Matt helped Myra Castle attain the state senate. Four years later she went to Washington, where she became a central figure in a major corruption scandal.
Matt went back to real estate for a year. When Starstruck appeared, he became an instant celebrity. He was played by Jason Cole, who specialized in action heroes. In that version, the mission had brought along a few nukes, and they took the monster out. Matt commented that a few nukes wouldn’t have mattered much, but nobody really seemed to care. When the Academy came back, he applied for reinstatement and, at the time of publication, is en route to the Dumbbell Nebula with a contact mission. (There’s evidence some planets in the region are being manipulated.)
THE SIGMA HOTELBook was retrieved from Jim’s memory banks and made available to the general public. To everyone’s surprise, it climbed the best seller list and stayed there for months. People who know about such things claim it’s a book everyone buys but no one reads. It’s also shown up in university classes around the world as a demonstration that sentient creatures have more in common than anyone would have believed a century ago.
MacElroy High School named its gym for Rudy, and made Matt an honorary school board member. When he’s in town, he still gets invited to speak to the classes. And, on his visits to the school, he invariably stops to admire the AKV Spartan lander, which, as a historical object, has been moved indoors out of the weather.
Jon continues to work in the more arcane branches of physics, trying to develop a system that would allow transportation into other universes. “Provided,” he likes to say, “there are other universes.” The common wisdom is that they are abundant, but Jon would argue that cosmological insight is never common.
He also serves, with Hutch, on the board of the Prometheus Foundation.
And the medium through which the Locarno Drive moves is, of course, known as Silvestri space.
PHYL HAD BEEN disconnected and carried from the Preston by Hutch. She indicated no interest in returning to superluminals. She is now the house AI at the Wescott, Alabama, Animal Shelter.
SHORTLY AFTER HER return, Hutch sold the house in Woodbridge and moved to Arlington. Several teaching offers came in. Major publishers pressed for a book. And local political operatives invited her to run for office.
She passed on all of it.
“Why, Mom?” asked Charlie, referring to a career in politics. Charlie remained interested in art, but after the flight to the Mordecai Zone, he’d taken to talking a lot about piloting an interstellar himself. Hutch approved, of course. It would make a great family tradition.
“Not my style,” she said.
She enjoyed doing speaking engagements. She was good at bonding with an audience, at winning them over, at persuading them the human race had places to go. A destiny that would take it well beyond Baltimore. (Or wherever she happened to be speaking. The line was always good for a laugh.) Her old friend Gregory MacAllister, after watching her, commented she was a natural flack.
“Two hundred fifty years ago,” she told Charlie, as she’d told countless groups around the country, “Stephen Hawking warned us that if we want to survive, we have to get off-world. Establish ourselves elsewhere. We haven’t really done that yet.” The Orion Arm had given them numerous examples of what happens to societies that don’t spread out.
“So it’s survival,” said Charlie.
They were on the front porch in Arlington. It was a dark night, cloud-ridden, threatening rain. “It’s more than that,” she told him. “In the long run, Charlie, yes, we need it to save ourselves. Not physically, maybe. But it’s one of the ways we find out who we are. Whether we’re worth saving. If we’re just going to sit home and watch the world go by…”
She let the thought drift away.
Charlie pushed back in his rocker. “I’m glad things turned out the way they did.” At the time, he was near graduation, and flight school was a possibility. His nervousness showed. But she knew he’d be okay. She remembered her own unsettled feelings when she’d left home so many years ago.
“Me, too,” she said. She looked at him, and thought of Rudy and Jon, and Dr. Science, and Matt out somewhere in the deeps, and she knew they would be okay.
* Editor’s Note: Poetic license. The term used by the inhabitants of Sigma 2711 to describe themselves is not translatable, other than as above.