Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [119]
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,
VI 1902 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.
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