“Bill is perfectly capable of bringing you home,” she said. “All you’d have to do is tell him I’ve gone to a better world, and ask him to bring you back here.” She smiled and looked around. “Anything else? If not, I suggest we all settle in and get moving.”
Chapter 6
All expectation hath something of a torment.
SURPRISINGLY, IT WAS the quietest, most unobtrusive group Hutch had ever transported anywhere. George spent most of his time in the common room, poring over securities and financial reports. “Tracking trends,” he explained to Hutch, warming quickly to his subject. “It’s where the money is.”
Alyx was laying out plans for a new production, which she said would be launched next fall. The tentative title was Take Off Your Clothes And Run. Hutch couldn’t decide whether she was serious. She and Hutch took turns providing a fourth with Herman, Pete, and Bill in an ongoing game of bridge.
Occasionally they partied. Bill provided music, and they did sing-alongs, although Hutch felt a bit inadequate matching her voice with Alyx’s lovely contralto. “You sound fine, Hutch,” Alyx said. “I believe you could go professional if you wanted.”
Hutch knew better.
“I’m serious. All you’d need is a little training. And, of course, you’d have to let go of your inhibitions.”
“What inhibitions?”
That brought a mild gasp. “Oh, my dear, you have a cartload of them.”
Alyx and Herman adhered to a strenuous workout program. Hutch was always careful to spend time in the gym during a flight, but she was far more casual about it.
They watched a lot of sims. Their tastes varied, but they set up each evening and everybody piled into the tank for the night’s thriller, or romance, or whatever. They took turns playing leads and bit parts. Herman enjoyed being Al Trent, Jason Cordman’s celebrated detective; George showed up one memorable evening as Julius Caesar; and Hutch accepted a challenge and allowed herself to portray the masked twenty-first-century superhero Vengada. Even Alyx entered the fray with good humor, plugging herself in as Cleopatra to George’s Caesar, and later as Delilah to Herman’s Samson. (They’d both been unlikely candidates for the roles, Herman because he just couldn’t mount the intensity—nobody believed he could be persuaded to pull a temple down on himself; and Alyx because she couldn’t submerge her good humor.)
Herman, of course, never lost his infatuation with Alyx. He tried to hide it, but his voice always rose an octave or two when she walked into the room. One of the problems with the compact communities formed by interstellar travel is that nothing can be hidden. People are too close, and their emotions too transparent.
Hutch got a lot of reading done. And she spent an increasing amount of time with George. He had all sorts of documentary evidence to support the notion that there had been a series of alien forays through terrestrial history. He produced pictures of carvings and ancient literary references and sightings that were hard to dispute. Yet lifelong opinions are hard to overcome. The notion that there’d been visitors, even though she knew of at least two races that had, in ancient times, achieved interstellar travel, still seemed absurd. But she listened, caught up in the warmth of his enthusiasm.
They were in fact all believers, even Pete, and she began to root for them, to hope the mission would produce success.
The Memphis was about six weeks out when it stopped at Outpost to collect the final two passengers.
NICK CARMENTINE HAD started his UFO career as a rabid fan of occult tales. He loved rampaging mummies, vampires, demons, spectral creatures that floated through not-quite-empty houses, and disembodied voices carried by the night wind. He started with Poe and Lovecraft and read through to Massengale and DiLillo. He was thoroughly chilled by the dark of the moon, the unquiet grave, the terrible secret in the attic. That was where he lived, and although in later years his interests moved well beyond the genre, he never really left it behind.
He tried to. It was a dangerous passion for a funeral director. Had his bloodthirsty tastes gotten generally about, his clients would have deserted him. And that’s why he switched over to UFOs, which also embodied a healthy sense of the mysterious, without all the trappings that could destroy his reputation.
In time, the hunt for night visitors from other worlds overtook the vampires, and eventually he joined the Contact Society.
His father had been a funeral director, had done well, and had retired early, leaving the business to Nick. Nick was an entrepreneur at heart, and quite soon the Sunrise Funeral Home in downtown Hartford had become Sunrise Enterprises, Inc. While his chain of establishments continued to conduct ordinary services, they specialized in the custom funeral. If someone wanted his ashes put in orbit, or distributed around second base at some lonely country ballpark, or deposited in a remote lagoon in Micronesia, Sunrise was the organization to do the job. They arranged transportation for mourners, provided refreshments, counselors, support. They could arrange for clergy or, when the nonreligious were passing (no one ever “died”), recommend appropriate closing remarks and ceremonies.
His only child Lyra shared his taste for the exotic, although she tended to discount the notion of ambassadors from other civilizations. Nevertheless, she had won her father’s heart by becoming an exoarcheologist.
Nick had never been off-world, which is to say, he’d never gotten beyond Earth orbit, until Lyra was posted to Pinnacle, where she was poking among the million-year-old ruins of that ancient world. On a whim, Nick had spent a small fortune to go out and visit her. They’d strolled together among the upended columns and collapsed roofs of the ancient sites, and she’d taken him to see some of the reconstructed public buildings. (“We had to do some guesswork here, Dad.”) They were beautifully rendered structures, every bit the artistic equal of the Temple of Athena.
They’d watched a virtual alien religious service, and he’d gotten a sense of what it must have been like on Pinnacle when the first humans were just showing up around their campfires.
He spent a month there. Lyra showed him pottery estimated at eight hundred thousand standard years old. “Glaze it,” she explained, “and it lasts forever.”
He looked at the progress they’d made with translation, which was extensive when one considered the few samples they had to work with. And there’d been ancient roadways and harbors, invisible now save to the instruments. “Right here,” she’d said, while they stood in the middle of a desert that ran absolutely flat in all directions clear to the horizon, “right here the crossroads met between the two most powerful empires of the Third Komainic.” There had been a wayfarer’s station, and a river, and possibly a landing pad.
“What were their names?” he’d asked. “The empires?”
She didn’t know. No one knew.
It was only a few hours later that the message came from Hockelmann. THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE THIS MAY BE IT, it concluded. MEET US AT THE OUTPOST.
Sure. Meet me at Larry’s.
OUTPOST WAS A service and supply center on the edge of human expansion. It was located just beyond the rings at Salivar’s Hatch, which was about a billion kilometers out from a class-B blue-white star. Hutch wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting in her funeral-director passenger, probably someone somber and methodical. Nick was about average size, loose-limbed, with black hair, amiable gray eyes, and a guileless smile. Not the sort of man she pictured wandering about the funeral home reassuring friends and relatives. George had hurried off the ship and hugged him when he appeared at the foot of the ramp. He brought him back like a long-lost cousin. “Hutch,” he said, “this is Nick. He will never let you down.” He chuckled at his joke, while Nick sighed.