Anything at all?” He had a wide skull, a few strands of white hair, and deep-set eyes that never left me.
“No,” I said. “We know which system it got blown out of. That’s about it.”
“I see.” He scribbled a note. And he didn’t crack a smile, although I sensed that he wanted to. “How large will the search fleet be?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How many ships would be engaged in the operation?”
“One. It’s not a fleet.”
“One.” Another near smile. Another scribble. “Very good.”
“I assume that creates a problem.”
He cleared his throat. “Does the ejected world have a name?”
I scrambled for one. I’d once had a cat named for a character in an old novel. “Yes,” I said. “It’s called Balfour.”
“Balfour.” He tasted it, ran it around on his lips. “If people can give it a name, surely somebody would have an idea which way it went. If not, if you’re just going out into the dark to search, you’d be as likely to find it as to find a coin in a sizable patch of woods. At night.”
“Even with the best technology?”
He laughed. There was something of a rumble in it. Had we been audio only I would have thought him much bigger than he was. “Consider the sensor gear a flashlight.
With a narrow beam.”
“Situation’s that bad, huh?”
“I always try to take an optimistic view.”
TWENTY-NINE
There are persons who pass through our lives but briefly. And we are never afterward the same.
- Chile Yarimoto,
Travels, 1421 Alex doesn’t believe anything’s impossible. If you can travel faster than light, he liked to say, everything’s on the table. The corollary is that you don’t go to him and tell him an assignment can’t be managed.
I needed help, so I went back to Shara. She was engrossed in a conversation with-I think-her AI when I walked in the door. She signaled me she needed a minute, asked a couple questions about stellar populations in a region I’d never heard of, got her answers, made notes, and turned my way with a big smile. “Chase,” she said. “How’s it feel to be a celebrity?”
“I’m looking for a way to cash in.”
“I understand they’re trying to get you to come work for Survey.”
“There’s been some talk.”
“Don’t do it. There’s not much money, and I don’t think anybody ever got famous.”
She got serious. “What can I do for you?”
“Shara, there was another world in the Tinicum system. A class-K. We suspect whatever scrambled the orbit of Margolia ejected it.”
“And you were wondering if there might be a way to track it down?”
“Yes.”
“Why on earth would you care? You think there might have been a base there?”
“Something like that.”
“Okay,” she said.
“So do you think it might be possible to find it?”
“This all happened, what, nine thousand years ago?”
“That’s correct.”
“Good. That’s relatively recent. But you don’t know the nature of the intruder? Of whatever broke up the system?”
“No. We think it might have been a black hole.”
“Why?”
“Because there aren’t any stars near enough to have done the job.”
She looked skeptical. “Well, actually, it might have been any of a number of things.”
“Whatever. We don’t care what the object was. All we’re interested in is finding the missing world.”
“It might be possible. Tell me about the system again.”
“Okay,” I said. “Right now, it has two gas giants in normal orbits. It also has Margolia, which is running in a seriously exaggerated ellipse, and a dislodged moon.”
“Does the class-K have a name?”
“Balfour.” It was starting to sound good.
“And you’ve got a couple of ancient spacecraft out there, too, right?”
“Yes. And a dock that went adrift at the time of the event. The Seeker was apparently trying to jump into hyper when it blew.”
“Okay. As I understand it, the Seeker set out with those kids three years before the event.”
“That’s correct.”
“That means it probably won’t be much help. What about the other ship? The Whatzis?”
“The Bremerhaven. Its orbit doesn’t place it anywhere near Margolia when the intruder came through.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Maybe it was orbiting Balfour.”
“Any reason to think that? Or is it guesswork?”
“It’s guesswork.”
“What about the dock?”
“It would have been at Margolia when the object hit.”
“And they’re both currently in solar orbit?”
“Yes.”
“Get me the details. Everything you’ve got. The first thing we need to do is establish when it happened.”
“We already know.”
“All right. Good. That might make it possible. Send me the data. I’ll look everything over and get back to you.”
“Thanks, Shara.”
“My pleasure. I’m glad to help. It’ll be a break from my routine. Is there a deadline on this?”
“No,” I said. “It’s waited this long; I assume it can wait a bit longer.”
She laughed. “Get it to me tonight, and I’ll try to have something for you tomorrow.”
“You were right about the time of the event,” she said next evening, as we sat at the Longtree, sipping cocktails. “It happened March 1, 2745, on the terrestrial calendar.”
“That’s only a couple days away from what we figured.”
“We’re talking calendars rather than time itself,” she said. “It’s hard to deal with this sort of thing because of the odd things that happen with time when the objects are hundreds of light-years apart.”
“All right,” I said. “We know when it happened. Where do we go from there?”
A singer was doing “Fire and Ice.” It was cold and wet outside. But the Longtree was filled to capacity. A wedding party had taken over one wing, and another large group was celebrating something. Couldn’t tell what. There were occasional bursts of laughter around the room. In the center of the dining area, several couples were dancing.
“Chase,” she said, “we know where the gas giants were at the time of the event.”
“Okay.”
“They were undisturbed by the passage. That probably lets out your black hole. Had the intruder been massive, really massive, they would have been disrupted, too. But in this case, their orbits don’t seem to have been influenced at all.”
“That tells us what?”
“That the intruder was less than a tenth of a solar mass.”
“Okay.” I didn’t see how that could help. But she seemed to know where she was headed.
She finished her cocktail and ordered another round. “Might as well,” she said, “as long as Alex is feeling generous.” Rainbow, of course, was paying for the evening.
“Absolutely. Help yourself.”
“All right. So Margolia’s orbit gets stretched, and its moon goes south. The other terrestrial world, Balfour, is tossed out of the system altogether. That suggests an intruder mass at least a hundred times greater than Margolia.”
“Okay.”
“My best guess,” she said, “is a mass equivalent somewhere between a Jovian and an M-class dwarf star.”
“Shara,” I said, “I know you’re interested for academic reasons. But is any of this going to help us find Balfour?”
“Ah, you don’t have the patience you used to, Chase. If we split the difference between the Jovian and the class-M, we’re in brown dwarf territory.”
“Brown dwarf.”
“Yes. It’s a star that never quite got off the ground. Not enough mass. So it didn’t ignite.”
“It’s a dark object, then.”
“No. Not necessarily. They have enough energy to glow. They stay warm for a long time.”
“What generates the energy?”
“It’s left over from their formation. What I’m saying is that this thing won’t look at all like a star. It wouldn’t be a bright light in the sky. But if you got close enough, you’d be able to see it.”
“What would it look like?”
She thought about it. “It might resemble a gas giant illuminated from within. It would have clouds. Probably a muddy brown.”
“That seems an odd color.”
Shara had a tendency sometimes to go into lecture mode. She did it now. “Younger dwarfs are usually blood red. They’re just radiating the heat generated during formation. As they age, they cool off. More and more molecules form in their atmospheres, and they acquire clouds.”