Odyssey

Stein had better things to do, and he let her see it. “It’s just like Allard, though,” he said. “He warns us of something like this and doesn’t bother to send anyone to help if it were to materialize. We have seventy-two people here, with no way to move any of them off in a hurry if we had to. I guess that tells you how seriously he was taking it.”

Valya shrugged. “You don’t have a ship here anywhere, I guess?”

“We have two shuttles.”

“Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. And we have ships on the way. To stand by. Just in case.”

He shook his head, a man in the employ of morons. Something in the gesture reminded her of Mac. “I suspect it is a waste of resources, young lady. But nevertheless I appreciate your concern. It’s nice to know somebody cares.”

“I have a question for you, Professor,” said Eric. “Valya says rockets and maneuvering jets aren’t allowed anywhere near the collider.”

“That’s correct.”

“But you have shuttles.”

“Two of them at each tower, yes.”

“How are they powered?”

“Some of our people would tell you by hot air.”

“I’m serious.”

Stein laughed. “They operate within magnetic and gravitational fields projected from stations along the tube. They orient with clutched gyros. It’s quite effective.”

“Suppose there’s an emergency?”

“If necessary, they can maneuver by ejecting te

“Te

Valya smiled. “The director is pulling your leg, Eric.”

“Well,” said Stein, “actually they’re trackable missiles. But they look like te

THEY WERE REINTRODUCED to a few of the people they’d met on the first flight. To Jerry Bonham, a quiet, nervous guy from Seattle. His specialty, Lou explained, was flow dynamics. “He’s been here six months. I think he hopes to make this his home.” And Lisa Kao Ti, an engineer, part of the team seeing to the expansion of the collider.

“It’s been, what, a month since you were here?” Lisa asked. “We’re about three hundred kilometers longer than we were then.”

“And this is Felix Eastman,” he said, introducing them to a copper-ski

They were in a lounge. There were probably a half dozen others present, and all conversations stopped when Eric asked whether there was any general danger attached to the project. “There is a slight risk,” Eastman conceded. He was young, not yet out of his twenties. “But the odds are heavily against any kind of major mishap.” He smiled. Nothing to worry about.

“But it is possible there could be a problem?”

“Mr. Samuels, anything not prohibited is possible. Yes, of course there’s a possibility. But so small that we really need not concern ourselves with it.”

“If this mishap were to occur, worst-case scenario, what would it entail? What would happen?”

“Worst-case?” He looked around and they all gri

Another young man stepped forward. Again, not much more than a kid. But she could see he had a high opinion of himself. “Maybe I can help,” he said. “My name is Rolly Clemens. I’m the project director for Blueprint.”

Eric nodded. “Glad to meet you, Professor.” He shook hands, but looked uncomfortable. Calling a kid “professor” must have seemed out of order. “Tell me about the possibility of catastrophe.”

“Eric,” he said, “there isn’t much that is not possible.” He adopted a tolerant expression. “But I don’t think you need worry.”

“You’re sure.”

“Of course.”

“If the ‘lights out’ thing were to happen — ”

“It won’t — ”

“Indulge me. If it were to occur, it would also involve Earth, right?”

Clemens was trying to be patient. They were talking nonsense. “Yes,” he conceded. “It would involve everything.”

“How long would it take before the effects were felt? At home?”

“A little more than twenty years.”

“Why so long?”

“Because,” he said, shifting to lecture mode for slow students, “it would cause a rift, and the rift would travel at light speed.” He looked bored. Been through all this before.

What the hell, you can’t live forever.

“If you’re really worried about it,” he continued, “you needn’t be. The chances of something like that occurring are so remote they defy imagination.”

A woman stepped out of the crowd. Plain-looking, black hair, also in her twenties. “I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said. The comment earned her a glare. But she plunged on. “Who’s to say it can’t happen. Who’s calculating the odds? We’re in unknown territory here.”

“Oh, come on, Barb,” said Clemens. “How many times are we going to have this conversation?”

“In the end,” said Eastman, “you can’t be certain of anything. But what’s life worth if we don’t take an occasional chance?” He was trying to make a joke of it.

She threw up her hands. “You people know it all. No need for me to be concerned.”

“Doesn’t it strike you,” said Eric, “that if there’s any chance at all of a catastrophe on this order, we shouldn’t be doing the experiment?”

“It’s the nature of experimentation,” said Clemens. Whatever that meant.

LOU GOT DINNER for them. Afterward, Eric settled in with several others to listen to projections about the things mankind was going to learn from Origins when it was completed, in another century and a half. Did they think the construction effort would actually continue that long?

They were all convinced it would. Valya suspected it would become a casualty of belt-tightening before the year was over.

The facility was on Greenwich Mean Time, several hours ahead of the clock Eric and Valya had been living by. Consequently their hosts eventually peeled off and left them in an otherwise empty room.

She wished she could sit down at a radio and carry on a conversation with Hutchins. And Mac. She would have liked to be able to explain why she’d done what she had. Both of them probably believed she’d been bought. God knew what they thought of her.

She sat quietly while Eric talked about the downside of public relations, how people acted as if he were only a flack, how they refused to take him seriously. “They think I’m always trying to sell the product,” he was saying. Through a viewport, she could see the soft reflection given off by the collider, fading into infinity.

Yet, if she had it to do again, she would change nothing.

IN THE MORNING, she told Eric she was going to the West Terminal. Did he want to come?

She knew he was glad to be out of the ship’s confined quarters, and would probably have liked to put some distance between himself and her. But he was a gallant sort. Dull, but his heart was in the right place. “I’ll go along if you don’t mind,” he said.

They had breakfast in the cafeteria, said good-bye to Lou and a cluster of Eric’s newfound friends, climbed aboard the Salvator, and let the facility’s gravity controls launch them. The tubular weave of the accelerator glowed in their lights. They moved out along it, drifting past automated machines unwinding wire from spools and knitting it into the structure.

They passed one of the support rings every few seconds. Eventually, an hour or so away from the East Terminal, a couple thousand kilometers out, they approached the midsection of the accelerator, where particles were slammed into each other at the speed of light.

Eric seemed to be feeling better than he had. He’d made a peace of sorts with what she’d done, and they were even able to talk about it. He told her he understood her motivation, and he’d do what he could to help her keep her job.

That wasn’t going to happen. She knew that, but she appreciated his kindness. She was trying to think of a reply when Lou called them from the terminal. “Valya,” he said, “I think we have moonriders.”

I’m starting this because there’s a possibility that a record of events may be helpful later.

Valentina admitted to me yesterday that she was part of a conspiracy to perpetrate a hoax that would entice the government to spend large sums of money on interstellar exploration and on defense. “The truth is,” she told me, “we don’t really know what’s out there.” However that may be, she has proven herself untrustworthy. I regret her actions, because she didn’t think things out before allowing herself to get caught up in all this.

She says she ca

— Sunday, May 10

chapter 39

Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.

— Gregory MacAllister, “Advice for Politicians,” Down from the Mountain

Valya ignited her engines — she wasn’t supposed to do that in the vicinity of the accelerator — and started a long turn. She relayed Lou’s message to Union Ops, with the comment she was on her way back to the East Tower.

While the Salvator shed velocity and swung wide of the tube, Lou kept her apprised of the situation: “They’re just floating out there. Two of them. About twenty kilometers away. Black globes.”

“No lights anywhere?”

“Negative.”

“You try to talk to them?”

“They don’t respond, Valya.”

“Lou,” she said, “you might want to think about evacuating.”

“We have no way to do that.”

“Can you put me through to Stein?”

“As a matter of fact, he wants to speak with you. Hold on.”

Stein appeared. The self-contained vaguely superior mode was gone. “Do you two know something you haven’t been telling me?”

“No,” said Valya. Damned if she was going to drag Amy into this. Anyhow, what difference would it make?

“You have no idea what those things are?”

“No.”

“Why do you think they’re a threat?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’m listening.”

“One of our people may have talked to them.”

“And what did they say?”

“She says they told her to arrange the evacuation of the Origins Project. Because they were going to destroy it. That’s why the Academy contacted Allard.”