Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home (25 page)

The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information, by throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber, in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.

—Edgar Allen Poe,
Marginalia
, 1844
C.E.

Finally it was time to go. John conducted a briefing for the pilots from a conference room at the Department of Transportation. Approximately thirty people were there. The rest of us watched by HV.
“Since we don’t know precisely when it will appear,”
he said,
“we’ll arrive four days early and maintain the search around the clock. That means you should be on station at 1600 hours on the twelfth. Check in with your squadron commander as soon as you arrive. The formation will be spherical and centered on the
Dauntless
, which will be placed as close to the anticipated arrival site as we can manage. Unless you’re on the outer boundary of the formation, the six ships closest to you will be at a range of fifteen thousand kilometers. Those will be operating above and below you, fore and aft, and on either side.

“One other thing: Unless you’re carrying lifeboats, we want only the pilot in each ship. If you need an additional person for any reason, check with your squadron or division commander. We need to conserve our life-support capabilities.

“Your position in the formation will be assigned this evening. We don’t expect the
Capella
to appear before 1600 hours on the sixteenth. But we could be wrong about that. We could also be wrong in our estimate that it will arrive inside the search area. So we need everyone to maintain vigilance in all directions. If anyone locates it, or notices anything out of the ordinary, notify your commander immediately but take no action until you receive instructions.”

A hand went up.
“If it doesn’t show up, John, how long will we wait?”

“We’re hoping everyone will be willing to give it three or four days, if necessary. The
Dauntless
, and the StarCorps ships, will wait as long as it takes. StarCorps, by the way, already has units in place in case it arrives early. In that event, we will probably be unable to load lifeboats, but we will do what we can.

“We anticipate that when it does arrive, it will be accessible for approximately seven or eight hours. If you become part of the contact group, you will likely be closer to the action than the
Dauntless
. But be careful. It will get busy very quickly. If you do not have lifeboats on board, your mission will be to take off as many people as you can as quickly as you can. Once you have them on board, get clear so someone else can move in.

“Be aware that our principal objective is to get the lifeboats loaded onto the
Capella
. If we can rescue some people at the same time, that’s good. But do not under any circumstances get in the way of the teams that are trying to transfer the boats. Vehicles with boats will have radio ID’s and blue-and-white blinkers. They will be given right of way.”

Another hand went up.
“Do the people on the
Capella
know they’re in trouble?”

“We haven’t had contact with them, Maureen. So we have no way of knowing. But probably they do. From their perspective, they will have surfaced off schedule and gone down again without initiating the action. So I’d be surprised if Captain Schultz is not aware she’s in trouble.

“I’m sure most of you know that Robert Dyke is among the passengers. We’ll have several teams of physicists and engineers spread around in the rescue force. What we want to do is talk to him. Give him what we have and find out if he might be able to help. Do not, however, initiate contact with the
Capella
. If they contact you, pass it on to your squadron commander immediately. Since we do not know the situation aboard ship, do not allow yourself to get into a conversation with them. News of radio contact should be passed to the
Dauntless
, and we will take it from there. Is that clear to everyone?”

*   *   *

I took the shuttle to Skydeck a few hours later. The normal routine for anyone who maintained a ship at the station was that you notified them in advance when you would be using it, and it was waiting for you in one of the eight docks. But under the pressure of the rescue fleet being assembled, traffic was so heavy that they directed me to report to one of the operations offices, from which I was conducted to the maintenance area. There I boarded the
Belle-Marie
. There were probably twenty other ships, all crowded into a relatively small space. Two freighters and a fleet cruiser were floating outside the station.

I sat down on the bridge, said hello to Belle, and started running the checklist. Outside, a few lights broke through the darkness. “Do you know how to get us out of here?” I asked Belle.

“Yes,”
she said.
“No problem.”

I finished the preflight and checked in with ops.

“
Belle-Marie
,”
said a male voice,
“it’ll be a few minutes. We’ll get back to you.”

“Copy that.”

Sitting on the bridge in a sparsely lit enclosure is different from being under a dark sky. It can become oppressive. I was glad when my link buzzed. It was Alex.
“How’s it going?”

“I’m waiting to launch.”

“You have a minute?”

“As far as I know. What’s going on?”

“I’ve been doing some research. Thought you might be interested in what I found.”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I’ve been reading Harvey Foxworth’s
Walking Through the Rubble
. It’s a history of archeological efforts to reconstruct the major events of the Dark Age. It was written a thousand years ago, but it’s the classic work on the era. Foxworth has some details regarding Dmitri Zorbas that I haven’t seen before. He kept a diary, Zorbas did, but never allowed it to be published. After his death, Jerome Zorbas, his brother, apparently under instructions, destroyed it.”

“You think they destroyed it because it revealed the location of the artifacts?”

“There’s no way to know.”

“So what good does it do us if it’s been destroyed?”

“It provides credence to the probability that Zorbas had the artifacts and hid them.”

“Maybe. On the other hand, maybe they destroyed it because he had too many women in his life.”

“I didn’t say it was a confirmation, Chase. But Foxworth thinks he salvaged the contents of the Prairie House. Zorbas came from a wealthy family, so he had resources. We’ve known that. The family maintained a home, according to the book, ‘in a safe place’ well away from their quarters in Union City. Unfortunately, there’s still no hint where that might have been. Foxworth comments that, at the height of the period, there were no safe places. There are a couple of pictures of Rodia, standing with her husband. These were the first pictures I’d seen of Zorbas himself. He always seems to be wearing a backpack. He’s on a horse in a couple of them. And there’s one with him standing with a group of guys beside what appears to be a lander. It’s hard to be sure because the technology was so primitive. But they’re laughing, and everybody’s got a bottle.

“Something else,”
said Alex.
“About the internet failure.”
Terrorist attacks had gradually disrupted it and eventually took it down worldwide. It was one of the causes of the Dark Age. Some historians think it was the prime cause.

“They lost almost everything,”
he continued.
“I’m talking about books now. A lot of the minor stuff, administrative records and avatars and medical data and whatnot, stuff that was maintained on local data nets, survived. But they lost pretty much every book that didn’t exist as a print copy somewhere. And print copies don’t have a good survival record over time. Anyhow, Zorbas set up a team to rescue whatever books they could. Foxworth has put together a long list of titles that he credits Zorbas with saving.”

The list appeared on my auxiliary screen. It included Cicero and several Greek and Roman plays, Chaucer, Rabelais, two Dickens novels, and three of the six surviving Shakespearean plays. And a book that one of my high-school teachers had used, she’d said, with the hope that it would create a passion for reading: Ray Bradbury’s
Martian Chronicles
. I remember how disappointed I’d been later when I learned the Martian canals had been pure fantasy.

There were probably two hundred titles in all. They weren’t all classics, but the mere fact that they’d survived gave them considerable value.

“Zorbas,” I said, “must have been one hell of a guy.”

“Yeah. He was. But I suspect he’d be unhappy if he knew how things have turned out with the museum artifacts.”

“Have you had any luck locating Madeleine O’Rourke?” The woman who’d pretended to be
The Plains Drifter
reporter.

“No. She’s done a decent job of keeping out of sight.”

“Pity. She might be the key to this business.”

“My thought exactly.”
He paused.
“What are you going to do about Khaled?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know we’ll be going back to Earth when this business with the
Capella
is over.”

“Actually, I
didn’t
know that. Why will we be going back to Earth?”

“Because we haven’t found the artifacts yet.”

“Oh. Does that mean you know where to look?”

“Not yet. But we’ll find out.”

“How will we do that?”

“I’m not sure yet. But Baylee figured it out.”

“Maybe we’re not as smart as he was.”

“Maybe not. Chase, are you still not moving?”

“That is correct. I’m sitting in a basement.”

“Well, enjoy.”
He paused.
“Listen, keep me informed, okay? And if by any chance you get seriously lucky and have Gabe among your passengers on the way back, let me know. I’d want to be there when you come in.”

*   *   *

I waited almost half an hour before clearance came. Then doors opened, and we passed through into the docking area and out through another set of doors into the night. Belle set course, and, finally, we were on our way.

I made my jump, divided my time between reading and sleeping, and eventually surfaced just outside the target zone. At least that was Belle’s best estimate.

Belle worked to get an angle on our position while I checked in with the
Dauntless
. When I’d finished, she informed me we’d need thirty-six hours to arrive on station.
“Find a good book,”
she said.

We had some material about Baylee in the library, and I settled in with it. There were a couple of histories that had information on his assorted treks around terrestrial archeological sites. I sat looking at pictures of him standing with a spade in one hand at an Egyptian dig site, directing excavations at Chicago, examining ancient English inscriptions on a building in the American Southwest, talking with locals near Roman ruins. There were pictures of him and his team working at the Broomar site on Mars. And investigating an early space station orbiting Jupiter.

Lawrence Southwick had obviously spent more time with him than I realized. He was in many of the photos. And there was somebody else. In a picture from the Nevada desert, near the Phoenix ruins, a young woman stood between Baylee and Southwick. A fedora was pulled down to block off the sun. It was hard to make out her face. But I knew her.

“Who is it?”
asked Belle.

“It’s Madeleine O’Rourke.”

“The reporter?”

The caption identified her as Heli Tokata.

Enjoy your time with a friend. You will not have him forever.

—Elizabeth Stiles,
Singing in the Void
, 1221

I sent a message to Alex suggesting he run a search on Heli Tokata and informing him where I’d seen her picture. A response came back within a few hours.
“Thanks,”
he said.
“It’s
her
. I can’t believe I missed it.”

And finally we arrived in the search area. The
Capella
was due in a little over four days. I informed the
Dauntless
that we were on station and checked in with the squadron commanders who were assigned to me. Six were there; four were presumably still en route.

There was no sign of movement in the sky, of course. We were too far from each other to see anything with the naked eye. I invested my time by going back over Alex’s research material. He’d added not only a few books to Belle’s library but also probably a thousand essays, reports, journals, and diaries. Belle offered to help, but Alex had already put her through the more obvious searches. I didn’t see any familiar names among the authors, so I picked a book titled
Golden Vistas
. It was a history written by Marcia Hadron. She was a contemporary, living on Toxicon. The fact that I wasn’t familiar with her name shouldn’t be interpreted as implying that she was an obscure voice in the field. To begin with, despite my job, I’m not nearly as well-read as I should be. Hadron had won several major prizes for her research.

The title referred to archeological missions aimed at recovering artifacts from the early space age. The
Golden Age
. Baylee got an entire chapter. But Hadron barely mentioned the Prairie House or Dmitri Zorbas. Nevertheless, I read through the chapter, and in the process found my respect for Baylee continuing to grow. He was described as a man who inspired others, who accomplished a great deal during his career, but who consistently gave the credit to his colleagues.
“They loved him,”
Hadron says.
“He was remarkably selfless in a profession that traditionally attracted giant egos.”

“You know,” I told Belle, “you tend to hear the same thing about physicists, writers, lawyers, and actors. You never hear it said about physicians, though.”

“Maybe,”
Belle said,
“it’s because physicians are in a position to inflict serious damage on a patient who criticizes them.”

Baylee was mentioned a few times elsewhere in the book, but I couldn’t find anything relating to the hunt for the Apollo artifacts other than the author’s regret that they had never been recovered. Hadron dismissed the Dakota “myth,” as she called it. The artifacts, she believed, had almost certainly been taken out of Huntsville by thieves.

“I have something you might be interested in,”
said Belle.
“It does not relate to the artifacts, but it is nevertheless intriguing.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s from a doctoral dissertation by a young woman who cites Luciana Moretti as her source. Apparently Baylee and Southwick did an excavation at Tyuratam.”

“Where?”

“It was a Russian launch site. The Baikonur Cosmodome. It sent the first satellite into orbit in the 1950s. The exact date has been lost. Anyhow, according to the account, he and Southwick led an expedition there twenty years ago. Well, technically Southwick led the expedition. He was the guy with the money. A few of them went out rafting on a nearby river, the Syr Darya. And something in the water attacked them. No indication what it was. Anyway, one guy was killed. But Baylee emerged as the hero. He fought the thing off with a pole. Saved Southwick’s life. And two other people.”

“I’m surprised,” I said, “Southwick never mentioned that to us.”

“I am surprised as well.”

“It might be a male thing. You don’t look very good floundering around in the water while somebody else tackles the alligator. Do they have alligators at Tyuratam?”

“I have no data on that.”

“Most guys,” I said, “would probably claim that they used an oar or something to help.” Whatever the truth was, Baylee kept looking better.

*   *   *

I found something else. It showed up in Trevor Nakada’s memoir,
Life in the Ruins
. Nakada was an archeologist who’d spent most of his career working in Asia. But he’d gotten his start with Baylee and Southwick in an underwater expedition that had brought back artifacts from the White House. The book had a substantial number of photos from the mission, most with Nakada on eminent display. One shows him standing between two young women, using a cloth to hold a tray. One of the young women has just removed her swim fins; the other has a broad-brimmed cap pulled down over her head. The caption reads:
The author holds a nine-thousand-year-old platter which he has just recovered. Margaret Woods stands to his left, with an unidentified colleague.

The unidentified colleague was Madeleine again.

Belle’s light blinked.
“Transmission coming in,”
she said.
“From the
Dauntless
.”

It was John.
“A few vehicles are not going to make it out here. So we’re doing some minor changes in positioning.”
We acknowledged receipt and relayed it to the squadron commanders, all of whom had by then arrived. We were, however, still missing three ships.

With about forty hours remaining before the
Capella
’s expected arrival, the last two ships in my unit checked in.

*   *   *

I rarely spend time alone in the
Belle-Marie
. Belle is company of sorts, but it’s not really quite the same as actually having a living person on board. On that flight, I did more workout sessions than usual. Took most of my meals on the bridge. After the first night, I slept in the passenger cabin. Anything to break up the routine.

I couldn’t help thinking about the first time I’d boarded the
Belle-Marie
. I’d been with my mom, back in the days when she’d been Gabe’s pilot. Gabe had just bought the yacht, replacing the
Tracker
, which he’d had for years. They’d brought me aboard for the maiden voyage, which had only been a short flight to Lara. I was twenty at the time. That was when I decided I wanted the same career my mother was enjoying. A couple of years later, when Mom decided to go home and live a normal life, Gabe hired me, reluctantly, to replace her. I’m pretty sure he did it to make her happy, expecting he’d have to get rid of me pretty quickly. But everything worked out, and I spent a year and a half with him before he climbed on board the
Capella
. Ordinarily, he’d have used the
Belle-Marie
, but he was looking at a long flight and wanted to turn it into a vacation. So he’d gotten on the cruise ship and gone into oblivion. I’d wondered if his decision had something to do with maybe not trusting me on an extended mission. But Mom told me he’d liked the big cruise ships, and there’d been nothing unusual in his decision.

When he and the other passengers and crew were all declared dead a year later, Alex inherited the
Belle-Marie
, and it became officially the means of transport for Rainbow Enterprises.

I’d enjoyed my time with Gabe. This should not be read as a criticism of Alex in any way, but he was easier to talk to. More amiable. There was no subject that didn’t interest him. He loved to talk about history and politics and religion. He was passionate about everything but never in the sense that he’d get angry if you disagreed with him. In fact, he seemed to enjoy contrary opinions and was always willing to listen. Once or twice, I thought I even succeeded in changing his mind. He thought, or pretended to, that the human race would have been better off if everyone were kept just slightly inebriated. “People are much friendlier, much more empathic,” he told me, “when they’ve had a couple of light drinks. But not when they get much beyond that. And there’s the problem. You can’t control intake.”

There’d been a lot of girlfriends. He even took them on his archeological missions occasionally. At first I felt a little uncomfortable, alone in an interstellar with a guy who seemed to be a makeout artist, but he never got out of line. I was the pilot, and if he wanted a woman along on a trip, he brought one. My mom just smiled when I asked her about it. “Some things never change,” she said. “But you don’t have to worry about him.”

I’d have trusted him with my life. I had trouble once with a technician on the Dellacondan space station. He was a big guy, and I can’t say he really intended anything serious, but he mouthed off about my looking “delicious.” He was with a couple of oversized friends. All of them were considerably bigger than Gabe, but he stepped in immediately and made it clear that he’d do whatever it took.

I slept late into that final morning before the
Capella
’s expected arrival time.

I couldn’t help thinking about him as I showered and had breakfast and took my seat in the passenger cabin. I remembered his disappointment on the return flight from a mission to the City on the Crag. I don’t recall any longer precisely what it was he’d been looking for, but it’d had something to do with a two-thousand-year-old civilization that had collapsed with no apparent explanation. Whatever he’d been looking for specifically, he hadn’t found it. There were five members of his archeological team coming back with him, all annoyed, all convinced they’d missed something. But in the end, the gloom had gone away, and it had turned into a party. Sometimes, Alex partied, but it always carried with it a sense of dutiful behavior. Alex did social stuff because whatever he wanted to accomplish required it. Gabe loved having a good time. It was hard to believe that, if we could get him off the
Capella
, Gabe would be only a few days older than the last time I’d seen him, eleven years before. I was sitting there thinking what a crazy universe we live in but how we wouldn’t be able to get around much if time and space weren’t so counterintuitive. It was hard to understand how the structure of the universe could come about naturally. Why wasn’t there just hydrogen drifting around? It was a question physicists had struggled to answer since Isaac Newton’s time. There were theories, of course. But they were always hidden in equations. There was never anything you could visualize.

“Chase.”
Belle’s voice.
“Transmission coming from the
Dauntless
.”

“Okay.”

“Good afternoon, all. Be advised the
Capella
could now appear at any time.”
It was John.
“Those of you who are able, pick up passengers: After they’re on board, they’ll probably be asking questions. Be honest with them. No point trying to hide the truth. We’d like to prevent their communicating with people on the
Capella
, but I don’t see any way to block that other than to ask them to refrain. I suggest you not let them know about the time differential unless specifically asked. Don’t lie about it, but try to avoid the issue.”

I remember thinking that, if we were successful, and the passengers and crew were actually rescued, that someone would make a movie of the experience. And I had a title:
Waiting for the
Capella.