She also found time to conduct an inspection of the McAdams. She took Matt with her. The ship seemed serviceable, so Rudy completed the deal with Orion. No money changed hands. The corporate giant got some good public relations and a tax break.
When that had been completed, work began to mount extra shielding on both ships.
Rudy pressed her about piloting one of the ships. “It’s been a long time,” she said.
“Are you still licensed?”
“No.” She laughed. “It’s been a while.”
“Can you requalify?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you hire somebody who’s a bit more current?”
“I’d prefer having you to bringing a stranger on board.”
“You figure you get more publicity this way?”
“That wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “But it’s not the reason. This will be a historic flight. And we don’t really know what we might run into. You’ve been through some wild stuff already.”
“And—?”
“I trust you.”
HUTCH HAD ENJOYED herself thoroughly during the Alioth flight and its aftermath. When they’d returned, she was still on a high, and could have gotten down from the space station without a shuttle. It obviously showed because she’d quickly become the media’s darling for interviews. They’d decided before they came home that they’d try to downplay the Mordecai aspect of things. Antonio agreed to go along with it, although he insisted the omegas were simply too big a story to be hidden. “I won’t push it,” he’d promised, “but if it takes off on its own, I’ll have to jump on board.”
It had. And he did.
All the exciting stuff was at the core. Stars crammed together like commuters on a train. Giant jets. Black holes. Astronomers had been arguing for centuries about details at the center. It was the big boiling point for the galaxy, the Cauldron.
This was the time when the term came into wide use. They’re going into the Cauldron.
God knows what’s being cooked up.
The Texas Rangers, a popular singing group of the period, even came up with a song, “The Cookpot Blues,” which went right to the head of the charts.
Hutch would have discouraged it had she been able. It was the wrong image.
The reporters loved the story and kept it alive. They even covered the crash training program she underwent to get her license renewed.
Hutch was asked constantly whether they’d get close enough to see the central black hole?
No, she said.
That was a pity. You go all that way and don’t get to see the core.
Too much radiation, she explained.
Can’t you put more shielding on the ship? And what about the omegas? You keep denying the mission is about them. But aren’t they the real reason you’re making the flight?
That last question surfaced at every press conference, at every appearance.
Well, she said, we’ll probably take a look, see what it’s about. If we get time. Mostly what we want is to demonstrate that the new star drive can manage this type of initiative.
Yes. Initiative. That doesn’t sound dangerous. Have to be careful how you respond to these things.
SHE TREATED HERSELF to some new clothes for the flight. In the old days, she’d have been running around in one of those jumpsuit uniforms that made her look like a boy. Not this time. She might have to perform as pilot, but she was not going back into uniform.
The people at Orion, at the signing ceremony that handed the McAdams to the Foundation, suggested to Rudy that he was making a mistake allowing her on the bridge. “It’s not that they don’t trust you,” Matt told her over dinner the following night at Max’s German Restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue. “They’re just concerned because you’ve been inactive for so long. They think you should step down.”
“I’ve requalified,” she said.
“I know. And I have complete confidence in you.” That comment irritated her more than the advice from Orion.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“That you haven’t kept up. You’ve done it all at Dawson.” That was the center in Ohio where pilots could requalify virtually. It made no practical difference whether you sat in the VR carrier or took something out to Vega, but you couldn’t always explain that to the world’s bureaucrats.
“So what are you telling me?” she asked, unable to keep the edge from her voice.
“I was just passing it along.”
“Good. Fine. For the record, Matt, if Rudy wants me to walk away from this, all he has to do is say something and I will.”
“No. No, please. That’s not what I meant at all.”
“Then what—?”
“I just wanted to be sure you were comfortable.”
“I was.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. Now that we’ve got that out of the way: “Do you care which ship you run?”
“The Preston.” It was older. Like her. And more familiar.
“Okay. By the way, did you hear Antonio’s coming along again?”
“No,” she said. “Worldwide is going to let him do it?”
“He says nobody else wants the job. Big story or not, seven or eight months inside a ship doesn’t appeal to the other reporters. At least that’s what Antonio says.”
JON REPORTED PROGRESS on targeting. “On an initial jump, we’ll always miss our destination by a substantial amount,” he said, “because we’re covering such enormous distances. But we should be able to do a second TDI and get reasonably close.” The Transdimensional Interface was official terminology for a jump. “We’ll also have a hypercomm.”
He and Matt went out in the Preston, took it to Jupiter, an eye blink, and then to Uranus, another eye blink. In both cases they got within four hundred thousand klicks of the target. On short range it was as good as the Hazeltine. Actually, a bit better.
ON A BLEAK, unseasonably cold day in early November, they sat down in the Foundation conference room to plan the mission. The walls were covered with star charts and pictures of superluminals gliding through starlit skies.
The Mordecai Zone was hidden behind vast agglomerations of dust, enormous clouds, some measuring in the light-years, orbiting the galactic core. For all they knew, the source of the omegas might be located in the center of a cloud. Or in a cluster of artificial modules. Who knew?
“We have a maximum range of about seven thousand light-years on a jump,” Jon explained. “Maybe a bit more. Again, it’s hard to be certain until we try. That means we’ll have to make some stops. We could just go in a straight line, or we could do some sightseeing en route.”
Sightseeing. That caught Rudy’s attention. “What did you have in mind?”
“We thought maybe the Wild Duck Cluster,” said Matt. “Lot of stars, jammed together. The skies would be spectacular.”
Jon nodded. “There’s a microquasar, too. It’s a little bit out of the way, but it might be interesting, up close.”
Rudy chuckled. “I don’t think you’d want to get too close.” He glanced at Hutch. “What about you, Priscilla?”
“Me?” She smiled. “There is a place I’d like to visit.”
“And where’s that?”
“It’s not out of the way.”
“Okay,” said Matt, inviting her to finish.
“It would be an opportunity to solve a mystery.”
“What mystery?” asked Matt.
“The chindi.”
“Oh, yes. You were part of that, too, weren’t you?”
She tried to look modest. “I’m still limping from that one.” The chindi was an automated sublight ship that moved from system to system, apparently looking for civilizations and God knew what else. Where it found a target, it left stealth satellites to observe and record. The ship itself was enormous, far and away the largest artificial object she’d seen (unless you counted omega clouds as being artificial). As well as constructing a vast communications network, it also collected artifacts and served as a traveling museum.
While they’d been examining it, the ship had taken off, with Tor on board, for a white class-F star whose catalog number ended in 97. She remembered that much. It was still en route to that same star, and was expected to arrive in about 170 years. “I don’t know whether you’ve kept up with this,” she said, “but the radio signals from the chindi satellites were tracked to a star near the Eagle.”