The first phase of the Weatherman Project consisted of the simultaneous launch of more than six hundred probes. When they all arrived at their stations, the Academy would have coverage of sites ranging from within two thousand light-years of the core all the way out to the rim, from Eta Carina to the Lagoon, from the Ring Nebula to the M15 cluster. They would take the temperature of dust clouds and nebulas, track down gravitational anomalies, and provide pictures of the controlled chaos around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. With luck, it would all happen during Harold’s lifetime.
Actually, there’d been several surprises, from black jets to the galactic wind. But the great anomaly was the quasi nova. Behind his back, his people were already calling them tewks. Starlike explosions, eruptions of enormous energy in places where there were no stars. And almost in a line. Not quite, but almost. It made his hair stand on end.
There was no use trying to go back to sleep. He disentangled himself from the sheets, wandered into the kitchen, got out two pieces of farm bread, and slugged some strawberry jelly on them. One of his many guilty pleasures.
The explosions, though they were less than nova force, were nevertheless of sufficient intensity to be visible across tens of thousands of light-years. Probably all the way out to Andromeda. They were far away, and for that he felt grateful. Explosions of their magnitude, for which one couldn’t account, were disquieting.
Light from the four events would reach Earth toward the end of the millennium. They would be visible in the southern hemisphere, where they’d blaze across the sky, in Libra and Scorpius, not quite lining up. But close.
THIS WAS PRISCILLA Hutchins’s second tour in the Academy bureaucracy. She’d served two years as transport chief, gotten bored, returned to piloting, gotten married, and accepted a tempting offer: assistant director of operations. She was at last content to leave the superluminals behind, to get away from the long voyages, to get out of the ships with their virtual beaches and their virtual mountainscapes and their virtual everything-else. The oceans and the breezes and the sand were real now. She had a man who loved her, and a daughter, and a house in the suburbs, and life was good.
But Sylvia Virgil was leaving for a lucrative position in private industry. She was effectively gone, and Hutch had found herself assigned as Acting D.O. With an inside shot at getting a permanent appointment.
But the view from the top was turning out to be a bit more complicated than she’d expected. The days in which she made decisions of no consequence to anyone, invested countless hours formulating policy for the record, attended conferences at establishments with convenient golf courses, reviewed reports from the field, and took extraordinarily long lunches abruptly ended.
Hutch was now responsible for coordinating the movements of all Academy vessels, for deciding who piloted those vessels, and for determining passenger transportation. That sounded simple enough. In the old days, when Professor Hoskinson wanted to bump Dr. O’Leary from a flight to Pinnacle, Hutch had simply passed the issue along and let Sylvia make the call. Now she was in the middle of every food fight, and she had discovered that her clients, for the most part, owned substantial egos and were not above bringing to bear whatever pressure they could manage. Because they were inevitably the top people in their respective fields, the pressure they could bring was considerable.
She had also become responsible, within monetary constraints, for determining which projects the Academy pushed and which it neglected, and for establishing their priority, and the level of resources to be devoted to each. All, of course, controlled by guidelines from the commissioner. She had a staff of scientific advisors, but the decisions tended more often than not to be based on political considerations. Who had clout with Congress? Who had been supportive of the Academy during the previous fiscal year? Whom did Asquith like?
Michael Asquith was the Academy commissioner, her boss, and a man who believed that scientific considerations were necessarily secondary to rewarding the Academy’s supporters and punishing its critics. He called it taking the long view. “We have to give preference to our friends,” he told her in strictest secrecy, as if it weren’t a transparent policy. “If a little science doesn’t get done as a consequence, that’s a price we’re willing to pay. But we have to keep the Academy in business and well funded, and there’s only one way to do that.”
The result was that when a program that deserved support on its own merits didn’t get it, Hutch took the heat. When a popular initiative went through and provided serious results, the commissioner got the credit. During the three months since she’d accepted the assignment, she’d been bullied, threatened, harassed, and hectored by a substantial representation of the scientific community. Many of them seemed to believe they could take her job. Others promised reprisals, and there’d even been a couple of death threats. Her once benign view of academics, formed over more than two decades of hauling them around the Orion Arm, had gone downhill. Now, when they contacted her, she had to make a conscious effort not to get hostile.
She’d had a modicum of vengeance against Jim Albright, who’d called her to threaten and complain when his turn at one of the Weatherman units had been set back. She’d responded by indiscreetly mentioning the incident to Gregory MacAllister, an editor who’d made a long and happy career of attacking academics, moralists, politicians, and crusaders. MacAllister had gone after Albright with a bludgeon, depicting him as a champion of trivial causes and his program as “one more example of squandering the taxpayers’ money counting stars.” He hadn’t mentioned Hutch, but Albright knew.
That didn’t matter, because the bottom line was that she didn’t hear from Albright again, although she learned later that he’d tried to have her terminated. Asquith understood what had happened, though, and warned her to call off the big dog. “If it comes out that we’re behind any of that, we’ll all be out on the street,” he told her. He was right, and Hutch was careful not to use the MacAllister weapon again. But she’d enjoyed watching Albright go to ground.
She was in the middle of trying to decide how to persuade Alan Kimbel, who was currently at Serenity doing research on stellar jets, that he could not stay beyond the original timetable and would have to come home. Kimbel had appealed to her on the ground that there’d been a breakthrough discovery, and he and his team needed a few more weeks. Please. The man had been almost in tears.
The problem was that it happened all the time. Space on the outlying stations was scarce, and there were already people en route and more in line. Extensions could be granted under certain conditions, and her advisors had told her that Kimbel was correct in his assessment. But if she granted the extension, she’d have to tell another group already a week into their mission that, when they arrived at Serenity, they wouldn’t be able to stay. She couldn’t very well do that. And the only alternative was to cut someone else short. She’d looked at the possibilities and, for various reasons, there was no easy pick. In the end, she’d denied the request.
She was recording a response to Kimbel when her link chimed. Harold Tewksbury on the circuit.
Harold was the senior member of the astrophysics staff. He’d been with the Academy when Hutch had toured the place as a high school senior. He was an organization freak, a fussy little man with a penchant for order and procedure. His reputation in the field wasn’t good. His colleagues thought him quarrelsome and uncommunicative, but no one seemed to doubt his capabilities. And he was always nice to Hutch.
“Yes, Harold,” she said. “What are you up to this morning?”
“You busy at the moment?”
She had a hatful of problems. “It isn’t like the old days,” she said. “But I can make time.”
“Good. When you can, stop by the lab.”
SHE FOUND HIM sitting at his desk staring out into the courtyard. He shook his head when he saw her, signaling bewilderment. But he also managed a smile. “Something odd’s going on,” he said.
She thought he was talking about equipment. There had been recent problems with spectrometers. Replacing them would have been expensive, so they’d gone with upgrades. Harold didn’t like upgrades, didn’t like not having the top-of-the-line. “Spend all this money to send out packages,” he’d grumbled to her just a few days earlier, “and then skimp on the retrieval-and-analysis gear.”
But he surprised her. “You know about the quasi novas,” he said.
The tewks. She knew, more or less. It seemed a bit esoteric to her, events a thousand light-years away. Hardly a matter of concern for any but the specialists.
He leaned toward her. His white hair was plumped up and one wing of his collar stuck out sideways. He presented the classic image of a researcher. His blue eyes became unfocused rather easily; he frequently lost his train of thought: and he was inclined often to stop in the middle of a sentence when some new idea occurred to him. In the bright midday sunlight, he looked like an ultimate innocent, a man for whom physical law and mathematics were the only realities. Two cups of coffee arrived.
“They’re almost in a line,” he said.
“And the significance of that is—?”
“It shouldn’t happen naturally.”
She just didn’t know where to go with it. “What are you telling me, Harold?”
“I don’t really know, Hutch. But it scares me.”
“You’re sure they’re not novas?”
“Positive.” He tried his coffee, examined the cup, sighed. “Among other things, there’s too much energy in the visible spectrum, not enough in the X-ray and gamma.”
“Which means—?”
“You get more visible light for the amount of energy expended. A ton more. It’s brighter. By a lot.”
“A lightbulb.”
“You could almost say that.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll pass it on. You recommend any action?”