The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [91]
Alan pulled a card from the middle of Emilio’s hand and Emilio dealt himself a new one off the top of the deck. Predictably, he found it hilarious, and it was impossible to tell if he’d just gotten four of a kind or busted a flush. When the bets came around to him, he pushed his whole pile of peanuts into the center. "Winner takes all. Come on, Pace," Emilio urged.
They laid their cards down again and Alan roared with indignation. "I don’t believe it! A straight."
Emilio was practically crying now. "And the worst part is, you filled it. I was holding nothing!" He pushed the peanuts over to Alan and held up a hand, becoming before their eyes the very Buddha, soul of disinterest. "The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning."
There were cries of "Liar!" and dark mutterings about confession from Anne and Sofia and D.W., who’d all seen Emilio take the skin off his face maniacally sliding into home, and wide eyes from Alan, amazed by the eruption.
"He is completely full of shit, Alan," George told him. "He doesn’t care about poker because he doesn’t like peanuts. But he’ll cut your heart out at second base if he thinks you’re going to steal third."
"This is also true," Emilio acknowledged peaceably, gathering up the deck while the others vilified him. "And if we were playing for raisins, it would be different. I like raisins."
"Raisins make a mess of the cards," Sofia pointed out.
"Do you ever get tired of being practical?" Emilio demanded.
"Bingo," they heard Jimmy say quietly.
"No, poker," Emilio corrected him. "Bingo is with those square cards, and you put beans on the numbers ..." He fell silent as Jimmy came into the common room. One by one, they turned to look and went motionless, waiting.
"A planet," Jimmy said, dazed. "We found it. We found a planet. Might not be the Singers’ planet, but we found a planet."
SINCE ROTATING THE asteroid at the halfway point, to turn the engines around and begin deceleration, they’d stopped every two weeks to do periodic broad-spectrum imaging, engines off, and to listen for radio signals, which became relatively strong but remained strangely intermittent. As the Stella Maris passed out of the plane of the Alpha Centauri system, rising "above" it in order to image the system at right angles, there was something far odder than interval to worry about: they lost the radio signals completely. It was generally unnerving, although the reactions ranged from Marc’s faith that everything would come right in the end to George’s palpable frustration at being unable to figure out what could account for it. But Emilio seemed strangely relieved, almost giddy, suggesting cheerfully that they turn around and go home, an idea that provoked howls of rejection.
Now they all crowded around the bridge display as Jimmy ran the images back and forth in sequence, so they could see a point of light, varying in brightness from image to image, moving slightly. "Look," he said, "you can even see the difference in the reflected sunlight. It’s sort of gibbous here."
Marc Robichaux, who’d come out of the tiny gym when he heard the uproar, leaned around Jimmy and pointed to a smear, somewhat closer to the central sun. "And here. Another one."
"Good eye, man," Jimmy said. "Sure enough. That’s one, too."
"Can you enlarge these regions, Jimmy?" Marc asked, towel hung over his neck, still breathing fast, but not from treadmill work any longer.
"No point in it. Real-time observation, folks. We can just plain look at them with the telescope." A few minutes later, they could see the first planet directly, appearing now as a fuzzy ball, grayish and lumpy. And then the second, the one Marc had spotted, much larger and with two substantial companion bodies.
"Moons," George said softly, putting his arm around Anne and pulling her close. "Moons!"
"Forget the first one. There’s our planet," Marc said, with complete confidence. "A good-sized moon keeps a planet’s precession steady enough for stable weather patterns