Max lay in bed, gazing out the window at the familiar curve of the countryside, and imagined his world melting inside the fusion furnace of the Sun. It might be a simple task for the aliens to destroy this station by shifting it from otherspace into the Sun’s thermonuclear core, to rid themselves of creatures who had blundered into their interstellar web. But then why did the aliens go out of their way to trap the habitat? Certainly not to destroy it. He closed his eyes and imagined ice comets falling toward inner Sunspace from the Oort Cloud. Beams reached out from the Sun, vaporizing comet after comet, saving the Earth.…
Were the aliens hostile or helpful? Was it a sign of friendliness to have let Lissa’s ship in once? There seemed to be no obvious reason why they wouldn’t let her ship back into the suncore again. But there was no way to know if the ship had even gotten out .…
He thought of Lucinda and Emil. Their ordeal had tied the three of them together, and changed them. He cared about Lucinda, and Emil was more than a friend, because he was part of Lucinda. Emil
had
to recover, Max told himself, or nothing would ever be right again.…
He opened his eyes and sat up in bed. A late afternoon breeze blew in through the open window. He breathed deeply, feeling that he understood things a little better now, and would be able to sleep. Out there, around distant suns, waited the Others, the real strangers. Well, maybe not complete strangers, because they seemed to have involved themselves with human history. Did they know what they were doing? Were their aims good? Perhaps every successful species in the universe sooner or later adopted some younger one. Those who had gone ahead helped those who were just starting out, not out of goodness, but because everyone would benefit in the long run. Lissa was right about that. Knowledge and experience were too valuable to be wasted by isolation.
It made sense, he told himself as he lay back and tried to relax—unless the Others
were
in fact hostile.…
A knock on his door woke him.
“Come in!” he called out, and saw by his wall timer that he had slept ten hours.
He got up and rubbed his face as the door slid open. “Max,” his mother said, “please come out into the living room. Lucinda and her parents are here and want to talk to you.”
“Be right there,” Max said sleepily as he got up and started to dress.
Linda ten Eyck looked tense when Max entered the living room, but she smiled as she greeted him.
“What’s wrong?” Max asked nervously, looking at Lucinda for a clue, but seeing only resignation. His own parents stood by the dining alcove.
“We came to see how you were,” Jake said, “and to ask you to come with us to check the passage to Centauri. We must find out what’s happened to Emil.”
“I know,” Max replied. “That’s what I was thinking of doing.”
“Lucinda and I will go with you.”
“I have to be here,” the navigator explained nervously, “in case the ship comes back.” She sounded unsure, as if she didn’t believe her own words. It seemed to Max that she had already accepted Emil’s death and needed an excuse not to go.
“We can start right away,” he said, eager to help. The navigator wanted him to go, Max realized as he looked at her.
“We’ve been very worried,” she added, her voice straining. “You two got through safely, so you’ll make good guides.”
“If the way is open,” Max said, “then all we have to do is follow the markings Lucinda made.”
“We’ll wait for you out by the lock,” Jake said as they left.
“I’ve redone your pack,” Joe said, putting an arm around him and looking at him with affection.
“I wish you wouldn’t go,” Rosalie said.
“I have to. We know the way, so it won’t be dangerous this time. It’ll take only a few minutes.”
“Then why take a pack?” she asked.
Max was about to answer that it was better to be prepared for any obstacles, but held back. His mother didn’t need to hear that now.
“Be careful anyway,” Joe said, looking tired. “I’m very sad for Jake and Linda. Your mother and I go back a long way with them, so we won’t forbid you to go.”
Max said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”
Max kept looking over his shoulder as they made their way across the blue floor toward the place where Lissa’s ship had landed. Only its return would prove that it had gotten out safely. They might never see it again, he realized, or even have any contact with Earth except the long way around, through Centauri, unless the passage opened.
Lucinda and Jake walked next to Max in silence. She took his hand, and let it go as they came to the column. The black and gray storminess still roiled inside it, and Max felt a renewed wariness of how space itself was folded up, foreshortened, inside this alien device, making light-years into a minute’s walk through the dark.
“Which one?” Jake asked.
“Here,” Lucinda said. “I marked it.”
Max nodded. “We’ll come out in another blue station, and pass from there to Centauri.”
“Go ahead,” Jake said, taking Lucinda’s hand.
Max stepped through the square opening and slowly followed the curve to his right, quickening his pace when he saw the exit, and came out into the blue light of the identical station. Jake and Lucinda stepped out behind him.
“Here’s another,” she said with relief, pointing nervously to the next entrance.
“Ready?” Jake asked.
Max tensed. Lucinda took a deep breath and bit her lower lip. His stomach tightened as he faced the portal and went in. The darkness closed around him again. He hurried along the curve, hoping—and bumped into the barrier.
“It’s still closed!” he shouted in frustration.
“We’ll wait,” Lucinda said with sudden calm as she came up behind him. “It might have opened and closed again.”
“Sit down against the barrier,” Max said. “It could be a while, or in the next few minutes.”
It could be forever
, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut as he leaned against the barrier and slid to the floor.
A flashlight came on, its beam pointing upward. Jake sat down next to him and touched his shoulder gently. “We’ll wait. If we’re waiting too long, we’ll leave and set up a round-the-clock watch with alarm transmitter links, and someone will always be ready to go through.”
“Sure,” Max said bitterly. He had imagined striding through to Centauri and finding Emil sitting up in his hospital bed, eager to hear what he had missed.
Lucinda sat down at his side, and Max held her as she rested against him. They waited silently for a long time, but the barrier did not fall. He heard a deep sigh, then stood up slowly and helped her to her feet.
Max distracted himself by reading and thinking about aliens during the next three weeks, convincing himself that he was trying to understand more of what had happened to him.
He and Lucinda stood watch at the column every day, ready to go through. They would pass through the two portals and always find the barrier up. They would sit against it, waiting, and Max sometimes feared that the window into Earth’s Sun had also closed, preventing Lissa’s ship from reentering the suncore station. The habitat might face a future of isolation and immobility.
When they were not on watch, Lucinda and he sometimes hiked out to the stream in the hollow and sat by the waterfall where he had always gone alone. She became withdrawn in the third week, and rarely spoke, and Max began to fear that he was only a constant reminder of what had happened to her brother.
“Don’t you want to talk to me?” he asked one afternoon. “I know what you’re feeling.”
She stared past him, unable to speak, trapped within herself.
“Try not to let all this get you down, son,” Joe said to him at dinner one evening. “Not until we know more.”
“I’m not depressed,” Max answered. “I’m just trying to understand.” He was beginning to believe that it
had
all happened by accident. The alien builders were long dead and gone. The habitat had simply run afoul of automatic systems, maybe ones that were no longer working as well as they had been. Emil, Lucinda, and he had been lured out at random. He wondered if the aliens were clever enough to have made it seem a chance encounter.
“This station and its portals have been here a long time,” Joe said, “maybe longer than human history. We won’t learn everything about it right away. I think you’ve done quite well so far, considering.”
Max was silent.
“It wasn’t your fault or Lucinda’s that Emil got hurt,” Rosalie said.
He looked at his parents. “I know it wasn’t my fault, but I’ll have to live with Emil’s death all my life. It’ll be stuck inside me forever. If we don’t get out of here, I might never even find out what happened to him.”
“I know,” Joe said softly. “We all collect such things. Mine have never gone away, and never will. Don’t think only of how it will be for you if he’s lost. You’ll get very confused if you think only of yourself.”
“You and Lucinda will share a loss,” Rosalie said, “if that’s how it turns out, and you’ll have to make it bearable for each other.” The look of concern on his mother’s face was intense. Max had never seen her this way. “I know that Lucinda sees her mother reliving the death of her brother on Mercury and feels guilty. Jake and Linda are dismayed that their daughter will have the same kind of loss to live with. And they’re all worried sick about Emil.”
Max realized that Lucinda needed him more than ever now, even when she couldn’t show it. He would have to try harder to break through her worry and grief.
He stood up. “Don’t worry about me,” he said to his parents. “I’ll be back late.”
Lucinda was sitting on the grass in front of her house, and Max almost missed her in the twilight glow of the sunplate. He went over and sat down next to her.
“You don’t have to talk or anything,” he said softly. “We can just sit.”
“I’d like to talk,” she said suddenly.
“Sure,” he answered, surprised. “Go ahead.”
“You’ve been thinking about what’s happened. I know you have.”
“Tell me what you think first,” he said.
“I don’t think the aliens are malevolent,” she answered. “They expect us to look out for ourselves. What happened to Emil was simply an accident.”
Max knew she was right. It wasn’t reasonable to expect the aliens to have set up warnings about poisonous vegetation on every world in their transport web, but he still felt resentful.
She frowned. “Why would they take the trouble to lure us out, to get us interested, just to be mean? It would make no sense, would it?”
“You’re probably right.”
“I am right. One day we’ll know it all. You’re not going to be the only one who will help figure it out. I’m going to be right there with you.”
Max felt a rush of relief. “You have been thinking.”
“Of course.” She leaned toward him and rested her head on his shoulder. “Just feeling all the time makes you blind.”
As he held her, Max knew that his fear of Earth, of returning to the large mass of humanity from which he had sprung, was gone, just as his father had said. His fears and doubts were probably like humanity’s suspicion of the Others. He held the thought, because it explained him to himself. He was to Earth, and even to other people, as Earth was to the Galaxy. Earth would fear the galactic civilizations around it for a while, then would grow out of that fear, as he was growing out of his own. But there would always be new problems.
“I’m afraid for my mother,” Lucinda said suddenly. “I think she’ll hate me if Emil dies. She’ll resent us both, Max, because we’ll still be alive, while he won’t.”
Shaken by Lucinda’s fears, Max went home. If she was right, and Emil died, then he might never be able to tell Lucinda how much he cared about her, how attracted he was to her. He had suppressed his feelings, hoping that he could tell her when all this was over.
As he walked up the road to his house, Arthur Cheney pulled up to him on his bike and stared.
“What is it?” Max asked, noticing that Arthur seemed shy of him. He had seen the same wide-eyed nervous look on the faces of the other kids lately; even Muhammad was more nervous around him. They admired him now, it seemed, but Max found it hard to enjoy the attention. Now even Arthur was trying to ingratiate himself.
“We’ve got the next watch together,” Arthur said.
“I didn’t know,” Max answered.
“I saw you sitting with Lucinda. I guess she’s really upset about Emil.”
Max nodded, remembering when Arthur had been her favorite.
“He didn’t like me much,” Arthur said. “Maybe that’s why she dropped me, when Emil gave her the word. I hope he’s all right, but he was a little prick in some ways. Not that I’d wish anything really bad on the kid, but he wouldn’t be much of a loss.”
Max was silent.
“Well, it’d be too bad for Lucinda and her parents, I suppose, but it’d give you a clear way with her.”
As Arthur started to pull away, Max put his foot into the front spokes, and the bike fell over. “You’re a bit of a prick yourself,” Max said as Arthur hit the ground.
“Hey!” the boy cried. “I thought you didn’t like him at all.”
“Yeah, well maybe I do, just a little,” Max said, helping Arthur up.
Max was in the library the next day, reading about rolled-up dimensions and superstring theories, wondering if he might get some idea of how the alien passages worked, when the Sanger twins came by and stopped at his desk.
“What was it like to be lured out?” Jane asked.
“Did you feel weird?” Alice added.
Max was about to explain when Muhammad Bekhter stopped to listen. Then Arthur Cheney and a few of his friends from the lower grade wandered by. Max found himself surrounded.
“Well?” Jane asked.
Max saw that a few of the younger kids seemed eager to hear what he had to say. Stories and inaccurate rumors had begun to circulate as soon as he and Lucinda had come back, now more than three weeks ago, and the level of curiosity had continued to increase in direct proportion to the few available answers.
“Do you really know why we’re here?” Muhammad asked. “My father says everyone’s just guessing.”