Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [8]
His smile left her feeling as if she were once again an undergraduate. Was it really that long ago he had led them in work songs from the era then under study, the terraforming years on Greenway? His classroom had rocked with “Granite John” and “Lay My Bones in the Deep Blue Sea.”
“I think there was a little more to it,” he said. “I think they found something.”
“Something! What kind of something!”
“What they were looking for.”
Had it been anyone else, she would have simply found a way to terminate the conversation. “Professor Tolliver, if they did, they forgot to mention it when they got back.”
“I know,” he said. “They kept it quiet.”
“Why would they do that?” She adopted her best let’s-be-reasonable tone.
“I don’t know. Maybe they were frightened by what they’d found.”
Frightened? The ship’s captain was Markis Kane. A war hero who had a wing of the Mighty Third Memorial Museum all to himself. He’d been killed a few years ago while attempting to rescue children during a forest fire in North America. “That’s hard to believe,” she said.
“Nevertheless, I think it’s what happened.”
There’d been only four people on the Hunter. Kane, Emily, Yoshi. And Kile Tripley, head of the Tripley Foundation, which had sponsored the missions. He too had vanished, and that was an odd business. Tripley and Kane had both lived in the Severin Valley in the western mountain region of Equatoria. Three days after the Hunter had returned from its mission, after the women had disappeared, a still-unexplained explosion had ripped apart the eastern face of Mount Hope, had leveled Severin Village and killed three hundred people. Tripley had never been found after the event and was presumed buried somewhere in the rubble.
Most of the experts at the Institute thought it had been a meteor, but no trace of the object had ever been found. The force of the explosion had been estimated at roughly equivalent to a small nuclear bomb.
“It’s all connected,” Tolliver said. “The Hunter mission, the disappearances, the explosion.”
There’d been stories to that effect for years. It was a favorite subject of the conspiracy theorists. And maybe there was something to it. But there was no evidence, and she hated sitting here with Sheyel Tolliver talking about Mount Hope. It saddened her to see her old teacher reduced to a believer in cover-ups and visitors from other worlds.
There were all sorts of lunatic theories about the incident. Some said that a micro black hole had come to ground. They’d searched the logs of ships and aircraft on the other side of Greenway looking for an indication that the hole had emerged from the ocean. Much as researchers had a thousand years before, after the Tunguska event. As it turned out, there had been a spout under a heavy sky, so the story had gained credence. Even though everyone knew there could be no such thing as a micro black hole.
Others were convinced a government experiment had gone wrong. The experiment was said by one group to have involved time-travel research; by another, mass transference. Still others thought an antimatter alien ship had exploded while trying to land.
“Kim,” he said, “how much do you know about Kile Tripley?”
“I know he was a wealthy freelance enthusiast who wanted to make a name for himself.” Tripley had been the CEO of Interstellar, Inc., which specialized in restoring and maintaining jump engines, which moved starships into and out of hyperspace.
“He was a tough-minded man, had to be in that business,” Tolliver said. “Have you by any chance read Korkel’s biography?”
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