Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [168]
There was no way to be certain that she wouldn’t be recorded by a security system. If that happened, Tora would get a picture of a young man, and the plan would be blown, but she at least would escape detection.
She went behind the villa, got the ladder out of the shed, and used it to climb to the roof. She now removed her universal tap from a jacket pocket and secured it to a cornice. It was painted the same dull brown, so it would be almost invisible to anyone arriving in a flyer.
Satisfied, she climbed down, put the ladder back, and left.
She returned home to work on Aquilla Selby’s lines, but had hardly gotten started when Matt called to ask whether she was okay, by which he presumably meant had she been arrested yet? He also reported that he’d found a lab they could use to examine the Valiant, but that it would be a couple of weeks before they could get access to it.
He asked again whether she would not relent and give him access to the “bric-a-brac.” He was so mysterious that she knew anyone listening would understand he was trying to talk in code.
“Best to leave things as they are,” she told him.
“I don’t understand why you don’t trust me,” he said.
And she said the usual things, it wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but these things have a way of getting out, and they needed to concentrate on security, and so on.
He gave up, and informed her he’d pared the list of potential researchers to six.
“Three at most,” she insisted, knowing even that was too many.
They agreed that no feelers would go out until the lab was available.
After he’d disconnected she sat for a while studying the Kane print, Storm Warning. It was an ominous landscape, ruined towers in the distance, oncoming thunderheads.
She ran through the Selby script several times before she was satisfied. Then she downloaded it into a compupak, had dinner, and went for a long walk in the twilight. The tides on Greenway did not share the rhythmic aspect they would have had under a single satellite. These were up and down all the time, pulled constantly in different directions by Helios and the four moons.
They were at extreme low tide, the ocean far out, more beach exposed than would usually be visible in a month’s time. She strolled along the water’s edge, letting the waves wash over her feet, watching the stars appear. They looked far away and she wondered again how anything capable of mastering those immense distances could behave so irrationally. Yet there had been the war with Pacifica.
Such things could happen apparently. The people who devised physical theory and constructed jump engines were not the same people who made political decisions, or who allowed themselves to be swept up by the current media craze, or to be ruled by centuries-old traditions that might once have served to hold nations together but had now become counterproductive.
Don’t assume that a species is intelligent because it produces intelligent individuals. Brandywine’s Corollary.
Maybe in the end she’d be remembered for some such principle rather than the discovery of the Valiant. She smiled and decided she’d be willing to settle for that.
The next morning she flew over to Bayside Park where she could use a private commbooth, ensuring that even if things went wrong no one would be able to track her down.
The booth was located in a mall along a gravel walkway off the ocean. It was still early in the season, and there were few people abroad: a few university students between classes, some locals taking their constitutionals. No tourists yet. The morning was bright and cloudless, and the air still cool, with a crisp wind coming inshore.
She tied in the Selby program and punched in Tora’s number.
The link chimed at the other end.
A couple of kids with balloons chased one another through the mall. She watched