Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [50]
It was a little overwrought, but there was no doubting her sincerity. Emily had not been trained as a scientist, so she tended to draw conclusions based on emotional need rather than on evidence. The human race could not be alone because the universe was so big. Because we needed to have someone to compare notes with.
The reality, of course, was that the appearance of life on Earth seemed to require a set of circumstances so unusual and so fortuitous that it might very well have been a unique event. It was quite possible that the human race was the only intelligent species in all those billions of light-years. In the dark of the night, Kim suspected that was precisely the true state of affairs. She would not have admitted it, not even to Solly. She’d been riding point for too many years, trying to engender enthusiasm for Beacon, which was the only Institute project that seemed to have the capacity to get people excited.
Yoshi Amara had left no written work behind, save her doctoral thesis, which dealt with atmospheric thermodynamics. She was still in her early twenties when she joined the Tripley team. Her flight on the Hunter, as far as Kim could determine, was the first time she’d been away from the home world.
She ran some videos of Emily urging the Algonda Chamber of Commerce to get behind a public funding for elderly citizens; conducting a leadership program for managers at All-Purpose Transport; speaking to the class of ’71 at Mellinda University, saying all the things one usually says to graduates; participating in a symposium on the topic “Where Do We Go from Here?”—which was about population loss and not space exploration—and arguing strenuously for a concerted effort to persuade people to have more children.
She switched over to her Tripley file and watched Kile at the charter meeting of the Foundation, trying to explain why it was essential to pursue the search for celestials. It never seemed to occur to him that they might not exist. He struggled a bit. It was, after all, not an easy argument to nail down. Someone in the audience commented that we all know how humans behave and if there are celestials out there and they operate the way we do, maybe finding them wouldn’t be such a good thing. Let them be, he said.
By midnight she’d concluded that Emily’s companions on the Hunter—Tripley, Amara, and the pilot, Kane—were everything they purported to be. It might be true that all but Kane edged into fanaticism, including Emily, but there was no doubt that, had they succeeded in their attempt to find evidence of other civilizations, had they actually encountered something alive beyond St. Johns, they would have broadcast it to the world.
That meant Sheyel was wrong. Had to be. Yet there was a good chance the shoe from the villa had belonged to Yoshi.
And Gaerhard was hiding something. He’d done what the records indicated was a routine repair job almost three decades ago. And when she mentioned it he knew immediately what she was talking about.
Andra had provided several hundred accounts of the Mount Hope explosion and its aftermath.
Kim studied pictures of the area before and immediately after the explosion. The crater was there, of course, a kilometer and a quarter wide, looking as if someone had dropped a nuke. Trees for vast distances had been scorched and blown down. The valley had been decimated.
There were literally hundreds of pictures of the destruction, buildings wrecked, fires burning, rescue workers pouring in, dazed survivors wandering through the carnage.
Investigators had estimated the yield at several kilotons. But there was no radiation. A government commission had finally labeled the incident “due to cause or causes unknown.”
No record could be found of a vessel that had lost fuel cells, or of improper disposal of spent units. Of course it would not have been in a perpetrator’s interest to get caught, and records were not difficult to falsify.
Authorities pursued independent