When the turnaround maneuver was done, he turned his big telescopes and instrument platforms forward, looking ahead to the solar focus.
“You must want to come home. You must have family.”
“No.”
“And now—”
“Look, Sally, all we’ve done since finding the Gaijin is talk, for twelve years. Somebody ought to do something. Who better than me? And so I’m going to the edge of the system, where I expect to encounter Gaijin.” He grinned. “I figure I’ll cross all subsequent bridges when I come to them.”
“Godspeed, Malenfant,” she said, chilled. She sensed she would never see him again.
The Perry slowed to a relative halt. From a thousand AU, the Sun was an overbright star in the constellation Cetus, and the inner system — planets, humans, Gaijin, and all — was just a puddle of light.
Malenfant, cooped up in his hab module, spent a week scanning his environment. He knew he was in the right area, roughly; the precision was uncertain. Of course, if some huge interstellar mother craft was out here, it should be hard to miss.
There wasn’t a damn thing.
He went in search of Alpha Centauri’s solar focus. He nudged the Perry forward, using his reaction thrusters and occasional fusion-pulse blips.
The focusing of gravitational lensing was surprisingly tight. Alpha Centauri’s focal-point spot was only a few kilometers across, in comparison with the hundred billion kilometers Malenfant had crossed to get here.
He took his time, shepherding his fuel.
At last he had it. In his big optical telescope there was an image of Alpha Centauri A, the largest component of the multiple Alpha system. The star’s image was distorted into an annulus, a faintly orange ring of light.
He recorded as much data as he could and fired it down his laser link to Earth. The processors there would be able to deconvolve the image and turn it into an image of the multiple-star Alpha Centauri system, perhaps even of any planets hugging the two main stars.
This data alone, he thought, ought to justify the mission to its sponsors.
But he still didn’t turn up any evidence of Gaijin activity.
A new fear started to gnaw at him. For the first time he considered seriously the possibility that he might be wrong about this. What if there was nothing here, after all? If so, his life, his reputation, would be wasted.
And then his big supercooled infrared sensors picked up a powerful new signature.
The object passed within a million kilometers of him.
His telescopes returned images, tantalizingly blurred. The thing was tumbling, sending back glimmering reflections from the remote Sun; the reflections helped the processors figure out its shape.
The craft was maybe fifty meters across. It was shaped something like a spider. A dodecahedral central unit sprouted arms, eight or ten of them, that articulated as it moved. It seemed to be assembling itself as it traveled.
It wasn’t possible to identify its purpose, or composition, or propulsion method, before it passed out of sight. But he was prepared to bet it was heading for the asteroid belt.
It was possible to work out where the drone had come from. It was a point along the Sun’s focal line, farther out, a point no more distant from the Perry than the Moon from Earth.
Malenfant turned his telescopes that way, but he couldn’t see a thing.
Still, he felt affirmed. Contact, by damn. I was right. I can’t figure out how or what, but there sure is something out here.
He powered up his fusion-pulse engine, one more time. It would take him twenty hours to get there.
It was just a hoop, some kind of metal perhaps, facing the Sun. It was around thirty meters across, and it was sky blue, the color dazzling out here in the void. It was silent, not transmitting on any frequency, barely visible at all in the light of the point-source Sun.
There was no huge mother ship emitting asteroid-factory drones. Just this enigmatic artifact.
He described all this to Sally Brind, back in Houston. He would have to wait for a reply; he was six light-days from home.
After a time, he decided he didn’t want to wait that long.
The Perry drifted beside the Gaijin hoop, with only occasional station-keeping bursts of its thrusters.
Malenfant shut himself up inside the Perry ’s cramped air lock. He’d have to spend two hours in here, purging the nitrogen from his body. His antique shuttle-class EVA mobility unit would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea-level pressure, to keep it flexible.
Malenfant pulled on his thermal underwear, and then his cooling and ventilation garment — a corrugated layering of water-coolant pipes. He fitted his urine-collection device, a huge, unlikely condom.
He lifted up his lower torso assembly — this was the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on — and he squirmed into it. He fitted a tube over his condom attachment; there was a bag sewn into his lower torso assembly garment big enough to store a couple of pints of urine. The LTA unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff. Maybe I’m not in quite the same shape as I used to be, forty years ago.
Now it was time for the HUT, the hard upper torso piece. His HUT was fixed to the wall of the air lock, like the top half of a suit of armor. He crouched underneath, reached up his arms, and wriggled upward. Inside the HUT there was a smell of plastic and metal. He guided the metal rings at his waist to mate and click together. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.
The ritual of suit assembly was familiar, comforting. As if he was in control of the situation.
He studied himself in the mirror. The EMU was gleaming white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve. He still had his final mission patch stitched to the fabric, for STS-194. Looking pretty good for an old bastard, Malenfant.
Just before he depressurized, he tucked his snap of Emma into an inside pocket.
He opened the air lock’s outer hatch.
For twenty months he’d been confined within a chamber a few meters across; now his world opened out to infinity.
He didn’t want to look up, down, or around, and certainly not at the Gaijin artifact. Not yet.
Resolutely he turned to face the Perry. The paintwork and finishing over the hull’s powder-gray meteorite blanket had pretty much worn away and yellowed, but the dim sunlight made it look as if the whole craft had been dipped in gold.
His MMU, the manned maneuvering unit, was stowed in a service station against the Perry ’s outer hull, under a layer of meteorite fabric. He uncovered the MMU and backed into it; it was like fitting himself into the back and arms of a chair. Latches clasped his pressure suit. He powered up the control systems and checked the nitrogen-filled fuel tanks in the backpack. He pulled his two hand controllers around to their flight positions, then released the service station’s captive latches.
He tried out the maneuvering unit. The left hand controller pushed him forward, gently; the right hand enabled him to rotate, dip, and roll. Every time a thruster fired, a gentle tone sounded in his headset.
He moved in short straight lines around the Perry. After years in a glass case at KSC, not all of the pack’s reaction-control thrusters were working. But there seemed to be enough left for him to control his flight. And the automatic gyro stabilization was locked in.