Gomez looked startled for a moment, then he smiled back—a little tiredly, Raven thought—and answered, “Hello, Raven.”
Behind him Raven could see a trio of astronomers intently scanning a viewscreen filled with alphanumeric symbols.
Keeping her smile in place, she asked, “How’s it going, Tómas?”
His lips twitched into a bitter grimace. “They’re tearing all my work apart. I feel like a criminal who’s being investigated by the police.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
Trying to stay cheerful, Raven said, “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
He sighed. “I’m having dinner with Professor Abbott and his crew.”
“Oh.”
His face brightening, Gomez said, “You could join us, though. Why don’t you?”
She suppressed the frown that threatened to break out and said instead, “Okay, sure. Where and what time?”
“Seven o’clock at the main restaurant.”
“I’ll be there.”
Gomez broke into a genuine grin. “Great!”
DINNER FOR SEVENTEEN
As usual, Professor Abbott sat at the head of the long table. Gomez was several seats below, but Raven saw that he had kept the chair next to him empty for her.
She sat down and nodded greetings to the others. They nodded back and smiled at her.
How much do they know about me? Raven wondered. About my background, my past life? Those records are supposed to be kept private, but…
“And how are you, Ms. Marchesi?” Abbott asked from the head of the table.
“Fine, thank you,” Raven lied.
“I believe we’ve just about concluded the first phase of our study,” Abbott went on, smiling enough to show the gap between his front teeth.
Raven saw Tómas stiffen in his chair. “And?” Gomez asked.
Still smiling, Abbott said, “No news is good news, my boy. We haven’t found anything that invalidates your conclusion.”
“The sample didn’t come from one of our own vessels?” asked one of the astronomers, sitting across the table.
Abbott shook his head slowly. “Apparently not. At least, we haven’t been able to find any evidence that it did.”
The astronomer—young, blond, husky—countered, “Absence of proof is not proof of absence, Professor.”
“I quite agree, but we have run into a blank wall. That scrap of steel is real, and—as Dr. Gomez has told us many times—its composition does not match any of the types of steel used in our own submersibles.”
Raven saw that Tómas was trembling. “Then it’s from here, from Uranus,” he said.
Abbott fingered his moustache thoughtfully before answering, “That’s the best hypothesis we have at the moment. It might be wrong, mind you, but we haven’t found any evidence that proves it’s wrong.”
The table went absolutely silent. Raven could hear threads of conversation from the other tables in the dining room: laughter, the clink of tableware, murmurs and mumbles from across the big room. But the astronomers’ table was absolutely silent.
Yet she knew what was going through the minds of the young astronomers: the scrap of steel that Tómas found was manufactured here on Uranus, by intelligent Uranians. Yet the planet has been sterilized, wiped clean of their existence.
Gomez broke their silence. “So what do we do now?”
“We scan the seabed. We use your submarine to start scanning in the region where your scrap of steel was found. And I intend to ask the Astronomical Association to send digging equipment and a crew out here as soon as possible.”
Tómas sank back onto his chair. His face looked halfway between stunned and unutterably satisfied.
The dinner turned into a celebration. Fourteen astronomers, plus Abbott, Tómas and Raven ate, laughed, made jokes, offered toasts until the dining room emptied out almost completely, except for their table. The robot servers waited with inhuman patience by the restaurant’s rear wall as the men and women reveled with unrestrained delight.
Through all the merriment, Gomez marveled, They’re not against me. They didn’t come here to tear me down. They like me!
He basked in the newfound warmth, even as Abbott warned, “What we’re facing now is a task that will be far from easy. We’re astronomers, not miners—”
The husky blond fellow across the table suggested, “Maybe we could recruit some of the Rock Rats from the Asteroid Belt. They’re miners.”
But Abbott shook his head. “Not the type we need, not at all. It’s one thing to tear up an asteroid and extract the minerals that have a high market price, it’s quite another to search for scraps of what might be relics buried in a seabed full of worthless rocks and sand.”
The blond young astronomer nodded his reluctant agreement.
“No,” Abbott went on, “we have before us a task of the most grueling kind. We’re going to need patience, skill, and a fairly sizeable amount of luck.”
That’s a cheerful note, Raven thought. She saw that Tómas looked sober, thoughtful, as if from an old story of the American Wild West about a gunslinger facing a challenger.
The dinner broke up at last and the group headed for the restaurant’s doors. Raven noticed that several of the astronomers paired off; romance was in the air.
Abbott seemed to pay no attention to the apparent couplings. Then Raven realized that Gomez was walking beside her, silent. But his eyes were focused on her face.
While the rest of the group headed down to the quarters that had been assigned to them, Raven walked with Tómas past her own apartment. And his.
“Where are we going, Tómas?” she asked.
“To the observation blister down at the end of this passageway,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“Why?”
He shrugged his husky shoulders. “I want to say goodnight to the universe.”
She saw that he was smiling shyly. And she wondered what else he had in mind.
He opened the observation blister’s hatch and gestured Raven inside. It was noticeably cooler inside, even though the blister’s glass bubble was opaqued.
Before Raven could say anything, Gomez touched the control button next to the hatch and the bubble immediately became perfectly transparent. Raven felt as if she were suddenly standing among the stars, vast clouds of swirling dots of light looking down at her, with blue-gray Uranus hanging to one side, huge and silent.
Raven shuddered at the beauty of the universe.
“You’re cold?” Gomez asked, stepping closer to her.
She shook her head. “It’s just so… so…”
“Magnificent,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Magnificent.”
He slid his arm around her shoulders and for several moments they stood together, silent, awestruck.
“I come here often,” Gomez said softly. “I need to remind myself of what I’m dealing with.”
Raven forced herself back to reality. It wasn’t easy, with the heavens gazing down at her, but she made an effort of will.
“Tómas, Mr. Waxman fired me. I don’t have a job anymore.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“He called and told me. He said you’d come crawling to me now.”
Sudden anger surged through Raven’s veins.
Before she could say a word, though, Gomez told her, “I can hire you as my assistant. You’ve been doing the work, why shouldn’t I pay you for it?”
“Tómas, I can’t—”
“Of course you can’t,” he said, in a near whisper. “I don’t want you to. I don’t want to buy your love, Raven. I want you to love me, really love me.”
In the light of the stars, she saw that his eyes were gleaming.