He took a long pull at his drink. “You’re right. It wasn’t me. I don’t know a Paul Calder. And I sure as hell didn’t buy a vest from anybody.”
“He was at the last meeting of the Chacun Historical Association. Had the vest with him, I believe.”
Davis shrugged. “I wasn’t at the last meeting.”
He was about to cut the link when I held up my hand. “Is there anybody else in the organization named Davis?”
“No,” he said. “We have thirty, maybe thirty-five members. But no other Davises.”
“Something’s going on,” said Alex. “Get in touch with everybody who got one of the Polaris artifacts. Warn them to be careful. And ask them to notify us if anybody they don’t know shows undue interest.”
“You think somebody’s trying to steal them?”
We were on the back deck, adjacent to the greenhouse. He’d been watching a couple of birds fluttering around in the fountain. “I honestly don’t know. But that’s what it feels like, doesn’t it?”
I dutifully talked with everyone. “We don’t know for sure that something out of the way is happening,” I told them. “But take precautions to safeguard your artifact.
And please keep us informed.”
Alex stuck his head in the door between calls. “Got a question for you,” he said.
“The Polaris was a special trip to a special event. Every scientific figure on Rimway wanted to go. Yes?”
“That’s the way I understand it, yes.”
“Why were there only seven people on board? The Polaris had accommodations for eight.”
I hadn’t noticed. But he was right. Four compartments on either side of the passageway. “Don’t know,” I said.
He nodded, as if that was the answer he expected. Then he was gone again.
I had a few other duties to attend to, and they took me well into the afternoon.
When I’d finished I had Jacob pull up the contemporary media accounts of the Polaris story. At the time, of course, it had been huge news. It dominated public life for months. The entire Confederacy was drawn into the search, largely because of a suspicion there was something hostile beyond known space. Entire fleets came from Toxicon, Dellaconda, the Spinners, Cormoral, Earth. Even the Mutes sent a contingent.
The general assumption seemed to be that Maddy and her passengers had been seized by something. No other plausible theory could be produced. And that meant that a force with extensive capabilities existed somewhere out there. And that it had aggressive inclinations.
For more than a year, the fleets spread out through the Veiled Lady, across thousands of star systems, looking for something, anything, that might provide a clue.
For trying to help, the Mutes got attacked regularly by commentators and politicians.
They were a silent species, endowed with telepathic abilities. That fact made a lot of people nervous, and, of course, they didn’t look much like us. So they were accused of spying. As if they could get any useful information about Confederate defenses by going to Delta Karpis.
To a casual reader it sounds like a thorough search, but the reality is that the volume of space involved was so large that it couldn’t be adequately examined in a year’s time with the resources available. In fact, they wouldn’t have come anywhere close. Meanwhile, the hunt cost money, and gradually the public lost interest. In the end, the seven victims were simply written off and declared dead.
For as long as anyone could remember, people had thought of the wilderness beyond the known systems as human territory by implied right, by default, to be claimed when we got around to it. Even the discovery of the Mutes, and the on-again off-again conflict with them, hadn’t altered that. But the Polaris incident made the outer darkness really dark. We were reminded that we didn’t know what was out there. And, in Ali ben-Kasha’s memorable phrase, we suddenly wondered whether we might be on somebody’s menu.
All that has long since gone away. There were no subsequent disappearances, no encounters with the suspect alien wind by the research ships that continued to push deeper into the unknown, no indication of a dark genie. And people forgot.
Alex came inside, sat down beside me, and watched the reports as Jacob posted them. “All that effort,” he said. “And they never found anything.”
“Not a hair.”
“Incredible.” He leaned forward, frowning. “Chase, they examined the Polaris when it came back. And they didn’t see anything unusual. If something hostile wanted to get into the ship, the captain or the passengers had to let it in, right? I mean, can you get through an airlock if the people inside don’t want you to?”
“Well,” I said, “you can’t really lock the outer hatches. If someone, or some thing, gets to the hull, he can let himself in. Although you could stop that easily enough if you wanted to.”
“How?”
“One way is to pressurize the airlock. Then the outer hatch won’t open no matter what.”
“Okay.”
“Another way would be to accelerate. Or slam on the brakes. Either way, the intruder goes downtown.”
“So for something to get in, the people inside had to cooperate, right?”
“Or at least not take action against it.”
He sat for several minutes without saying anything. Jacob was running a report from the team that had investigated the interior of the Polaris after it had been returned to Skydeck. No indication occupants were at any time in distress.
No sign of a struggle.
No evidence of hurried departure.
Clothes, toiletries, and other items present suggest that when personnel departed, they took with them only what they were wearing.
Open copy of Lost Souls in one of the compartments and half-eaten apple in the common room imply ship was taken completely by surprise. Book is believed to have belonged to Boland. Towel found in the washroom had Klassner’s DNA.
“I wonder who directed the search,” he said.
“Survey did.”
“I mean, at Survey.”
“Jess Taliaferro,” said Jacob.
Alex folded his hands and seemed lost in thought. “The same guy who disappeared himself.”
“Yes. That is an odd coincidence, isn’t it?”
“They never found him either.”
“No. He left his office one day, and nobody ever saw him again.”
“When?” he asked.
“Two and a half years after the Polaris. ”
“What do you think happened to him, Chase?”
“I have no idea. Probably a suicide.”
Alex considered the possibility. “If that is what happened, would it have been connected with the Polaris?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. The common wisdom is that Taliaferro was distraught by the disaster. He dreamed up the idea to send a group of VIPs out to watch the event, to accompany the research ships. He knew Boland and Klassner personally.
They were both past chairs of the White Clock. Of which he was a contributor and fund-raiser.”
“The old population-control group,” said Alex.
“Yes.” I told Jacob to shut down. He complied, the curtains opened, and bright, dazzling sunlight broke into the room. “When the search found nothing, according to Taliaferro’s colleagues at Survey, he got depressed.” I could see it happening easily enough, the idealistic bureaucrat who had lost a ship’s captain and six of the most celebrated people of the age and couldn’t even explain what had happened to them.
“I’ve been reading about him. After the Polaris, he used to go to Carimba Canyon sometimes and just stand out there and watch the sun go down.”
Alex’s eyes had become hooded. “He might have jumped into the Melony. Been carried out to sea.”
“It could have happened that way.”
“But there wasn’t a suicide note?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Chase,” he said, “I wonder if I could persuade you to do me a favor?”
Georg Kloski had been with the team of analysts that went over the Polaris when it was brought back. He had to be older than he looked. He could have passed for a guy in his midforties, but he was at least twice that age. “I work out,” he said, when I commented on his appearance.
He was about medium size and build, affable, happily retired on Guillermo Island in the Gulf. I introduced myself, told him I was collecting information for a research project, which was true enough, and asked whether I could take him to lunch. It’s always more convenient, of course, to ask questions over the circuit. But you can get a lot more out of people if you treat for tea and a steak sandwich.