Were Politics Really Less Nasty in the Old Days?
INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE PASSES 100,000
Wall Street Celebrates
Bickley: “Affirmation of the President’s Economic Policies”
MY FAIR LADY REVIVAL GOES INTO FOURTH YEAR
Twentieth-Century Musical Boffo at Box Office
RAKOVIC FACES WORLD COURT
Ex-Dictator Charged with Crimes Against Humanity
Demonstrators Demand Death Penalty
MORE TORNADOES HIT MIDWEST
Wind Speed in Three Kansas Storms Reaches 170 mph
BREAKTHROUGH IN EDUCATION
Parental Involvement Critical Factor
* * *
THE WASHINGTON POST COLUMN
by Anika Avery
We had a report a few days ago that invisible aliens have been found on a sunless world. The expedition that discovered them returned last week to the space station. The first question that comes to mind is: How can we be sure the expedition came back alone . . . ?
Chapter 46
JAKE BOARDED THE Venture a half hour before the scheduled departure time and got a surprise. Samantha Campbell, the Academy Project director, was seated in the passenger cabin. “Dr. Campbell,” he said, “it’s good of you to come see us off.”
“Not at all, Jake. I’m going with you.”
“You are? Well, welcome aboard.”
“Thank you.” She looked genuinely pleased to see him. “Since we’re going to be together for a while, you probably should call me Samantha.” She started to drift off the chair, grabbed a restraint, laughed, and hauled herself back. “No way I’d miss this one.”
“I’m not sure I’d get my hopes up.”
“We’ll see how it plays out.”
Jake smiled. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.” He went onto the bridge, said hello to Lily, and began his routine check. It included ensuring they had a pallet to retrieve Otto’s body.
The rest of the team trooped in a few minutes later. He could hear them talking, laughing, saying how this was the mission they’d all waited for. Mission of a lifetime. When he’d finished, Jake went back into the cabin, and Samantha introduced them. Tony and Mary Carpenter, she explained, had been with several high-stakes Academy expeditions before. They’d penetrated a library on Nok and made off with as much reading material as they could carry. “One of them—one of the Noks—saw us as we were heading for the lander,” said Tony, smiling at his blond wife. “I guess we scared the devil out of it.”
“He’s not kidding,” said Mary. “It screeched and ran into a wall.”
“They don’t look so good themselves,” said Tony, who realized halfway through what he was saying. “Not that you don’t look good, hon.”
Mary had nothing to worry about. But the Noks, of course, were long, spindly creatures, all eyes and husk and clutching jaws, and the color of dried grass. Not exactly showstoppers. At least not in a positive sense.
Brandon Eliot was the Academy’s hi-tech guy. He’d be responsible for getting the shelter put together when they decided on a site for it. Brandon was chunky, a little less than average height, about fifty years old. Usually, when Jake saw him in the Cockpit or the Pilots’ Club, he had a looker on his arm. And it seemed never to be the same one twice.
Denise Peifer was a specialist in extraterrestrial biology. Denise was gorgeous, with light brown hair, a captivating smile, and penetrating brown eyes. She sat down beside Jake. “Drake asked me to say hello,” she said.
“Drake?” He had to think about it. Oh, Drake Peifer. “You’re his wife?”
“His sister.” Denise was momentarily amused. Then it was on to the serious stuff: “I hope you got everything right, Jake. It sounds as if there’s something really weird going on out there. But I’ll tell you”—she was talking to Samantha now—“if we find something alive on a world that hasn’t had sunlight for millions of years, I will be shocked. In fact—”
“I get your point,” said Samantha. “But you’ve seen the report. And if you have any questions, the guy who wrote it is right here.”
They all looked at him, and Jake avoided their eyes. He didn’t want to be responsible for taking anybody on a long wild-goose chase. If that was the way it turned out. “It was strange,” he said. “But the report is as accurate as we could make it.”
* * *
WITHIN A FEW minutes after clearing the station, Samantha joined him on the bridge. “Jake,” she said, “I was looking at the pictures you got of the landscape.”
“You mean the artwork?”
“Yes. That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?”
He nodded. “It’s hard to see how those curving hills and domed peaks and the rest of it could have happened naturally.”
“You have any theories?”
“None.”
“Tell me about the rain. Was it falling everywhere across the area?”
“No. It only extended a few meters out from Priscilla and me.”
“Your own private shower?”
“Something like that.”
* * *
PRISCILLA HAD BEEN good company during that long qualification flight. But as amiable and easygoing as she was, Jake knew that having several people on board constituted a vast improvement in social atmosphere. Given a group, you almost always got a conversational flow, and the content was much less predictable. In addition, Tony was an accomplished violinist.
Within an hour after they’d submerged and were on their way to Orfano, they’d gotten into several debates. Samantha thought that some of the more radical physicists might well be right in claiming that the universe was an illusion. Tony, a mathematician with a conservative taste in politics, found himself in a duel with Denise, who had a liberal mind-set. Mary, at one point, asked him to shut up. Tony commented that he was only upset that he was being cut off from the presidential campaign as it was heating up. “I’m just saying the timing for all this could have been better.”
“We could have gotten someone else to come,” Samantha told him.
“No, no,” he said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I wouldn’t miss this for anything. But the economy’s been losing ground for years. I’ll be surprised if McGruder doesn’t walk away with the election.”
“McGruder doesn’t have a prayer,” said Mary. Once a reporter for The New York Times, she was now a freelance writer, the author of several books on popular science, including the bestseller Clockwork.
Denise looked around at her colleagues. “I wonder if there’s any possibility we could discover something out there that would impact the presidential race.”
And so it went.
* * *
MARY SPENT A lot of time taking notes, and Jake got the impression that, if they were successful, everything they said would show up in an autobiography, or a bestseller.
Denise was so excited by the mission, she had trouble sleeping. She was full of theories about the prospects on Orfano. “It’s possible,” she said, “that the world was home to a hypercivilization when it was ripped out of orbit. If you have enough technology, you can survive pretty much anything. They’d have had to go underground, though.”
Mary was skeptical. “If they were a hyper, couldn’t they have prevented it? Kept their world in orbit?”
“How,” asked Tony, “would an underground civilization have stepped in to prevent the lander from going down?”