And, of course, another ship.

Rudy wondered why he hadn’t brought these details up before.

“WE NEED TO find a tech,” Jon said. “One of the people who helped with the launch.”

“Why?” asked Hutch.

But he was already signaling for his bill and pushing himself away from the table.

Rudy and Hutch followed him back to the operations section, where they prowled the passageways until they found a technician who seemed to have time on her hands. Jon identified himself. “I was part of the Happy Times experiment earlier today,” he added.

She nodded. “I’m sorry about the way it turned out, Dr. Silvestri.”

“I’d like to look at the last few seconds again. The ship’s transit. Can you arrange that?”

She gave him a sympathetic smile and took them into a room with several cubicles, all empty. “Pick one,” she said.

He sat down in front of a display, and she brought up the Happy Times, adjusted the clock, and froze the picture. Twelve fifty-eight P.M. One minute to jump. “Thanks,” he said.

“Sure.” She explained the controls. “This starts it again. This freeezes it. And this slows it down or speeds it up. Okay?”

“Fine.”

“When you’re finished, just leave it. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He started it forward, and played it in real time. The ship filled the screen, moving quietly against the field of stars. The clock counted down, and it vanished.

He backed it up and ran it again. At a slower pace.

Watched as it blinked out.

Something was there.

He ran it again, still more slowly this time, and slower still as it approached the critical moment.

The ship began to fade out of the three-dimensional universe. The transition started in the Happy Times’s after section, where the Locarno Drive was installed, and moved forward.

Something else was happening: The ship was bending, folding up, as if it were cardboard, as if an invisible hand had taken hold of it, had begun squeezing it. Or maybe pulling it apart. Metal bent in extraordinary ways, and in those last moments, as it faded to oblivion it no longer resembled a ship. Rather it might have been a clay model that had simultaneously exploded and crumpled.

He threw his head back in the chair. “It didn’t survive entry.”

“No,” Rudy said. “I guess not.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

The failure of the Locarno Drive is a major setback for us all. The talking heads are telling us we’re better off, that it could only lead to another interstellar age, and thereby drain funds needed elsewhere. And it may be true that there are places too dangerous to go. New York Online has cited the classic Murray Leinster story “First Contact,” in which a human starship encounters an alien vessel, and neither ship feels it can safely leave the rendezvous point without risking the possibility that the other will follow it home. And thereby betray the location of the home world to God knows what.

That is the argument we are now hearing from those who think we should not venture into deep space. The stakes are too high, the risk too great. What chance would we have against technologies wielded by a million-year-old civilization? And these fears have been underscored by the recent discovery, and subsequent loss, of an alien vessel said to be more than a billion years old.

But one has to ask whether we wouldn’t still be sitting in the middle of the forest if we were a species that first and foremost played it safe.

Eventually we will move out into the galaxy. We will, or our children will. If we can perfect a drive to enable more extensive exploration, then we should do it. And I’d go a step farther. One of the objections most often raised to the development of an enhanced transport system is the fear that somebody will make for the galactic core, stir up whatever force exists in the Mordecai Zone, and bring them down on our heads. This is haunted house logic. If somebody is still there, still orchestrating the omegas that drift through the galaxy blowing things up, maybe it’s time we explained things to them.

A new propulsion technology might put us in a position to stop the production of omegas. That will not matter much to any but our most distant descendants. The omegas are, apparently, already in the pipeline for well over a million years to come. But if we can shut the operation down, we should do it. We owe that much to ourselves, and to any other reasoning creatures in the path of the damned things.

—Mark Ingals, The Washington Post, June 5, 2255

chapter 9

HUTCH HAD TAKEN care to see that she and Rudy sat together on the shuttle flight back to Reagan. However things went, she wanted to be with him. Either to celebrate the moment. Or to limit the damage. Jon was staggering a bit, but he was young, and seemed strong enough to rebound. In fact, he was already talking about where he thought the problem lay. Rudy was another matter.

As the vehicle fell away from the station and began its descent, she saw that, beneath the brave front he’d put on for the media, the guy was stricken. “Rudy,” she told him, “we knew all along the odds were against us.” She almost said long shot. In fact, she was the only one of the inner circle who’d believed that.

He was staring listlessly out the window. “I know.”

Rudy was an optimist, the kind of guy who thought you could do anything if you put your mind to it. The immediate problem was less that the test had failed than that they’d lost the Happy Times. “Listen,” she said, “why don’t you take the day off tomorrow? Come over to the house? I’ll make dinner.”

Rudy managed a smile. “Do I look that desperate?”

“Hey,” she said. “I’m a decent cook.”

He squeezed her hand. “I know. I mean, that’s not what I meant.”

Whatever. “You need to get away from it for a bit. You and Jon both. We’ll make a party out of it.”

He still avoided looking at her. “You know that business up there today all but destroyed the Foundation.”

She knew. “What’s our situation?”

“It leaves us with payments to make on a ship we no longer have.”

“It wasn’t insured?”

“Insurance was out of sight. Everybody knew what we were trying to do.” The eyes finally found her. “It’s a pity. Imagine what a working drive would have meant.”

“We’ll need to find new donors.”

“In this atmosphere…” His voice trailed off.

“They’ll be there,” she said. “This isn’t the first time the Foundation’s been a little short.”

“A little?” He laughed. It was a harsh, ugly sound, not at all characteristic of the Rudy she knew.

“There is one possibility,” she said.

They punched in drink orders, and she thought he hadn’t heard her. “What’s that?” he asked finally.

“If Jon can figure out what went wrong, we still have the Preston.”

“What? Let him lose our other ship?” He squeezed his forehead. “No, Hutch. We aren’t going to do that.”

She was quiet, for a time. “Look,” she said at last, “it’s a gamble, sure, but it could pay off.”

“No. I’m not giving him another ship to play with.”

“IT’S THERE,” JON insisted. They were standing on the roof of the terminal, watching Hutch climb into her taxi. She waved as it lifted off, and her eyes brushed his. He caught a faint smile. She knew he’d been waiting for a chance to speak to Rudy alone, and she knew why. “We just have to make some adjustments. Run the tests until we get it right.”

But Rudy looked beaten. His eyes were bleary, and he had adopted a manner that was simultaneously apologetic and resentful. “I don’t think you understand the position the Foundation is now in, Jon,” he said. “We invested a lot in the Locarno. We were counting on your getting it right.”