that he left Homefall to get word of the colony to the Expansion. But the council sent Klien to eliminate him.” He looked at Mackendrick. “I presume Quineau reached Earth, where he contacted you?” Bennett considered the many questions he wanted to ask, not the least of which was why Quineau had sought out Mackendrick.
What Hupcka said next cleared up that mystery. “Quineau didn’t head specifically for Earth—anywhere in the inhabited Expansion would have done. He went with the intention of locating the representatives of one of the big shipping lines or exploration companies—Patel or Redwood; we were not aware of the Mackendrick Foundation at the time—who might view the fact that Homefall was Earth-norm and inhabitable as a reason to open up lines of trade and communications. He obviously achieved this, though not quite as fast as we hoped.”
“It’s fortunate that Quineau reached the cone of Expansion at all,” Mackendrick added, “and pure luck that he came to my attention. His ship was poorly equipped, in a bad state of repair. It was a miracle he achieved transfer to and from the void in one piece.”
Hupcka smiled. “He departed in somewhat hurried and dangerous circumstances,” he said.
“How did you find Quineau, Mr Mackendrick?” Miriam James asked.
“I didn’t,” Mackendrick answered. “One of my exploration vessels came across a small scout ship becalmed in regular space just inside the limit of the Expansion. They took the ship on board and found someone in the suspension unit. We learned that his name was Pierre Quineau. The ship had suffered massive systems failure in trans-c flight through the void; only an automatic eject program had brought it back into regular space. One of the systems failures meant that Quineau had been in suspension for over a year as the ship floated in space. When my men found him and gave medical assistance, he was irreparably brain-damaged.”
Hupcka shook his head. “But was he able to tell you about the expedition to the interior?”
“I was on Earth at the time of the discovery, and I wasn’t immediately notified of his rescue. I had many other matters to attend to. My engineers and computer specialists had been working to find out where the scout ship had originated as the systems failures had all but destroyed the record of its flight-path. The information they did find suggested that the ship had phased into the void at some location far out on the Rim, which they couldn’t believe. Ships didn’t explore that far afield, and as there were no colonies out there…
“This is when I was told of the mysterious star traveller. I was intrigued enough to travel to the colony world of Madrigal, where he was undergoing psychiatric treatment at a foundation medical centre. I found a man…” Mackendrick paused and looked around the group of staring faces. “He could only be described as not being in his right mind. At the time of our first meeting he was extremely violent and had to be forcefully restrained. I tried to talk to him, but his rantings made little sense. No one had ever survived more than a year in suspension and the psychiatrists diagnosed his symptoms as those produced by chronic suspension trauma.”
“Did he recover?” Hupcka asked.
Mackendrick shook his head. “I saw him three more times during the week I was on Madrigal, and he showed no signs of recovery.”
Miriam James said, “What did he tell you, Mr Mackendrick?”
“You must understand that he was barely coherent at the time. He ranted for hours in a mixture of French and English. He couldn’t even tell me the name of his planet. All he said was that he came from a world on the Rim, and that he’d been on an expedition, a long trek with two other men. He said that they’d walked into mountainous country and descended into a deep underground chamber. There he claimed that they’d discovered an alien race. He told me that the Ancients, as he called them, had incredible healing powers.” Mackendrick smiled. “Of course, I was far from convinced. I took his story for the rantings of a madman.”
“But didn’t he have the softscreen?” James asked.
Mackendrick nodded. “He told me about the screen. He’d told no one else, he said, because he could trust no one. Secreted aboard the scout ship was a softscreen recording of the exploration he undertook with his colleagues, Klien and Carstairs. I had my engineers search the ship. I was still on Madrigal when they found the screen. I watched it with Quineau in his hospital room.
“It showed the first week of the expedition, the long trek through high mountainous terrain, much of it through snow blizzards. They reached the entrance of the underground chamber and descended, but then the quality of the recording deteriorated drastically. There was very little light down there, and only shadows could be made out. The recording actually ends before Quineau and the others make contact with the aliens, if of course he was telling the truth. I left for Earth, taking the softscreen with me. I wanted to get it analysed, the underground shots computer-enhanced.”
Mackendrick stopped there, staring at his hands. He looked up, at Hupcka and the other rebels, and shook his head.
“When I reached Earth, I was contacted by the police authorities on Madrigal. Pierre Quineau had escaped from the grounds of the hospital while taking exercise, and had been found murdered in a public park a kilometre away. A woman had witnessed the shooting, and I requested a copy of the police computer-visual of her description of the killer. To my amazement it bore more than a marked resemblance to Quineau’s fellow explorer I’d seen on the softscreen recording, Klien. I began to wonder if there might be a grain of truth in Quineau’s story.”
Miriam James said, “You told me that the softscreen was stolen.”
Mackendrick nodded. “Shortly after I arrived on Earth, a thief broke into my house in Calcutta and stole it.”
Hupcka said, “So Klien killed Quineau, came to Earth and took the softscreen.”
Mackendrick was shaking his head. “That wasn’t possible. Quineau was killed on the twenty-fifth of May, and the softscreen was taken from my safe just two days later. It takes three days by starship to reach Earth from Madrigal. There was no way Klien could have murdered Quineau, boarded a ship and stolen the screen in Calcutta. Hard though it is to believe, the theft was just a terrible coincidence.”
“And it’s never been discovered?” James asked.
“I hired private detectives to hunt both Quineau’s killer and the softscreen, with no luck.” He paused. “So I decided to set about exploring the Rim for Quineau’s planet. I sent out uncrewed exploration ships to the sector of the Rim adjacent to where his ship was discovered, but of course the area we were searching was vast. It was no wonder it took us more than twelve years to locate Homefall.” He looked around the staring faces. “The rest you know.”
Hupcka smiled, almost regretfully. “We had hoped that Quineau would get through to the inhabited sector and alert Earth to the fact of our existence.” He looked from Bennett to Mackendrick. “I didn’t know Quineau, but he was a friend of my brother. Just over fourteen years ago he returned from the expedition to the interior alone, without Carstairs or Klien. The story was that Carstairs had died on the way back; we suspect that Klien killed him, though what exactly happened has never come to light.
“Quineau told Jan, my brother, an engineer working on the reconstruction of the scout ships, that he had to get off the planet, alert Earth to the fact of Homefall and what he’d discovered in the mountains. At that time on Homefall, the council was divided as to whether to re-contact the Expansion. Some wanted to, while a more conservative element was violently opposed to the idea. They had founded a viable community on Homefall, away from the perceived sins of the Expansion, and they didn’t want their Eden invaded. The pro-contact faction had held sway for some time, hence the rebuilding of the scout ships, but the anti-contact faction was gaining power. There was talk that the ships were to be destroyed. Quineau convinced Jan and others to help him flee the planet aboard one of the ships. It was pre-programmed with the flight-path to take it in the approximate direction of the Expansion. My brother planned to take the second scout ship and follow Quineau. He’d manufactured a device… I suppose you would call it a homing device, a small receiver designed to pick up a signal, and implanted it in the softscreen recording Quineau was to take with him. Quineau left Homefall aboard the scout ship one night a few weeks after returning from the interior.”
Hupcka paused there. He considered his words, then continued.
“The following day, my brother was arrested as he tried to board the second ship. Over a dozen other sympathisers were also arrested. They had copies of the softscreen recording made by Quineau, and these were taken and destroyed. Fortunately they did not find the receiver—Jan gave it to me shortly before his arrest, told me to bury it where it wouldn’t be discovered. Jan and the others were interrogated and tortured. They were never seen alive again and their bodies were never discovered.”
Hupcka fell silent. He looked up at last.
“Two days later Klien was despatched in the second ship to track down and kill Quineau. The conservative element of the Council of Elders gained ascendancy and routed the liberal forces. The rumour was that Quineau,
