Omega

“It just went. We took a chance, and it didn’t work out.”

“Okay. Look, relax. We’ll get through this.”

AN HOUR LATER Eric was at her door. “We’ve got serious problems,” he said. “How am I supposed to explain this?”

Eric Samuels was an imposing man, tall, well dressed, with an articulated voice that one instinctively trusted. Until it became clear that he lived in a world of images and mirrors. Perception is everything, he was fond of saying. In a glorious sally a few weeks earlier he’d told a group of particle physicists that the underlying lesson to be learned from quantum theory was that reality and image were identical. “If we don’t see it,” he’d said, “it’s not there.”

“Explain what?” she asked.

“The al-Jahani. What the hell else would I be talking about?” He looked frantic.

“Sit, Eric,” she said.

He stayed on his feet. “What do I tell them?”

“You have a press conference today?”

“I do now.” Eric was good with the media when things were going well. And that was usually the case at the Academy. Most problems and setbacks could be buried because the general public simply wasn’t that interested in the work the Academy did. A recent study by UNN had shown that 50 percent of Americans had no idea whether Alpha Centauri was a planet, a star, a constellation, or a country in west Asia.

But the public loved the Goompahs.

She broke out the decanter and offered him a glass. Eric was a straight arrow whom she had never known to touch alcohol on the job. But this would be an exception. Yes. Please. “The commissioner insisted we issue a statement,” he said. “Get out ahead of the curve. Make ourselves available.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“That one-half of the rescue mission broke down. What else can I say?”

“You’re not going to put it like that, I hope?”

“No. Of course not.” He looked puzzled. How else could one put it?

“Just attribute it to insufficient resources to meet an emergency of this magnitude.”

“Of course.”

“It’s true,” she said. “We did the best we could with what we had.”

“You think they’ll buy that?”

“It’s true, Eric.”

“That doesn’t always guarantee that we can get by with something.” He tried his drink and made a face. “Anyhow, if we go that route, it might offend the Senate committee, or maybe even the Council. See, that’s the problem. It sounds as if we’re trying to blame somebody.”

“And you’d rather blame—”

“—A technician. Somebody who can always get another job with somebody else.” He smiled weakly. “Not you, Hutch. I’d never think of blaming you.”

“Good.” She’d been wondering about that all day, whether in the end, needing to point a finger at somebody, Asquith wouldn’t find it expedient to target her. Admitting to the media he should have kept an eye on things himself. Hutchins tried to get it right, but I should have stayed on top of it. Not really her fault though. Bad luck. She wondered what Sylvia was doing these days.

“Just tell the truth,” she said. “It’ll come out in the end anyway.” She had to bite down on that line, knowing the truth that came out would depend on the way the media perceived what Eric had to say, and what they wanted to stress. Generally, they were inclined to go after people in high places. Which meant that they would probably bite the Senate committee and the commissioner.

She was becoming cynical. A few years back, she’d have considered her present job more than she could possibly have hoped for. But here she was, the director of operations, eminently successful in her career by any reasonable measure. And she wondered why she was doing it.

The job had turned out to be not what she’d expected. She’d thought it would be operational, with some politics mixed in. Truth was, all her critical functions were political. The rest of it could have been handled by anybody who could count. She’d discovered a talent for politics, and didn’t mind jollying people along provided she didn’t have to compromise herself. Asquith didn’t altogether approve of her. He thought she was something of a crank. But she was good at her job, and she thought he’d be reluctant to let her go. Although not so reluctant he’d be willing to face fire from the Hill.

“I hate days like this,” Eric said.

She nodded. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not the end of the world.” At least not for us.

EARLY THAT AFTERNOON she got a call from Charlie, who’d been serving as director pro tem of the astrophysics lab. “I’ve been debating whether to bother you with this, Hutch,” he said. She came to full alert. “Can you stop by the lab either today or tomorrow?”

It didn’t sound like a breakthrough. “I’ll be over in an hour or so, Charlie.”

It was more like three hours, and by then a rainstorm had moved in and turned into a downpour. In dry weather she’d have gone outside, strolled past the pool, and tossed some popcorn to the ducks. But she descended instead to the tu

The walls were concrete, painted a hideous ocher, the long monotony broken only by pictures of the Academy’s ships and stations, and some astronomical shots, galaxies and nebulas and planetary rings. Somebody had added one of the omegas. It was dark and menacing, sections of it illuminated by interior power surges. Long tendrils of cloud reached forward, threatening the observer, and an escorting asteroid was front and center.

She wondered what the Goompahs would think when they saw it up close.

There were three other known races who had ventured into interstellar space: the unknown architects of the chindi, who were apparently a race bent on preserving everything of value, who had found their own unique way to defeat time. The Monument-Makers, who had obviously gone to a lot of trouble for the civilizations at Quraqua and Nok. And, finally, the Hawks, who had performed a rescue when Deepsix went into a long-term ice age several thousand years ago.

And now her own species, trying to help where it could. They were in good company. And she felt a modicum of pride. If Darwin ruled on planetary surfaces, it appeared that a concern for one’s neighbor was a working principle at higher levels.

Unless, of course, one counted the agency behind the omegas.

She’d have liked to talk with representatives of those three races, but nobody knew where the chindi had originated, the Hawks were lost in time, and the few remaining members of the race that had spawned the Monument-Makers were savages on a backward world with no knowledge of their former greatness.

Charlie Wilson must have been alerted she was coming. He met her in the corridor and escorted her into the lab. “Now understand,” he said, “I don’t really know what any of this means.”

“What any of what means?”

Charlie was still filling in as acting lab director. He was doing a good job, but eventually she’d have to bring in somebody with an established reputation.

He took her into the tank, which was a small amphitheater. Thirty-two seats circled a chamber. Like so much of the Academy, it had been designed with public relations in mind. But it had turned out the general public wasn’t all that interested. Usually, it was used by only one or two people at a time, but it occasionally served visiting groups of schoolchildren.

They sat down, and Charlie produced a remote. The lights faded to black, the stars came on, vast dust clouds lit up, and they were adrift somewhere in the night. The sensation that they were actually afloat among the stars, the two of them and their chairs, was broken only by the presence of gravity and a flow of cool air.

“We now have forty-seven tewks on record. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“All forty-seven are in places where we would have expected to find omegas. So we can assume they are all the same phenomenon.”

He shifted in his chair, turning so he could face her. “Some of the Weathermen were close enough to the events to allow us to look for purpose. That is, what was the explosion supposed to accomplish? All of them took place in interstellar space. No worlds nearby. So it’s not an attempt to cause general havoc. It’s not somebody being vindictive.”

“Tell that to Quraqua.”

He nodded, conceding the point. Civilization on Quraqua had been obliterated. “All the clouds we’ve checked, each one is programmed to follow the hedgehog at a slightly higher velocity. When it overtakes the thing, it attacks the hedgehog, which then explodes, triggering the cloud, and you get the tewk.”

“Okay. But why?”

“Who knows? Anyhow, it puts out as much light as a small nova. Somebody else will have to figure out why. We just know it happens.”

“So what’s the point? Why has someone gone to all this trouble?”

“I can’t answer that question. But I can tell you that these things happen in bunches. Harold saw that from the first. Even when we only had a handful to look at. There’s a pattern. There are six distinct areas where we’ve had events. But that’s not to say we won’t find others as Weatherman proceeds.

“The yellow star on your right is the supergiant R Coronae Borealis. Seven thousand light-years from here.” He touched the remote. A hand’s width to one side of the supergiant, a new star sizzled into existence. “Coronae 14,” he said. “The fourteenth recorded event.”

And a second new star, a few degrees away. “Coronae 15.” And, a few degrees farther on, a third. Sixteen.

If there were to be a fourth, she could have guessed where it would be. But there wasn’t.

“They’re all this way,” he said. “We get five here, six there. All within a relatively short time span. Maybe a thousand years or so. And each series is confined to a given region.”

“Which means what?”

He looked frustrated. “Hutch, it’s a research project of some sort. Has to be.”

“What are they researching?”

“I don’t know. It must have to do with light. Some of our people have made some guesses, but we don’t have anything yet that makes sense. But you understand that would be the case if they were on a level sufficiently beyond us.”

“Like Kepler trying to understand gravity fluctuations.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

NEWSCOPE

(Extract from Eric Samuels Press Conference)

New York On-line: Eric, can you tell us precisely what happened to the al-Jahani?

Samuels: There was a problem with the engines. With the jump engines. Uh, Bill?