Infinity Beach (13 page)

“Why?”

“It wasn’t exactly clear
why
. But it has to do with you. When you were making the presentation, did you ask him about the Mount Hope incident?”

“We talked about it.”

“Did you imply that his father was involved in criminal activity?”

She tried to remember the conversations. “No,” she said. “Why would I do something like that?”

“That was going to be my question.”

“It didn’t happen.”

“Good. Because whatever benefit we got from giving him the Morton Cable Award, we’ve more than lost.”

“Matt—”

“Did you
really
break into his house?”

“No!”

“He says you did.”

Kim felt her temper rising. Take a deep breath and don’t lose control. “I looked at the property in the Severin Valley. But it’s not his place anymore. That whole area’s abandoned.”

“Are you sure about the details? Did you check out the ownership before you went in?”

“No—”

“That’s what I thought. The director had to apologize to him this morning.”

“Apologize?”
Tripley’s image took shape in her mind. He was smiling. “What for? Whatever the paperwork says, the place is abandoned.”

“Tripley thinks the Institute’s sticking its nose into his business.” Matt sighed. “Kim, we’ve assured him there’s a misunderstanding somewhere, and that the matter is ended. I don’t know what this is all about. But it
is
ended, right?”

“Matt, this is something I’ve been doing on my own.”

“
No
, Kim.
You
don’t do anything on your own. You’re a representative of the Institute. For God’s sake, you speak for us a couple of times a week.” His gaze hardened. “You will back away and not go near any of this again. Do you understand?”

She returned his stare. “Matt, I talked to one of the Interstellar technicians yesterday. About the repairs made on the
Hunter
after they came back. He lied to me.”

“How do you know?”

“I could see it in his face.”

“Good. That’ll hold up if anybody questions you—”

“Listen, if there’s nothing to any of this, why is Tripley so bent out of shape? What’s he hiding?”

“That’s easy. A lot of people died out there. In the explosion. If it were to be shown that his father was in some way liable, there’d be a hundred lawsuits against the estate.”

“After all these years?”

“I’m not a lawyer. But, yeah, I’d say he stands to lose quite a lot if you were to find something that makes his father culpable.”

Somebody apparently entered the office. The interruption was behind her, so she couldn’t see who it was. But Matt glowered over her shoulder at the visitor. She heard the door shut, and his attention returned to her. “Matt, I don’t see how I can just walk away from this.”

He cleared his throat. “Kim, I have a pretty good idea what this means to you—”

“Matt, you have no idea what it means to me—”

“All right. I’m sorry. I hear what you’re saying. But the problem is there’s no proof anywhere to support an investigation. All that’s going to happen if you persist is that the Institute will get burned, you’ll wind up out on the street, and nothing will have been accomplished.”

She took a minute to get control of her voice. “How do we get evidence if we don’t look?”

He looked pained. “I don’t know, Kim. But you have to realize that you represent the Institute. Round-the-clock. Whatever you do reflects on us.” He braced both elbows on his desk and set his chin atop his clasped hands. “I understand that we’re not being fair to you. But you have to understand there’s just too much at stake.”

“Money.”

“A lot of money.”

She let her eyes close. “Anything else?”

“No. That’s about it.”

“Thanks,” she said. And broke the connection. Her living room re-formed around her. She got up, retrieved the jacket, and walked out onto the deck.

The sea looked cold and gray.

The big push at the Institute was to lay out a strategy for exploiting interest in Beacon. Matt had already arranged interviews with the crew of the Trent. It was awkward because the hypercomm signals required time to make the round-trip. Journalists had, in effect, to submit their questions and come back the next day for the answers. So much for spontaneity, or for playing off a scientist’s response and letting it lead naturally to the next question.

Consequently nobody really wanted to talk to the
Trent
crew. No one from the media had accompanied the mission, because travel time was excessive and it just wasn’t perceived as that big a story. It was too far away. And nobody took celestials seriously anymore. The interest was not generated by the reason for the experiment, but by the fact that we had demonstrated we could trigger a nova.

Consequently, the Institute’s public information group decided to concentrate on that aspect of the story, and the benefits the human race might eventually derive from the capability. Unfortunately no one could think of any. Improvements in magnetic bottle design, maybe. We
were
getting better at antimatter containment. And maybe gravity deflec
tion systems, which allowed electronic devices to function in ever-more-concentrated gravity fields.

Cray Elliott, a public relations specialist who was a junior member of the team, nodded and wrote it all down. Kim showed her disquiet. “We are forever trying to sell science because somebody somewhere will get a better toothbrush,” she grumbled. “Whatever happened to sheer curiosity?”

“You have to be practical,” Cray said. He was bright, ebullient, cheerful. She really didn’t want to have to deal with
cheerful
.

Nevertheless it was all there if one wanted to look: long-range star travel was rendered more efficient, the cells that provided fuel to heating and lighting systems for entire cities would increase their capacity, and safety would be enhanced.

“But,” said Kim, “star travel is being cut back everywhere, we’ve already got more power than we can possibly use, and there hasn’t been any kind of accident, that
I
know of, involving fuel cells.
Ever.
” Other than Mount Hope, probably.

“It doesn’t matter,” Matt said. “Those are just details. Nobody notices
details
.”

Maybe he was right. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d stretched things a bit. Two years before, the Institute had not challenged rumors that a breakthrough in antigravity was imminent, even though no such thing was in the works, and in fact every physicist that Kim knew of thought antigravity an impossibility. The story retained credence because people believed that if you could induce artificial gravity, you could surely nullify its effects. But it was a different matter altogether. One didn’t need to bend time and space, but only to establish magnetic fields, to create the condition that allowed people to walk about in starships.

Kim thought that the public relations division might even have
started
the rumor. When she’d mentioned it to Matt, he had piously denied everything. Piety was always how you knew Matt was lying.

Now she listened to his instructions and wondered why
she didn’t just walk out. The money was good, the Institute was a decent cause, and the truth was she got a lot of satisfaction simply from the fact that she was so talented at what she did. But as long as she stayed here, the career she’d wanted, dreamed about, prepared for, would not happen.

She recalled the defensiveness with which she’d told Sheyel what she was doing.
“It’s not the field I’d have chosen.”

And he’d been embarrassed for her.
“One never knows how things will turn out.”

It was always like that. She was among those who never went to reunions.

Back in her office she found a communication from Shepard.
“There’s a response to your message to St. Johns,”
he said.

“Onscreen, please, Shep.”

“Yes, Kim. Please note I have adjusted all dates to Greenway Central Time.”

The entire mission was to have lasted fifteen months. Kim pressed Solly’s key.

“Hi, Kim.” His image brightened the screen. “How’d the meeting go?”

“As usual. Got a question for you.”

“Go ahead.”

“I should have asked this before: When the
Hunter
left St. Johns, would they have inspected the jump engines?”

“You mean the station?”

“Yes.”

“Only if asked. The engines should have been looked at by the Foundation’s own people before leaving Sky Harbor. If you’re asking me whether a breakdown is likely early in a voyage that was going way out into the deeps, I’d think not. But it happened. And to be honest, jump engines take a beating. It doesn’t take much of an oversight to cause a problem.”

“What happens if the engines die while they’re in hyperspace?”

“Bye-bye, baby,” he said. “Unless they can make repairs.”

“What about communications?”

“They won’t have any. The ship has to make the jump back into realspace first before they can talk to anybody.”

“That doesn’t show a great deal of foresight.”

He shrugged. “Realities of basic physics, m’ dear.”

“Has it ever happened?”

“Don’t know. We’ve lost a ship from time to time.” He watched for a reaction, but she didn’t provide one. “Why? What have you got?”

“Not a thing,” she said.

She put the projected route on her screen, drawing a line between St. Johns and the
187
target star. Somewhere along that line, the engines had shut down and they’d come out of hyperspace, made temporary repairs, and returned to Greenway. So they’d gotten nowhere close to the Golden Pitcher. In fact, since it was approximately a forty-day flight back to Sky Harbor from the closest points along that line, they couldn’t have been much more than a week out of St. Johns when the problem developed.

A week.

That was still a long distance. A starship would cover about 270 light-years in a week.

She marked off the line at that point. Somewhere between the mark and St. Johns, the engines had brought them out of hyper.

“So what?” said Solly, who seemed to be reading her mind. “I mean, we’ve known all along they broke down. What difference does it make where it happened?”

“Let’s go back to square one,” she said.

“What’s square one?”

“‘We struck gold.’ Sheyel’s convinced there was a contact of some kind. Let’s assume he’s right. That the
Hunter
saw something out there. So the question becomes, where were they when it happened?”

“You tell me: Where were they?”

“Near a star.”

“How do we know that?” asked Solly.

“Has to be. If contact was made either with a ground entity or with an orbiter of some kind, we have ipso facto a star system. If it was made with a vessel, you’d have to ask yourself whether the vessel was in a star system or whether it was out in the void. If it was in the void, what could it have been doing out there?”

“Repairing its engines?” suggested Solly, seeing the point.

“Right. What are the odds against two ships suffering breakdowns and showing up at the same empty place? No, whatever happened, it had to be close to a star.”

She looked at the
Hunter
’s course. “I count seven stars within a reasonable range along their course line. If they ran into something, it would have been in the neighborhood of one of those seven.”

Solly shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “Suppose you’re right. Suppose there
was
an encounter of some kind. It was twenty-seven years ago. You think the celestials are still going to be hanging around out there?”

“It doesn’t have to have been another
ship
,” she said. “They may have discovered a living world.”

He sat down on the edge of his desk and considered the possibility. “Yeah,” he said. “That could be.”

“There are only seven stars,” she said again.
“Seven.”

“I hope you’re not telling me you’re going to ask for a mission.”

“No.”

“Good,” he said.

“Matt would think I’d gone over the edge.”

“That’s right. And I’m not sure he’d be far wrong. Look, Kim, this is all guesswork, and you don’t have anything more persuasive than a shoe and a crew member who calls home with a cryptic message that may not mean anything at all. That may have been misunderstood for that matter. By the way, did it occur to you that Yoshi might have been talking about the Golden Pitcher?”

“They didn’t get to the Golden Pitcher. They didn’t get anywhere close.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. “I mean, if they found, say, a tree out there, or a
city
, why not say that? What’s the big secret?”

She had no answer.

He looked at the time. “Got to go. I have some reports due.”

She could see he felt relieved. He’d expected her to go in and make a fool of herself trying to persuade Matt that the Institute should send out a survey team. “Solly,” she said, “when a ship’s logs get sent to the Archives, does anyone actually review them?”

“Under normal circumstances I can’t imagine why they would. But if you’re asking whether anyone has seen the
Hunter
’s logs from the Golden Pitcher flight, I’d say almost certainly.”

“Because of the disappearances.”

“Right. The police would have looked for any indication that something unusual had happened on the mission. The fact that there doesn’t seem to have been a follow-up, that no one searched Tripley’s place, seems to indicate they didn’t find anything.”

“They might have been bought off.”

“It’s possible.” A long silence drew out between them. “Kim,” he said, “Matt’s right. Why don’t you give this a rest?”

She’d have liked to. Kim had no appetite for challenging her boss, for taking on Tripley, for encouraging Solly to think she had become obsessed. But Emily was lost out there somewhere, and somehow it all seemed to be connected. “I can’t just walk away from it,” she said. “I want to know what happened. And I don’t care who gets offended, or who gets sued.”

Solly looked at her for a long minute, and nodded. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said.

“There is. How can we get a look at those logs?”

He took a deep breath. “We’d have to bribe somebody,” he said.

Bribe?
“Isn’t there a way to do it without breaking the law?”

“None that I know of. So I think where we are is this: You need to decide whether you’re as serious as you say. If so—” He shrugged.

Kim had never knowingly violated the law. “We can’t do that,” she said.

“I didn’t think so.” Solly looked out of the screen at her, trying to suggest everything would be all right. “Gotta go,” he said.

The screen blanked. She sat staring at it, pushed back in her chair, activated it again and brought up the
Autumn
. Emily with those wistful eyes looked back at her.

Where are you?

She thought about the terrible days after her disappearance while they waited for news. Her parents had tried to protect her, to reassure her that Emily was coming home, that she’d taken a trip somewhere and they’d be hearing from her at any time. But Kim had seen the hollowness in their eyes, detected the strained voices. She’d known.

They must have assumed from the beginning that she would not be found alive. Murders were extremely rare in Equatoria, seldom exceeding more than a half dozen annu
ally, in a population of six million. Homicides were usually domestic, but there was still the occasional maniac. The St. Luke killer, so named because of his penchant for leaving biblical verses pinned to the bodies of victims, had rampaged through the northwest during a two-year spree in which he’d murdered seven people. He had been the worst of modern times.

What must have surprised her folks was that the mystery was never solved. No body was ever found.

Set against that, what was a little bribery?

She punched in Solly’s code and he appeared onscreen, not looking as surprised as she’d expected.

“Can we arrange it?” she asked.

He looked at her disapprovingly. “Is my lovely associate running amok?”

“Yes,” she said. “If that’s what it takes. Can we do it?”

“I know somebody,” he said.

“How much will it cost?”

“I don’t know. Probably a couple of hundred. Let me make some calls, and I’ll get back to you.”

Kim was scheduled to have lunch with a representative of the Theosophical Society, a Brother Kendrick. This time, her objective was not to solicit contributions, but to reassure the Society that there would be no long-term deleterious effects from Beacon, thereby persuading them, she hoped, to remove their outspoken opposition to the Institute.

They ate at Kashmir’s, which specialized in cuisine from the Sebastian Island chain. Brother Kendrick expressed the Society’s concern that the series of novas would make an area of approximately eight million cubic light-years permanently uninhabitable.

Kim pointed out there were no human habitations anywhere close to what the technicians called the target box.

“What about nonhuman habitations?” he asked.

The question stopped her cold.

Brother Kendrick, like almost everyone else on Greenway, was of indeterminate age. But he was inclined to lec
ture rather than talk. His attitude embodied a barely concealed condescension, his eyes never left her, and it was clear he was speaking through a controlled anger. He wore a neatly trimmed black beard and his hair was cut long. The Theosophists were not among those who adhered to trends.