The smile came again. 'Obvious. No one else had the opportunity. And I'm a decent judge of character.'
Hutch shrugged. 'You deserved it. You were playing hardball.'
'I know.' She looked pleased. 'I assume you'll be happy to know that no permanent damage was done. You gave me some bad moments. Made me look silly. But after a while, my people noticed that I stayed. That I got as many off as I could. I think they compared me to some of the other management types they've known. I gather I came away looking pretty good. Anyway, I wanted to say hello to you properly, and let you know there are no hard feelings.'
Hutch thought of Richard clinging to the end of his lifeline while the wave took him. 'Easy for you to forgive,' she said.
Truscott nodded. 'I know. And I'm sorry. But you knew it was coming. Why the hell didn't you get him out?'
'Don't you think I would if I could have?'
Hutch stared angrily at the older woman, and Truscott said quietly, 'There's some brandy in the cabinet beside the monitor. Will you have a drink with me?'
Hutch hesitated.
'If you refuse, I understand. And I would be very sorry.' She got the bottle, and filled two glasses. 'If it helps, Corporate feels the same way you do. They're blaming me for Wald's death. I'm to be fed to the court of public opinion.'
Hutch didn't care much for brandy. 'I'm not sure whose fault it was,' she said, reaching for a glass. 'At this point, it hardly matters.'
Truscott looked somber. 'Nobody wanted it to happen.'
'Of course not.' She couldn't quite keep the sting out of her voice. 'We're all well-meaning.'
The director nodded. 'To Richard Wald,' she said.
They drank, and Truscott refilled their glasses.
'So what happens now? With you and Kosmik?'
'Board of inquiry. They'll find culpability on my part if I let it go that far.'
'Can you stop it?'
'I can make a public apology. Take the blame. I don't mind doing that. It happened on my watch, and I can't really evade responsibility. Did I tell you I was directed to see that no one was hurt?'
'No—' Hutch felt a new surge of resentment.
'It's true. I thought I'd arranged things pretty well. But I blundered.'
'How?'
'Doesn't matter.'
'What will happen to you?'
'They'll get my resignation, I'll drop out of sight for six months, and then I'll start a new career. I'll be fine. I have friends.'
Hutch was silent for a long time. Finally she said, 'Losing him was such a waste.'
'I know. I've been reading his books.' She sighed. 'Hutch, you have a job with me any time you want it.'
They drank to that. They drank to Perth, and to Alpha.
Then, amused, Truscott proposed a toast to Norman Caseway. 'God bless him,' she said. 'We couldn't have got here without him. And you'd still be waiting for the Ashley Tee.'
'How do you mean?'
'The Perth brought out the people who are going to implement phase two of Project Hope. It also brought the directive for me to go back and face the music. Caseway did not send my recall on ahead. Instead, he arranged to have it handed to me by the ship's captain. An insult. But, as a result they had to wait around a few days while I finished with loose ends. If that hadn't happened, the Perth would have been on its way home when your SOS came through.
There would have been no ship to send after you.'
Hutch drained her glass, refilled it, and refilled Truscott's. 'One more,' she said. Hutch did not have a lot of tolerance for alcohol. It didn't take much to loosen her inhibitions, and she knew she should not propose this new toast. But she couldn't help herself.
'To whom?' asked Truscott.
'Not a whom, Melanie. You don't object if I call you Melanie? Good. Not a whom, Melanie. A what. I give you, the foamball.'
Hutch raised her glass.
Truscott's aristocratic features darkened. She looked hard at Hutch, and the cloud lifted. 'What the hell,' she said. 'Why not?'
It was clearly a bowl. Carson's team gathered in an observation lounge during the approach, where they had access to a wide-screen display and communication with the ship's operations center. Harvey Sill joined them, announcing that he had been assigned to assist. 'Don't hesitate to ask for anything you need,' he said, with marked lack of enthusiasm.
Perth moved in on the open side of the object. It broadened, and mutated into an inverted world, a world whose landscape sank, and whose horizons rose. They glided below the rim, and their perspective shifted again: the surface flattened, became a blue-black plain, stretching to infinity. The horizon rose, and the lower sky went black. They passed beneath an enormous arch, one of a network tied in to strong points across the face of the object. 'This is the only one of the telescopes,' Sill said, 'that's still transmitting.'
'Have you tried to translate the signal?' asked Carson.
'We don't really have the means to attempt it. But we can tell you that they were aimed at the Lesser Magellanic.'
There was a young male crewman with them, wearing earphones. He reported precise physical specifications as they came in—diameter, angle of curvature, declination. 'And thin,' he said. 'It's very thin.'
'How thin?' asked Carson.
'At the rim, they're saying a little under six-tenths of a centimeter.'
'That's still thick enough to have ripped us up,' said Hutch. 'How did we get through?'
'There's an antenna at dead center,' said the crewman. 'And it looks as if that's where the transmitter is.' He listened to his earphones and nodded. 'Operations reports it is rotating around its axis. They say one complete rotation in seventeen days, eleven hours, twenty minutes.'
'What holds it together?' asked Maggie. 'It seems too fragile.'
'It's not metal or plastic. We're getting odd readings: potassium, sodium, calcium. Heavy concentrations of calcium at the center construct.'
'Do we have a picture of it yet?' asked Sill. 'The center?'
'Coming up now.' The crewman glanced at the screens.
The bulkhead opposite the window changed colors, went dark, and revealed a cluster of black globes, a group of small dish antennas, a few domes. 'The signal source,' said the crewman.
Carson glanced at Sill. 'We'd like to get a good look at it,' he said.
'We'll take you in close.'
'Is there a way we can date this thing?' asked Hutch.
'Maybe if we had a sample,' said Janet.
'I don't think we want to do that.' Carson looked uncertain what he wanted to do. 'How about scrapings? Can we do it with scrapings?'
Janet thought about it. 'Maybe.'
'It's even thinner away from the rim,' said the crewman. 'Scanners indicate that thickness in this area is less than two millimeters. There's a latticework of thicker material, providing support. But for the most part, the object is micro-thin.'
Nobody noticed Truscott until she spoke. 'Now we see why Wink survived,' she said.
She was accompanied by a narrow, uniformed man whom she introduced as Captain Morris. His eyes were the color of water, and his hair was black and cut close in a military fashion. He acknowledged their names and
