James P Hogan. Giant’s Star. Giant Series #3

from the Giants’ Star and confirming that it was indeed the new home of the Ganymeans was received only hours after they first began sending. But by that time the Shapieron had already left, and news of the message could not be relayed to it because of the spacetime distortion induced around the craft by its drive, which prevented electromagnetic signals from being received coherently. There was nothing more that the scientists on Earth could do; the Shapieron had vanished back into the void from whence it had come, and many more years of uncertainty would pass before the Ganymeans aboard it would know whether or not their quest was in vain.

The transmitters on lunar Farside continued sending intermittently during the three months that followed, but no further reply was evoked.

chapter one

Dr. Victor Hunt finished combing his hair, buttoned on a clean shirt, and paused to contemplate the somewhat sleepy-eyed but otherwise presentable image staring back at him from the bathroom mirror. He detected a couple of gray strands here and there among his full head of dark brown waves, but somebody would have had to be looking for them to notice them. His skin had an acceptably healthy tone to it; the lines of his cheeks and jaw were solid and firm, and his belt still rested loosely on his hips to serve its intended purpose of keeping his pants up and not to keep his waistline in. All in all, he decided, he wasn’t doing too badly for thirty-nine. The face in the mirror frowned suddenly as the ritual reminded him of a typical specimen of middle-age male wreckage in a TV commercial; all it wanted now was for the mentally defective, bottle-brandishing wife to appear in the doorway behind to deliver the message on baldness cures, body deodorants, remedies for bad breath, or whatever. Shuddering at the thought, he tossed the comb into the medicine cabinet above the sink, closed the door, and ambled through into the apartment’s kitchen.

“Are you through in the bathroom, Vie?” Lyn’s voice called from the open door of the bedroom. It sounded bright and cheerful, and should have been illegal at that time in the morning.

“Go ahead.” Hunt tapped a code into the kitchen terminal to summon a breakfast menu onto its screen, studied the display for a few seconds, then entered an order to the robochef for scrambled eggs, bacon (crisp), toast with marmalade, and coffee, twice. Lyn appeared in the hallway outside, Hunt’s bathrobe hanging loosely on her shoulders and doing little to hide her long, slim legs and golden-tanned body. She flashed him a smile, then vanished into the bathroom in a swirl of the red hair that hung halfway down her back.

“It’s coming up,” Hunt called after her.

“The usual,” her voice threw back from the doorway.

“You guessed?”

“The English are creatures of habit.”

“Why make life complicated?”

The screen presented a list of grocery items that were getting low, and Hunt okayed the computer to transmit an order to Albertson’s for delivery later that day. The sound of the shower being turned on greeted him as he emerged from the kitchen and walked through into the living room, wondering how a world that accepted as normal the nightly spectacle of people discussing their constipation, hemorrhoids, dandruff, and indigestion in front of an audience of a million strangers could possibly find something obscene in the sight of pretty girls taking their clothes off. “There’s now’t so strange as folk,” his grandmother from Yorkshire would have said, he thought to himself.

It wouldn’t have needed a Sherlock Holmes to read the story of the night before from the scene that confronted him in the living room. The half-fflled coffee cup, empty cigarette pack, and the remains of a pepperoni pizza surrounded by scientific papers and notes strewn untidily in front of the desk terminal told of an evening that had begun with the best and purest of intentions to explore another approach to the Pluto problem. Lyn’s shoulder bag on the table by the door, her coat draped across one end of the couch, the empty Chablis bottle, and the white cardboard box containing traces of a beef-curry dinner-to-go all added up to an interruption in the form of an unexpected but not exactly unwelcome arrival. The crumpled cushions and the two pairs of shoes lying where they had fallen between the couch and the coffee table said the rest. Oh well, Hunt told himself, it wouldn’t make much difference to the rest of the world if the solution to how Pluto had wound up where it was had to wait an extra twenty-four hours.

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