Thornberry yanked the headphones off and swung his legs off the edge of the couch. “Well now, do I look any smarter to you?”
Jordan thought he looked totally normal, except that his wrinkled shirt was stained with perspiration.
“You look fine, Mitch,” he said. “How do you feel?”
Thornberry hesitated a moment. “Pretty normal. Me shirt’s a bit sticky, though.” Then his beefy face broke into a broad smile. “B’god, I see! I see it all! By all the saints in heaven, I understand how it works!”
Aditi asked, “What can you tell me about the energy screen generators?”
“Why, they tap the multidimensional branes that envelop space-time and focus them to produce a warping field that absorbs incoming energy.”
Jordan felt impressed. Aditi pulled a digital notepad and stylus from her desk drawer and handed them to Thornberry.
“The basic equations, please,” she said.
Grinning, Thornberry scribbled away on the notepad’s screen, his tongue peeking out from between his teeth.
“There,” he said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
Aditi said, “I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. But your equations have been sent to the chief of our physics department…”
“And?” Jordan prompted.
Aditi’s smile told him everything. “He confirms that your equations are correct. The downloading worked fine.”
“I’m a bloody physicist!” Thornberry crowed. “And I can build a field generator from scratch, b’god.”
“It worked,” Jordan breathed.
Aditi nodded happily. “It certainly did.”
Thornberry got to his feet and pranced across the room. “I want to call Hazzard. I want to impress him with me new knowledge. We can build an energy shield for the ship, b’god.”
“Well, I’m certainly impressed,” said Jordan.
Verify
Hazzard was impressed, too. On the wall screen above Aditi’s desk, his dark face was split by a bright grin as Thornberry spouted enthusiasm about building an energy shield to protect the ship from harmful levels of radiation.
Glancing at his wristwatch again, Jordan said to Aditi, “I should get over to the observatory and see how Dr. Rudaki is doing with your astronomers.”
She nodded. “I understand. I’ll stay here with Dr. Thornberry.”
Jordan looked at Thornberry, chattering happily with Hazzard. The astronaut seemed halfway between delighted and bewildered at the roboticist’s fervor.
“He won’t miss you,” Aditi said.
Jordan agreed with a nod. He kissed Aditi lightly on the lips and headed for the door.
“Dinner tonight?” he asked her.
“Of course,” she said.
Jordan whistled happily as he strode briskly through the city’s bustling streets toward the observatory. It works, he thought. The brain stimulation works and there aren’t any bad side effects. None that I could see, at least. Mitch seems as happy as a little boy on Christmas morning.
His phone buzzed. Yanking it from his shirt pocket, he saw Adri’s lined face on its tiny screen. The old man was beaming brightly.
“Aditi tells me that Dr. Thornberry’s download went very well,” he said.
“It did indeed,” Jordan said cheerfully, without breaking stride.
“I am pleased.”
“I’m overjoyed.”
“Apparently Dr. Rudaki is finding what she came for among the astronomers.”
“That’s where I’m heading now,” Jordan said.
“Yes, I know.”
Of course you know, Jordan said silently. You know every move we make.
Aloud, he replied to Adri, “Will you join us for dinner this evening?”
Adri chuckled softly. “Your affinity for mixing sociability with meals is putting weight on me.”
Jordan laughed. “A couple of kilos won’t hurt you.”
“Perhaps not,” Adri agreed, smiling back at Jordan. “This evening, then, in the dining hall.”
“Seven o’clock?”
“Seven will be fine.”
Jordan snapped the phone shut and slipped it back into his shirt pocket. He saw the observatory no more than two blocks ahead.
Entering the observatory was like entering a cathedral. Even though the telescopes were not working in the daytime, once he stepped into the main section of the building, with its domed roof and skyward-pointing instruments, Jordan felt an almost religious kind of awe and majesty.
He remembered a line of Galileo’s: Astronomers seek to investigate the true constitution of the universe, the most important and the most admirable problem that there is.
As he stood there gaping, a young man in a comfortably loose white tunic and dark blue slacks hurried across the observatory’s stone floor toward him.
“Mr. Kell! Welcome.”
Jordan dipped his chin a notch. “Thank you. May I ask what your name is?”
The young astronomer hesitated a moment, looking blank, puzzled, but at last answered, “In your language, my name is Mitra.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mitra.”
He was a pleasant-faced young man, a shade taller than Jordan yet somehow softer-looking, as if he had not yet outgrown his baby fat. His hair was a light brown color, sandy, so wispy that the slightest waft of air sent it flying.
“You’re here to see Dr. Rudaki, I presume,” Mitra said, smiling brightly at Jordan.
“Yes. Can you take me to her?”
“With pleasure. She’s in the conference room with the top staff.”
Mitra led Jordan across the hushed observatory, past the slanting gridwork of the resting telescopes, and up a steel stairway that clanged echoingly with every step they took. He stopped at a closed door, tapped on it with a knuckle, then slid it open.
There were ten people seated around a long table, with Elyse at its foot, Brandon sitting beside her. They both looked grim. Five other men and three women, Jordan saw. One of the men, chunky and barrel-chested, with short-cropped dark brown hair, was on his feet at the head of the table. The wall screens displayed astronomical images from ceiling to floor, swirling clouds of stars, vast glowing streams of gas, dark veils of obscuring dust.
“Mr. Kell,” said the standing man. “Welcome to our little colloquium.” He gestured to an empty chair at the foot of the table, next to Elyse and Brandon. They’ve been expecting me, Jordan realized.
The astronomer introduced the men and women seated around the table, then ended with, “I am Hari, chief astronomer.”
Jordan nodded a hello to each of them in turn as he went to the chair and sat in it.
“We have been showing Dr. Rudaki and Dr. Kell images and data concerning the gamma ray eruption at the galactic core.”
As Hari spoke, the images on the walls changed. Like a slide show, Jordan thought.
“Most of these images are more than twelve thousand years old,” the astronomer went on, just the slightest bit pompous. “I’m afraid their quality has degraded a bit over time, but they are still useful.”
Hari explained that the images looked inward, toward the heart of the galaxy, where the stars were so thickly clustered that they showed as one bright continuous glow. The images shifted, and Jordan guessed that they were showing the same field of view in different wavelengths: optical, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray and finally—
“And this is the gamma-ray view,” Hari intoned.
The background of the galaxy’s heart disappeared in the final view, smothered by a blazing wave of gamma radiation. The images flicked every few seconds; the wave grew bigger with each change, like a menacing tsunami growing, surging, coming closer.