Solly folded his arms and stared at the screen. "I hope Kane didn't destroy them."
"I'm sure he didn't. This is the most dramatic moment in human history. There's no way he'd have destroyed the record. None. He's hidden it somewhere."
"But where? Why?"
"I don't know. We'll figure it out."
It was taking a long time for the next transmission to come in. "You know," said Solly, "one of Kane's questions keeps coming back to me. Why do you think he asked if Hunter could assist? Is it possible the celestial is disabled? In trouble?"
"Could be. Damn Kane anyhow. We shouldn't be caught up in all this guesswork."
"I think you should show more appreciation."
"Why's that?"
"If he'd done everything by the book, done what he was supposed to do, this whole matter would have been settled twenty-seven years ago. And you would never have gotten near it. Instead, he's saved you a juicy puzzle and a chance at immortality. Be thankful."
"Visuals," said the AI.
Emily reappeared. "Hello again," she said. "Would you like to come on board?"
"What's that all about?" asked Solly. "They don't expect anybody hanging around out here to speak English, do they?"
"It's not the words," said Kim. "It's the tone. The nonverbals. But I wouldn't think a truly alien culture would be able to read our nonverbal cues."
The image went to a split screen and Hunter materialized beside Emily. It floated against a river of stars.
A dazzling burnt orange planetary ring arced across the sky behind it. The cargo door opened and lights came on, illuminating the interior. Emily's side of the split screen vanished, and Yoshi blinked into existence in her place, beckoning to the open door so the occupants of the other vessel couldn't possibly miss the point.
"That's not bad," said Kim.
Solly pursed his lips. "I'm not sure I agree."
"Why?"
"If we were looking across, say, a few hundred meters of empty space at a ship that was not manned by people, that was in fact operated by God knows what, and they opened a door and invited me in-" He held out his hands to heaven. "Not very likely."
"Solly," she said, pretending shock, "where's your spirit of adventure?"
The Hunter repeated its transmission.
And repeated it again.
"The whatevers are thinking it over," said Kim.
Solly nodded. "Tripley's pressing his luck. He should leave it alone. Offer once and drop it."
A slice of starry sky was visible past the hull of the Hunter. "Solly," she asked, "how would you think they're producing those pictures?"
He thought for a moment. "Easiest way would be to use the feed from one of the scopes." He glanced at the starfield glittering in their windows. "Then do an overlay of the Hunter just as they've done with Yoshi."
"Then that's the way the stars would actually have looked, on that night, from their position?"
"Probably. Sure."
"Would you guess the forward view?"
"Maybe. That might be the natural way to do it. Why? What difference does it make?"
"Probably none. But it does give us a course heading during the contact." She filed the information away in her head.
"What time of day would it have been when all this was going on?" asked Solly.
Kim had been keeping track. The first radio signal had been transmitted from Hunter at 11:42 A.M., February 17, 573, Seabright time. It would now be 4:12 P.M. on the Hunter.
"What they should do," said Solly, "is just go back to the radio and keep talking. Try to establish a next step."
The FAULS screen was blank again. "Well," she said, "I don't think the invitations are working."
There was nothing more for almost two hours. Then Hunter transmitted the open-door image again, this time with Tripley. But he merely waved to the viewer and made no effort to point at the cargo area.
"I guess they're at a standstill," said Solly.
Kim exhaled. "I'm surprised."
"In what way?"
"That they'd spent so many years trying to accomplish precisely this and been so little prepared for the event."
"You mean the open-door pictures?"
"I mean the whole thing has a kind of spontaneous feel, doesn't it? As if they were all taken by surprise. It makes me think they never really expected to succeed."
"What should they do?" asked Solly.
"The bottom line is that Emily and her friends can't do very much. And they need to recognize that. They aren't going to be able to master a new language; they can get only so far with number games; and it's obvious that establishing a sense of mutual trust with, say, giant spiders is going to be a tricky business.
I'd say it would take a team of specialists to get much beyond saying hello."
"Therefore-?"
"Therefore they should concentrate on one thing: establish a date for a second encounter. If they could do that, they'd have achieved as much success as anyone could wish."
"How would you go about it?"
"They've got a planet handy. They could use the planet to make a date. Show them, say, a couple hundred revolutions. Six months. We'll be back in six months. The meaning would be plain enough."
"You make it sound easy," Solly said. "Too bad you weren't with them."
She drew up her knees and put her arms around them. Emily was with them.
Solly was showing signs of frustration. "How about some breakfast?" he suggested.
"No, thanks. I want to stay here."
"You won't miss anything. I don't mind getting it."
"That's okay," she said. "I'm not hungry. Really."
He shook his head. "I'm going to exercise my prerogative as captain and insist. This might go on for another twenty-four hours or so, and I don't need you getting sick out here."
She looked at the status panel. At the glowing lamps. "All right," she said.
He brought out two plates of ham, biscuits, and pineapple slices. Kim ate quietly, subdued, annoyed at the apparent inability of the Hunter to create an effective strategy. Solly suggested the celestials might have been scared off by the open door. Or that they might have a cultural bias prohibiting them from befriending a different species. Or- "How could that happen?" she asked. "These critters have spaceflight. Since they're in the vicinity of Alnitak, they must have FTL. Surely they wouldn't be afflicted with preconceptions about another sentient species."
"Maybe they'd have a religious problem about us," he said. "Maybe we're not supposed to exist, and we've trashed a theological system."
"I don't think you'd find that kind of thinking among space-travelers."
"Really? We had Christians and Muslims arguing all the way out to Carribee. Even the Universalists are inclined to look down on anyone who doesn't subscribe to the official theology."
"Which is that there is no official theology."
"Doesn't matter. The same tendency is there. I don't know. Maybe the celestials don't come in a lot of packages the way humans do. If there's basically only one type of critter, it would never have been required to deal with anything different."
Solly slowly ate through his breakfast, let his head drift back, and fell asleep. After an hour or so he woke up, went to his room, showered, and changed. When he came back he looked neater but still fatigued. "I can't believe they're just sitting there doing nothing," he said.
"Maybe they've launched the lander," suggested Kim. "It's possible they're trying a meeting."
"No. There'd be radio traffic. The Hunter would need to tell them-show them-what they wanted to do."
During the course of the morning the screens remained quiet. Solly and Kim went over the same ground again and again. By midafternoon Kim thought the quality of the signal had probably disintegrated to a degree they were simply not acquiring it anymore.
"It's possible," said Solly. "But not likely."
They went down to the rec room and worked out. Neither said much and when they were finished, had showered and changed, Solly asked whether she thought it was over.
"Probably," she said.
"So what do we do now?"
"We listen some more. If we don't hear anything, we move to another intercept site and listen to it all again. That'll allow us to take a second bearing and pin down their location."
"How long do we stay here?"
The Hunter had been in the Alnitak area almost two days. "Let's stay put through midnight tomorrow. If we haven't heard anything by then, we'll clear out."
That evening he came to her with a tenderness and a passion that overwhelmed her. "I'm glad you got what you wanted," he told her after the first flush of lovemaking had passed. "We don't have all the details yet, but at least we know it happened."
"Kiss me, you fool," she sighed.
The night filled with laughter and a few tears, and she didn't know why, couldn't explain the tears either to herself or to him, but just let them flow.
"I'm in bed with an immortal," he said.
And she knew it was so. Eventually they'd sort everything out, get the answers, learn what had happened to Emily and find out how Yoshi ended up in a river and what had blown the face off Mount Hope. It was just a matter of time, and kids a thousand years from now would be learning how to pronounce her name.
She had never, ever, felt more alive than she did then, and she attacked Solly with a will, laughing when he finally slumped back exhausted, pleading with her to give him a rest.
Somewhere around five A.M., lying on her back with Solly's left arm thrown over her, she decided that she would keep him, she would do whatever she had to. Moreover, Solly was part of this whole marvelous event and she was going to hold onto all of it. They had been wedded by the sheer joy of the experience. The ceremony, when it came, would be only a recognition of what had happened in this most glorious of starships.
They slept late in the morning, ate, watched a VR, and wandered down to mission control, where the FAULS screen was still blank. They had gone more than twenty-four hours without any further interceptions. It now seemed clear, for whatever reason, that the party was over. But they waited anyway.
They hurried through dinner, anxious to concede the issue, to be off to their next station, to outrun the radio transmissions, to race across the void and jump back into realspace and take a new bearing on Alnitak.
"But I'm not hopeful," she said, down considerably from the previous day's high. She was thinking of the old axiom that if you want people to believe extraordinary claims, you must present extraordinary evidence. Did she have extraordinary evidence?
She remembered the telescope she would have turned on Henry IV, and wished with all her heart she had such an instrument to point at the ringed world in the Alnitak system. She'd be able to see the two ships, see what was happening. It frustrated her to know the photons were all around her, the disassembled truth of whatever had happened to the Hunter and the Valiant, flowing past, accessible to the proper instruments.
At midnight she sighed. "Time to go."
19
... Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
-WILLIAM JAMES,.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, VI1902 C.E.
The Hammersmith passed into hyperspace at 12:41 A.M., Saturday, March 10. The plan was to go back outside the expanding bubble of radio signals. They would remain in the plane of the Alnitak system, but their new bearing on the giant star would be at right angles to the first one. They would be traveling roughly thirty light-years, and would arrive at their destination just after eight P.M.
They slept late. Kim woke up excited, anxious to get through the day, and to launch the second round of FAULS devices. But she could find nothing to occupy her, and ended by playing chess in the rec room with the AI, whom she set at a beginner's level and proceeded to hammer.
Solly, with his inimitable sense of what was needed, put together another candlelight dinner. She drank a bit more than she should have, and she was a bit woozy when the Hammersmith returned to realspace.
This time, because the jump had been much shorter, they arrived closer to their ideal site, and within an hour they were listening again to the Hunter trying to open a conversation with its invisible companion.
Shortly after the intercept had begun, however, they lost the signal. They were gratified to see it appear fourteen minutes later, precisely on schedule. That seemed to confirm the speculation that it was passing behind the gas giant.
They knew there'd be several hours of futile signaling by Hunter before Valiant responded. So they settled in, alternately reading and napping, and occasionally cavorting like adolescents. "This is the way star travel was meant to be," Solly told her.
Four hours after the first signals, the four-count, had been sent, the Valiant had apparently responded.
Hunter replied with thirteen blips. Emily and her shipmates appeared onscreen, and sent greetings. And showed their open door.