“Because we’ve gotten hints that this may be something we’d go for, too.” Muramoto lifted his palm. “No, please, not with any idea of warlike application. If our guess is right, it is an area that concerns us strongly, but ‘we’ are not just a few men and women in uniform. We include civilians, scientists, and certain members of the President’s Advisory Council.”
She flushed beneath the gray hair. A fist clenched. “My God, does that clique decide everything these days?”
Muramoto had his own wistfulness about the republic that Jefferson helped found, but it wasn’t relevant today. “Myself, I hope your request will be approved. Yes, and I’d like it to be an international undertaking, as you’ve proposed. So would my superiors, partly to save American money, partly on principle. We aren’t blind chauvinists.”
Taken aback, she sat quiet for a while before she murmured, “I… presume… not.”
“But you haven’t given us reasons to fight for what you want,” he said. “If you’ll tell me what you have in mind and why it shouldn’t be publicized” — he smiled —”you’ll find we military are pretty good at keeping our mouths shut.”
Lewis reached a decision. She actually returned his smile. “The truth is nothing desperate. It’s bound to come out in due course, and certainly should. But the potential for sensationalism —” She drew breath. “You see, our latest observations lie at the limits of sensitivity available to us at present. They could be in error. An announcement, followed by a retraction, would do worse than wreck several careers. It would harm this whole institution.”
“I see, I thought so,” he replied. Intently: “You think you have found more starship trails, don’t you?”
She nodded. Although he was not surprised, his mind whirled back through time, twenty-seven years, and again he was a boy, watching the news, listening to the discussions, feeling the dream explode into reality.
Pointlike sources of hard X-rays with radio tails, crisscrossing a region in the Centaur. Some have come suddenly into being as we watched, others have blanked out. Parallax measurements taken across interplanetary spans show they are five thousand light-years distant. Therefore maximum transverse motion joins with Doppler effect to show they are traveling at virtually the speed of light.
What can they be but the trails of material objects blasting through the interstellar medium?
Slowly, grudgingly, more and more physicists admit that the least fantastic hypothesis is that they indicate spacecraft.
They aren’t many, less than a hundred, and they seemed confined to a volume of perhaps two hundred parsecs’ diameter. Why that is, why they don’t range everywhere, why they haven’t come to us — those are among the mysteries. But all at once, humans around the whole Earth want us also to be in space.
Through a quickening pulsebeat, he heard Lewis’s carefully dry voice: “Lately, here, using the Maxwell superconducting telescope, we’ve found what appear to be similar phenomena elsewhere. The traces are faint, scattered, from sources far more distant than those behind Zeta Centauri. They are few, and none is as rich in objects as that region is. But there they are. Or so we think.
“To confirm, we need better instruments. That will also let us pinpoint them in the galaxy. More important, new theoretical work suggests that improved data will give clues to what the power source is. There’s the great stumbling block, you know. Where does the energy come from? I honestly believe we’re on the verge of a revolution in our understanding of the universe.
“I can show you around, introduce you to the people doing the research, let you judge for yourself before you report to your group. Would you like that?”
“I — I would,” he answered inadequately. “And — no promises, you realize, but — I expect you’ll get what you want.”
It happened that Avery Houghton launched his coup on the day that Edward Olivares recorded a television interview. Nothing had overtly begun when the physicist reached his office, but the crisis had been building up for weeks — demands, threats, demonstrations, riots — and was now unmistakably close to the breaking point. Most Americans who could’ve stayed home, huddled over the newscasts. The amber-hued Hispanic facades of Caltech stood on a nearly deserted campus, impossibly sunlit and peaceful, while fighter jets drew contrails across the blue above them.