“I only met her once. At the farewell party before the mission left. Yoshi invited me. Your sister was a brilliant woman. A bit driven, I thought. But then, so was Yoshi.”

“I think we all are, Professor,” Kim said. “At least everybody worth knowing.”

“Yes, I quite agree.” He studied her for a long moment. “How much do you know about the last voyage? On the Hunter?”

Actually, not much. Kim wasn’t aware there was anything to know. Emily wanted to find extraterrestrial life. Preferably intelligent extraterrestrial life. And she’d cared about little else, except Kim. Emily had gone through two marriages with men who simply did not want to deal with an absentee wife. She’d shipped out on the Hunter any number of times, often on voyages of more than a year’s duration. They’d found nothing, and she had come back on each occasion certain that next time would be different. “They didn’t get far. They had engine trouble, and they came home.” She felt puzzled. What did he expect her to say?

His smile left her feeling as if she were once again an undergraduate. Was it really that long ago he had led them in work songs from the era then under study, the terraforming years on Greenway? His classroom had rocked with “Granite John” and “Lay My Bones in the Deep Blue Sea.”

“I think there was a little more to it,” he said. “I think they found something.”

“Something! What kind of something!”

“What they were looking for.”

Had it been anyone else, she would have simply found a way to terminate the conversation. “Professor Tolliver, if they did, they forgot to mention it when they got back.”

“I know,” he said. “They kept it quiet.”

“Why would they do that?” She adopted her best let’s-be-reasonable tone.

“I don’t know. Maybe they were frightened by what they’d found.”

Frightened? The ship’s captain was Markis Kane. A war hero who had a wing of the Mighty Third Memorial Museum all to himself. He’d been killed a few years ago while attempting to rescue children during a forest fire in North America. “That’s hard to believe,” she said.

“Nevertheless, I think it’s what happened.”

There’d been only four people on the Hunter. Kane, Emily, Yoshi. And Kile Tripley, head of the Tripley Foundation, which had sponsored the missions. He too had vanished, and that was an odd business. Tripley and Kane had both lived in the Severin Valley in the western mountain region of Equatoria. Three days after the Hunter had returned from its mission, after the women had disappeared, a still-unexplained explosion had ripped apart the eastern face of Mount Hope, had leveled Severin Village and killed three hundred people. Tripley had never been found after the event and was presumed buried somewhere in the rubble.

Most of the experts at the Institute thought it had been a meteor, but no trace of the object had ever been found. The force of the explosion had been estimated at roughly equivalent to a small nuclear bomb.

“It’s all connected,” Tolliver said. “The Hunter mission, the disappearances, the explosion.”

There’d been stories to that effect for years. It was a favorite subject of the conspiracy theorists. And maybe there was something to it. But there was no evidence, and she hated sitting here with Sheyel Tolliver talking about Mount Hope. It saddened her to see her old teacher reduced to a believer in cover-ups and visitors from other worlds.

There were all sorts of lunatic theories about the incident. Some said that a micro black hole had come to ground. They’d searched the logs of ships and aircraft on the other side of Greenway looking for an indication that the hole had emerged from the ocean. Much as researchers had a thousand years before, after the Tunguska event. As it turned out, there had been a spout under a heavy sky, so the story had gained credence. Even though everyone knew there could be no such thing as a micro black hole.

Others were convinced a government experiment had gone wrong. The experiment was said by one group to have involved time-travel research; by another, mass transference. Still others thought an antimatter alien ship had exploded while trying to land.

“Kim,” he said, “how much do you know about Kile Tripley?”

“I know he was a wealthy freelance enthusiast who wanted to make a name for himself.” Tripley had been the CEO of Interstellar, Inc., which specialized in restoring and maintaining jump engines, which moved starships into and out of hyperspace.

“He was a tough-minded man, had to be in that business,” Tolliver said. “Have you by any chance read Korkel’s biography?”

She hadn’t.

“He made it quite clear that Tripley wasn’t going to be satisfied just bagging a bacterium somewhere. He wanted to find a thinking creature. A civilization. It was the whole purpose of the Foundation—the whole purpose of his existence.”

Like Emily.

One of the saddest places anywhere in the Nine Worlds was the abandoned radio telescope array on the far side of Earth’s moon, designed explicitly to search for artificial radio signals. Far more versatile than anything that had gone before, it had closed down its SETI function after something over a century and a half of futility, and was eventually diverted to other uses. By now, it was obsolete, standing only as a monument to a lost dream. We’re alone.

There’s never been a signal. Never a sign of a supercivilization building Dyson spheres. Never a visitor. There was really only one conclusion to draw.

She spread her hands helplessly, wondering how to break off the conversation. “Professor—”

“My name is Sheyel, Kim.”

“Sheyel. I’m inclined to accept whatever you say simply because it comes from you. But I’m reminded of—”

“—The danger of assigning too much credence to the source when weighing the validity of an argument. Of course, after this you may categorize me as an unreliable source.”

“I’m thinking about it,” she admitted. “You must know something you haven’t told me.”

“I do.” He rearranged the cushions. “The Hunter left St. Johns February twelfth, 573.” St. Johns was an outpost in the Cynex system, last water hole before leaping into the unknown. “They were bound for the Golden Chalice in the Drum Nebula. Lots of old, yellow suns. First stop was to be—” he looked down at something she couldn’t see, “—QCY449187, a class G. But of course they never got that far.”

“They had a problem with the jump engines,” said Kim.

“According to the record, yes. They came out of hyper-space in the middle of nowhere, made temporary repairs, and turned back.

“But they didn’t return to St. Johns. Kane decided St. Johns couldn’t manage the problem. So they came all the way home to Sky Harbor, arriving March thirtieth. It was ironic, of course, that the Hunter, whose owner had made a fortune repairing and maintaining jump engines, should suffer such a breakdown. But nevertheless—”

There it was.

“Okay,” said Kim, in a tone that suggested she saw nothing out of the way in any of this.

He produced another picture. Yoshi, Tripley, and Emily in Foundation jumpsuits. Yoshi had chiseled cheekbones and riveting dark eyes. A white scarf highlighted her youth. Kim saw a monogram on the scarf and asked about it.

“It’s a crescent,” he explained. His gaze turned inward. “She liked crescents. Collected them. Wore them as jewelry and monograms.

“Anyway, an hour or so after they docked at Sky Harbor, Yoshi called me.”

That got Kim’s attention. “What did she say?”

“‘Granpop, we struck gold.’”

“Gold?”

“That’s right. She said that she’d be in touch; but she couldn’t say anything more for the moment. Asked me to say nothing.”

“Sheyel—”

“It can only have one meaning.”