“Lovely,” she said. He’d come a long way from the sterile landscapes he’d shown her back in Arlington.
“You like it?”
“Oh, yes, Tor. But how’d you make it work?” She looked around at the airless rock. “Did you do this from inside?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I set up right over there.” He showed her. Near a boulder that might have served as an armrest, or even a place to sit.
“Doesn’t everything freeze up?”
“The canvas is high—rag content. The pastels are reformulated. They use less volatile binders.” He smiled at his work, obviously pleased with himself, and put it away. “It works quite well, really.”
“But why?”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure. It must cost a fortune to come all the way out here. And to paint a picture?”
“Money’s no object, Hutch. Not anymore. Do you have any idea how much this will be worth when we get back?”
“None.”
He nodded as if the amount were beyond calculation. “Hard to believe that we’d meet in a place like this.” He sat down, wrapped his arms around his knees, and looked up at her. “You’re lovely as ever, Hutch.”
“Thanks. And congratulations, Tor. I’m happy for you.”
Tor looked quite dashing in the glow of the rings. He pulled a remote from a vest pocket, aimed it at the dome, and keyed it. The dome sagged, collapsed, and dwindled to a pack. They picked it up, along with the air and water tanks, and carried everything to the lander.
George and the others were waiting. They all shook hands, poured drinks, laughed, exclaimed how surprised they were that he and Hutch knew each other, said how glad they were to see him again, and talked about how they were going after the biggest prize of all.
They asked to see what he’d been doing and he showed them and they ooohed and ahhhed. What was he going to call it, Alyx asked with excitement.
It was a question Hutch should have put to him.
“Night Passage,” he said.
Chapter 7
— Something of an extraordinary nature will turn up.
DURING THE FINAL week of their voyage, Tor made no attempt to reestablish their relationship on its old footing. There were no covert smiles, no oblique references, no solitary visits to areas of the ship where she happened to be.
Nevertheless, having what amounted to an old boyfriend on board changed the chemistry and created a decidedly uncomfortable situation.
For the first couple of days after Tor boarded, Hutch spent less time with her passengers and all but confined herself to the bridge. But as Tor seemed to be making every effort to avoid creating a problem, she gradually returned to her normal routines.
During the final days of their approach to 1107, she spent a fair amount of time talking with Preach. Well, maybe talking wasn’t quite the right descriptive. They were a couple of hours apart, using hypercomm, so the conversations consisted of long monologues and a lot of waiting. It wasn’t at all like sitting in the same room with someone, and even with years of practice on both sides, the experience could be frustrating.
The process had taught Hutch a long time back about the vagaries of human conversation, the things that really mattered, which were not at all the words, or even the tones, but rather the moment-to-moment reactions people had to one another, the sudden glitter of understanding in the eyes, the raised hand that accompanied a request for additional explanation, the signal of approval or dismay or affection that a given phrase might induce. What good was it to say, for example, I would like to spend more time with you to a still image and wait more than an hour for a response that came as part of a long reply.
So she said nothing of that sort, nothing personal. Nothing that she couldn’t put out there gradually, using his reactions to guide her. She liked Preach, liked him more than anyone she’d met in a long time. She enjoyed spending hours trading small talk back and forth with him, telling him what she was reading, how excited everyone was now that they were drawing close to 1107.
The exchanges had been infrequent at first, maybe twice a day, centering primarily on details of the mission, how Preach’s contact team was every bit as excited as hers. The Condor group consisted of ten people, six men, four women. Five were corporate executives, one was the chairman of the World Food Store; two were university presidents. Another was a prominent Catholic bishop who’d become famous after he got into an argument with the Vatican. And he also had on board the celebrated comedian Harry Brubaker. “Harry,” Preach said, “claims he’s just along gathering material.”
The emphasis of his team was different. As opposed to looking for a piece of hardware, they harbored an outside hope that the planetary system at Point B was home to an advanced civilization. “Nobody’ll really admit they think it’s likely, but they all light up when the subject surfaces.”
The presence of the bishop had surprised Hutch. “His interest in the possibility of contact has only recently developed,” Preach said. “But he thinks that eventually we’re going to have an encounter that’ll call everything humans believe about God into question. That we’re going to have to opt for a wider vision. He wants to be part of it when it happens.”
She could see that his own eyes brightened as he described the state of mind of his passengers. “I know what you’re thinking, Hutch,” he continued. “And it’s true. I don’t care much about the scientific side of this thing, but there’ll be a lot of publicity if we really do find something, and that can’t hurt an independent contractor. I’d love to see it happen.
“By the way, something I meant to tell you…” And he lurched into an account of two of his passengers caught en flagrante in one of the storerooms. “They were trying to avoid the possibility of being seen sneaking in and out of their quarters, so….” One or the other had tripped the surveillance imagers and the coupling had been relayed to every monitor on the ship.
“But it turned out okay,” he added. “This is a fairly laid-back group.”
Their conversations became less impersonal with the passage of time. There was a quality to the vastness outside, the sense of their joint isolation in a hostile place, that tempted her to say more sometimes than might be prudent. But she held back.
At night, when she was occasionally awakened by footsteps in the corridor, somebody headed for a midnight snack, or maybe a furtive rendezvous, she allowed herself to imagine that it was Preach coming for her.
GEORGE’S PEOPLE TOOK full advantage of the Memphis’s sim capabilities. They attended a Broadway production of South Pacific, circa 1947, in which George showed up as Emile, Alyx jumped in happily to play Nellie, and Herman became Luther Billis. Hutch played Liat, the island beauty. They watched hot-air balloons soar out of Albuquerque in the celebrated “checkerboard” race of 2019. They heard a concert by Marovitch, and another by the Trapdoors. (Pete played sax, and Alyx did the vocals.) They were present, with Gable and Leigh, at the Hollywood opening of Gone With the Wind in 1939.
They watched a nineteenth-century soccer match between Spain and Britain, and a Phillies-Cardinals game from the 1920s. The latter was Herman’s suggestion, and he had to explain the rules to everybody. The leadoff hitter for the Phillies was Hutch, who thought she looked pretty good in the uniform. She started the game with a line drive single to center.
Later she asked Herman why everybody swung three or four bats before coming to the plate, and then discarded all but one.
“When you get up there,” he explained, “the single bat feels lighter. You can get it around quicker.”