and it was hard to visualize a situation in which human judgment might be needed. But somebody apparently understood what seeing a fresh face could mean when you were out in the deeps.
Jack Markover had thrown his weight into the fight by threatening to quit and hold a news conference if they took the human captains off the run. The commissioner had backed down, pretended it had been someone else’s idea, and it had been quietly put aside.
Jack was the chief of mission. He was a little man with a hawk face and too much energy. He loved his work and, if he’d been forced to follow through on his threat, would not have survived. He talked about retirement a lot, usually during the gray hours when the Jenkins was in hyperflight, and the hours were long and quiet. But Digger knew he’d never step down, that one day they’d have to haul him off and lock him away.
Digger had never quite figured out what Jack’s specialty was. He was from the American Midwest, a quiet, dedicated type with doctorates in physics and literature. There seemed to be no field of human knowledge in which he did not speak as an expert. Acquainted with all, he was fond of saying, knowledgeable in none.
The comment could hardly have been less true. Where Digger knew the ground, the man inevitably had his facts down. He was the only person Digger knew who could explain Radcliffe’s equations, quote Paradise Lost, discuss the implications of the Dialogues, play Mozart with panache, and hold forth on the history of the Quraquat.
Kellie loved him, Digger thought of him as the grandfather he’d never known, and Mark Stevens, who usually piloted the supply ship, was fond of saying the only reason he agreed to keep doing the flights was to spend a few hours with Jack Markover every couple of months.
The fourth member of the research team was Winnie Colgate. Winnie had been through a couple of marriages. Both had expired, according to Winnie, amiably under mutual agreement. But there was an undercurrent of anger that suggested things had not been so amiable. And Digger suspected that Winnie would be slow to try the game again.
She had begun her professional life as a cosmologist, and she periodically commented that her great regret was that she would not live long enough to see the solutions to the great problems: whether there was a multiverse, what had caused the Big Bang, whether there was a purpose to it all. Digger thought they were adrift in a cosmic bingo game; Jack could not believe stars and people had happened by accident. Winnie kept an open mind, meaning that she changed her opinions from day to day.
She was blond, quiet, affable. It was no secret that she was entranced by Jack, would have taken him into her bed, but Jack was something of a Puritan about sex, didn’t believe you should do it outside marriage. In any case, he behaved like Kellie, apparently convinced that his position as head of mission would in some way be compromised if he started sleeping with the staff.
Digger wished for it to happen, because it would have eased his way with Kellie. But, unhappily, Jack held his ground and respected Wendy’s virtue.
JACK MARKOVER HAD spent half his career on these missions, and had come to doubt the wisdom of his choice. He’d staked everything on the glorious possibility of making the first major contact. There was a time when it had seemed easy. Almost inevitable. Just get out there and do it. But that had been during an era of overt optimism, when the assumption had been that every world on which life was possible would inevitably develop a biosystem, and that once you got a biosystem you would eventually get tribal chiefs and math teachers. It was true that the habitable worlds orbiting the sun’s immediate neighbors had been sterile, but that had seemed like no more than a caprice.
Now he wondered whether they’d all simply read too much science fiction.
He knew what his reputation was. Hi, Jack, find any little green men yet? He had, after each of the last two missions, gone home determined not to come out again. But it was like a siren call, the sense that he might quit just one mission too soon. So he knew that, whatever happened this time, whatever he might think about retiring to Cape Cod, he’d be back out again, poking a new set of worlds. Hoping to find the big prize.
To date, during the past year, they had looked at seventy-nine systems, all with stable suns. The stated purpose of the mission was strictly survey. They were accumulating information and, especially, noting planets that might become future habitats without extensive terraforming. They’d found one life-supporting world, but the life-forms were microscopic. In his entire career, across thirty-five years, Jack had seen only nine worlds on which life had gotten a foothold and been able to sustain itself. There’d been two others on which conditions had changed, an atmosphere grown too thin, a passing star scrambling an orbit, and the life-forms had died out. And that was it.
On each of the living worlds, the bioforms were still microscopic. He had never gone to a previously unvisited world and seen so much as a blade of grass.
The omega was approximately 41,000 kilometers through the middle, big as these things went. It had turned, had adjusted course, was still turning. It was also decelerating. You could see it because the cloud had lost its spherical shape. As it decelerated, sections of mist broke loose and fountained forward.
The turn was so slight as to be barely discernible. Jack was surprised it had been detected at all. Observers must have been watching the object over a period of months to make the determination. Then he realized that, because it was approaching a planetary system, the Academy would have been paying special attention.
The Jenkins spent several days doing measurements and collecting readings, sometimes standing off at thousands of kilometers, sometimes pushing uncomfortably close to the cloud front. The numbers confirmed what Broadside had: It was angling into the planetary system.
It wasn’t hard to find the target.
If the braking continued at the present level, and the turn continued as it was going, the omega would shortly line up on a vector that would bring it to a rendezvous with the third planet.
The Jenkins was still too far away to see details. But Jack reported to Broadside. “Looks like a December 14 intersect, Vadim,” he told them. “We’ll head over there and take a look.”
IT WAS THEIR custom to name each terrestrial world they investigated. Although the names were not official, and each planet would continue to be referred to in formal communications by a numerical designator attached to its star’s catalog number, unofficially it was easier to think in terms of Brewster’s World, or Backwater, or Blotto. (Brewster had been Winnie’s companion in her first foray to the altar. The world got its name because it had achieved tidal lock, so the sun, viewed from the surface, “just sat there, doing nothing.”)
It was Kellie’s turn to name the new one. “This might turn out to be a special place,” she said. “When I was a kid we lived near Lookout Point in northern New York. I loved the place. We used to go there and have picnics. You could see the Hudson in the distance.”
“So you want to call it Lookout Point?”
“Lookout would be good, I think.”
And so Lookout it became.
The ship made a jump to get within an AU, and began its approach. They were still much too far for the telescopes to make out any detail. But they discovered immediately that no electronic envelope surrounded the world.
That news produced mixed feelings. Like everyone else, Digger would have liked to see a world with an advanced civilization. It had never happened, and it would be a huge achievement. On the other hand, there was the cloud. Better, he told himself, it should be empty, and the cloud being drawn by unusual rock formations. Or by ruins, like at Moonlight.