As before, there was no further transmission.
But they had their second bearing. They compensated for stellar movement in the interim, and the lines intersected at a point three hundred AUs from Alnitak. Right on the orbit of the gas giant.
They waited nevertheless through two more days. Finally, there could be no question that the show was over, and Solly put a disk into the recorder and directed the AI to copy the intercept record from both sites. When it was completed he gave it to Kim. "With luck," he said. "It'll keep us both out of court."
"We'll see." She looked at the disk. "It might be easier for someone to argue the entire crew of the Hunter went over the edge rather than that they actually saw something. That might be stretched to account for the missing women, as well. What we really need is a glimpse of whatever it was they saw." She took a deep breath. "Okay, I guess it's time to go to phase two."
"The scene of the crime?"
"Yep."
"Why bother? What's the point? They're all long gone."
"Solly," she said, "put yourself in the place of the other ship. Look, for reasons we don't understand, our people came back and didn't say anything. Maybe there was a fight on board, a disagreement on how to handle the announcement, on who was going to get the credit-"
"-That doesn't make sense-"
"Okay. But something happened. Maybe the experience scared them off. Maybe they saw something so terrifying it drove them all out of their minds-"
"-And we want to go there?-"
"We'll be careful. And we won't be taken by surprise. Look, the point is, both ships knew there'd been contact. It had to be as big an event for the celestials as it was for us. So what did they do afterward?
What would you and I do?"
He propped his chin on one hand and gazed steadily at her. "Assuming no real conversation took place and the other ship just took off, we'd post a surveillance."
"Can you see any possibility we wouldn't do that? That we'd just ignore the incident?"
"No," he said after a moment's pause. "No, although we did ignore the incident. But I'd have expected we'd have put science teams out there right away."
"And they'd have stayed for years, right?"
"I suppose. But twenty-seven years?"
"Well, maybe not that long. I don't know. But we'd leave some automated systems in place."
"Sure," he said. "We'd establish a presence and keep it indefinitely."
"Right. So all we have to do is show up at Alnitak and let whatever they've left behind get a look at us.
We head for the gas giant and we do whatever we can to draw attention to ourselves. We look for anything that doesn't belong there. And if we're lucky, who knows what might show up?"
At three hundred AUs, the world was eight times farther out than Endgame was from Helios, or six times Pluto's distance from Sol. It had seventeen satellites and a ring system divided into three sections. A permanent storm of the kind often associated with gas giants floated in its southern latitudes. It required roughly twenty-three centuries to complete an orbit around the central luminary, which even at this extreme distance, was fully a third as bright as Greenway's noontime sun.
Solly set course toward the planet.
"The system," said Kim, "has been surveyed once. That was a hit and run, in-and-out. They spent two days here. There are no really unusual features, unless you're talking about the atmospherics." She meant the vast interstellar clouds, cradles for new stars, turbulent and explosive, illuminated from within and also by Alnitak. The nearby nebula NGC2024, stretching for light-years across that restless sky, was a kaleidoscope of bright and dark lanes, of exquisite geometry, of glowing surfaces and interior fires.
Enormous lightning bolts moved through it, but it was so far that they seemed frozen in place.
"Slow lightning," said Solly. "Like the mission."
Kim looked at the nebula. "How do you mean?"
"We've known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would have to happen, and that when it did it would change everything, our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We've seen this particular lightning strike coming and we've played with the idea of what it might mean for at least twelve hundred years. We've imagined that other intelligences exist, we've imagined them as fearsome and gentle, as impossibly strange and remarkably familiar, as godlike, as incapable, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point."
On the other side of the sky, a long luminous bar, IC434, stretched away into a glorious haze. Presiding over it was the great dark mass of the Horsehead Nebula.
"It's a place for artists." She stood by a window looking out at the vast display. The brilliant rings of the gas giant angled past her field of vision, a glowing bridge to its family of moons, all in their first quarter.
She looked again at the blowup of Kane's mural. It was impossible to know whether this world was the one in Emily's hand. But she'd have bet on it.
There were two other suns in the system, one too remote to pick out, the other bright enough to provide reading light. The nearer was approximately 1300 AUs from Alnitak. It too was superluminous, though not in the same league with its companion. "People used to think a binary star couldn't have a planetary system," she told Solly. "We know better now, but the planets tend to get tossed around a lot, and often thrown out altogether. Especially when both components are massive and there isn't a lot of space between them." She eased herself into a chair and gazed steadily at the rings and moons. "It won't stay in orbit long. It's just a matter of time before something jerks it loose."
The planetary disk had an autumnal coloration. The storm was a darker splotch, a circular piece of night.
"About one and a half Jupiters," he said, using the standard measurement for gas giant mass. "I'm beginning to understand why they decided this was the place to stop while Kane did his patchwork."
"It is spectacular. I looked over the records of Tripley's previous voyages," said Kim. "He was here before. Wanted to see the Horsehead."
Solly stared at the clouds and the world for long minutes, and then turned to her. "What do we do first?"
Good question. "We go into orbit. And then we wait."
"Kim," he said, "we were a little critical of Tripley for being unprepared to run a contact scenario. Are we ready? If something happens?"
She drew herself up in her professorial mode. "Be assured," she said, "nothing will happen." They both laughed. In fact, Kim had prepared a visual program to transmit in the event there was an encounter. It included pictures of the Valiant and the Hunter, of herself and Solly, of interiors of the Hammersmith.
There were pictures of Greenway's forests and oceans, of people lounging on beaches. There were anatomical charts of humans and several dozen animals and plants. And finally there was an image of three Valiants and three Hammersmiths silhouetted against the rings of the Jovian; and the Jovian itself followed by four hundred lines divided into tens. She showed it to Solly.
"We meet back here when the planet has turned on its axis four hundred times."
"Good," he said. A day on the gas giant lasted between seventeen and eighteen hours. So they were talking roughly one year. Enough time to outfit an expedition, work out their strategy, and return. "Kim,"
he asked, "how do you want me to program, the sensors? What exactly are we looking for?"
"Set for maximum sweep and range. And we should look for anything that wouldn't normally be out there. Processed metal. Plastic. Anything that isn't gas, rock, or ice. Or anything that moves on its own."
The original survey gave few details for the gas giant. Kim knew it had an equatorial diameter of 187,000 kilometers, and a polar diameter of 173,000 kilometers. Average density was only 1.2 times that of water, indicating a high proportion of the lighter elements, hydrogen and helium. Its axial tilt was 11.1 degrees.
Its most striking feature was the rings, which were coplanar with the equator. They had an overall diameter of 750,000 kilometers, and were divided into three distinct sets. The innermost reached down almost to the cloudtops. They were barely one kilometer thick, so when the Hammersmith passed them edge-on they all but vanished.
Two of the satellites were larger than Greenway; one minuscule worldlet at the outermost extremes of the system was only a half-dozen kilometers across. It orbited almost at right angles to the equator.
"It would help," said Kim, "if we knew precisely where the incident took place."
"How do you mean?"
"Altitude. Orbit, if possible."
"Don't see how we can determine that," said Solly. "We can see the rings in one of the sequences, but the planet's not visible at all."
"But we know when everything happened," said Kim. "We know now right to the minute." Contact had been made February 17 at 11:42 A.M. shipboard time. "We have a picture of the rings during the event, and we have a starry background."
"The stars would look the same from anywhere in the system," he objected.
"The stars would," she agreed.
But not the moons. And surely there was at least one moon in the picture.
There were two.
They ran the sequence again. Hunter floating against the midnight sky, the cargo door opening and lights coming on, splashing out into the void. How warm and inviting the interior looked, Kim thought, especially when Yoshi's smiling image appeared and invited entry. There was something almost blatantly sexual in all that, and she wondered what the celestials had made of it.
They surveyed the satellite system until they had its mechanics down. Once they'd accomplished that, they ran the orbits backward to 4:12 P.M., February 17, the moment that the open door image had been transmitted. They matched the positions of the moons against the angle of the rings.
"Okay." Solly put a graphic on one of the auxiliary monitors. "In order for everything to appear as it does in the picture, the Hunter would have had to be here." He showed her the point, eleven degrees north of the equatorial plane, at an altitude of 45,000 kilometers. "But we only have a couple of minutes on the image, and it's not enough to track a complete orbit."
"We've got a second picture," Kim reminded him. The Emily image, which had been taken two hours later.
Solly brought it up, found more moons, three this time, repeated the process, and smiled triumphantly. "I think we're in business," he said.
She was delighted. "Good. Let's get ourselves into the same orbit. But I want to move a bit faster than the Hunter would have."
"Why?"
"So that we'll overtake anything that might be traveling at Hunter's velocity."
Solly frowned.
"Just do it, okay?" she said.
"Okay, Kim."
"And let's do as thorough a search as we can."
"What exactly do you expect to find?"
"I expect nothing," she said, feeling like Veronica King, who always said that. "But the possibilities are limitless." The hope that she entertained, that she did not want to describe, was that the celestial was still here somewhere, a derelict. It was possible.
Solly passed instructions to the AI. "We'll be going into orbit," he told her, "later this evening. And we'll need roughly twelve hours to do a complete search along the orbit."
There was something in Solly's voice. "Anything wrong?" she asked.
"I thought about this before we left but it didn't really seem like something I wanted to bring up at the time."
"Tell me, Solly."
"We're not armed," he said. "Has it occurred to you that if this thing is here, it may not be friendly?"
"I don't think that's likely."
"Why not?"
She looked out at the star-clouds. "Solly, even if they were an aggressive species, there wouldn't be any point shooting at someone in a wasteland like this. What's to gain?"
"Maybe they just don't like strangers. Something happened to the Hunter"
"We have to assume they're rational, Solly. Otherwise they couldn't have gotten here in the first place."
She enjoyed being with him, alone in all this vast emptiness. It was different now that they could look out the windows and know that what they were seeing was really there. "They didn't shoot at the Hunter. Or if they did, they're not very dangerous because the Hunter got home safely."
"It's possible," said Solly, "they're at war against their own kind. Maybe Ben Tripley got the name right, calling it the Valiant. It could have been a warship."
"Solly," she said patiently, "they got home all right."
"Did they? Who knows? Maybe they were taken. Maybe something else went back." He made a scary face and hummed a few notes from the old horror series Midnight Express. She laughed. But a chill ran through her nevertheless.
Shortly after dinner they settled into Hunter's orbit, which was roughly equatorial, varying only a few degrees above and below the line.
The rings dominated the sky, a vast shining arch beneath which the copper-gold clouds rolled on forever.
Lightning bolts cruised through the depths and occasionally they saw the fiery streak of a meteor.
It seemed a place of infinite serenity and beauty. One might almost conclude it had been designed specifically to please the human eye and mind.
It was, she thought, a reason in itself to pursue starflight. Even if we were truly alone the mere existence of this kind of world and its magnificent star-clouds should be enough to summon the race from its ancestral home. There was something decadent in what was happening now, in the general retreat back to comfort and routine and familiar surroundings. In the lack of interest in all the things that had once been counted as noble and worth accomplishing.
We had begun to lead virtual lives.
No one had to work, so few did anything more than pursue quiet leisure. Kim had always thought herself ambitious. Yet during her entire life she had never felt an urge, even when the opportunity was there, to move beyond the home worlds. People complained about long weeks locked up in spartan accommodations, at getting ill during the jumps, at the expense of interstellar travel. And they settled for imaginary images, lovely little technological fireworks displays, created in the warm comfort of their living rooms. Throw a log on the fire and visit Betelgeuse.
She started to explain to Solly how she felt, looking at the star-cradles glowing in their windows, at the Horsehead, at the rings. The presence of another intelligence seemed not quite as important as it had a few hours before.
"Welcome to the club, Kim," he said when she'd finished. "Those of us who make a living out here have known that for years. It really doesn't matter all that much whether there are celestials in Orion. There's just too much to see to complain about the details. And if it does turn out that we're the only part of the universe able to see what's around us, that's okay."
She'd always felt that Solly tended to neglect the more intellectual aspects of life. He didn't read as much as he should, and he'd seemed to be too interested in the practical and the mundane, a man who seldom considered the philosophical issues. He'd surprised her several times on this trip, particularly with his remarks about the slow lightning. Ask Solly what the purpose of existence was, and he could be expected to reply that it's a good lunch with good friends. Or a good woman.
She'd had a confused notion that life had something to do with expanding one's intellectual horizons. And with achievement. Now she looked out the window and decided that whatever her purpose was, she'd fulfilled it when she arrived here.
And if she could choose a place to meet another intelligence, this would surely be it.
Below her, the upper atmosphere caught the light from the distant sun. It looked warm down there, and it was easy to imagine broad oceans and continents lying beneath those shimmering mists. In fact the temperature at the cloudtops was a terrestrial -17 C, the heat generated internally. Not all that bad if you could breathe hydrogen and methane.
Solly concentrated the scanners along the arc of the orbit, but he maintained a full search bubble out to more than six thousand kilometers. That took about 30 percent off the range and definition of the main search, but it was a price he was prepared to pay to avoid being surprised. Kim didn't argue the point.
They were circling the planet every hour and twenty-two minutes. It had gotten late but no one showed any inclination to retire.