Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [120]
“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