Chindi

They were in fact all believers, even Pete, and she began to root for them, to hope the mission would produce success.

The Memphis was about six weeks out when it stopped at Outpost to collect the final two passengers.

NICK CARMENTINE HAD started his UFO career as a rabid fan of occult tales. He loved rampaging mummies, vampires, demons, spectral creatures that floated through not-quite-empty houses, and disembodied voices carried by the night wind. He started with Poe and Lovecraft and read through to Massengale and DiLillo. He was thoroughly chilled by the dark of the moon, the unquiet grave, the terrible secret in the attic. That was where he lived, and although in later years his interests moved well beyond the genre, he never really left it behind.

He tried to. It was a dangerous passion for a funeral director. Had his bloodthirsty tastes gotten generally about, his clients would have deserted him. And that’s why he switched over to UFOs, which also embodied a healthy sense of the mysterious, without all the trappings that could destroy his reputation.

In time, the hunt for night visitors from other worlds overtook the vampires, and eventually he joined the Contact Society.

His father had been a funeral director, had done well, and had retired early, leaving the business to Nick. Nick was an entrepreneur at heart, and quite soon the Sunrise Funeral Home in downtown Hartford had become Sunrise Enterprises, Inc. While his chain of establishments continued to conduct ordinary services, they specialized in the custom funeral. If someone wanted his ashes put in orbit, or distributed around second base at some lonely country ballpark, or deposited in a remote lagoon in Micronesia, Sunrise was the organization to do the job. They arranged transportation for mourners, provided refreshments, counselors, support. They could arrange for clergy or, when the nonreligious were passing (no one ever “died”), recommend appropriate closing remarks and ceremonies.

His only child Lyra shared his taste for the exotic, although she tended to discount the notion of ambassadors from other civilizations. Nevertheless, she had won her father’s heart by becoming an exoarcheologist.

Nick had never been off-world, which is to say, he’d never gotten beyond Earth orbit, until Lyra was posted to Pi

They’d watched a virtual alien religious service, and he’d gotten a sense of what it must have been like on Pi

He spent a month there. Lyra showed him pottery estimated at eight hundred thousand standard years old. “Glaze it,” she explained, “and it lasts forever.”

He looked at the progress they’d made with translation, which was extensive when one considered the few samples they had to work with. And there’d been ancient roadways and harbors, invisible now save to the instruments. “Right here,” she’d said, while they stood in the middle of a desert that ran absolutely flat in all directions clear to the horizon, “right here the crossroads met between the two most powerful empires of the Third Komainic.” There had been a wayfarer’s station, and a river, and possibly a landing pad.

“What were their names?” he’d asked. “The empires?”

She didn’t know. No one knew.

It was only a few hours later that the message came from Hockelma

Sure. Meet me at Larry’s.

OUTPOST WAS A service and supply center on the edge of human expansion. It was located just beyond the rings at Salivar’s Hatch, which was about a billion kilometers out from a class-B blue-white star. Hutch wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting in her funeral-director passenger, probably someone somber and methodical. Nick was about average size, loose-limbed, with black hair, amiable gray eyes, and a guileless smile. Not the sort of man she pictured wandering about the funeral home reassuring friends and relatives. George had hurried off the ship and hugged him when he appeared at the foot of the ramp. He brought him back like a long-lost cousin. “Hutch,” he said, “this is Nick. He will never let you down.” He chuckled at his joke, while Nick sighed.

They shook hands, made small talk, and then Hutch asked about Tor, the sixth passenger.

“He’s out on 21,” said Nick, looking surprised. “They didn’t tell you?”

“No,” she said. “What’s 21?”

“One of the moons. He was supposed to come in this week to be ready, but he’s in the middle of something and, well”—looking at George—“you know how he is.”

George apparently knew, and he glanced over at Hutch as if she should have foreseen something like this would happen. Everybody knows how Tor is.

Hutch sighed. She’d known a Tor once. “Bill?” she said.

“It’s coming in now,” said Bill. “Going out to 21, departure time looks like a little over seventeen hours.”

“Seventeen hours?” said Hutch. She turned toward George. “I’m going to strangle this guy.”

“He wouldn’t have known it would take so long,” said George. “If he’d known, he would have been here. He’s an artist.”

He said that as if it explained everything. It was fu

“Okay, folks,” she said. “We won’t be leaving until about 3:00 A.M. This is a good time to tour the station.”

TOR KIRBY’S BACKGROUND was unclear. Hutch’s data package stipulated only that he was an heir to the Happy Plumber fortune. What he might be doing at Outpost was left unstated. Did they really bring in a plumber from the NAU to keep the water flowing?

The gas giant that was home to Outpost was the sole world in the system moving within a relatively stable orbit. Everything else had been scattered, planets ejected, moons hurled across vast distances. The station had begun as a mission trying to learn what had happened, why everything else had gone south while the big planet had retained its rings and a large family of satellites. Theory held that there’d been a close encounter with another star some twenty thousand years earlier. But finding the candidate had proved more difficult than expected. Nick arranged a simulation of the event for George and his team. The experts thought they had it all down: what the alignment had looked like at the time of passage, how long the event had taken (three years), where the intruder had been. Four of the worlds had been ejected altogether, but they’d been found, drifting through the interstellar void, exactly where they were supposed to be. The others were rattling around the sun. The Hatch had survived intact because it was on the far side of the sun during the height of the action. Their inability to find the other body led to the suspicion that it had actually been a neutron star or possibly even a black hole.

Hutch had seen the demonstration before, and was about to duck out when her commlink vibrated. “Captain Hutchins?” A woman’s voice. “Dr. Mogambo wishes you to stop by his office if you’ve a moment.”

She was surprised to hear that Mogambo was at Outpost.

“He’s directing the geometric group,” the voice explained. Not that she understood what it meant.

Hutch went up to the main deck and turned into the admin area. “Second door on the right,” said the voice. Its owner was waiting for her when she entered. Olive-ski