Eater Read Free Page B

location. Still…“What if it’s not?”
    “Then this is a burster that makes no sense.”
    “But that’s what you’d like—something new.”
    He gazed skeptically at the long filament. “New yes, wrong no.”
    “You don’t know it’s wrong yet.” He had been like this lately, doubting everything. Perhaps it came from her illness; medicine always rewarded a skeptical, informed use of the squeaky-wheel principle. He had loyally squeaked a lot in her defense.
    “I’ll bet it goes away tomorrow.”
    “And I bet not,” she said impetuously.
    “How much?” He gave her his satyr grin.
    “Something kinky, say.”
    “Sounds like we can’t lose.”
    “You bet.” This evening was getting off to a good start, despite earlier signs. Now to glide by the hard part. “I want to go in with you tomorrow, have a look at this burster.”
    Concern flickered in his face, then he suppressed it. He was always urging her to stay home, rest up, but bless him, he didn’t know how maddening that could be. She did still have a job and desk at the Center, even if both were getting covered in cobwebs.
    “I don’t think—”
    “If this is important—and of course, you’re probably right, it’s not—I’d like to be in on it.”
    “As experiences go, it’ll be pretty dull.”
    Lately, experience was something she never seemed to get until just after she needed it. “Better than daytime TV.”
    She let a little too much desperation creep into her voice, which was not fair, but at the moment maybe it was just being honest. She watched him struggle with that for a long moment. Visibly reluctant, he finally said, “Uh, okay.”
    “You always say you want your staff to be ambitious, look for the new.”
    “Well, sure…”
    He was getting a bit too sober, she saw, the weight of her news pressing him down. How to rescue the evening?
    “Standard executive cheerleading. Follow your dream, you say.” She smiled and lowered her eyelids while giving him an up-from-under gaze—a dead-sure attention-getter, she knew, and just the sort of attention she wanted right now. “Unless, of course, it’s that one about giving a speech to the International Astronomical Union dressed in sexy underwear.”

3
    Astronomy, Benjamin mused, was a lot like a detective story with the clues revealed first, and the actual body only later—if ever. Pulsars and quasars, both brilliant beacons glimpsed across the cosmos, had proved to be powered by small specks of compressed mass, resolved only decades after their emissions made them obvious. The clues were gaudy, the causes obscure. So it went with this latest mystery.
    The next morning Channing was too worn out to come in with him after all. He lingered over breakfast, they talked about the news in ritual fashion, and finally she shooed him out of the house. “My bed beckons,” she said. He was somewhat relieved, then, to get immediately to work with Amy when they got the “cleaned” radio map, chugged out by the ever-laboring computers. It showed the intensity of radio emissions, plotted like a topographical map. A long, spindly feature like a ridge line.
    “A definite tail,” Amy said. “Some kind of guided flow.”
    “A galactic jet?”
    To his surprise, she shook her head. “That’s what I figured. But I checked the old radio maps of this region. This thing wasn’t there five years ago.”
    “What?” He flatly did not believe her, but kept that out of his voice. A mistake, surely. He did a quick calculation and realized that if this thing were a jet in a distant galaxy, itcould not possibly have grown so large in a few years. Must be a mistake. “It’s too big—”
    “Yeah, and too luminous. Couldn’t have missed it before. This thing is new.”
    “But…but—” He traced out the size of the straight feature and checked his calculation again. “It would have to be the size of a galaxy, maybe bigger, to look this big.”
    Amy grinned. “Now you know why I only got three