They went on in that vein for a few minutes. She was seated on a sofa, crosshatched by sunlight. Her red hair glistened, and she looked genuinely pleased to see him. The chemistry was running both ways. Not necessarily good, he thought. He had avoided emotional attachments all his life. Except once. And he’d paid a substantial price for that. “How long are you going to be home?”
“I haven’t received my next assignment yet. They have more pilots than ships at the moment, so I expect I’ll be unemployed for a while.” She leaned back against a cushion. “Might have to find a job over at Broadbent’s.” Broadbent’s was a furniture chain.
“You don’t seriously think they’d cut back, do you?”
“They’ve already done it. Hard to see what else they could have done the way things are going. But” — she shrugged — “there’s always work for people like me.”
“I was wondering,” he said, “if you’d care to have dinner with me. We promised ourselves an evening at the Seahawk.”
“Wish I could, Mac. But I’m wiped out. I’m going in and collapse for the rest of the day.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“I’ve got relatives in tomorrow. How about Thursday?”
“Sure,” he said. “That sounds pretty good.”
AMY CALLED PROMPTLY at seven.
“I understand something happened at the museum,” said Hutch.
“Yes, ma’am. I think I talked with one of them.” Amy was in her bedroom. Pictures of Academy ships hung on the walls.
“With one of the moonriders?”
“I had no way to know for sure. But something that wasn’t human.”
“You say you think this happened.”
“It happened, Hutch,”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Describe it for me. Tell me everything. What you saw. What you heard. Don’t leave anything out.”
“All right.”
“I’m going to record it.”
Hutch had heard that the apparition had more or less taken her form. Now she listened intently while Amy told her story. How she’d been unable to sleep. Sitting on the bridge. How the figure wrapped in darkness had come down the passageway.
How it had been Priscilla Hutchins. But a taller version.
And its message. Blueprint. The Origins Project.
“We are going to destroy it.”
“Did she say why?”
“No. When I asked why she just said for me to get everybody off. That they wouldn’t wait forever. Or words to that effect.”
“Okay. Let’s go back a minute. What’s ‘blueprint’ all about?”
“It’s an old term for a building plan.”
“No. I’m aware of that. I’m just wondering what it means in this context.”
“I don’t know. I asked her what she wanted, and she said ‘blueprint.’”
“Was there anything else?”
“No. Yes. She denied they’d attacked anyone.”
WHAT WAS BLUEPRINT?
“George.” The household AI.
“Yes, Hutch.”
“Do a search on ‘blueprint.’ I want to know — ”
“Yes —?”
What was she looking for? “If there’s any connection with unknown aerial or space phenomena?”
There were several action vids by Blueprint Entertainment that pitted various heroes against outer space monsters.
And a 250-year-old blueprint of a moonrider — they called them UFOs then — obtained originally by a married couple who claimed to have been riding all over the solar system in the vehicle.
And Blueprint for Armageddon, published in the twenty-first century, a book predicting an attack by aliens. It even had pictures of the creatures, but none of them looked anything like Hutch.
There was also the Madison, Wisconsin, urban legend about a thing running loose that left monstrous footprints and bled blue. The whole affair was supposedly hushed up by the authorities. For reasons not given.
And an oil painting, Cosmic Blueprint, by somebody she had never heard of, depicting two ships, one obviously alien, watching each other in the foreground of a ringed planet.
She gazed thoughtfully at the alien vessel and realized she’d missed the obvious. “George.”
“Yes, Hutch.”
“Let’s try it again. Make it ‘blueprint’ and the ‘Origins Project.’” She rubbed her eyes. It had been a long day, and she was tired.
“I have more than seventeen thousand hits,” said the AI. “Do you wish to narrow it down?”
Bingo. “Yes. Eliminate all that have to do with the design of the facility itself. How many are left?”
“Four thousand three hundred seven.”
“Pick one at random. Let me see what they’re talking about.”
“The vast majority are simply technical documents.”
“Pick one.”
George put up a title page: Blueprint, credited to two names with which she was unfamiliar, and filled with text and equations that meant nothing to her, references to hybrid tangles and monolith reversals.
She looked at a few more documents, all similar, all incomprehensible, and called Amy back. “Answer a question for me, Love.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do you know about Origins?”
“Just what I learned on the flight. Why?”
“Were you aware of any of the initiatives they’re involved in? Any of the things they’re doing?”
“I know they bounce particles off one another. That’s all.”
“Blueprint appears to be the name of one of their projects.” Amy bit her lip. “My question is, could you have learned about it somewhere else? Before you got to the museum?”
“No,” she said. “I never heard of it.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m positive.”
SHE CALLED ERIC. “They have a Blueprint,” she said.
“Whoa. Who has a blueprint? What are we talking about?”
“Origins.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t aware of that. She probably saw it somewhere and remembered it.”
“That was my first thought. Eric, she insists that didn’t happen.”
“That’s very strange.”
“You guys checked with the AI, right? We have no record of this visitation other than Amy’s word.”
“That’s correct.” Eric took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. “Hutch, they have a lot of people out there. At Origins. If there’s even a chance she might be right…”
“Okay. We’d better look into it. I’m going to talk to the commissioner. You make some calls. Use your contacts. See if you can find out what Blueprint is about. And ask them when they’re doing it.”
“The public information office is in Paris. It’s closed at this hour. I can try to track down some of the people who are involved.”
“Do it. Get back to me as soon as you have something. But Eric —?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t say anything to them about moonriders. Okay?”
SHE USED HER time to inform herself about the Origins facility. How many people were currently there. Whether they routinely kept a ship on station. (They didn’t.) What kind of person the groundside administrator, Hans Allard, was.
Eric called back. “I talked with Donald Gaspard,” he said. “He’s part of the consulting team for Blueprint.”
“Okay. So what’s it about?”
“How’s your physics?”
“Try me.”
“It has something to do with using the collider to make small black holes.”
“Black holes?”
“Small ones. Micros. Apparently they’ve been doing it all along. For years, according to Gaspard. Blueprint will be an extension of the effort. But he says there’s no danger to the facility. The holes dissipate quickly. Almost right away. I think he said within microseconds.”