Resurgence

Teri could feel the stirrings within her brain of old legends and myths. All the species of the Orion Arm had discovered spaceflight long after the beginnings of their recorded history. When everything was written down or stored in computer data banks there should be no room for uncertainty. The mechanism for the creation of myths was that of oral memory and imperfect traditions. And yet the stories lived on. Ships had been lost, that was an undeniable fact. A group of unfortunate travelers might enter the Croquemort Timewell and be trapped there until time itself came to an end. Or perhaps you and your party would enter a hiatus, a singularity of spacetime from which you would emerge within half a minute—or this year, next year, sometime, never.

A rational mind rejected all such fancies. If the Croquemort Timewell existed and a ship vanished into it, how would anyone ever learn that fact? It was all imagining, the fancy of uneasy minds. And yet, beyond the No Regrets stood nothing.

For the first few hours, Teri, Torran Veck and Julian Graves had stayed together, comforting each other with useless reassurances that this would soon be over and they would pop out into open space. Teri had endured false optimism for as long as she could, then crept away to be alone. She retreated to the observation chamber and stared—stared so hard looking for something, anything, that her eyeballs felt ready to pop out of her head.

She was frightened, and ashamed of being frightened. So why was it reassuring when suddenly the door to the observation chamber slid open and Torran Veck came lumbering in?

“Oops. Sorry. I didn’t know someone was already in here.”

“Torran, if you are going to lie, you have to learn to be better at it.”

He grinned at her, quite unabashed. “All right. I knew you were here. I’ve been trying something, and I got a result. But I don’t understand it. You’re smarter than me, so I thought I’d ask you to help me out.”

“That’s a lie just as big as your last one.” Teri felt oddly comforted. “Where’s Julian Graves?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t want him in on this, in case it’s nothing. It’s bad enough to make a fool of yourself in front of one person.”

Torran had twice Teri’s body mass, and when he sat down next to her, he as usual seemed to overflow the seat. “You came out here to find out if you could see anything,” he said. “In a way, I did the same thing, except that I went into the control room in case any of our sensors reported finding anything.”

He shook his head at her excited look. “Sorry. Not a peep from any recording instrument that we have. They all insist that the ship is nowhere in the universe. But then I did something stupid and irrational.”

“You mean more stupid than entering a Bose node when you don’t know where or if you’ll come out?”

“About that stupid. I sent a call for help.”

“You did what?”

“I know. It was totally dumb, but I felt desperate enough for anything. I generated a message saying who we were, that we were lost, and if anyone heard this, please would they come and help. I sent it. I didn’t expect any reply, but I sent it anyway.”

“And you had a reply?”

“No.” Torran shrugged. “Hey, let’s be reasonable. What are the chances of anyone picking up a call like that? Zero. But something peculiar did happen. A few microseconds after my message was sent out, the ship’s radio receivers recorded a signal. I call it a signal, but it would be more accurate to say it was a burst of static. I couldn’t make any sense of it, nor could the ship’s computer. But it was something, where before we’d had absolutely nothing.

“I sat there for a while, then I said to myself, Teri’s brighter than you. Why don’t you go and bounce it off her? And here I am.”

“Did you apply Lund’s First Rule of Oddities?”

Arabella Lund had been full of “rules,” and one of her most basic was this: Anything in the universe can happen once, or at least it can seem to happen. If you want to obtain information, make it happen again.

Torran nodded. “I did the same thing, three times over. I found identical results: send a signal, and microseconds afterwards we get a funny squiggle of radio sound on our receivers.”

“How did you send your message? I mean, was it in some particular direction?”

“No, I used omni-directional. Hell, if there was help to be had anywhere I wanted to hear from them. What is it, Teri? You’ve got an idea, haven’t you?”

“If you can call it that. It may be half-baked, but I want to try something. Let’s head back to the control room.”

“Do we need Julian Graves?”

Teri gave him a drop-dead-right-now glare. “You didn’t want to seem like an idiot in front of Julian Graves, but you don’t mind me doing it?”

“Sorry. What are you planning?”

“Wait and see. You didn’t tell me in advance.” Teri led the way to the control room. Once there, she ignored the radio wavelength equipment and went across the optical section. “Which one of these lasers provides the best collimated beam?”