Had it really happened?
The locals swore it had.
Pieces of evidence had been found at the scene, but the army had arrived, collected everything, and then denied everything.
George understood that it was to the benefit of the citizens of Dolbeau to keep the story alive. The town had become a major tourist center. There were five motels, a museum, a theater dedicated to endless restagings of the event, souvenir shops, and a collection of restaurants serving sandwiches with names like the ET, the Coverup, the FTL, the Anti-Grav. All appeared to be prospering.
George was a skeptic both by training and by inclination. Yet there was something about the Dolbeau phenomenon that left him wanting to believe it had happened. He would remember for the rest of his life standing on the ridge overlooking the sacred spot, listening to the wind moving among the trees, and thinking, yes, it might have come in from over there, big and iron gray with lights blinking, and it would have set down there, mashing those trees. It was disk-shaped. You could still see the bowl formed in the vegetation, maybe thirty meters across.
And he believed. From that moment, his life changed. Not a small change, like the day you discover you like asparagus after all, or when you stop wearing white socks. This was life-altering stuff. This was casting off the religious beliefs of a lifetime and signing on for something new. Not that the UFO itself took him over, but in later years he’d realize it was the first time he had ever looked at the stars. Really looked at them, and seen the sky as a four-dimensional marvel rather than simply a canopy over his head.
There might not have been Visitors along the St. Maurice, he knew, but there should have been. There should be somebody out there that humans could talk to, could compare notes with. Could go hunting with.
He’d hired people to look into the Dolbeau story. There was no evidence that the government had actually found anything at the site. And George knew quite well that the Canadian bureaucracy could not possibly have kept a secret of that magnitude for fifty years.
Witnesses could still be found who swore they had seen the vessel. Yet even contemporary media reports were self-contradictory and skeptical. Nobody had any pictures of the UFO.
Yet three people had died. Hunters from Indiana, who had been staying at Albert’s Motel. If they weren’t in the graves, they’d gone missing. And no one had ever heard from them again.
A dozen or more townspeople had recorded statements, showing the cameras pieces of burnt metal said to be from the intruder. Within the first twenty-four hours, the army had come and made off with the evidence. And according to townspeople, the ship itself.
And that was it.
FOR GEORGE, IT became a quest.
Specialists at the Academy of Science and Technology in Arlington assured him nothing had happened at Dolbeau. The Indiana hunters were a fable, they said. When Academy investigators looked into it and reported that there was no record they’d even existed, they in turn were accused of a cover-up. We’re out in the neighborhood now, they’d told him, meaning that they had actually set foot in hundreds of local star systems. And there was nothing remotely resembling intelligent beings.
But ten years later they’d found ruins on Quraqua. And less than six months after that, they’d found the Noks.
The Noks weren’t going to go visiting anybody soon. They were in an early industrialization phase, but they’d been up and down several times and had all but exhausted their natural resources. Furthermore, they did not seem to be bright enough to sort out their internal problems. They came in several sizes and shapes, they held strong political and religious opinions, and they seemed to have no talent for compromise.
Nevertheless, he was hooked by the Great Unknown. George Hockelmann became a familiar visitor at the Academy. He organized the Friends of the Academy and set them to supplementing the meager funds provided by the government and by private contributors.
It became his overriding ambition to find an intelligent alien, to establish communication, to create a common language, to make it possible one day to sit down with him, or her, perhaps beside a blazing fire, and talk about God, the universe, and how it had all come to be.
He’d heard the rumors about 1107 before Pete Damon got back, the mysterious signals in a remote place and the fruitless effort to hunt them down. When he’d inquired at the Academy, Sylvia Virgil had pointed out that there was no conceivable reason to believe anyone would have placed a transmitter out at the neutron star. It simply made no sense, she had insisted. A second mission would be expensive, would almost certainly produce no result, and would lead to charges that the Academy was squandering its money on wild-eyed projects.
But who knew what might make sense to a different kind of intelligence?
What had Pete thought?
Pete had declined to speak freely over the link, but had insisted on coming instead to see George personally. George had wondered if he feared being monitored by someone.
George had him over to his Bracken Valley retreat, and they went outside onto the upper deck to drink lime coolers and watch the sun set. “Nobody really cares about it,” Pete complained.
And George understood why he’d stayed off the link. It was too important to trust to long-distance communications. Pete had wanted to make his point in person, to force George to feel the intensity of the situation.
It was a late-summer evening, with a storm approaching and the wind beginning to pick up.
“Sylvia doesn’t think it’s anything other than an anomaly. A glitch in the computers,” said George. “Nearly as I can make out, neither does anybody else.”
“They weren’t there.”
“They’ve seen the evidence.”
“George, they don’t want to accept the implications. They’re too worried about their reputations.”
George took a long pull from his drink. “You really think they’d hide something like this?”
“No. They’re not hiding anything. They’ve convinced themselves there’s nothing to it because it entails risks if they don’t. They know if they put together an expedition, a lot of people will laugh. There’s a good chance they won’t find anything, and then the laughter will get louder, the politicians will start asking questions, and the board will start looking for a new commissioner. That would mean the end of Sylvia too.”
“So what really do you think? Is there anything out there?”
He leaned forward, his eyebrows drawing together. “George, she’s right: It might have been a glitch. We can’t deny that. But it’s not the point. There might really be something there. That’s the possibility we should be considering.”
“Somebody to talk to?”
“Maybe.”
Two nights later, George made a deal with Virgil. The Contact Society would fund a mission to investigate the anomaly, and it would even supply the ship. In fact, it would supply the investigators. All that would be asked was the Academy’s blessing, and a pilot.
FOR PETE DAMON, the evening with George had marked the culmination of a weary struggle.
There was no longer a future in scientific research, for the simple reason there was nothing much left to research. We knew in general how stars were born and how they died. We knew how black holes formed and what their neighborhoods were like. We knew the details of galactic formation, we understood the structure of space, and we had finally figured out, just a few years before, the nature of gravity. Quantum effects were no longer quite so uncertain, and dark matter had long since been brought into the light.