“I’m seated firmly in the Capani Chair. Which means I work with occasional doctoral candidates. God help them.” He laughed and got up, tottered momentarily, but hung on and laughed. “The floor’s not as steady as it used to be. Now, I believe you’re here to-” His voice trailed off, and he rummaged through another pile of papers, gave up, and opened a cabinet. More searching, then his features brightened. “Yes,” he said, “here it is. Ms. Kolpath, why don’t you come with me?” He headed for the veranda.
The door slid open, and he led the way outside. “Be careful,” he said.
He immediately gained strength. His frailty slipped away, and he moved almost with the ease of a young man. When I stepped out behind him, and my weight melted off, I understood why. “Antigrav units,” I said.
“Of course. You’re about thirty percent normal weight at the moment, Chase. May I call you Chase? Good. Please watch your step. Sometimes the effect induces a sense of too much well-being. We’ve had people fall off.”
We were on one of the ramps I’d seen from the ground. Its handrails consisted of ornately carved metal, and it angled sharply up to one of the rooftops. Lochlear started to climb, moving with practiced ease.
We went to the top and strode out onto the roof. He walked with a casual inattention that, combined with his frailty and reduced weight, left me worried that the windwhich was steady and coming in off the ocean-might blow him off. He saw my concern and laughed. “Have no fear,” he said, “I come this way all the time.”
I gazed across the rooftop at the sea. “It’s lovely,” I said.
“This is where I get to be young again. For a few minutes.” We hurried past chairs and tables, and reentered the building through a double door. I couldn’t figure out what all the rush was about, until I realized that Lochlear did everything on the run.
We pushed through a set of curtains and entered a long, narrow room, crowded with shelves and files and chips and books and display cases. The cases held individual volumes. “They’re here somewhere,” he said. “I thought I’d set them aside after the messages from your Mr. Benedict.” The books on display were old, the covers discolored and worn, and in some cases missing. He opened a cabinet door, peered inside, and brightened. “Here it is,” he said. He removed a box, set it down on a table, and began to go through it. “Yes.” He pulled out several labeled containers. “Good.”
He dusted them off, sorted them, put a couple back, and placed the rest in front of me.
There were four of them. Each held eight disks. The labels read COLLIER ARRAY, UNCOLLATED, and were marked with catalog numbers.
“Tarim?” he said.
An AI’s voice replied, gently, “Good afternoon, Dr. Lochlear.”
He turned to me. “Chase, Tarim will be happy to assist you.”
“Thank you.”
“One more thing: These are quite valuable. Please be careful. The scanner is over here by the wall if you wish to make copies. You won’t be able to take the originals out of the room, of course. If you need to speak with me, just tell Tarim, and he’ll put you through. When you’re finished, please leave everything on the table. It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Chase.” Then he was gone. The door closed behind him with an audible click.
At the time it became operational, the Collier Array had been the largest telescope of all time. It was based off Castleman’s World, which supported and maintained it for the better part of seven centuries. With units scattered across the planetary system, it had possessed a virtual diameter of 400 million kilometers. It was a product of the Fifth Millennium, and it remained in operation until it fell victim to one of the incessant wars of the period. Its destruction had been a deliberate act of malice. By then, however, it had become obsolete.
The Array had drawn Alex’s interest because Castleman’s was four thousand lightyears from Tinicum 2116. Four thousand years for light to arrive at the system’s multiple lenses. So he realized that, if it had any record at all of that star, it would be of a time preceding the event that had disrupted life for the Margolians.
Much of the data gathered by the Collier was lost with the general collapse on Castleman’s at the end of the Fifth Millennium. But in the early decades of the last century, investigators uncovered a trove of stored raw data in hard copy from the Array. No one had sorted it out, because much of it had since become available elsewhere.
The disks were marked with the dates they were thought to cover, but even about that there was uncertainty. Not that it mattered.
I sat down in front of a reader, took Belle’s record of our flight to Tinicum, and inserted it. Then I removed the first disk from box #1 and put it in also. “Tarim,” I said, “please activate.”
Status lamps came on.
“Tarim, I’m trying to find Tinicum 2116 in the Collier raw data. I’ve provided you with a spectrographic analysis and images of surrounding star patterns. Please commence search.”
“Working,” he said.
I opened a novel and sat back to wait.
Sometimes you get lucky. Tinicum 2116 had been inspected, and the entry turned up thirty minutes later, on the second disk.
Tarim posted a picture of the star, as seen through the Collier. Beneath were the results of the analysis, spelling out quantities of hydrogen, helium, iron, lithium, and whatnot. And a final line: Planets: 4.
Four.
We knew of three.
The fourth was another terrestrial.
No wonder the orbits hadn’t matched.
Two gas giants. And two terrestrials.
Bingo.
Lochlear called to ask whether I’d like to have dinner with him. Some of the faculty members got together most evenings. I’d stayed in the archives, going over the other disks to see whether there was more on Tinicum. There wasn’t. But I was bored and stiff when the invitation came, so I was more than willing to find something else to do.
He picked me up and escorted me to the faculty dining room, which was in an adjoining building. There were five or six others gathered when we walked in.
Lochlear did the introductions, everybody made room, and I was surprised to discover they’d heard of me. Kolpath? Furrowed brows all around. You were with Benedict when he found Margolia, weren’t you?
I allowed as how that was so.
They wanted to shake my hand. All of them. “Superb piece of work, Chase,” said an energetic young guy who looked as if he lifted barbells when he wasn’t in the classroom. They asked me to pass my congratulations to Alex, and to tell him they were all in his debt. It was a nice moment. A couple of them asked lightheartedly whether Rainbow was taking on help. And they wondered what I was doing at the university.
When I told them it was just basic research, they laughed, and a middle-aged woman with honey-colored hair said she’d keep it quiet, too, if she were out to bag the kind of game I usually went after. They all laughed again. And I sat there feeling like the queen of the walk.
The guy with the muscles wondered if we were positive about what we’d found. Was it really Margolia? “Yes,” I said. “There’s no question.”
They raised their coffee cups in a toast to Rainbow. “The University of the Americas appreciates you, Chase,” said a heavyset man in a red sweater. Galan Something-orother. His specialty was modern theater. I wondered what he thought of Lochlear’s plays.
They didn’t seem to feel any of the disappointment Alex and I had experienced.
Exhilaration was the order of the day. The middle-aged woman excused herself and left, returning a few minutes later with a copy of Christopher Sim’s Man and Olympian. “I was wondering if you’d sign it,” she said.
My connection with the Sim business was a long time ago, and I hesitated. It was a leather-bound edition, gilt edge, black ribbons. Not the sort of book you want casually to mark up. “Please,” she said.
I complied, feeling a bit foolish.
“What’s next?” asked Lochlear.
“Home,” I said.
“I mean, what’s the next project? McCarthy?”
Golis McCarthy was an archeologist who’d returned from a frontier world a century earlier, claiming to have brought back alien artifacts. Not Mute. Something else. He wouldn’t go into details, but during the next three months the artifacts went missing, supposedly weighted and dropped in the ocean by McCarthy. McCarthy and his people-seven of them altogether-refused to comment and, within seven months, all were dead, the victims of assorted accidents. It was a conspiracy theorist’s dream.