The administrator squinted at it, and shook his head. "I don’t know him."
"How many professionals do you have on your staff?"
"That depends on how you define the word."
"Define it any way you please. At least one of them will recognize the photo. Of course, I’d need to be sure I had the right person, so I’ll expect him, or her, to be able to describe the project."
"Very well," he said, tossing the photo into a stack of paper. "I’ll see what I can do."
"I couldn’t ask for more." I lifted my left wrist ostentatiously, and spoke into the commlink. "Jacob, we’ll be making the transfer now." And to the administrator: "I’ll need an account number."
He was only too happy to comply. I named the sum for Jacob, who acknowledged, and announced he was prepared to execute. About a week’s pay for the administrator, I guessed. "It’s yours. There’s as much more if you find the person I’m looking for."
"Yes," he said, gaining interest. "I’m sure I can find him."
"By tonight."
He nodded. "Of course," he said. "Where can I reach you?"
Eric Hammersmith was sandy-haired, bearded, overweight, and he drank too much. I liked him immediately.
"I never really got to know your uncle," he said. We were in a pub downtown, huddled over a bottle of tomcat rum, and eying the gravity dancers while we talked. "He was kind of secretive. He kept pretending the search he wanted me to do was part of a statistical study of some sort."
"Okay," I said.
"You’ll forgive my saying so," he pinched my sleeve between thumb and forefinger. "But he was a lousy actor."
There was a loud dinner party in an adjoining room, and a fair amount of noise in the bar, so we had to lean close together to be heard.
Hammersmith was propped up on an elbow. He’d walked in sufficiently flushed that I suspected he’d done some early celebrating. "What," he asked, with an engaging smile, "was he up to?"
"He was trying to locate an archaeological site, Eric," I said. "It’s a long story." And I hoped he wouldn’t insist I tell it.
"With a constellation?" His eyebrows arched.
I drank my rum, and adapted an ignorant bystander attitude. "I guess it is strange. Fact is, I really didn’t pay much attention to the details." The dancers were distracting him. "Anyway, he wanted to be sure you understood he was grateful for your help."
"I’m glad to hear it," he said. "It wasn’t exactly by the book, you know."
"What wasn’t?"
"What I’m trying to say is that I had to bend a few regulations. We’re not supposed to use the equipment for private purposes."
"I understand." I repeated the process of setting up a transfer, this time for about six months' salary—as best I could guess.
"Thanks," said Hammersmith, his smile broadening. "Let me buy the next round."
I shrugged. "Okay."
He was waiting for me to transfer the money. When I didn’t, he signaled the waiter, and we refilled our glasses. "I assume," he said, "you don’t know any more than I do."
I was startled. Was I really that transparent? "You mean about the wheel?"
"Then you do know!"
Bingo. Results at last. "Of course." Somewhere in the Veiled Lady, there was a world in whose skies that circular constellation appeared. Nine on the rim, two at the hub. "By the way," I said, trying to sound nonchalant, "he used to talk about this quite a lot. Where is it, exactly, the world he was looking for?"
"Oh, yes." The dancers pursued each other erotically through a halo of soft blue light. "It took several weeks to find," he said, "because we’re just not programmed to perform that kind of search. And the computers often weren’t available. Actually," —he lowered his voice— "it’s the first time I’ve taken a chance and broken the regulations. It’s worth my job if anyone finds out."
Sure, I thought. That explains how the administrator was able to locate you so easily.
"It was a big job, Alex. There are 2.6 million stars in the Veiled Lady, and, without a very specific configuration, drawn by a computer, with precise angles between the stars, and exact magnitudes, he would be very likely to get a substantial number of possibilities. I mean, what’s a wheel look like? Is it perfectly formed? If not, how much variance is there from the base line of arc? Are there really only nine stars? Or are there nine bright stars? We had to set some parameters, and the result was, to a large extent, guesswork."
"How many possibilities did you get?"
"Over two hundred. Or twelve thousand if you become a little liberal with the parameters." He watched me sympathetically, enjoying the frustration he imagined I was feeling. But I was thinking how Jacob and I had looked at the starship patterns weeks ago, and cut the search area down to ten thousand stars or so. Given those numbers, it should be easy to eliminate most of Hammersmith’s targets. I was briefly tempted to buy a round for the house.
"Can you give me a printout?"
He reached into his jacket. "I brought it along in case you wanted proof." He delivered a broad grin.
"Thanks," I said. I completed the transfer, and got up. "You’ve been helpful, Eric."
We were both tossing cash onto the table. "Thank you," he said. "And Alex—?"
"Yes?"
"Gabe asked me not to say anything about this. To anyone. I wouldn’t have, if he were still alive."
"I understand."
"I’d like a favor. If you ever find out what this is all about, would you come back and tell me what it is?"
Our eyes met. "If I can," I said, and walked out into a pleasant, late winter evening.
The primary target was located about thirteen hundred light years from Saraglia, in a region of the Veiled Lady that carried only coordinates and no name. "Two months, at least," Chase said. "One way. It’s a long way out."
XXI.
A starship is no place for a man in a hurry.
WE RODE THE Grainger out to Saraglia. Grainger was the Capella’s sister ship, and I thought a lot about Gabe while we drifted down the long gray tunnel.
The observation ports were, of course, shuttered. The view outside is a bit hard on the comfort level for most people; but there are a few places on the ship where a curious passenger who wants to see the nether world can indulge himself. One of them was a lounge called the Captain’s Bar at the forward section of the topmost deck.
Chase and I retreated there after I recovered from the plunge into hyper. My reaction, by the way, seemed to be getting worse with each successive trip. And I sat there that first evening, refusing to say very much to anyone, morosely recalling my pledge to myself—it seemed a long time ago now—that I was returning to Rimway to travel no more.
We drank too much. Starship bars always do very well. And, with too much time to think, I got to wondering why the research team on the Tenandrome had agreed that they would say nothing of their find. And I worried about that.
I didn’t eat well, and after a while even Chase seemed to grow moody. So we worried our way through the formless flux of a dimension whose existence, according to some, was purely mathematical in nature.
Eight days later, ship time, we made the jump back into linear. The passengers, as they recovered from the effects of the transit, crowded around the ship’s viewports, which were now open, to gape at the spectacle of the Veiled Lady.
At this close range, it bore no resemblance to anything on a human scale. Even the nebular structure was no longer recognizable. Rather, we were staring at a vast congregation of individual stars, a blazing multitude of dazzling points of color spearing the soul, a river of light passing ultimately into infinity. How poor had Jacob’s representation been in the study at home.