Nowhere was there any mention of a derelict, or of Margolia.
I made a copy of the record. Next I needed somebody with some insight into Survey procedures.
Shara Michaels was an astrophysicist, employed on Survey’s analytical staff. Her responsibility was to advise upper management about submitted projects: which were worth pursuing, which could be put on the waiting list, and which could be safely dismissed.
I’d gone to school with her, partied with her, and even introduced her to a future husband. A future ex, as things turned out, but we’d remained friends through it all although in recent years we hadn’t seen much of each other.
She’d been the queen of the walk in those early days, the woman you didn’t want your date to see. Blond hair cut in an elfin style, sea-blue eyes, and a talent for mischief. Everybody loved her.
She still looked good when she came to the door of her office. But the old cavalier attitude had disappeared. She was all business. Polite, glad to see me, commented how we needed to get together once in a while. But there was a level of reserve her younger self had never known.
“You should have called,” she said, showing me to a chair and taking one herself.
“You almost missed me. I was on my way out the door.”
“I hadn’t expected to come by today, Shara,” I said. “Do you have a few minutes?”
“For you? Sure. What’s going on?”
“Alex has had me on the run. I was over at the archives.”
“Still doing slave labor?”
“Pretty much.” We did several minutes’ worth of small talk. Then I got down to cases.
“I need your help.”
She got drinks for us. Wine from the islands. “Name it.”
“I’ve been looking at some old mission reports. From forty years ago.”
“Why?” she asked. “What are you looking for?”
“Survey used to have a husband-and-wife team, Adam and Margaret Wescott. There’s a possibility they found something unusual on one of the missions.”
“People often find unusual things on the missions.” She meant planets with odd orbits or gas giants with unusual mixes of, say, carbon and methane.
I looked at her over the rim of my glass. “No,” I said. “Not like that.”
“Like what, then?”
“Like an artifact. A derelict ship. Connected with Margolia.”
“With what?”
“Margolia.”
She still had a great smile. “You’re kidding.”
“Shara, a woman showed up at our place a week or so ago with a drinking cup that might be from the Seeker.” When the frown reappeared, I explained.
When I’d finished, she looked amused. Maybe disappointed that I could jump to an obviously silly conclusion. “Chase,” she said, “anybody can manufacture a cup.”
“It’s nine thousand years old, love.” Her eyes widened. “We’ve been able to trace it back to Wescott. It was taken from his home in the 1390s. By a burglar.”
“But you don’t know where Wescott got it?”
“No.”
“He probably bought it somewhere. Do you have reason to suspect it actually came off the ship? Or from”-she couldn’t suppress a smile-“Margolia.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“A remote one.”
Her office was on the third level. The walls were decorated with pictures of stars in collision. That was her specialty. She’d done her thesis on interstellar traffic accidents and remained disappointed that she’d come along too late to see the crash between Delta Karpis and a dwarf star sixty years earlier.
One image was particularly striking. It was a computer graphic done from behind and above a yellow star that was about to do a head-on with a white mass of some sort. A dwarf, probably. “How often do these things happen?” I asked.
“Collisions? There’s always one going on somewhere. There’s one happening at this moment. Somewhere in the observable universe.”
“Well, the observable universe is pretty big.”
“I was just trying to answer your question.”
“It’s still a lot of wreckage,” I admitted. “I’ve only heard of one in my life.”
“The Polaris incident.”
“Yes.”
She smiled again, letting me know how uninformed I was. “They happen all the time, Chase. We don’t see much of it around here because we’re pretty spread out. Thank God. Stars never get close to one another. But go out into some of the clusters-” She stopped and thought about it. “If you draw a sphere around the sun, with a radius of one parsec, you know how many other stars will fall within that space?”
“Zero,” I said. “Nothing’s close.” In fact the nearest star was Formega Ti, six lightyears out.
“Right. But you go out to one of the clusters, like maybe the Colizoid, and you’d find a half million stars crowded into that same sphere.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I never kid, Chase. They bump into one another all the time.” I tried to imagine it.
Wondered what the night sky would look like in such a place. Probably never got dark.
“I have a question for you,” I said.
She tucked a wisp of hair back in place. “I thought you might.”
“If I want to do a mission, I come to you with a plan. You look at it, and if it’s okay, you approve it, assign me a ship and pilot, and I’m on my way. That’s the way it works, right?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the essence of it, yes.”
“Okay. The plan I submit tells you which star systems I want to look at. It includes a flight plan, and, if there are special reasons for the mission, it mentions those also. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“I used to do the preliminary missions. And I know there were follow-up flights, with specialists.”
She nodded.
“How often? If I came back from a mission on which I’d visited, say, a dozen systems, what are the chances somebody would actually go back and look at one them?”
“Usually, you could expect maybe half of them would get follow-ups.”
“Really? That many?”
“Oh, yes. Sure.”
“So if I found something and wanted to keep it quiet-”
“You’d want to leave that system off the mission report. Substitute something else.”
“But if I did that, you guys would notice, right?”
Shara looked uncomfortable. “I doubt it. I don’t know how we were doing things thirty, forty years ago. But there’s no reason to backcheck the report against the proposal. Nobody has a reason to lie about any of that, and to my knowledge there’s never been a problem.”
“Do the proposals still exist?”
“From 1390? I doubt it.”
“Would you check for me?”
“Hold on.”
She put the question to the AI. And we both heard the response: “Proposals are retained three years before being discarded.”
“That’s longer than I would have thought we keep them,” she said. “You think the Wescotts found the Seeker and falsified the report?”
“It’s possible.”
“Why would they do that? They’d get full credit.”
“But if they found the Seeker, could Margolia be far away? What would Survey have done if they’d announced their discovery?”
She thought about it. “Oh.”
“That’s right. You’d have assigned a small fleet to go looking for Margolia. So the big discovery would probably get made by someone else.”
“I suppose so. Yes.”
“That’s why it doesn’t go into the report, Shara. They wanted to be the ones who found Margolia. Biggest discovery ever. But to do that they had to keep quiet about the Seeker.” I became aware of voices in the corridor. “But the ship’s AI,” I said, “would record where the mission actually went.”
“Yes.”
“So you’d have to doctor that as well, if you were going to falsify the record.”
“Yes.”
“My experience is that it wouldn’t be that hard to make the change.”
“I wouldn’t think so. I’m sure Margaret Wescott would have known how to do it.
Penalties are severe if you get caught, though.”
“But they wouldn’t be likely to get caught.”
“Probably not.”
“Can we get access to the AIs from their missions?”
“No,” she said. “They get wiped periodically. Every few years. I’m not sure of the exact timing, but it’s nowhere near thirty.”