He shook his head. “I’d give quite a lot to have a Weatherman in place the next time one goes off.”
“Can we do that? Can you predict the next one?”
Now he was looking at the spoon. “Unfortunately not. I can take a stab.”
“A stab? What are the odds?”
“Not good.”
“Harold, let’s do this: Let’s watch for a while. If you reach a point where we know an event is coming, where you can give me a target with a reasonable degree of certainty, we’ll take a serious look. Okay?”
IT WASN’T SOMETHING she could get excited about. She made a mental note to suggest that Eric Samuels, the public relations director, get in touch with Harold to see whether the Academy couldn’t squeeze some publicity out of it. Meantime, she was looking at a busy afternoon.
She had lunch with the president of the SPA, the Superluminal Pilots’ Association. They wanted more money, a better retirement system, better career opportunities, you name it. She knew Ben Zalotski well, from her own days on the bridge. Ben was a decent guy, and a hard charger for the pilots. The problem was that he had no compunctions about taking advantage of their long association to get what he wanted. In reality, it wasn’t even Hutch’s area of responsibility. Jill Watkin in Personnel was supposed to handle all this stuff, but Ben had framed the hour as an opportunity for old friends to get together. She’d known what was coming, but couldn’t very easily refuse to see him. She might have simply gotten busy, but she didn’t like being devious. In the end she had to tell him she couldn’t help, refused even to concede that she sympathized with his objectives, even though she did. But she was part of the management team and her loyalties lay in a different direction. Ben quoted some of her past comments back at her, the pilots are overworked, they can’t keep their families together, and nobody gives a damn for them. They’re just glorified bus drivers and that’s the way they get treated. He allowed himself to look disappointed, and even implied that she’d turned her back on her old comrades.
So she returned to her office in a foul mood, listened to an appeal from Hollis Gunderson, “speaking for the University of the Netherlands,” to have his pet project put on the docket. The project was a hunt for a white hole, which Hutch’s scientific team had advised her didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, and would be a waste of resources. Gunderson had gotten past the appointments secretary by claiming someone had misunderstood his intentions. Hutch had made time to talk with him, on the assumption it was easier to see him while he was here than to call back and cancel him. Anyhow, there was something to be said for not making enemies unnecessarily. Her now-retiring boss, Sylvia Virgil, had commented on Priscilla’s most recent evaluation that she had a tendency to put off confrontations. She’d suggested Hutch was too timid. Hutch had wondered how Virgil would have done on Deepsix, but let it go.
She heard Gunderson out and concluded the “misunderstanding” to which he’d referred was semantic rather than substantive. Call it by any other name, he still wanted to go looking for a white hole. She told him that, to have the project even considered, he’d have to provide a written statement supporting his views from two of the thirteen physicists certified by the Academy to rule on such matters. “Until you can satisfy two of them, Professor,” she said, “I’m afraid we can’t help you.”
A young man had a complaint concerning one of the pilots. He’d been gruff, he said, and rude and generally not very talkative. All the way back from Outpost. Did Hutch have any idea what it was like to ride for weeks with a ship’s captain who kept to himself? He was talking about Adrian Belmont, whom she’d like to get rid of because there were always complaints, but the SPA would come down hard on the Academy if she terminated him. Better to hire a hit man. Cleaner.
In any case, it wasn’t an operational matter. “I’m terribly sorry,” she told him. “You should be aware that the pilots frequently make those voyages alone. Some of them have simply learned to get along without a social life. We ask the passengers to be understanding. But if you really want to press the matter, I’m afraid you have the wrong department. You’ll want Personnel. End of the corridor, turn right, thank you very much.”
She gave an interview to a journalist working on a book about Moonlight, arranged special transportation to Paradise for Abel Kotanik, who’d been requested by the field team, juggled shipping schedules to get a load of medical supplies (which had been mistakenly dropped and left on the pier at Serenity) forwarded to the Twins, and decided to fire the chief engineer at Pinnacle for sins of commission and omission that stretched back three years.
Her final meeting of the day was with Dr. Alva K. Emerson. It was another example of granting an interview she would have liked to hand off to someone else. Anyone else. Hutch didn’t intimidate easily, but she was willing to make an exception on this occasion.
Alva Emerson was an M.D., well into her eighties, and one of the great figures of the age. She had founded and led the Children’s Alliance, which had brought modern medical care to hundreds of thousands of kids worldwide during the past forty years. She’d mobilized the wealthy nations, gotten legislation passed by the World Council and in sixty countries around the globe to provide care for the forgotten peoples of the Earth. While we reach for the stars, she’d said in her celebrated remarks twenty years before at the Sudan Memorial, a third of our children cannot reach for a sandwich. The comment was engraved in stone over the entrance to Alliance Headquarters in Lisbon.
The world loved her. Political leaders were terrified of her. Everywhere she went, good things happened. Hospitals rose, doctors poured in, corporate donations swelled the coffers. (No one wanted to be perceived as stingy or mean-spirited when Dr. Alva came knocking.) She was credited with saving millions. She’d won the Peace Prize and the Americus, was on first-name terms with the pope and the president of the NAU, and had stopped a civil war in Argentina simply by putting her body in the way. And there she was to see Hutch. Not the commissioner. Not Asquith. But Priscilla Hutchins. By name.
Asquith had asked her why, but Hutch had no idea.
“Whatever she wants,” Asquith had instructed her, “don’t commit the Academy to anything. Tell her we’ll take it under advisement.”
He didn’t offer to sit in.
HUTCH HAD SEEN Dr. Alva numerous times, of course. Everyone had. Who could forget the blood-soaked images of her kneeling over a dying girl during the aftershocks of the Peruvian earthquake of ’21? Or leading the Counselor himself through the wreckage of Bellaconda after the Peacekeepers finally put down the rebels? Or charging out of the flyer in plague-ridden South Africa?
But when she came through the door, Hutch would not have recognized her. She seemed smaller somehow. The windblown hair was under control. There was no sign of the no-nonsense attitude that was such a large part of the legend. She was reserved, polite, almost submissive. A woman, perhaps, headed out shopping.
“Dr. Emerson,” said Hutch, rising to greet her, “it’s a privilege to meet you.” Her voice went a few decibels higher than normal.
“Priscilla?” Alva stretched out her hand. “It’s my pleasure.”
Hutch directed her to a wing chair and sat down beside her. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the office.”
Alva wore a pleated navy skirt and a light blue blouse beneath a frayed velomir jacket. Part of the image. Her hair had gone white, “in the service of the unfortunate,” as Gregory MacAllister had once put it. She was probably the only public figure for whom MacAllister had ever found a kind word.
“None at all, thank you.” She arranged herself, glanced around the office, and smiled approvingly. It was decorated with several of Tor’s sketches, images of the Twins and of the Refuge at Vertical, of the illuminated Memphis gliding through starlight, of Hutch herself in an antique Phillies uniform. She smiled at that one, and her eyes settled on Hutch. They were dark and penetrating. Sensors, peering through the objects in the room. This was not a woman to be jollied along.
“What can I do for you, Doctor?” she asked.
“Priscilla, I need your help.”
Hutch wanted to shift her weight. Move it around a bit. Force herself to relax. But she sat quite still. “In what way?”
“We need to do something about the omega.”
At first Hutch thought she’d misunderstood. Alva was of course talking about the one headed toward Earth. When people said the omega, that was always the one they meant. “It won’t become a problem for almost a thousand years,” she said uneasily. “Were you suggesting—?”
“I was suggesting we find a way to stop it.”
That was easy to say. “We’ve been doing some research.”
“It’s been more than twenty years, Priscilla. Or is it Hutch?”
“Hutch is good.”
“Hutch.” Her tone softened. “Somehow, in your case, it is a very feminine name.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Alva.”
Hutch nodded and tried the name. It was a bit like sitting with Washington and calling him George.
Alva leaned forward. “What have we learned so far?”
Hutch shrugged. “It’s loaded with nanos. Some of our people think it can create gravity fields. To help it navigate.”
“And it doesn’t like artificial objects.”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“There’s a lot of dust and hydrogen. The clouds vary in size by a factor of about 30 percent. They coast along at a pretty good clip. In the range of 20 million klicks an hour.”
“That’s how fast it’s coming? Our cloud?”
“Yes.” Hutch thought for a minute. “Oh, and they seem to come in waves. We don’t know how wide the waves are because we can’t see the end of them. The local waves are 160 light-years apart, give or take, and one of them rolls through the solar system approximately every eight thousand years.”
“But they’re not always the same distance apart? The waves?”
“No. It’s pretty erratic. At the beginning, we assumed that the local pattern held everywhere, and that there were literally millions of clouds drifting throughout the Orion Arm. But of course that’s not true. Fortunately.”