Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [198]
Toward the end of the party, Paul McKeep commented that it was a good thing the Institute had kept the existence of the ship quiet. “The government’s too conservative,” he said. “They’d never have allowed us away from the dock.” Paul was their mathematician.
Kim threw a sidelong glance at Ali to make sure he was listening. Then she raised her voice slightly: “There’s something you folks ought to know.”
“Something else?” laughed Mona.
“Yes,” she said. “We didn’t quite succeed in keeping a lid on the Valiant. Woodbridge found out about it and tried to take it from me.”
“How’d you manage to keep it out of his hands?” asked Ali.
“I gave him a duplicate.”
That brought a round of laughter.
But Ali never cracked a smile. “You know what that means,” he said.
“Yes.” Kim looked directly into his dark eyes. “When we make the jump, we’ll find a recall waiting for us.”
He frowned, turned, and left the room. The others fell silent. Kim looked at Matt, intending to follow him, and make sure he would resist pressure from home.
But Matt shook his head. No, he was saying. This is not the time.
There was an echo to the voyage. Kim could not repress memories of the flight with Solly. The distances tended to collapse, as if she were on a train running through dark but familiar countryside, and the landmarks were all abstract, temporal, racing by. Places she’d been before. Here we were playing chess and Solly kept winning so I got annoyed. And there was where we finally beat Veronica King to the solution, in the case of “The Haunted Balcony.”
She knew when they arrived at the place where Kim’s image, as Clea, had performed the torchlight dance.
Stupid. Somewhere she had been incredibly stupid and had let it all slip through her fingers.
They spent most of their time devising their contact strategy. They intended to begin broadcasting as soon as they arrived, to ensure they couldn’t be missed. A new kind of Beacon Project, Kim thought.
They debated endlessly how best to establish a syntax and vocabulary. “We don’t want to play more number games,” Gil Chase reminded them.
They knew the two technologies had a common system for exchanging audio and visual signals. “We can use pictures in the beginning,” Eric Climer said. He was a linguist. “But it would have been helpful,” he complained to Kim, “if I had known in advance what this was about. I could have brought the proper software.”
They formulated lists of questions to ask once a common language had been devised. How far back can you trace your history? To even begin to phrase that question they’d have to work out a joint system for measuring time.
Where are you from?
“No,” said Maurie, “don’t ask that. It sounds too much like intelligence-gathering.”
“What do we do,” asked Sandra, “if they put that kind of question to us?”
“Considering what’s already happened,” said Paul, “we’d better avoid giving them any information of that nature.”
Kim nodded. “I agree.” She didn’t want to be responsible for the arrival of an invasion fleet if they encountered a worst-case scenario.
“But if they get the idea we don’t trust them,” said Matt, “how can we expect them to trust us?”
“We can’t,” said Mona. “But we don’t need a great deal of mutual trust. At least not in the beginning. They’ll certainly understand our reluctance to divulge that kind of information. I think our best approach to this is to be honest.”
“So what other questions,” asked Terri, “do we want answered?”
“Is there anyone else?” said Ali. “Have they found anybody else out there?”
“Your ships seem to have armaments. Why?”
“What’s your explanation for order in the universe? For the existence of the universe