“I know. You have an urgent message for me?”
He bobbed his head up and down so hard that a lock of his curly hair flopped in front of his eyes. Brushing it back, he broke into a strange, toothy smile that just might have been a grimace of pain.
“It just came in … from the automated station at Einstein….”
“Einstein? The black hole?”
“Yes. No video, of course. But—well, listen for yourself.”
A long, low bass note, throbbing slightly, like the last distant echo of faraway thunder or the rumble of a torch ship’s engines.
Spence sat up in the bed beside Jade. “What the hell is that?” he whispered.
“What is it?” Jade asked Goodman’s image on the video screen.
The professor looked startled all over again. “Oh! Excuse me. In my haste I activated the raw data chip. Here—here’s the same message, but time-compressed and computer-enhanced.”
“… you wouldn’t believe what these guys can do! It’s fantastic!”
Sam Gunn’s voice!
Jade felt her heart clutch in her chest. “What is that?” she blurted.
“It’s Sam!” Goodman almost yelled. “Sam! He’s on his way back! He’s coming out of the black hole!”
“That’s impossible,” Spence said, his voice hollow.
“I know! But he’s doing it,” Professor Goodman answered, oblivious to the fact that he was now speaking to a man’s voice.
“He’s alive?” Jade asked.
“Yes! Yes!” Goodman seemed ecstatic. “He found aliens on the other side of the black hole. An intelligent extraterrestrial species! They’ve provided him with the means to come back through the space-time warp!”
“Sacre dieu,” Jade breathed.
“He’s alive and coming back to us!” Goodman was almost capering around the comm center now. “He’s discovered intelligent extraterrestrial life. It’s a miracle. Two miracles! Miraculous, the whole thing is miraculous!”
“The time distortion,” Jade asked. “How long will it take before Sam is back with us?”
Goodman sobered, but only slightly. “We’re working on that. Trying to get a Doppler fix on the raw data. It’s only a rough estimate, but from what we’ve got now I’d say that Sam will pop out of the event horizon in another twenty to twenty-five years.”
“Years?” Spence gasped.
“He’s been gone for more than fifteen,” Goodman said. Then he fell to musing. “Maybe there’s a symmetry here. Maybe it’ll take him exactly as long to return as it did to go through the other way. Still, it’ll be fifteen years, at least. Unless …”
Jade turned to Spence and clutched him by the shoulders. “He’s alive! Sam’s alive!”
“And on his way back. The little SOB is coming back to us.”
“And he’s met intelligent aliens.”
“Holy cow,” said Spence, fervently.
Two days later Jade and Spence stood at the observation bay of the torch ship as it sped away from Titan, heading back toward civilization and the Earth-Moon system.
Holding one arm protectively around the tiny young woman he loved, Johansen pointed with his free hand: “There’s Jupiter, the big bright one. And Mars, the smaller red star, down to your left.”
Jade nestled into the crook of his arm, rested her head against his chest. “And Earth? Can we see Earth?”
“Yep. Kind of faint at this distance, but it still looks distinctly blue. See it, out there to the left of Jupiter.”
Jade saw the distant blue speck and knew that her mother lay buried there. And there was another woman on Earth, Jade realized, still alive. But for how long? The one thing she had learned in the past year or so was that life surges along, always changing, whether you want it to or not. Nothing remains the same.
“Spence?” she asked, turning to look up into his face. “Would you mind if we went down to Earth? Just for a few days.”
“Earth? I thought you couldn’t….”
“I can wear an exoskeleton for a few days. And attach myself to a heart pump.”
“But why?”
“My adoptive mother lives in Quebec. I want to see her. I want to tell her that I understand why she had to leave me.”
“I thought you hated her.”
“I thought so, too. Maybe I did. But I don’t anymore. I can’t. Not anymore.”
He gazed down into her lovely green eyes, knowing that he could not deny her anything.
“Couldn’t you speak with her on a video link? It’s just as good, almost.”
Jade shook her head gendy. “No. This has to be in person. For real. Flesh to flesh.”
He shrugged. “I might need an exoskeleton myself. Been a long time since I faced a full g.”
The ship was accelerating at just under one-sixth gravity. They had weeks of leisure ahead of them. Solar News was planning an elaborate special series on Sam Gunn, now that the news of his return had broken. Raki had promised Jade that she would narrate the entire series and be the on-camera star. Her career was assured, even though she had carefully withheld the information that she was probably Sam Gunn’s daughter.
“Will you go out to the black hole for the show?” Spence asked.
“No,” said Jade. “We can record that with the remote cameras already on station at Einstein and patch me into the scene. There’s not much to see, really. No point going out there until Sam’s about to emerge, and he won’t be coming out for another fifteen or twenty years.”
“But he’s on his way back.”
“I wonder if he’s aged? Maybe I’ll be his age when he comes out.”
Spence let a little grin show on his face.
“It’s so like Sam,” Jade went on. “He has the whole solar system in a commotion. Intelligent alien life! All these years the astronomers have been searching and Sam’s the one to find them.”
Spence made a sound that might have been a barely suppressed laugh.
Jade took no notice of it. “The scientists, the politicians, the military—they’re all in an uproar. To say nothing of the world’s religious leaders.”
Spence made no reply.
“Well,” Jade said, with a sigh, “at least we have fifteen or twenty years to get ready for it.”
“Maybe,” Spence said at last.
She looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know for sure,” he replied. “But there’s a strange flavor to all this.”
Jade knit her brows.
“I mean,” said Spence, “Sam disappears while a shipload of lawyers are on their way to strip him naked. Then fifteen years later he pops up again claiming he’s met intelligent extraterrestrial creatures.”
“You don’t think….!”
“Before we left Titan I used the university library access system to look up the status of all the lawsuits filed against Sam. The statute of limitations runs out on the last one next year.”
“But the signals from the black hole!”
“He’s Sam Gunn, honey. He’s been hiding out someplace for the past fifteen years. Maybe he really did fall into a black hole.” Spence pulled her tighter and gazed out at the wide starry universe. “I wouldn’t put any money on it, though.”
She smiled up at him. “And you claim to be his friend.”
“I knew Sam pretty well. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
“He couldn’t have! It just isn’t possible.”
Spence grinned and looked out at the stars again. “He’s Sam Gunn, honey. Unlimited.
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SAM GUNN BIO IS SMASH HIT
Amid rumors that he’s not dead after all, Solar News’s biographical series about Sam Gunn has swept the ratings across the solar system.