It was obvious how that would play out. Yes, we’ve got an alien transmitter! Mogambo would gallop onto the scene and grab all the credit. George would never know what hit him. “I’m not sure I can do that, Professor.”
He looked hurt. “Hutch, why not?”
“The contract stipulates that Mr. Hockelmann controls the reporting.” That wasn’t strictly true, but it might have been. “I can’t do what you ask, as much as I’d like to.”
“Hutch, this means a great deal to me. Listen, the truth is, I’d be there with you if I could. But it’s just not possible. I’m loaded up with work here. I can’t just go running off. You understand. What’s it take to get out there from here? A week?”
“More or less.”
He gave her a pained expression. “I just can’t manage it.” He touched a control, and the lamp brightened. Its light filled the room. “I need this, Hutch. I’d consider it a personal favor, and I’d appreciate it if you could find a way.” She started to reply, but he held up a hand. “Do this for me, and I’ll see that you’re rewarded. I have contacts. I’m sure you don’t want to spend the rest of your life running back and forth between Sol and the Outpost.”
She rose quietly and put her glass, half-empty, on the edge of his desk. “I’ll pass your request on, Professor. I’m sure George will want to comply with your wishes.”
TOR KNEW SHE was coming.
He’d spent a few evenings with Hutch four years ago. A couple of shows, a couple of dinners, drinks at Cassidy’s one night overlooking the Potomac and the Mall. A walk along the river. A Saturday afternoon horseback ride through Rock Creek Park. And then, on a Wednesday evening in late November, she’d told him she wouldn’t be seeing him anymore, she was sorry, hoped it wasn’t a problem for him, but she’d be on her way out again to someplace he couldn’t pronounce, that idiot world where the Noks were killing one another in large numbers, fighting a war that apparently went on forever. “I just don’t get back to Arlington very often, Tor,” she’d said, by way of explanation.
He had known it was coming. Didn’t know how, something in her manner all along had told him that it was all temporary, that the day would come when he’d revisit the same places alone. He didn’t tell her any of that, of course, didn’t know how, feared it would only push her farther away. So he’d called for the bill, paid up, told her he was sorry it had ended as it had, and walked off. Left her sitting there.
He was Tor Vinderwahl then, the name he’d been born with, the name he’d changed at the suggestion of the director of the Georgetown Art Exhibit. Vinderwahl sounds made up, he’d said. And it’s hard to remember. Not a good idea if you want to go commercial.
He hadn’t seen her since. But he hadn’t forgotten her.
He’d started any number of times to send her a message. Hutch, I’m still here. Or, Hutch, when you get back, why don’t we give it another try? Or Hutch, Priscilla, I love you.” He recorded message after message but never hit the transmit button. He’d gone up to the Wheel a few times when he knew she was due in. Twice he’d seen her, beautiful beyond reason, and his heart had begun pumping and his throat clogged so he knew he wouldn’t be able to speak to her but would just stand there looking silly, saying wasn’t it a big surprise running into each other like this.
It was a ridiculous way for a grown man to behave. The adult thing to do would have been to seek her out and talk to her, give her a chance to change her mind. Women did that all the time. Besides, he was successful, his work had begun to sell, and that had to count for something.
Once, he’d seen her in a restaurant in Georgetown, had actually sat across the room from her, while his date kept asking whether he was okay. Hutch had never noticed him, or if she had she’d pretended not to. When it was over, when she and the man she’d been with—frumpy and dumb-looking, he’d thought—had gotten up and left, he’d sat churning, glued to his seat, barely able to breathe.
In the end, he never called, never sent a message, never let her hear from him again. He didn’t want to become a nuisance, thought the only chance he had to win her over demanded that he keep his pride. Otherwise—
His career had turned around when he started doing off-world art. In the beginning, he simply holed up in a holotank and switched on the view from Charon, or of a yacht passing an ocean world bathed in moonlight.
Some of those had sold. Not for big money, but for something. Enough to persuade him that he could do art at a sufficiently high level that people would pay to put it on their walls.
“Kirby’s work reflects talent,” one reviewer had commented, “but it lacks depth. It lacks feeling. Great art overwhelms us, absorbs us into the painting, makes us experience the dance of the worlds. As good as Kirby is, one never quite feels the illuminated sky rotating.”
Whatever that meant. But it revealed a truth: Kirby had to get out into the planetary systems he painted. To capture the rings of a gas giant on canvas, he needed to get close to them, to see them overhead, to allow himself to be caught up in their majesty. So he began finding ways to visit his subjects. It was intolerably expensive. But it had paid off.
He did not ascend to the top rank, of course. He’d have to be dead thirty years before he could accomplish that. But his work showed up in the elite galleries, and it commanded substantial prices. For the first time in his life, he had experienced serious professional success. And the money that came with it.
He had by then given up on any chance of recovering Priscilla Hutchins. It was in fact a bitter side effect of his situation that, because he had changed his name, she had no way of knowing that he and Tor Kirby were the same.
He saw no easy way to correct the situation. Until he read an article about George Hockelmann, the Contact Society, and its substantial contributions to the Academy. Hutch’s employer.
Tor had never maintained a steady interest in the world around him. Of the Contact Society’s questionable reputation among the professionals who did the field work, he was utterly innocent. He knew only that the names of their major players showed up periodically on the Academy data streams available to anyone who wanted to look.
It was his chance. He contributed a painting of the Temple of the Winds at Quraqua, an underwater archeological site. It was his best work to date, the temple illuminated by sunlight filtering down through the sea, a submersible descending gradually toward it—it was quite apparent the vehicle was going down—escorted by a pair of Quraquat kimbos, long, flat, wedge-shaped fish, and something like a squid. The painting was auctioned off and brought so much money that Tor regretted having made the donation. His picture and name—both names—made the Academy news links. But even as he looked at the stories, and thought how generous and talented they made him appear, he understood they would not be enough to convince her to call. She probably wouldn’t even see them.
A few days later he caught commercial transportation out to Koestler’s Rock, a dazzling world of cliffs and angry seas orbiting a gas giant. Tor was painting the rings, depicting them rising out of a rough sea, when the message came from George. MAJOR DISCOVERY PENDING. He wasn’t interested at first, until he heard the comment, Academy pilot.
He replied, hardly daring to hope, asking questions about the duration of the mission and the nature of the signals and several other issues in which he had no interest, using them to disguise the one question he cared about. “By the way, do you know the pilot’s name?”
It was an agonizing five-day wait for the reply. “Hutchings.”
George didn’t quite have the name right, but he knew he had hit the jackpot.
HE CAUGHT TRANSPORTATION to Outpost, got there early, and decided to work while he waited. Decided, in fact, that his best bet with Hutch was to let her find him at work. Let her see what he was doing.