“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Kimball, but that’s really not feasible.”
“It’s important,” he said. “And I’d be grateful.” He produced his link, typed in a figure, and showed it to her. “Would this cover it?”
Her eyebrows went up. “Yes,” she said, drawing the word out. “If it means that much, I suppose we can manage it.”
“Thank you,” said Alex. “Please be sure it’s a working duplicate.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I think it’s what Barber and Kiernan were looking for.”
“Really. Why?”
“Because it’s the one object that has no possible use on the Polaris. ”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Ask yourself what it was doing in the shuttle’s cargo compartment.” He looked around to be sure we were alone. “Chase, I know how it was done.”
We were walking across a white stone bridge that separated the Foundation grounds from the landing pad. He stopped and gripped the white handrail and leaned out over a brook as if he were really interested in seeing whether it contained fish. He could be infuriating sometimes. I waited for the explanation, which did not come.
“How?” I said at last.
“You suggested the ship went elsewhere in the system.”
“Yes.”
“Why not outside the system? They had six days before the Peronovski would arrive.”
“It’s possible. Sure.”
“Everybody assumed the ship went adrift right after the last message. But that’s not what happened. It jumped out of the system. Took the passengers somewhere. To a drop-off point. Then they unloaded everyone. The place, wherever it was, had living accommodations. That’s where the key came from.”
“There’s no place like that near Delta Kay.”
“You sure? We’re talking three days available for travel, one way. How far was that in 1365?”
“Sixty light-years.”
“That’s a pretty big area. Even out there.” He dropped a pebble into the water.
“The key, in effect, is a hotel key. Whoever had it unloaded his passengers, got a good night’s sleep, and in the morning he started back in the Polaris to Delta Kay.”
“-Where the ship was found by the Peronovski -”
“Yes.”
“And, with Walker’s help, he was able to slip aboard and hide below. Until they returned to port.”
“Very good, Chase.”
“You really think that’s what happened?”
“Except one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Change the pronoun. She slipped aboard.”
“Maddy?”
“I don’t think there’s any question. She’s the one in the ideal position to pull it off, provided she had help from other passengers. And she was a pilot. The conspirators had arranged in advance to make another ship available for her at Indigo.
When she got back, she collected it and went out to recover them.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“All the objects that were looked at by our burglars belonged to Maddy. Nobody else.”
“But Alvarez should have seen her when he searched the Polaris. ”
“She hid in the shuttle cargo compartment. That’s when she lost the key.”
“They had no reason to open the cargo compartment.”
“Right. And when the search was over, Alvarez and Walker went back to the Peronovski. That night, Alvarez goes to sleep-”
“-And Walker brings her aboard.”
“He stashed her in one of the compartments belowdecks. Voila, the alien wind has swept them all away.”
“Incredible,” I said. “That simple.”
Alex shrugged modestly.
“They did all this just to head off Dunninger’s research?”
“They saw it as life and death for millions of people. And they were all idealists.”
“Fanatics.”
“One man’s idealist is another’s lunatic.”
“But why is anyone worried about it now? Is someone still in power from those years?”
His eyes were troubled. “No. I’ve checked. Everyone who could have been involved, either at Survey, or in the political world, is dead or retired.”
“Then who’s behind the attacks on us?”
“I have an idea, but let’s put that aside for now.”
“Okay. So where’d the Polaris take them?”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
We stayed in Sabatini and returned to Limoges the next day by train. Alex liked trains, and he also thought it might be smart to change our travel plans. Just in case.
We rode a taxi to the station and arrived just as the Tragonia Flyer was pulling in. We got into our compartment, and Alex lapsed into silence. The train made a second stop in Sabatini, then began its long trek across the Koralis.
We were still in mountain country when the service bot brought lunch. And wine. Alex gazed moodily through the window at the passing landscape.
I thought about Maddy while I ate. I liked her, identified with her, and I hated to think she’d been part of a conspiracy to put Dunninger out of action.
“First thing we need to do,” I told Alex, “is to go back and look at the shipping schedules again. We’d assumed that any black ship would have to go all the way out to Delta Kay. But this changes things. We need to check, to see whether anyone was in a position to get close enough to manage a rendezvous.”
“I’ve already looked,” he said. “It was one of the first things I did.”
“So you’re telling me nobody would have been able to do that either?”
“That’s correct. Nobody was unaccounted for. Nobody, other than the Peronovski, was anywhere near the target space. And not for weeks afterward.
Which means Maddy didn’t immediately go back to pick them up. But that’s just smart planning.”
He finished his meal and pushed it aside.
“You know,” I said, “I think I prefer the alien juggernaut theory.”
“Yeah. I feel that way, too.”
“I have a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“What was the last-minute emergency that kept Taliaferro off the flight?”
“Chase, I don’t think Taliaferro ever intended to go. I think everybody on board that ship was part of the conspiracy to shut down Dunninger. Taliaferro got volunteers, people who were willing to give up their everyday lives to stop something they thought would be a major calamity. But there was a limited number he dared ask.
Not enough to fill the ship. Taliaferro couldn’t go himself, because they needed him to direct things from Survey. They were going to need money, for example, and eventually a base. So Taliaferro set up Morton College. But there were a lot of people who wanted to make the Polaris flight, so they had to be able to claim it was filled.”
We passed through a small town, lots of lights, someone on a runabout.
Otherwise, the streets were empty.
TWENTY-TWO
“Do
not underestimate the woman. Provoke her, anger her, infuriate her, and in her hands every object, every knife, every pot, every pebble, can become lethal.”
Jeremy Riggs, Last Man Out
The train ride required a bit more than fourteen hours. We slept most of the way and got into Limoges an hour or two before midnight. Once off the train, we hurried through the terminal like a couple of fugitives, watching everybody and wondering when someone would throw a bomb. But we got back to the town house without incident.
Neither of us was ready to call it a night. Alex poured two glasses of Vintage 17, made a sandwich, and sat down in an armchair in a manner that suggested big things were about to happen.
I’ve forgotten the AI’s name at the town house, but he directed it to provide a display with Delta Karpis at the center. “Make a sphere around it, with a sixty-lightyear radius.” Sixty light-years, of course, was the maximum range the Polaris could have traveled in the three days it had available. “How many habitable worlds are there?”
“One moment, please.”
Alex was in excellent spirits. He looked across at me and grinned. “We’ve got them,” he said. His sandwich showed up, and he picked it up without looking at it, took a bite, chewed and swallowed, and washed it down with his wine.
I was feeling less jovial. Alex says I worry too much. “I hate to point this out,” I told him, “but I think we’ve done enough. Why don’t we walk away from this? Give everything to Fenn and let him deal with it? Before more bad things happen?”