Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home (23 page)

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet; the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

—Washington Irving,
The Sketch-Book
, 1820
C.E.

Alex showed up next day on
Morning Deadline
, whose host was Cal Whitaker. The topic, of course, was the
Capella
. Its projected arrival was now two weeks away. Also appearing on the program was Levi Edward, a celebrated newscaster who’d retired twenty years earlier and was now visibly near the end of his life. His face was lined, and he grunted with pain every time he moved.
“Too much running for interviews,”
he said, trying to turn it into a joke. The familiar baritone was still there.

Everyone in the audience knew that Edward’s wife, Lana, was on the lost cruise ship. He’d been at the forefront in pushing for a way to bring the
Capella
home.
“I’d love to see her again.”
He looked across the glass table at Alex.
“If she has to wait another five years to get back—”
He delivered a forced smile.

“What do you think, Alex?”
asked Whitaker.
“Is there any chance at all they might find a way to stop it from moving ahead another five years? Or has the
Grainger
incident ruled that out beyond any chance?”

Alex was clearly uncomfortable.
“I don’t think there’s any chance now that
we’ll
find a quick fix,”
he said.
“If there’s any alternative plan in the works, I haven’t heard of it.”

“But they’re still saying that manipulation would probably work. Despite the
Grainger
, physicists are claiming that if we simply reduce the power in the engines, the odds are ninety-five percent that everything would be okay, and the process will stop. Am I right?”

“That’s what some of them are saying, Cal. But I don’t think the people who have to make the decision are willing to take that chance.”

Edward nodded.
“It’s certainly a rational approach. I don’t know whether I agree with it or not, but I can understand it. Alex, if it were
your
call, what would you do? Would you mess around with these lifeboats? If you were a passenger on the ship, what would you want them to do?”

Alex’s eyes took on that distant look I knew so well.
“If I were on board, with those odds, I think I’d want them to take the chance.”

*   *   *

Overnight, Project Lifeboat had become the focus of everyone’s attention. The news programs carried pictures of the “lifeboats,” and the various hosts walked us through them, counted the sixty-four seats in each, and assured their viewers that the vehicles seemed perfectly safe. Easy to say, of course, while they were perched on the landing strip at the Clayborn facility, where a substantial number of them were being manufactured.

Each lifeboat was folded into a gray, cube-shaped, plastene package with rounded edges. The cube measured slightly less than four meters on a side, which made it too large to fit into the
Belle-Marie
or most of the yachts that would be involved in the rescue effort. They were also too large to be carried by the shuttles that routinely took people and cargo to Skydeck. So special shuttles were being built. From Skydeck, the packages were loaded onto anything in the rescue fleet that could accommodate them. Some ships could carry two. A few of the cargo vehicles would be able to take an entire complement of forty-four, which would constitute enough to take care of everyone on the
Capella
. The complication was that there’d be only a few hours to find the
Capella
and load the lifeboats. If the operation was conducted successfully, which is to say if we were able to load forty-four lifeboats, then everybody should be able to get off when the ship returns in five years.

Each package was equipped with a pair of jets, which would be used to guide it into one of the
Capella
’s three cargo decks.

We watched as a member of John Kraus’s team strolled around one of the packaged vehicles. The cube was marked
TOP
,
BOTTOM
,
FRONT
, and
REAR
. Four tanks were attached to the rear, and a half meter of black cord hung out of the front of the package. He reached for the cord, held it for a moment, then pulled on it.

The cube literally unrolled as it filled with air and morphed into a lifeboat. Two aides attached small jets to the rear and sides of the vehicle. That would enable the AI pilot to control movement.

A section of Skydeck had been set aside to manufacture the lifeboats, but because there was no way to know which ships would reach the
Capella
during the few hours they expected it to be accessible,
thousands
of them were needed, and that was far beyond anything that could be done on the station.

Also, operating out of Skydeck, rescue teams were practicing moving the lifeboat packages from rescue vehicles into a replica of the
Capella
’s three cargo decks.

In a conversation with Alex and Shara, John Kraus admitted that he saw little likelihood they’d be able to get forty-four of the packages on board during the short time they would have. “If they get unlucky,” Alex told me afterward, “they might not get any in there, and the entire project could be pushed back still another five and a half years.”

“That would be a disaster,” I said.

“It would be. But the truth is there’s no way around it. The alternative is to go back to manipulating the drive unit. Nobody wants to do that.”

“No more ships available?”

“They apparently have as many as they can handle. Some Mute vehicles are coming in, too. John says a lot of people are unhappy about that. We still have politicians who think the Mutes can’t be trusted.”

“Alex, what about President Davis? He doesn’t buy into that, does he?”

“If he did, they wouldn’t have been invited in the first place.”

“Good. I’m glad we have somebody with some sense.”

“Absolutely. And I hope he’s got it right.”

“Alex—”

“Just kidding.”

*   *   *

Later that morning, Shara came by the country house. “I was talking to John,” she said. “They’re caught up in another battle.”

“About what?”

She took off her jacket and sat down in the love seat. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“It won’t go any farther.”

“Promise?” I put my hand over my heart. “I’m serious,” she said.

“I won’t say a word. What’s going on? Something about tinkering with the star drive again?”

“Yes.”

“I thought what happened with JoAnn had settled it.”

She laughed. “JoAnn’s responsible for launching the new round.”

“All right,” I said. “What happened?”

“It looks as if she did a lot of research while she was caught in the warp. Years’ worth, I guess. She left the results for us, along with a request it be made available to Robert Dyke.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Right.”

“And John doesn’t want to let him see it?”

“I think he’d be willing to go with it, but if he does, he’ll be bucking the President. Davis has taken a public position, and I don’t really know what’s going on behind the scenes, but I’d be shocked if, after what he said, he’d be giving John a green light. So John will probably not ask.”

“He’ll make the call on his own.”

“Yes.”

“You’re suggesting JoAnn thought she had the solution.”

“I don’t have specific knowledge, except that she wanted her work passed on to Dyke.”

“That tells me something else,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“She understood what had happened to her and Nick. She knew that time outside the ship was moving a lot slower.”

*   *   *

I heard no more about it after that, nor, as far as I could tell, did Shara. As the time wound down, we continued moving ahead with the Lifeboat Project. The
Belle-Marie
, of course, would be part of the rescue fleet. “So what’s the plan?” asked Alex.

“They want us in place four days before they expect it to appear.”

“Four
days
?”

“They’re playing it safe, Alex. It would be a little embarrassing if the thing showed up early and was gone before anybody could get to it.”

“I guess so. I don’t think I’ve been paying as much attention as I should.”

“You’re still hung up on Baylee.”

“Well, there’s not much I can do about the
Capella
. But I’ll go with you when it’s time.”

“Actually, you’re not invited. They’re putting some limits on the yachts. Nobody but the pilot.”

“Because a passenger takes up space?”

“Right.”

“It makes sense. Well, okay. When are you leaving?”

“I’ll give myself three days to get into the area. I don’t want to be charging around at the last minute.”

He nodded. “Okay. How difficult will it be for the ships going out there to pinpoint their own positions? You’ve always said you can’t be too exact about where you are when there’s no star nearby.”

“That’s part of the problem, Alex. Everything’s too far away from any landmarks, so a few million kilometers one way or another doesn’t make much difference in the way the sky looks.”

“Then how—?”

“It’s one of the reasons they need so many ships. There’s going to be some guesswork involved in establishing the location, so they’re trying to flood the area. They want to set up the fleet cruisers first. And the cargo vehicles. Both carry a load of lifeboats. They
have
to be able to get one of them close to the
Capella
with at least five hours available to transfer the boats.”

“I hate to say this, Chase—” He didn’t look comfortable.

“I know. We’re going to need some luck.”

“Well, maybe JoAnn’s work will give them a breakthrough.”

I took a deep breath. “Shara tells me they’re beginning to think there might be an uncertainty principle involved that would take any hope of a guaranteed solution out of it. They don’t have a method to analyze the structure of the warp. It can vary, and that makes it impossible to be sure about the details. She thinks the reality is that they’d be very likely to be able to shut down the process, but there’d never be a guarantee.”

“So in the end—”

“Take a chance. Or use the boats.”

*   *   *

Senator Angela Herman showed up on
The Peter McCovey Show
that afternoon. She was an attractive woman, or would have been had she not been so combative. She obviously had presidential ambitions, and belonged to the Union Party, which was then out of power. She liked to portray herself as one of the “ordinary folks” who were always getting trampled by government stupidity or its deliberate malfeasance.
“Who do you think,”
she asked Peter,
“is going to see to it that this business with Sanusar ships doesn’t happen anymore? It turns out it’s been going on for literally thousands of years, and nobody noticed it until a physicist doing independent research and an antique dealer, for God’s sake, figured it out. And now we have to depend on the government to rescue the people stuck on the
Capella
. And they obviously don’t know what they’re doing. Look how this business with the
Grainger
went. Why didn’t they hire a good private corporation, like Orion or StarGate, to work out a solution? I just hope that they get it right this time.”

“Aren’t you being a little harsh, Senator? I mean, there are a lot of lives at stake. Kraus and his people are trying to pull off a small miracle.”

“Sure they are. And who do they put in charge? I don’t want to malign those who’ve been lost, but the reigning so-called genius was a twenty-seven-year-old who managed to get herself and her pilot stuck for thirty-some years on a ship that
she
disabled. Maybe they should have picked somebody with a little more experience?”

The host was clearly uncomfortable.
“Senator, I’m sure you’re aware that the most productive time for the great physicists down through the ages has always come before they hit thirty. That’s when they’ve had their major accomplishments. Do it in your twenties or forget it. JoAnn Suttner had an incredible career.”

“Until it mattered. The notion that you have to be a kid to do physics is a
myth
, Peter. It’s never been true. Never will be.”

“Jacob,” I said, “shut it down.”

After it went off, I don’t recall that my office had ever seemed so quiet. Outside, a few birds were chirping, and branches were swaying in a warm breeze. But somehow a general stagnation had infiltrated the country house.

“You okay?” Alex was standing at the door.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “She’s a crank.”

“I wasn’t thinking about
her
.”

“I know. You just have to have some time to get past this.”

“It won’t be all right, Alex. It never will be.”

*   *   *

He took me to dinner that evening at Bernie’s Far and Away. We sat out on the enclosed terrace, ordered drinks and I’m not sure what else. The Moon was full. But seeing Earth’s oversized satellite had spoiled me. Lara looked almost insignificant by contrast.

“I can’t help thinking,” he said, “how many artifacts will be created by everything that’s been happening.”

“How do you mean, Alex?” I asked.

“You remember the coffee cups you had made for
Belle
last year?”

“Sure.”
Belle-Marie
was inscribed beneath a pyramid and the company name,
Rainbow Enterprises
.

“If we get lucky and actually become part of the rescue—”