The standard routes allowed passengers to get a look at ringed giants and black holes. They could lob illuminated globes at neutron stars and land on beaches to relax under alien suns. If they had a desire to do so, they could swim in an ocean where nothing, ever, had lived. The clients inevitably liked to party. The schedule of events showed something happening every evening. I doubted it had been much different during Rachel’s time.
The young woman looked up, saw us, and smiled. “Let’s go say hello,” said Alex.
“We’re not going to schedule a flight, are we?”
“I don’t see any point in doing that. How long’s an average flight last?”
I looked through the advertising. “Shortest one looks like eight days. Up to four weeks.”
He nodded. “They used to be a lot longer. Technology wasn’t as good at the turn of the century, of course. Then the flights ran as long as four months. To the same destinations. Or at least to ones at the same range. The long ones were generally the hunting trips.”
“They went hunting?”
“They still do.” He led the way into the office. “Good morning.”
“Hello,” said the woman, her eyes brightening automatically. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Alex Benedict. We’d like to see Miriam Wiley, please.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“No. Actually, she isn’t.”
“I see.” She pressed a button and studied a screen. “I’m sorry, Mr. Benedict. She’s not available at the moment. I’ll be happy to assist you if I can.”
“This is important. Would you please tell her I’m here. That I’d like very much to talk to her?”
“One moment, please. I’ll connect you with my supervisor.”
It took a minute or two, but they apparently bypassed the supervisor. The next voice was also a woman’s: “Mr. Benedict, this is Miriam Wiley. I’m surprised to hear you’re on the station.” Her image appeared on-screen. She was a dark-eyed, dark-skinned woman with a surprised smile.
“It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Wiley.”
“Can I assume you’re the Alex Benedict?”
“Not sure about that. I deal in antiquities.”
“Yes, indeed,” she said with a sly grin. “So I’ve heard. Arma, send them in, please.”
Miriam Wiley was a retired pilot who had, at seventeen, charged into a collapsing building at a reclamation project to rescue an injured worker. On another occasion she’d taken over a taxi when its AI system malfunctioned, and ridden it to a safe landing, narrowly missing a swimming pool filled with gawkers who, apparently, didn’t have enough sense to clear out.
She stood up as we entered, came over, shook our hands, and suggested we all sit down and relax. “We don’t get many visitors out here,” she said. “At least not famous ones.”
Her pilot’s license, in a silver frame, hung on the wall behind her desk. The walls were covered with pictures of Eagles, flying through ring systems, gliding over lunar surfaces, standing by while a blast of white light emanated from something too far away to identify. The one that caught my eye was of an Eagle riding above a cloudscape, silhouetted against a partially obscured crescent moon. She tried to pretend she knew me by reputation, too, but she stumbled over my name. “What can I do for you?” she asked. “Were you planning on taking one of our tours?”
“No,” Alex said. “Unfortunately, we’re here on business at the moment.”
“Tracking a rare artifact, no doubt.”
“No doubt.” Alex smiled. They both smiled. Miriam was on the make.
“Too bad. I’d be more than happy to offer you our special VIP rate. You’d find a vacation with us to be a glorious experience.” She shifted those dark eyes in my direction, suggesting that I might consider urging him to take the offer. That I’d enjoy it myself.
“Miriam,” said Alex, “have you heard of Sunset Tuttle?”
“Who?”
“Sunset Tuttle? He was the guy who was always looking for aliens.”
“Oh, yes. Sure. There was a vid based on him a few years back.”
“Okay. We’re looking into the possibility—and it’s only a possibility—that he might have made a major discovery connected with a World’s End flight.”
“With one of our flights? What kind of discovery?”
“First of all, we’re talking thirty years ago.”
She laughed. It was a pleasant sound. “That’s well before my time. I’ve only been here six years.”
“Have you taken any of the tours yourself?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s part of the job. So what’s the discovery this Tuttle might have made? Did he find aliens on one of our tours?” The smile became even brighter. Suddenly, I was sitting there feeling foolish.
“No. At least not that we know of.”
“Okay. So—?”
“There’s an outside chance, though, that one of your captains may have encountered an extraterrestrial civilization.”
She laughed again. Even more skeptically. “Which one?”
“Rachel Bannister. Would it be possible to look at the flight logs?”
“I can’t see that there’d be a problem with that. I’d have to edit them first.”
“Edit them how?”
“Remove the names of the passengers. You want to see those, you’d need a court order.”
“Okay. No, we don’t care about the passengers, so that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Good. Which flight logs did you want to look at? What year?”
“It was 1403.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I can’t do that.”
“Is there a prohibition of some sort?”
“No. I mean the logs from that period don’t exist. They only go back to 1405. That’s ten years before current ownership took over. I should have realized when you mentioned thirty years that I wouldn’t be able to help you.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“We’re only required to keep the files for ten years, Alex. Walter—he was the CEO here previously—followed the letter of the law. We keep everything now. Have done since the new management took over. But 1405’s as far back as we go.”
“What do you know about the tours at the turn of the century? Were they the same as the ones you offer now?”
“Pretty much. We visit spectacular places. Do some specialized flights. You know, hunting, camping, that sort of thing. We’ve done interstellar weddings. We’ve taken people for rides on asteroids. We’ve even done a couple of ordinations. Did one two years ago, and another the year before that. So no, nothing’s changed very much. We have different destinations, of course, because we have a lot of repeat business. People want to see new stuff. But the nature of the flights is about the same.”
“Miriam, did they ever lose anyone? Was there ever an incident?”
“No. At least nothing I know of.” She glanced around the room at the framed pictures. “Thank God, we’ve been fortunate. And we’ve always had good people.”
“Do you have any records at all from the earlier years?”
She shook her head. “Not a thing, Alex. We don’t even have maintenance records. Which they were supposed to keep. Hell, we don’t have the advertising stuff anymore. We don’t know where the ships went. We’ve got nothing.” She raised her hands in surrender. “Sorry.”
TWELVE
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