“Of course they have. Completely wrong.” But there it was again, the curious tone in his voice when he said Benton ’s name. And with it, a strange sideways look at me.
Even at a hundred gees acceleration, we were going to be on the way in the Merganser for over a week. Too long to live with seething undercurrents of feeling.
“Mac, what is it with you and Geoffrey Benton? Surely you hardly know the man.”
“I guess I don’t. Not the way you do.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean? I’ve never even met him.”
He stared pop-eyed at me. “How can you say that? He’s the AG Newsman who flew with you back from the Titan prison colony — just the two of you.”
I groaned inside. A fifteen-year-ago fling, coming back to haunt me. “That wasn’t Geoffrey Benton.”
“But he works for AG News.”
“So do ten thousand other people. Mac, what on earth gave you the idea that it was Benton?”
“Paul told me.” McAndrew put a hand to his balding forehead. “It wasn’t Benton? My God. Do you know what I did? Do you know what I called him?”
“I know exactly what you did, and I can imagine what you told poor Benton. More than that, I know what Paul Fogarty did.”
“But why would Paul… he wanted to make the trip to the solar focus as bad as I did.”
“Worse than you did. Mac, don’t be dense. Fogarty wanted to make the trip all right. And he’s making it — without you. You’re older and you out-rank him. You’d have been the leader. Now, he keeps any credit for himself.”
“Paul? Do a thing like that. I don’t believe it.”
But he did. He went silent for hours, cracking his finger joints in the way that I hated and looking sideways out of the ship at the eldritch plume of glowing plasma that trailed away behind us.
And me? I ought not to say it, but I was rather pleased. I mean, McAndrew had been jealous, jealous of someone I hadn’t much liked at the time and hadn’t seen or heard of in fifteen years. I thought that was rather sweet.
No, it’s not quite the same as fine jewels or bouquets of flowers. But once you forget about his being a genius, McAndrew’s a simple man. When it comes to compliments I settle for what I can get.
McAndrew had known that several of the Arks had been launched far north of the ecliptic when he played me Fogarty’s message. He did the background research before we left, and it was all in the Merganser’s data banks.
I sifted through the material one morning, while McAndrew sat in a habitual stupor of advanced physics and the ship raced out toward the fiery point of the Cassiopeia supernova. The Sun had already shrunk behind us to a point of light and although we were crowding light-speed we didn’t seem to be moving.
There had been seventeen Arks, but only four of them were candidates for what we were seeking. Each of them was different and distinctive. You might expect that. Any group of people which decides to leave the rest of humanity and heads off on a one-way trip to the stars is likely to be a little odd.
The Ark of the Evangelist had set out to spread its version of the Word of God among the stars. It contained four thousand followers of the philosopher Socinus, which was probably all of them. The Word, from what I could see of it in the data base, was likely to baffle any alien who encountered it. Certainly, the Word baffled me.
The Ark of the Evangelist was equipped with unusually powerful communications equipment, able to beam messages ahead so that their ultimate arrival at another stellar system would be expected. The same equipment would, of course, also be able to send messages back toward Sol. None had ever been received, unless Paul Fogarty had picked up the first.
The Cyber Ark had no interest in evangelism. It had headed out toward Cassiopeia, but any direction would have done equally well. The Ark held two thousand computer specialists and the most advanced computing equipment that the Solar System could produce. The Ark ’s inhabitants were united in their disdain for the rules that limited the development of machine intelligence. They had vowed to produce real artificial intelligence, a true AI, and they claimed to know how exactly to do it. Their goal was an AI far beyond the known limits of either humans or machines. If they felt in a generous mood when they were done, well, they just might tell Earth when the work was finished.
Big talk. But if they had been successful, they had sent back no word in the fifty-nine years since they flew away from the Solar System.
Then there was the Ark of Noah. Its colonists had become convinced from their analysis of ancient religious writings that Armageddon and the end of Earth were close to hand. They had no faith in the survival of the colonies we had established on Mars, Titan, or Ceres. Inside the two-kilometer sphere of their ark, formed from a hollowed-out asteroid, they had tried to include a pair of every Earth species of plant and animal. Impossible, in practice — we were up to four million species of insects, and still counting. But the Ark of Noah gave it a good, all-out try, packing in a handful of every life-form they could find. They took liberties with the number of humans, two hundred instead of Noah’s single family; but somebody had to manage the Ark ’s life-support systems, if and when things went out of whack.
My own money was on the Amish Ark. When a group which shuns most forms of mechanical systems sets off into the void in as fundamentally high tech a structure as an artificial world, integration problems and equipment failures loom large as a source of possible trouble. The surprise was that the Ark had gone as far out as it had without killing everybody on board. The passengers — eight thousand of them at takeoff from Earth orbit, according to the roster — had been lucky to be able to send their weak call for help. Apparently they also didn’t know much about electronic signalling. Otherwise they’d have realized that only someone close to the Ark, or at a solar focus where the strength of any message was gravitationally concentrated, could possibly have heard them.
Of course, we were listening for a direct signal now, with the most sensitive equipment we had been able to place on board the Merganser. We knew the general direction of the lost Ark, and an approximate distance; but we might well be off a few hundred million kilometers, one way or the other.
After we came to our best estimate of the origin of the signal, we spent the next few days moving position, listening, and moving again. Nothing. I began to be discouraged. Not so McAndrew.
“Jeanie,” He said, “the chain of logic that led us here is clear and unbreakable. Keep looking, and we’ll find an Ark. ”
“The Amish.”
“You’re the one saying that, not me. But whichever Ark it is, once we find it we’ll be able to tell them that help is on the way.”
I was glad to hear him put it like that. Director Rumford couldn’t have been more explicit in our final meeting before we left the Institute.
“I’m approving the flight of the Merganser as an exploration mission,” he had said. “That’s the most I can do, because the Institute has no responsibility for search-and-rescue operations. I think you have a long shot — a very long shot — at finding someone in trouble. But remember that you are not a rescue party. There are only the two of you, in a small ship without special equipment. You are not trained for space rescue. If you find someone out there in trouble, call me and come back here. No heroics. No attempts at inspired space-engineering solutions. Leave that work to the specialists. Understand?”
“Of course.” McAndrew had agreed instantly, but I knew the man. He was itching to be on his way, and to get Rumford’s consent for the mission he’d have said anything.