“Probably,” she said.

“So what do we do now?”

“We listen some more. If we don’t hear anything, we move to another intercept site and listen to it all again. That’ll allow us to take a second bearing and pin down their location.”

“How long do we stay here?”

The Hunter had been in the Alnitak area almost two days. “Let’s stay put through midnight tomorrow. If we haven’t heard anything by then, we’ll clear out.”

That evening he came to her with a tenderness and a passion that overwhelmed her. “I’m glad you got what you wanted,” he told her after the first flush of lovemaking had passed. “We don’t have all the details yet, but at least we know it happened.”

“Kiss me, you fool,” she sighed.

The night filled with laughter and a few tears, and she didn’t know why, couldn’t explain the tears either to herself or to him, but just let them flow.

“I’m in bed with an immortal,” he said.

And she knew it was so. Eventually they’d sort everything out, get the answers, learn what had happened to Emily and find out how Yoshi ended up in a river and what had blown the face off Mount Hope. It was just a matter of time, and kids a thousand years from now would be learning how to pronounce her name.

She had never, ever, felt more alive than she did then, and she attacked Solly with a will, laughing when he finally slumped back exhausted, pleading with her to give him a rest.

Somewhere around five A.M., lying on her back with Solly’s left arm thrown over her, she decided that she would keep him, she would do whatever she had to. Moreover, Solly was part of this whole marvelous event and she was going to hold onto all of it. They had been wedded by the sheer joy of the experience. The ceremony, when it came, would be only a recognition of what had happened in this most glorious of starships.

They slept late in the morning, ate, watched a VR, and wandered down to mission control, where the FAULS screen was still blank. They had gone more than twenty-four hours without any further interceptions. It now seemed clear, for whatever reason, that the party was over. But they waited anyway. They hurried through dinner, anxious to concede the issue, to be off to their next station, to outrun the radio transmissions, to race across the void and jump back into realspace and take a new bearing on Alnitak.

“But I’m not hopeful,” she said, down considerably from the previous day’s high. She was thinking of the old axiom that if you want people to believe extraordinary claims, you must present extraordinary evidence. Did she have extraordinary evidence?

She remembered the telescope she would have turned on Henry IV, and wished with all her heart she had such an instrument to point at the ringed world in the Alnitak system. She’d be able to see the two ships, see what was happening. It frustrated her to know the photons were all around her, the disassembled truth of whatever had happened to the Hunter and the Valiant, flowing past, accessible to the proper instruments.

At midnight she sighed. “Time to go.”

19

The Hammersmith passed into hyperspace at 12:41 A.M., Saturday, March 10. The plan was to go back outside the expanding bubble of radio signals. They would remain in the plane of the Alnitak system, but their new bearing on the giant star would be at right angles to the first one. They would be traveling roughly thirty light-years, and would arrive at their destination just after eight P.M.

They slept late. Kim woke up excited, anxious to get through the day, and to launch the second round of FAULS devices. But she could find nothing to occupy her, and ended by playing chess in the rec room with the AI, whom she set at a beginner’s level and proceeded to hammer.

Solly, with his inimitable sense of what was needed, put together another candlelight dinner. She drank a bit more than she should have, and she was a bit woozy when the Hammersmith returned to realspace.

This time, because the jump had been much shorter, they arrived closer to their ideal site, and within an hour they were listening again to the Hunter trying to open a conversation with its invisible companion. Shortly after the intercept had begun, however, they lost the signal. They were gratified to see it appear fourteen minutes later, precisely on schedule. That seemed to confirm the speculation that it was passing behind the gas giant.

They knew there’d be several hours of futile signaling by Hunter before Valiant responded. So they settled in, alternately reading and napping, and occasionally cavorting like adolescents. “This is the way star travel was meant to be,” Solly told her.

Four hours after the first signals, the four-count, had been sent, the Valiant had apparently responded. Hunter replied with thirteen blips. Emily and her shipmates appeared onscreen, and sent greetings. And showed their open door.

As before, there was no further transmission.

But they had their second bearing. They compensated for stellar movement in the interim, and the lines intersected at a point three hundred AUs from Alnitak. Right on the orbit of the gas giant.

They waited nevertheless through two more days. Finally, there could be no question that the show was over, and Solly put a disk into the recorder and directed the AI to copy the intercept record from both sites. When it was completed he gave it to Kim. “With luck,” he said. “It’ll keep us both out of court.”

“We’ll see.” She looked at the disk. “It might be easier for someone to argue the entire crew of the Hunter went over the edge rather than that they actually saw something. That might be stretched to account for the missing women, as well. What we really need is a glimpse of whatever it was they saw.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I guess it’s time to go to phase two.”

“The scene of the crime?”

“Yep.”

“Why bother? What’s the point? They’re all long gone.”

“Solly,” she said, “put yourself in the place of the other ship. Look, for reasons we don’t understand, our people came back and didn’t say anything. Maybe there was a fight on board, a disagreement on how to handle the announcement, on who was going to get the credit—”

“—That doesn’t make sense—”

“Okay. But something happened. Maybe the experience scared them off. Maybe they saw something so terrifying it drove them all out of their minds—”

“—And we want to go there?—”

“We’ll be careful. And we won’t be taken by surprise. Look, the point is, both ships knew there’d been contact. It had to be as big an event for the celestials as it was for us. So what did they do afterward? What would you and I do?”

He propped his chin on one hand and gazed steadily at her. “Assuming no real conversation took place and the other ship just took off, we’d post a surveillance.”

“Can you see any possibility we wouldn’t do that? That we’d just ignore the incident?”

“No,” he said after a moment’s pause. “No, although we did ignore the incident. But I’d have expected we’d have put science teams out there right away.”

“And they’d have stayed for years, right?”

“I suppose. But twenty-seven years?”

“Well, maybe not that long. I don’t know. But we’d leave some automated systems in place.”

“Sure,” he said. “We’d establish a presence and keep it indefinitely.”

“Right. So all we have to do is show up at Alnitak and let whatever they’ve left behind get a look at us. We head for the gas giant and we do whatever we can to draw attention to ourselves. We look for anything that doesn’t belong there. And if we’re lucky, who knows what might show up?”