Odyssey Read online

  She dozed off. But it was a fitful rest, and she was awake again as the sky began to brighten. Time to get some air. She showered, toweled off, and paused momentarily in front of her mirror. Still look good, babe. She had a son on the way, but no one would have known.

  She selected fresh clothes from her wardrobe. It was one of her guiding principles that she never allowed people to see she was under pressure. Stay relaxed. Dress well. Always look as if the situation is under control.

  She was on her way out the door when Peter called again. “The al-Jahani has made its exit. Approximately four minutes farther down the track. Still no signal.” It would coordinate a search pattern with the Wildside. Meantime, she would have to get more ships out there.

  The area was simply too big. Even if they scrambled everything they had, finding the Heffernan was not going to be easy.

  She had no appetite but decided to go to breakfast anyhow. She needed to get some people around her. The only nearby place open that early, though, was Stud’s. Not her favorite. She crossed the Academy grounds, strolled past the Retreat, dodged traffic on the Parkway, and went into the Academy Mall. It always irritated her that the hucksters had stolen their name.

  She walked into Stud’s. There were maybe a dozen people inside, a couple from the Academy, most from local businesses. She ordered a bagel and coffee and smeared a ton of jelly on the bagel.

  Living dangerously.

  BACK IN HER office, Marla greeted her with a cheery good morning, as if Hutch hadn’t been there all night. Sometimes Marla didn’t seem to function properly. “Today is Tuesday, February 17,” she said. “Staff meeting is scheduled at eight thirty.”

  “Thanks, Marla.”

  “You have several calls. Priority is low, so I did not think you’d want to be disturbed.”

  “Queue them. I’ll get to them later this morning.”

  She sat down in the armchair and let her head drift back. Within minutes she was asleep.

  ASQUITH, WHO—LIKE pretty much everyone else—didn’t understand the distances involved, assured her everything was going to be okay. “They’ll find them,” he said. He was convincing because he believed it. The commissioner did not think in terms of light-minutes or billions of kilometers. To him a flight to Capella took about four days. Four days was not a long time, ergo the distance covered couldn’t be all that far.

  “Maybe. But we need more ships.”

  “We can’t do that. We don’t have more ships available.”

  “I can get some corporate help. We should also freeze everything we’re doing until we get this thing settled.”

  “And how long do you think that might take?”

  “Weeks. Maybe a month or more.”

  “My God. Really?”

  “Yes. Really.”

  “Do they have enough food and water on board? To survive that long?”

  “Yes. They have plenty of rations.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Hutch, we don’t even believe they’re alive, do we?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Yes or no, Hutch. Do you believe they’re still alive?”

  “They may be in a place where we can’t reach them. But that’s not the point.”

  “Let’s give the Wildside and the al-Jahani a little time before we scramble everybody’s schedule. Okay? Let’s just hang on a bit. We don’t want to panic.” He closed his eyes and made a noise deep in his throat. Thank God he was on-site to keep his crazy staff in check. “What else have we got?”

  It was hard to think about anything else. “I’ve begun putting together what we have to do as we take the Colbys out of service. I have the recommendations on mission cutbacks and cancellations for you. I meant to get them to you yesterday, but I got sidetracked.”

  He had a tendency, when you opposed him, to look at you as if you were being unreasonable. As if we’d been all through this before, and now you were starting again. “It’s not possible, Hutch. I would if I could. You know that.”

  “Michael, we still need a decision on the Kira.”

  “Where’s it headed?”

  “Nok. Next week. It’s scheduled to carry eight passengers.”

  “Hutch, we have to let it go.”

  “I’m canceling it. I’m going to notify everybody today.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I will not sign off on the flight. You want the mission, get somebody else to do it.”

  His jaw muscles worked. “Who’s on the goddam thing?”

  “A team from the University of Berlin and the Lisbon Field Unit. The sooner they’re informed, the less flak there’ll be.”

  “Yeah. Right. You know, this is easy enough for you to do. I’m the one who takes all the heat.” He looked wounded. Betrayed. “Okay,” he said. “Do what you have to. But let them know we’ll find a way to get them out there. That it’s only temporary.”

  BY LATE MORNING, the Wildside had made a second jump. Still nothing.

  She put in calls to eight of the corporate entities at the station. To Nova Industries and MirrorCorp, to Thor Transport and Maracaibo, to Hawkins and MicroTech and Orion Tours and WhiteStar. The message was the same to each: Can you contribute a ship to the Heffernan search?

  They could. Hawkins thought they could get one off later in the day. WhiteStar could send one by the end of the week. The others fell somewhere in between. “Okay,” she said. “Stand by. Don’t send anything out until I tell you. But be ready to go.”

  Hiram Taylor called just before noon to ask whether she’d meant what she said about taking Amy to the space station. He was in a custom gray satin suit. Amy would love to go, he said, especially with her. “I’m not all that excited about the idea,” he added, “but I’m willing to go along with it. So if you really want to—”

  “I’d enjoy it,” said Hutch. “It would give me a chance to do something different.”

  “What would be a good day?”

  “She has to go to school; I have to work. How about Saturday?”

  “Saturday will be fine.”

  “I’ll pick her up at seven.”

  “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

  “No. Of course not. It’ll be a pleasure to have her. I’ll take Maureen as well. Make it a family outing.”

  “Hutch, thank you.”

  “It’s my pleasure.”

  “You understand I’m not worried about safety. I just don’t like playing to these crazy ideas of hers.”

  “You could do worse, Senator.”

  “I don’t want to encourage her.”

  “Of course not.” He hesitated, embarrassed. “Listen, don’t worry. She’ll be fine.” Hutch resisted the impulse to tell him he was a jerk.

  “Hutch,” he said, “I’m grateful for what you’re doing, but you understand it won’t influence the way I vote on Academy funding.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way, Senator.”

  NEXT CAME THE flight cancellations. It was early evening in western Europe. She called her contacts at the University of Berlin and at the field unit and left messages. Flight to Nok indefinitely postponed. Regret the inconvenience. We are looking at alternatives.

  Another mission two weeks beyond that would have to be shut down as well. That was the Bill Jenkins, bound for the Origins Project. When she canceled that one, which she would do the next day, the howls would go all the way to the Congress.

  In the middle of that, Peter called to inform her the al-Jahani had made its second jump. Also with no results.

  She called the corporate entities that had volunteered to help and asked them to send whatever they could as quickly as possible.

  COVERAGE ON THE newsnets was heavy. The Black Cat had an expert pointing out that the Colby class, to which the Heffernan belonged, was obsolete. “Would you ride one?” asked correspondent Rose Beetem of their superluminal expert.

  “No way, Rose. Nada. Not a chance.”

  Worldwide was doing a piece attacking the Wor
ld Council for failure to fund the Academy. InterAct was running comments by someone described as a science analyst: “There’s simply no point to spending taxpayers’ money so the idle rich can run around in space, or so the world’s malcontents have somewhere else to go. It’s silly.”

  ERIC CALLED. “YOUR buddy was on yesterday.”

  “Who are we talking about?”

  “MacAllister. He was on a show with one of our pilots. Talking about us.”

  Uh-oh. Mac rarely said anything good about anybody. “How’d it go?”

  “I don’t want to prejudice you. But you should take a look.”

  Hutch sighed. “Who was the pilot?”

  “Valya,” he said.

  She told Marla to find it and put it up. Moments later, the office darkened, and Marge Dowling did the introduction for her show. Then she brought out Valya. Then MacAllister swaggered into view. Somehow he always contrived to make an entrance. She didn’t like any of her people going up against MacAllister. At least Valya would have been about as strong an advocate as the Academy could have produced out of its pilot corps. But MacAllister was a professional assassin. Arguing with him always left you running downhill in front of an avalanche.

  Dowling started by reviewing the Heffernan situation. Hutch fast-forwarded through it until she saw the discussion begin with a question to Valya. How safe were the starships?

  Absolutely safe, Valya insisted, while Mac contrived to look as if she wanted everyone to believe in fairies. “We’ve done the important stuff,” Mac said a few minutes later. “We’ve taken a good look at the neighborhood we live in, we got rid of the cloud that was headed our way, and we’ve allowed our academics to fill their computers with data nobody will ever use. It costs a lot of money to run back and forth to Orion’s belt—”

  “We haven’t gotten that far yet—” said Valya.

  “Wherever. It’s time to come home and fix the problems we have here. It’s time to grow up.” She froze the picture. MacAllister sat there, mouth open, index finger pointing at the ceiling, a model of rectitude and conviction, going on about spending billions and getting nothing back. She picked up a paperweight, a brass model of the Wildside, and tossed it at him. It passed through his left shoulder.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER Marla informed her she had a visitor. Nobody was scheduled until two thirty, when she was supposed to sit down with representatives from two laboratories who’d gotten into a battle over scheduling priorities. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Harry Everett.”

  Everett was a Native American, the pilot with whom she’d made her qualifying flight at the beginning of her career. The guy who’d told her she had a responsibility to do more than deliver researchers to their target sites. She’d never forgotten his comment, made while they orbited Terranova out at 36 Ophiuchi, the first world discovered to have multicellular life-forms. “If they’re going groundside,” he’d told her, looking down at the planet’s lush green continents, “you need to stay with them, mentally, and maybe physically as well. They will have a tendency to forget how dangerous some of these places can be.”

  “I’ve got it, Marla.” She strode through the door into the outer office. Everett was standing in his dark blue uniform, looking a bit older than the last time she’d seen him. But still pretty good.

  He wasn’t smiling.

  She put out her hand. “Glad to see you, Harry,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

  He looked at the hand. Looked at her. “I used to get a hug,” he said.

  Forgot. Directors don’t go around hugging the help. “Got out of the habit, I guess.” She embraced him, but he didn’t cooperate much. “What’s wrong, Harry?”

  “You have a minute?”

  “For you? Sure. Always.” She led him back into the office and closed the door. “How’s Annie?” His daughter, product of a marriage long gone south.

  “She’s good,” he said. “She’s married now. I’m a grandfather.”

  “Congratulations.” She got coffee for them, and they sat down. “I take it this isn’t social.”

  “No.”

  Okay. She could guess the rest. “The Heffernan.”

  He nodded. “How could you let that happen?”

  Everett was a head taller than Hutch. More than a head. There was something in his dark eyes that let her know that she might be the director of operations, but to him she was still a twenty-two-year-old neophyte pilot. “Harry,” she said, “there’s a problem with money. We’re doing everything we can.”

  The eyes never left her. “You’ve got a whole squadron of unsafe ships out there.”

  “I know.”

  “You were running on pure luck. What’s happening right now was inevitable. What the hell’s the point of your getting this kind of office”—he glanced around—“this kind of authority, if you don’t step in to help your people?”

  Hutch could hear voices outside somewhere. Kids. In the park. And a dog barking.

  Everett sat without moving.

  “The only alternative we have right now,” she said, finally, “would be to shut down a sizable piece of the program. How would the pilots respond if the workload was cut by a third?”

  “There’s another option.”

  “And what would that be?”

  He looked puzzled, as if she’d said something completely off the wall. “What in hell’s happened to you, Hutch? Do I really have to explain it? You’ve been sitting quietly while the Academy hangs us out there. You’re not getting the funding? What about making some noise? How about putting up a fight? Or have you forgotten how?”

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  We’ve satisfied our curiosity about the local stellar neighborhood. What is perhaps more important, we now know that the mere attainment of technological achievement does not guarantee species survival, and may indeed contribute to our eventual termination.

  The lesson to be taken from our experience so far is that we need to wake up, to recognize that we are at risk, not only from cosmic forces over which we have limited control at best, like the omega clouds, but also from the unfettered development of science. Unfortunately, technology brings with it enormous risks that, until recently, we’ve been reluctant to face. The runaway greenhouse explosion comes immediately to mind. There are other hazards, which we would do well to take seriously.

  —Paris Today, Tuesday, February 17

  chapter 7

  Freedom sounds good. Freedom of religion. The right to privacy. The right to protest when you don’t like the way things are going. Unfortunately, all these benevolences assume a mature, rational population, because they can be powerful weapons when misused. Freedom and idiots make a volatile mix. And the sad truth is that the idiocy quotient in the general population is alarmingly high.

  —Gregory MacAllister, Editor-at-Large

  MacAllister rapped his baton several times on the lectern, exactly as he’d seen it done by the conductor of the Geneva Philharmonic. The vast concert hall fell silent. He glanced around at the hunched figures arranged across the stage, illuminated only by the pivot lamps on their music stands. Behind him, the audience waited. Someone coughed.

  He felt the tension of the moment, as one always does during those last seconds before the performance begins. He gazed over at the violins and signaled them to start.

  The opening strains of Kornikov’s Charge of the Cossacks stirred, as if something in the night were just awakening. MacAllister summoned it forth, listened to it gather strength, felt it flow past the dimmed lights out into the audience. He knew its power, knew also that he controlled it, that it reacted to his baton, and to his fingertips.

  He signaled the oboes, and the wind began to pick up. It blew mournfully across the steppe, gradually resolving itself into the sound of approaching cavalry. They came, the hoof-beats rising to a crescendo that at last shook the sky. MacAllister leaped onto his gray steed, Alyosha, his companion in a thousand battles, and joined them. He was draped in fur, an am
munition belt slung over one shoulder, a musket strapped to the animal’s flank. They moved through the night while the moonlight glittered against their weapons, and the viols sang.

  He brought in the brass with a clamor, and they erupted in full gallop toward a hidden enemy. Toward women and children held captive. Toward invaders of the mother country.

  Born to be a Cossack.

  APPLAUSE ROLLED THROUGH the night. MacAllister generously pointed his baton toward the orchestra, and the noise went up a few decibels. He bowed and looked up to the boxes on his left. To Jenny’s box. He hadn’t programmed her in, never programmed her in, but it didn’t matter. She was there, and he saw her, gazing down at him, wearing one of the dark blue gowns she always wore on formal occasions. Then the curtain dropped and Tilly put the table lamp on and he was back in his living room.

  “Very good, sir,” Tilly said, in his deep baritone. “An outstanding performance.” There was a hint of mockery in the AI’s comment, but that was okay. Tilly knew it was more or less expected.

  He would have liked to reopen the curtain. To invite Jenny down to join him. And in fact it was possible. He could have her stroll across the stage and draw up a chair and sit and talk with him in her New England accent. He could send the rest of the audience home while they reminisced about the old days. He’d married late. He’d never expected to meet a woman to be taken seriously until Jenny erupted into his life.

  Irreplaceable.

  He’d always owned a reputation as something of a chauvinist. It wasn’t really true, of course. It was simply that he was a realist. He understood that women were, for the most part, not talented. Rule out the intersection of their anatomical attributes and his hormones, and they had little to offer. But he also understood that the great bulk of the male population were also vapid, easily led, dreary creatures. If Hutch got her wish, and we did one day encounter truly intelligent aliens, whom would we send to speak with them? To impress them with our capabilities? A politician? A college professor? Best, probably, would be a plumber. Someone lacking too high an opinion of himself.