Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [71]
Emily too had understood the odds.
This was the first time Kim had seen her sister in private interactions. They were three days into the flight before she came into the pilot’s room and Kim was finally able to observe her. Kane was already there, doing his morning routine. She strolled up behind him and squeezed his shoulder. Kane looked back at her and Kim understood that the presence of the imager, recording everything, was an impediment to them.
Solly glanced over at her but said nothing.
Emily slipped gracefully into the right-hand seat. She wore the mission jumpsuit, open at the neck just enough to reveal the curve of her breasts.
Kane commented that everything was going well. It was a nondescript remark, small talk, but his voice had dropped an octave. “They’re lovers,” Kim said, more to herself than to Solly.
There was nothing overt, of course. Kane and Emily gazed at each other with the kind of forced indifference that can only be displayed by people in love who are trying to hide the fact.
Yoshi was just out of her teens. Her grades had suggested promise, but she too was caught up in chasing the Dream. Kane took time whenever the opportunity offered to caution her that the missions had gone out many times. That it looked easy when there were hundreds of class Gs within a narrow field. That, despite the assumption that it was just a matter of finding the right one, there was no guarantee that there was a right one. No assurance that any star anywhere, other than Sol, had produced life. Accept the possibility, he told her. “We may be alone.”
“It could not be,” she said. “It’s a basic scientific principle that nothing is unique.”
Kim noticed that the crew of the Hunter never talked about finding an amoeba. Judging from all the conversation about how to handle a first encounter, what kind of technology to look for, what dangers might be posed by an immensely advanced celestial, she saw that the discovery of a blade of grass, everybody else’s ambition, would have been a distinct disappointment to this outfit. At the very least, they hoped to unearth ruins somewhere, evidence that another intelligence had existed.
“Until we show that it can happen somewhere else,” said Kane, “we have to accept the possibility that the human race was divinely created.”
She laughed at the idea, but Kane smiled back. “How else would you explain it?” he asked. “The universal silence?”
She had no answer.
Kim listened as they discussed their strategy. First step was to calculate the area of a given sun’s biozone, and then to find the elusive blade of grass. Once they had done that, had found a living world, then they would proceed to hunt for evidence of intelligence, past or present.
It was all very optimistic. But after all, Tripley said at one point, that’s what makes it worth doing. “It wouldn’t really be very sporting, would it, if there were life in every other system?”
By four A.M. Kim and Solly had reviewed the first six days of the mission, looking for hostility among the members of the research team, for indications of anything that might lead eventually to murder. It might have seemed a handicap that they were barred from overhearing conversations anywhere other than the pilot’s room, that in fact those who spoke for the record knew they were doing so, yet it was evident that the crew members got along well. Kane was almost always present during these dialogues, and there was never more than one other person with him, except on one occasion when Yoshi and Tripley arrived with sandwiches and beer.
There were some differences of opinion, minor and unavoidable among a group of people who talked politics and history, science and philosophy, apparently ran a book discussion group, and engaged in virtual gaming. Kim and Solly were never privy to the games, but they judged by what they heard afterward that they included a fair amount of sexual byplay. There was, however, no evidence of tension between Kane and Tripley, or between the women. Apparently there was an arrangement,