“Ah, yes,” Silvestri would say. “I probably wasn’t very clear on that. Let me try it another way.”

And so it went, through the morning. The critical thing was that Paul didn’t cut the meeting short. Rudy continually looked from one to the other, trying to follow the arcane dialogue. Eventually, Hutch got up and slipped out, apparently with only Rudy noticing. She wandered around the offices, talked to the help, stretched her legs, hit the washroom, and went back. They were still going strong.

Silvestri was explaining that he didn’t know precisely how effective the drive would be, which seemed to translate into how much ground it would cover. “Can’t be sure until we run a test.”

He went into a description of where “Henry” had gone wrong. (Hutch had trouble adjusting to referring to one of the century’s certified geniuses in so familiar a manner.) He laid too much reliance on asymmetrical vertices, Silvestri said. Not enough on something else that escaped her.

He finished with a flourish and a broad smile, implying that it was all so simple, how could we have missed it first time around? He glanced over at Hutch. Paul traded looks with Rudy, pursed his lips, let his head drift back until he was studying the ceiling. “Okay, Jon,” he said. “Thank you.”

Silvestri retrieved his chip. “You’re welcome.”

Paul sat back. “It would help if you’d leave that for us.”

“Okay. Sure.” He put the chip on the edge of Rudy’s battered desk. “You understand, no copies are to be made. And none of it is for publication.”

“Of course. Give us a few days to look it over, and we’ll get back to you.”

Silvestri had obviously been hoping for more. Those dark eyes clouded. He looked down at Paul. The decision-maker. “Be aware,” he said, “I could have gone elsewhere. Orion would love to have something like this. Tours to black holes. To places where stars are being born. They’d give a lot.”

Rudy’s mouth tightened. “So why didn’t you take it to them?”

Silvestri looked directly at Rudy. “I know how they’d use it,” he said. “I’d prefer you have it.”

WHEN HE WAS gone, the room went quiet. Paul stared at the notepad he’d been using. Rudy’s eyes swiveled from Paul to Hutch to the door and back to Paul. Hutch shifted her weight, and her chair squealed. “What do you think, gentlemen?” she asked. “Any of that make sense to you?” She was, of course, really talking to Paul.

Paul stared straight ahead, past her, past Rudy. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s too much to digest at one time.”

“You must have a sense of it, though,” insisted Rudy. “Does he sound as if he knows what he’s talking about?”

Paul was nodding and shaking his head no at the same time. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe.” He picked up the chip, turned it over, examined it, put it in his pocket. “My gut reaction is that it can’t be done. Nobody seriously believes it’s possible to outrun the Hazeltine. And by the way, that could be the real reason he didn’t go to Orion or Kosmik. They aren’t going to spend money on a boondoggle.”

“Then you think—what?”

“Give me some time. We’ll keep an open mind. There’s nothing to lose, and Henry Barber thought the project was sufficiently worthwhile to spend his last years on it. And he must have trusted Silvestri. So I’ll take everything home and get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Paul,” Hutch said, “when Barber was running his tests, the drive system kept blowing up. They lost, as I recall, three ships.”

“I know.”

“Do you think it might happen again?”

“Might? Sure. Will it? I don’t know.”

THE ACADEMY OF Science and Technology had not collapsed in the usual sense. The government hadn’t wanted to be accused of neglecting an organization with so many accomplishments. So, less than two years after Hutch left, they had reorganized the Academy, centralized it, according to the term then in vogue. It meant it had been subsumed into the federal structure, designated semiautonomous, and eventually taken over wholesale by the Department of Technological Development.

Since leaving the Academy, Hutch had lived a quiet life. She’d stayed home and reared her two kids, mostly. She’d also set up as a guest speaker, and had discovered there was no end of audiences who were willing to pay to hear her talk about her Academy years. She drew lessons for them in leadership and management, explaining why it was important to encourage subordinates to speak freely, why decision-makers should sit down with people who disagreed with them. She talked about what happens when managers intimidate people. She gave examples, sometimes naming names, of life-and-death decisions that had gone wrong even though information to make a rational call had been readily available. “If things blow up,” she was fond of saying, “and if the boss survives, he’ll inevitably claim that some underling dropped the ball. Didn’t tell me. Harry should have spoken up. Said something. But the truth is that when your people don’t tell you what you need to know, it’s a failure of leadership.”

She had seen much of it in her lifetime, at the Academy, in government, and in the private industries with which she’d had to deal during her years as director of operations. There was a tendency everywhere to believe that if you could perform a job, you could supervise others performing that same job. It was a view that led to mismanagement, inefficiency, failure, and sometimes carnage.

Life at home was quiet. Tor was gone, the victim of undiagnosed heart disease. Maureen and Charlie were both away at school. Maureen would graduate next year with a degree in history. She planned to teach, and had shown no interest in following the career arcs of either of her parents. Charlie, on the other hand, seemed to have his father’s artistic aptitude. Very few people, however, made a living moving paint around on a canvas. But however that turned out, it seemed clear there’d be no more star-pilots in the family.

Hutch never said anything, never pressed her kids about it. Careers were their call, not hers. And, of course, star pilots barely existed anymore. Another ten years, and she suspected nobody would be leaving the solar system.

Still, it hurt that her passion for the interstellar deeps had not passed down into the family.

THE PROVIDED WISDOM was that when you had an AI, you never came home to an empty house. He (or she) was always there to greet you when you walked in the door. Even if he’d been instructed to say nothing, as some were, you still felt his presence. But, of course, it wasn’t the same. AI or not, her home still had echoes.

She missed the kids. When they’d left for school, much of the family’s energy had gone with them. Now, as the flyer angled down out of the traffic stream and settled onto the pad, she looked at the house, dark despite the lights that came on to greet her, and it seemed abandoned.

After the chindi business, she’d retired from piloting to marry Tor and had taken an administrative job with the Academy. That had lasted about a year. She’d been unable to cope with riding back and forth to work every day. (They’d lived in Alexandria then.) And she’d felt horribly bored preparing personnel reports and staff studies. Tor had encouraged her to quit, and finally she had.

But it had been more than that. She’d wanted to go back to the interstellars. They’d talked it over, and Tor reluctantly had given his blessing. She could still recall his going up to Union that first day when she was heading out to Beta Pac with a team of assorted specialists who were going to try to discover whether anyone on that unhappy world remembered the days when they, too, had moved among the stars. (They found nobody. There were a few inscriptions, a few legends, that seemed to hark back to the Monument-Makers, but their descendants had no memory of who they had once been. And it struck Hutch as the ultimate irony that the race that had left monuments all over the Orion Arm because they wanted to be remembered by whatever other species might eventually show up had been forgotten by their own.)