"Could it have been a return flight? Were they going back?"
"No," said Chase. "At least I don’t think so. Their destination was an area eighteen hundred light years out. Too far. If we can assume that Gabe did know where they’d been, and that was where he was headed."
"What about the ship’s logs? Don’t they routinely become part of the public record? I’m sure I’ve seen them published."
"Not this time. Everything was classified."
"On what grounds?"
"I don’t know. Do they have to tell you? I just know that Gabe couldn’t get access to them."
"Jacob? Are you there?"
"Yes," he said.
"Please comment."
"It’s not all that unusual to withhold information if, in someone’s judgment, its release would damage the public interest. For example, if someone gets eaten, the details would not be made available. A recent example of nondisclosure occurred on the Borlanget flight, when a symbolist was seized and carried off by some sort of flying carnivore. But even then, only that part of the record dealing with the specific incident was held back. With the Tenandrome, it’s almost as if the mission never happened."
"Do you have any idea," I asked Chase, "what they might have seen?"
She shrugged. "I think Gabe knew. But he never told me. And if anybody on Saraglia knew what it was about, they weren’t saying."
"It might have been a biological problem," I suggested. "Something they were worried about, but had settled by the time they got to Fishbowl."
"I suppose it’s possible. But if they’d put their minds at ease, why are they still hiding information?"
"You said there were rumors."
She nodded. "I told you about the plague. The most interesting one was that there’d been a contact. I heard probably two dozen variations on that, the most common being that they’d barely got away, that the central government was afraid the Tenandrome had been followed home, and that the Navy had been called in. Some people said the Tenandrome that came home was not the same as the one that went out."
That was a chilling notion.
"Another story was that there’d been a time displacement, that more than forty years of ship time had passed, and that the crew members had aged severely." She considered the depths of human gullibility. "Gabe was able to talk to one of the members of the research team, and he was perfectly all right. I don’t know who that was."
"Hugh Scott," I breathed. "Did he say why they aborted the mission?"
"Whoever it was delivered the party line: the ship had problems with its Armstrong units, which they couldn’t repair without heavy facilities."
I sighed. "Then that was probably the reason. The fact that Gabe couldn’t find anyone who’d actually done the work hardly seems significant. And maybe the captain was anxious to get home for personal reasons. I suspect that this whole business has a series of simple explanations."
"Maybe," she said. "But whoever Gabe talked to—Scott, whoever —refused to tell him who else was on the flight." She pressed her fist against her lower lip. "That’s strange."
The conversation wandered a bit, and we went over old ground, as though there might be something there that had been missed. When Machesney’s name came up again, she sat up straight. "Gabe had somebody with him on the Capella," she said. "Maybe that was Machesney."
"Maybe," I said. I listened to the sound of the fire, and the creaking of the old house. "Chase?"
"Yes?"
Jacob had provided some cheese and a fresh round of drinks.
"What do you think?"
"About what they saw?"
"Yes."
She exhaled. "If they weren’t still sitting on information, I’d be inclined to dismiss the whole business. As it is—they’re hiding something. But that’s the only real evidence there is. That they won’t release the logs.
"Despite that, if I were pinned down, I’d have to think that Gabe’s imagination ran away with him." She bit off a piece of cheese, and chewed it slowly. "The romantic thing, of course, is to conclude that there’s some sort of threat out there, something rather terrifying. But what could it be? What could possibly scare people at a distance of several hundred light years?"
"How about the Ashiyyur? Maybe they’ve broken through into the Veiled Lady."
"So what? I suppose that would cost the military some sleep, but it’s not going to bother me. And anyhow they’re no more dangerous out there than they are along the Perimeter."
Later, when Chase was gone, I called up the passenger list for Capella. Gabe’s name was there, of course. Gabriel Benedict of Andiquar. There was no Machesney on the flight.
And I wondered, far into the night, why Gabe, who had navigated all kinds of ships among the stars, would want to hire a pilot.
IV.
That’s a hell of a pile of real estate.
THE DEPARTMENT OF Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research was a semi-autonomous agency, funded by the central treasury and an army of private foundations. It was controlled by a board of directors representing the associated interests and the academic community. The chairman was a political appointee, responsible to the foundations, but ultimately answerable to the Director herself. All of which is to say that, though Survey was officially a scientific body, it was very sensitive to political pressures.
It maintained administrative offices in Andiquar, for the purposes of recruiting technical personnel to man the big ships, and processing applications from specialists who wanted to join the research teams. There was also a public information branch.
Survey shared its office building with several other agencies. They were all on the upper levels of an old stone structure that had once housed the planetary government in the years before Confederation. The west wall was discolored where an interventionist’s bomb had gone off during the early days of the Resistance.
The reception room was depressing: washed-out yellow walls, hard flat furniture, group photos of the crews of a couple of starships, and a portrait of a black hole. Not much of a public relations operation.
I got up from the straight-backed chair into which I’d arrived, as a holo strode efficiently out of an adjoining room. The image was that of a cheerful young man, slender, coolly efficient. A stock character, actually, whom I’d seen before in other situations. The door closed behind him. "Good morning," he said. "Can I be of assistance?"
"Yes," I replied. "I hope so. My name’s Hugh Scott, and I flew with the Tenandrome on its last mission. Research team. A couple of us would like to put together a reunion. But we’ve lost touch with most of the others. I was wondering if you could supply a roster, or let me know where I could obtain one."
"The last Tenandrome flight? Let’s see, that would be XVII?"
"Yes," I said, after hesitating just long enough to suggest I was thinking about it.
The image, in turn, looked thoughtful. He had thick brown hair, a pleasant smile, and a face with a nose that was a trifle too long. Management undoubtedly wanted to project intelligence and congeniality. In some types of businesses, like antique merchandising, it would work well. There, in that bland unimaginative setting, these qualities just clashed with the furniture.
"Checking," he said. He crossed the room and stood inspecting the black hole while he waited for the computers to complete their run. I crossed one leg over the other, and picked up a brochure that invited me to consider a career with the Agency of the Future. Good pay, it said, and adventure in exotic places.