Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [200]
During the final days prior to arrival at Alnitak, tension began to build.
The renowned twenty-fourth-century psychologist Edmund Trimble had argued that extended life spans were detrimental to human progress. For one thing, he said, life tended for most people to consist of a series of missed opportunities. Consequently, after seventy or eighty years, people became not only inflexible, but increasingly cynical. As it had turned out, Trimble’s fears were exaggerated but not altogether groundless. The average age for the members of the contact team, not counting Kim or Ali (who was only 41) was 126. The general conviction, based on all these years of experience, was that something would go wrong. What they expected to go wrong was that no one would be waiting at Alnitak: that the opportunity had been missed and that all they would have to show in the end would be the Valiant, the Hunter logs, and maybe another intruder chasing them around.
On the last night before arrival, they celebrated Kim’s thirty-sixth birthday. They broke out a few bottles and toasted her. Gil provided a cake, they put up ribbon, and enjoyed a celebration whose level of festivity, it seemed to her, far exceeded the significance of the event.
33
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness,
So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
—LONGFELLOW, Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863 C.E.
Kim was sitting with AH in the pilot’s room when they made the jump back into realspace, into the Alnitak region. She heard the oooohs and aaaahs downstairs as everyone got a look at the view.
The captain’s manner throughout the flight had been detached, unemotional, under control. The sort of perspective you’d want in an emergency. She was consequently pleased to see him catch his breath when the great illuminated star-clouds appeared in the windows. He turned the lamp down and got up from his chair.
“It’s why the Hunter stopped here, Ali.”
“The hand of the Almighty,” he said. “Still at work.”
Kim had grown familiar with the instruments on the Hammersmith, and she’d made it her business to acquaint herself with those of the Mac. Especially with the long-range sensors, which were set to sound off at the first indication of an object moving contrary to orbital requirements. Her eyes went to them now, looking for telltales but finding none.
Ali stood for several minutes in the crystalline light, and then directed the AI to adjust course for the gas giant. He turned toward Kim. “Good luck,” he said.
“I hope so.”
She summoned the team to the mission center, where they briefly reviewed the plan. Matt asked whether there’d been an incoming transmission yet.
Yet. Now that they were here it did seem inevitable. “No,” she said. “We haven’t heard anything.”
They began broadcasting a visual program. It consisted of a portion of the numerical interchange between the Hunter and the Valiant, and the recorded Mona Vasquez, in her most inviting manner: “Hello. We are happy to have the opportunity to greet you and to say hello.”
They’d deliberately repeated the “hello” in an effort to imply its use. “It would be,” Maurie said in his somewhat pretentious manner, “an appropriate beginning.”
“We hope,” Mona continued, “to establish a long and fruitful collaboration for both of us. We look forward to exchanging ideas and information with you at the earliest opportunity.”
Mona added that she and her friends were a long way from home, and that they had made the voyage specifically in the desire to meet the entities who had been seen in the area of Alnitak a long time ago. She emphasized the star’s name. Its spelling and its picture appeared beside her.
She got some mocking applause when the broadcast finished. There was a sixty-second delay and it started again.
No one expected an immediate response, but Kim remained hopeful at the beginning. Although after the first few hours, when it became apparent that