AS THE PRESTON accelerated, they traded a few quips. You’re sure the drive works? We’re not going to come out of it with our brains scrambled, are we? “If the monkey could make it,” Matt said, “we should be fine.”

Matt had a taste for music, and he asked whether she objected, then brought up Beethoven. The Pathétique. It was pleasant, and fit the mood.

“What happens during the jump?” she asked.

“Not much. It’s not like hyperspace. The mists are gone. The sensors pick up nothing. It’s just unbroken darkness.”

Hutch looked out through the viewport. No moving lights anywhere. There was a time that something was always coming or going at Union. The station had been the center of traffic to a dozen regular ports of call and literally hundreds of star systems. It had been filled with tourists, some coming simply to see the station itself, others boarding one of the tour liners for the voyage of a lifetime.

People still came to look on Earth from orbit, and to spend a weekend, to give their kids a completely different experience. And maybe they came, most of all, so they could say they’d been there. Gone to the top of the world.

The station fell behind.

They came to the end of the Pathétique and moved on to something else. The music began to run together.

Matt opened the allcom: “Six minutes to insertion, guys,” he said. And to Hutch: “Has Rudy ever done a jump before?”

“He’s been out a couple of times,” she said.

“Okay. Antonio’s pretty well traveled. Says he’s been everywhere.”

“That takes in a fair amount of ground.”

“He’s the science reporter for WorldWide. I’d expect him to have gotten around.”

Hutch asked Phyl to produce a file of Antonio’s work. It matched what she already knew. Antonio did his science straight. No editorializing, though he was capable of getting excited. He’d been with the al Jahadi when it discovered the sun’s brown dwarf companion. He’d gotten to Nok right after Kaminsky had started his war against bureaucratic indifference and taken his stand. She felt guilty about that because she’d been one of the bureaucrats who thought that keeping hands off an alien society was a good idea no matter what they were doing. But Antonio had gotten the public on board, just as they’d gotten on board when the Academy moved to save the Goompahs.

It looked as if they were carrying the right journalist.

“Thirty seconds,” said Matt.

At 11:48 A.M., Washington time, they made their jump. Hutch was looking at the moon when it vanished.

TRANSITION WAS ALMOST seamless. She was accustomed to a mild queasiness during transits. But this time there was only a momentary pressure in her ears, as if the atmosphere had given her a quick squeeze. Then the sensation was gone, and she was looking out at the utter darkness Matt had described.

“Everybody okay back there?”

“We’re fine,” said Jon. “Transition complete?”

“It’s done. Welcome to”—he made a face—“wherever. Jon, you’re going to have to come up with a name for this place.”

“We’ll name it for Henry.”

“Barber space?” said Matt. “I don’t think it’ll work.”

“Yeah. I suppose not. Well, we’ll figure it out later. Okay to release the belts?”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Anybody hungry?”

It was lunchtime.

NEWS DESK

STARSHIP TESTS NEW DRIVE

The Phyllis Preston left the Union orbiter minutes ago en route to Alioth, eighty-one light-years away. What makes this flight a bit different is that, if all goes well, they’ll be back this evening.

We watched the ship disappear out of the night sky. There’s no way to be sure that everything is going as planned because there will be no communication with the Preston until it returns. Starships customarily use a device they call the hyperlink, which provides faster-than-light transmissions. But the Preston, if the new drive unit is working as it should, would far outrun a hyperlink transmission. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

—Jack Crispee, on The Jack Crispee Show,

Tuesday, September 18

chapter 18

FIVE AND A half hours to Alioth. It was unthinkable.

Antonio couldn’t stop talking about it. Hutch seemed struck by how different the transdimensional flight looked, how the mists were gone, how the navigation lights had simply reached out into the night until they faded whereas now they seemed smothered by the darkness. Jon was going on about what Henry Barber had missed, and what a pity it was he hadn’t lived just a bit longer.

With the success of the first lander flight, the world had assumed that Rudy controlled the Locarno. And that perception had intensified when word got out that the first manned flight would be made by the Foundation’s lone ship, the Phyllis Preston. Rudy had been getting calls for weeks from people who had a special black hole they wanted to see, or a nebula with a peculiar characteristic, or who wanted to go to the center of the galaxy. Several had even wondered about the prospects for an intergalactic flight.

Avril Hopkinson, from Media Labs, had asked about the Locarno’s range, had suggested they start designing ships specifically for the drive system, instead of just tacking it onto existing vessels. Media Labs, he said, would be willing to undertake the expense.

It had been a glorious time for him. He’d played the chief executive, cautioning against extravagant plans, let’s just take this one step at a time, I’ll get back to you if we start thinking about going in that direction.

The people who were calling him now, trying to climb onto the bandwagon, were by and large people who had not noticed the Foundation over the past fifteen years. They’d seen Rudy as a person of no consequence, a guy fighting to hold on to the past. A man with no imagination, no sense of where the real priorities lay. Someone not to be taken seriously.

It had given him a rare sense of pleasure to put the world on hold. I’ll call you if I need you.

It occurred to him he was being small-minded. Even vengeful. But that was okay. Small-minded could be good. Better to think of it as justice.

RUDY HAD NEVER been successful with women. For some inscrutable reason, he did not arouse their passions. Even his wives had seemed always to regard him as a comic figure. He was a guy a woman could confide in, could exchange stories with. They seemed impressed by his accomplishments, but not by him. He had no trouble getting dates, but nobody ever seemed to connect with him emotionally. Even his most recent wife had, somehow, been a remote figure. They’d parted amicably. Old buddies.

He was a good friend. A nice guy.

It wouldn’t be correct to say he’d been leading a lonely existence, but since he’d become an adult, he’d never shared an intense relationship with another human being. His life had been marked with a desire to distance himself from other people. As a kid he’d dreamed of living one day on an island. Or on a mountaintop. Somewhere inaccessible.

It was ironic that someone with his sensibilities, and his passions, had not traveled widely beyond the Sun’s immediate neighborhood. He allowed people to believe he had. Didn’t outright lie about it, but didn’t deny it either. In a sense, he had done a lot of traveling, but most of it had been virtual. Or with books.

There’d been opportunities. His specialty was stellar life cycles, and he’d gotten invitations from both Jesperson and Hightower when they were setting out, years ago. But he was young then and did not want to spend six or seven months inside a ship, cloistered with the smartest people in their various disciplines. He wouldn’t be able to get away from them, and he knew he lacked depth and didn’t want to be exposed. His mentor at the time told him he needed to believe in himself, but he couldn’t do it, wasn’t going to sit cooped up with MacPherson and Banikawa and the rest, talking about shadow matter and negative energy and neutral spin. He had plenty of time to go out to the stars later. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t there anymore.