He must have realized he was coming on a bit strong. He stopped, cleared his throat, straightened himself. And smiled. There was a tightness to it. And maybe a hint of anger. “Ms. Hutchins, I used to work with Henry Barber. I helped him develop the system.”

Barber had been working for years, trying to develop a drive that could seriously move vehicles around the galaxy, something with more giddyup than the plodding Hazeltine. “Riding around the galaxy with a Hazeltine,” he’d once famously said, “is like trying to cross the Pacific in a rowboat with one oar.”

The other man was checking his watch. He was maybe forty, though with rejuvenation techniques these days it was hard to tell. He could have been eighty. She knew him from somewhere. “Dr. Silvestri,” she said, thinking she shouldn’t get involved in this, “how much work remains to be done? To get the Locarno operational?”

“Why don’t we sit down for a minute?” He steered her to a couple of plastic chairs facing each other across a low table. “The work is effectively done. It’s simply a matter of running the tests.” A note of uncertainty had crept into his voice.

“You hope.”

“Yes.” He focused somewhere else, then came back to her. “I hope. But I see no reason why it should not function as expected. Henry did the brute work. It remained only to make a few adjustments. Solve a few minor problems.”

“He died last spring,” she said. “In Switzerland, as I recall. If you’ve an operational system, where’s it been all this time?”

“I’ve been working on it.”

“You have.”

“Yes. You seem skeptical.”

He looked so young. He was only a few years older than Charlie. Her son. “Barber hadn’t been able to make it work,” she said. She looked back to where the other man had been standing. He was gone.

“Henry was close. He simply didn’t have all the details right. What we have now is essentially his. But some things needed to be tweaked.”

She started to get up. Just tell him to drop by the office. Maggie can deal with him.

“I’m serious,” he said. “It will work.”

“You sound uncertain, Dr. Silvestri.”

“It hasn’t been tested yet. I need sponsorship.”

“I understand.”

“I came here today because I wanted to make it available to the Prometheus Foundation. I don’t want to turn it over to one of the corporations.”

“Why not? You’d get serious money that way. We wouldn’t have anything to give you.”

“I don’t need money. I don’t want it to become a moneymaking operation. There aren’t many people left doing deep-space exploration. I’d like you to have it. But I’ll need your help to run the tests.”

It didn’t feel like a con. That happened occasionally. People tried to get the Foundation to back various schemes. They’d ask for a grant, hoping to take the money and run. The organization had had a couple of bad experiences. But this guy either meant what he said, or he was very good. Still, the possibility that he had a workable drive seemed remote. “You know, Dr. Silvestri, the Foundation hears claims like this every day.” That wasn’t quite true, but it was close enough. “Tell me, with something like this, why don’t you get government funding?”

He sighed. “The government. If they fund it, they own it. But okay, if Prometheus isn’t interested, I’ll find somebody else.”

“No. Wait. Hold on a second. I guess there’s nothing much to lose. How sure are you? Really?”

“Without running a test, I can’t be positive.”

An honest answer. “That wasn’t my question.”

“You want me to put a number on it?”

“I want you to tell me, if the Foundation were to back this thing, what would our chances of success be?”

He thought it over. “I’m not objective,” he said.

“No way you could be.”

“Eighty-twenty.”

“Pro?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of improvement could we expect over the Hazeltine?”

“Canopus in about ten days.”

My God. With present technology, Canopus was three months away. “You’ll need a ship.”

“Yes.”

“The truth, Dr. Silvestri, is that you’re here at the worst possible time. We just lost the Jenkins.”

“I know.”

“You probably also know I’m not authorized to speak for the Foundation.”

“I’m not sure about your formal position, Ms. Hutchins. But I suspect you have influence.”

“Give me a number,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

THE FOUNDATION ROUTINELY set up a green room at its fund-raisers. Guests were invited to drop by, bring friends, and meet the people behind Prometheus. When Hutch walked in, Rudy was cloistered in a corner with a group of Rangers. That was the designation given to contributors who met a given minimum standard. It seemed a trifle juvenile to Hutch, but Rudy claimed it made people feel good and brought in additional money.

She picked up a scotch and soda and commenced mingling. She was never entirely comfortable during such events. She enjoyed playing to an audience, had discovered she could hold listeners spellbound, yet had never really learned the art of simple one-on-one socializing. She found it hard to insert herself into a group already engaged in conversation, even though they invariably recognized her and made room for her. The Foundation events were particularly difficult because she always felt that she was essentially begging for money.

When she found an opportunity, she drifted off to a side room and asked the house AI to provide whatever it had on Jon Silvestri. “A physicist,” she explained. “Associated with Henry Barber.”

One of the walls converted to a screen, and a list of topics appeared. Silvestri and Barber. Published work by Jon Silvestri. Silvestri and Propulsion Systems.

He’d appeared in several of the major science journals. Had been on the faculty at the University of Ottawa for two years before being invited by Barber to join his team in Switzerland. Born in Winnipeg. Twenty-six years old. Named to last year’s “rising stars” selections by the International Physics Journal.

There were lots of pictures: Silvestri on the Ottawa faculty softball team. Silvestri performing with a small band in Locarno. (He played a trumpet.) She listened to a couple of their selections and was impressed.

It wasn’t great music, but it wasn’t the clunky sort of stuff you expected from amateurs.

There was no mention of specific awards, but she suspected he might have been overshadowed, working with Henry Barber.

Satisfied he was legitimate, she returned to the green room.

WHEN THE RECEPTION was over, Rudy took her aside and thanked her. “I thought contributions would be down,” he said. “But I suspect they find you irresistible.”

She returned a smile. “What would you expect?”

Rudy was short, energetic, excitable. Everything, for him, had a passionate dimension. He lived and died with the Washington Sentinels. He loved some VR stars, loathed others. He enjoyed country music, especially the legendary Brad Wilkins, who sang about lost trains and lost love, and who had died under mysterious circumstances, probably a suicide, two years earlier. He knew what he liked at the dinner table and would never try anything new. Most of all, he thought humanity’s future depended on its ability to establish itself off-world. The failure of the Academy, he maintained, marked the beginning of a decadent age. “If we don’t get it back up and running,” he was fond of saying, “we don’t deserve to survive.”

He had started as a seminarian in New England, had gone through several career changes, and had eventually become an astrophysicist. He was the only astrophysicist Hutch had met who routinely used terms like destiny and spiritually fulfilling. Rudy was the ultimate true believer.

On this night, however, he was not in a good mood. “They think space is dead, some of them,” he said. “Pete Wescott says that unless we can find a way to make money out of it, he’ll have a hard time justifying further support. What the hell—? Nobody ever told him this was going to be easy.”