Polaris (15 page)

To a casual reader it sounds like a thorough search, but the reality is that the volume of space involved was so large that it couldn't be adequately examined in a year's time with the resources available. In fact, they wouldn't have come anywhere close. Meanwhile, the hunt cost money, and gradually the public lost interest. In the end, the seven victims were simply written off and declared dead.

For as long as anyone could remember, people had thought of the wilderness beyond the known systems as human territory by implied right, by default, to be claimed when we got around to it. Even the discovery of the Mutes, and the on-again off-again conflict with them, hadn't altered that. But the
Polaris
incident made the outer darkness really
dark.
We were reminded that we didn't know what was out there. And, in Ali ben-Kasha's memorable phrase, we suddenly wondered whether we might be on somebody's menu.

All that has long since gone away. There were no subsequent disappearances, no encounters with the suspect
alien wind
by the research
ships that continued to push deeper into the unknown, no indication of a dark genie. And people forgot.

Alex came inside, sat down beside me, and watched the reports as Jacob posted them. “All that effort,” he said. “And they never found anything.”

“Not a hair.”

“Incredible.” He leaned forward, frowning. “Chase, they examined the
Polaris
when it came back. And they didn't see anything unusual. If something hostile wanted to get into the ship, the captain or the passengers had to
let
it in, right? I mean, can you get through an airlock if the people inside don't want you to?”

“Well,” I said, “you can't really lock the outer hatches. If someone, or some
thing,
gets to the hull, he can let himself in. Although you could stop that easily enough if you wanted to.”

“How?”

“One way is to pressurize the airlock. Then the outer hatch won't open no matter what.”

“Okay.”

“Another way would be to accelerate. Or slam on the brakes. Either way, the intruder goes downtown.”

“So for something to get in, the people inside
had
to cooperate, right?”

“Or at least not take action against it.”

He sat for several minutes without saying anything. Jacob was running a report from the team that had investigated the interior of the
Polaris
after it had been returned to Skydeck.
No indication occupants were at any time in distress.

No sign of a struggle.

No evidence of hurried departure.

Clothes, toiletries, and other items present suggest that when personnel departed, they took with them only what they were wearing.

Open copy of
Lost Souls
in one of the compartments and half-eaten apple in the common room imply ship was taken completely by surprise. Book is believed to have belonged to Boland. Towel found in the washroom had Klassner's DNA.

“I wonder who directed the search,” he said.

“Survey did.”

“I mean,
at
Survey.”

“Jess Taliaferro,”
said Jacob.

Alex folded his hands and seemed lost in thought. “The same guy who disappeared himself.”

“Yes. That
is
an odd coincidence, isn't it?”

“They never found him either.”

“No. He left his office one day, and nobody ever saw him again.”

“When?” he asked.

“Two and a half years after the
Polaris.
”

“What do you think happened to him, Chase?”

“I have no idea. Probably a suicide.”

Alex considered the possibility. “If that
is
what happened, would it have been connected with the
Polaris
?”

“I wouldn't be surprised. The common wisdom is that Taliaferro was distraught by the disaster. He dreamed up the idea to send a group of VIPs out to watch the event, to accompany the research ships. He knew Boland and Klassner personally. They were both past chairs of the White Clock. Of which he was a contributor and fund-raiser.”

“The old population-control group,” said Alex.

“Yes.” I told Jacob to shut down. He complied, the curtains opened, and bright, dazzling sunlight broke into the room. “When the search found nothing, according to Taliaferro's colleagues at Survey, he got depressed.” I could see it happening easily enough, the idealistic bureaucrat who had lost a ship's captain and six of the most celebrated people of the age and couldn't even explain what had happened to them. “I've been reading about him. After the
Polaris,
he used to go to Carimba Canyon sometimes and just stand out there and watch the sun go down.”

Alex's eyes had become hooded. “He might have jumped into the Melony. Been carried out to sea.”

“It could have happened that way.”

“But there wasn't a suicide note?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Chase,” he said, “I wonder if I could persuade you to do me a favor?”

Georg Kloski had been with the team of analysts that went over the
Polaris
when it was brought back. He had to be older than he looked. He could have passed for a guy in his midforties, but he was at least twice that age. “I work out,” he said, when I commented on his appearance.

He was about medium size and build, affable, happily retired on Guillermo Island in the Gulf. I introduced myself, told him I was collecting information for a research project, which was true enough, and asked whether I could take him to lunch. It's always more convenient, of course, to ask questions over the circuit. But you can get a lot more out of people if you treat for tea and a steak sandwich.

He said yes, of course, he'd never decline lunch with a beautiful woman. I knew right away I was going to like this guy. I flew down next morning and met him at a waterfront restaurant. I think it was called the Pelican. There are, of course, no pelicans on Rimway, but Georg (we got quickly to a first-name basis) told me the owners were from Florida. Did I know where Florida was?

I knew it was on Earth somewhere, so I guessed Europe and he said close enough.

He lived alone. Some of his grandkids were nearby on the mainland. “But not too close,” he said with a wink. His hair was thick and black, streaked with gray. Broad shoulders, lots of muscle, a helping of flab. Good smile. Every woman in the restaurant seemed to know him. “I was mayor at one time,” he said, by way of explanation. But we both knew there was more to it than that.

So we sat for the first few minutes, getting acquainted, listening to the shrieks of seabirds. The Pelican was located off a stone walkway that ran along the waterfront. The island has a much balmier climate than Andiquar. Hordes of people in beachwear were strolling past. Kids trailed balloons and some folks rode in motorized coaches. Guillermo was popular because it had real thrill rides, glider chutes, tramways, boat rides, a haunted house. It was a place for people who wanted something a bit more challenging than the virtuals, which induced the same heart-stopping effects, but were always accompanied by the knowledge you were
actually sitting in a dark room, perfectly safe. Which some folks thought took the edge off things.

From the Pelican we could see a parachute drop.

“It was a terrible time,” he told me, when I finally steered the conversation around to the
Polaris.
“People didn't know what to think.”

“What did
you
think?” I asked.

“It was the lander that really threw me. I mean, it would have been easy enough to imagine that they'd all decided to go for a joyride somewhere and gotten lost, or hit by an asteroid. Or something. At least it would have been a theoretical possibility. But the lander was still moored in the launch bay. And that last message—”

“
—
Departure imminent
—
”

“—
Imminent.
It still sends a chill down my back. Whatever happened, happened very fast. Happened within the few seconds between the time she sent the message and the moment she'd have initiated the jump. It's as if something seized them, shut them down, cut off their comms, and took the people off.”

The sandwiches arrived. I tried mine, chewed on it for a minute, and asked whether he had any ideas at all how it could have happened, other than superior technology.

“Look, Chase,” he said, “it has to be something out there way ahead of us. I mean, on their own, it wouldn't even have been physically possible for them to leave the immediate area of the ship. Not without the lander. Maddy had four pressure suits on board. They were still there when the
Peronovski
arrived on the scene.”

There was a tourist artist out on the walkway, sketching a young woman. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and smiled prettily for him. “Georg,” I said, “is it possible there could have been some kind of virus or disease that drove everyone insane?”

Two young women in see-through suits strolled past. Followed by a couple of guys. “Shocking what people wear these days,” he said with a smile. His eyes never left the women until they disappeared past the window. “Anything's possible, I suppose. But even had something like that happened, had they been rendered incompetent by a bug of some sort that
subsequently became undetectable to the cleanup crew, so what? It still doesn't explain how they got off the ship.”

The tea was good. I listened to the roar of the surf. It was solid and real and reassuring.

“No,” he continued. “The suits were still there. If they went out one of the airlocks, they were either already dead, or they died a few seconds later. You ever been on a ship, Chase?”

“Occasionally.”

“The outer hatch won't move until the air pressure in the airlock goes to zero. Anybody trying to leave who doesn't have a suit is going to be in pretty bad shape before the door even opens. But let's say he holds his breath and doesn't mind that things get a little brisk. He jumps out. It's a good jump. Say, a meter a second. The
Peronovski
gets there six days later. How far away is the jumper?”

“Not very far,” I said.

He pulled a napkin over, produced a pen, and started scribbling. When he'd finished he looked up. “I make it at most five hundred eighteen kilometers. Round it off to six hundred.” He tossed the pen down and looked at me. “That's easily within the search range of the
Peronovski
's sensors.”

“Did they do a search?”

“Sure. They got zero.” He sighed, and I wondered how many times he'd thought about this during the past sixty years, whether he'd ever been free of it for a full day. “If I hadn't lived through it, I'd say that what happened to the
Polaris
wasn't possible.” He ordered a lime kolat and sat staring at the window until it came.

“When they brought the ship back,” I said, “did you find anything you hadn't expected to? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“No. Nothing. Their clothes were all there. Toothbrushes. Shoes. I mean, what it looked like was that they'd all stepped out for a minute.” He leaned over the table. His eyes were dark brown, and they got very intense. “I'll tell you, Chase. This was all a long time ago, but it still scares me. It's the only really spooky thing I've seen in my life. But it makes me wonder if sometimes the laws of physics just don't apply.”

Georg looked like a guy who ordinarily enjoyed his food. But he only
nibbled at his sandwich. “We spent weeks inside the ship. We pretty much stripped it. Took everything out and labeled it and sent it to the lab. The lab didn't find anything that advanced the investigation. Eventually, they put the stuff in a vault somewhere. Later the Trendel Commission came in and sorted through it. I was there for that, too.”

“Don't take this the wrong way, but how thorough were you?”

“I was only a tech. Fresh out of school. But I thought we were reasonably thorough. The commission brought in outside people so nobody could claim cover-up. I knew one of the investigators they brought in. Amanda Deliberté. Died early. In childbirth. You believe that? She's the only case of a childbirth fatality we've had during the last half century. Anyhow, Amanda wasn't given to screwing around. But they didn't find anything more than we did. I'll tell you, Chase, there was nothing there. Whatever happened to those people, it happened fast. I mean, it had to, right? Maddy didn't even have time to get off a Code White. Not a blip. People talk about some sort of alien whatzis, but how the hell could they get through the airlock before she'd sent off an alert?” He tried the drink and looked at me across the top of the glass. “I've never been able to come up with any kind of explanation. They were just
gone,
and we didn't have any idea, any at all, what had happened to them.”

I watched a couple of people seated against the wall trying to mollify a cranky kid. “Your team took everything out of the
Polaris,
right?”

“Yes.”