Polaris Read Free

Dunninger.
    â€œIt’s starting to go,” said Klassner. “What you’ll see first is a general collapse.” Moments later, that character-switch came over him, and he was someone else. He looked first puzzled, then sleepy. Boland watched his eyelids sag. Within minutes, Klassner was asleep.
    What they saw first was a bright white light that blew all the pictures off the monitors. Somebody inhaled, but no one spoke. Mendoza, seated beside Klassner, looked toward Boland, and their eyes locked. Boland knew Mendoza well. They’d been friends a long time, but something deeper passed between them in that moment, as if they were comrades standing on a dark shore.
    They jumped out past the orbit of the fifth planet, to a prearranged location, where they rejoined the other ships. Klassner woke during the jump and looked devastated when they told him it was over. “You slept through it, Marty,” said Mendoza. “We tried to wake you, but you were seriously out.”
    â€œIt’s okay,” White told him. “You’ll get another chance.” From thisrange, the explosion hadn’t occurred yet, was still forty minutes away, and the researchers were able to set up and wait for the event to happen again. Klassner swallowed his disappointment, and commented that his daughter wouldn’t be a bit surprised when he told her what had happened. Boland understood that Klassner had no children.
    From their present range, Delta Karpis would normally have been a relatively small disk. But the disk was gone, replaced by a yellow smear twisted into the shape of a pear.
    Nancy White was sitting with a notebook, recording her impressions, as if she would one day publish them. Her reputation had come from creating and moderating a series of shows, Nancy White’s Fireside Chats, in which she talked science and philosophy with her audience; and Time-Out, a panel discussion that allowed her to sit each week with simulated historical figures ranging from Hammurabi to Adrian Cutter to Myra Kildare to discuss the issues of the day. The show had never been enormously popular, but—as the producers liked to say—the people who counted loved it.
    Urquhart talked quietly with Mendoza. Dunninger had opened a book but wasn’t really paying any attention to it.
    They counted down, and it all happened again. Except at this range it was less painful to watch. The pear buckled, and the light coming through the viewports alternately brightened and darkened. And finally subsided into a hostile red glow.
    It was odd, living through an event twice. But that was what FTL did for you. When you could outrun light, you could travel in time.
    Within two hours, Delta Karpis was gone, and the light in the solar system had gone out. Only a blaze of luminous gas, and the bright golden ring around the dwarf, remained. They watched while the neutron star proceeded quietly on its way.
II.
    Rondel (Rondo) Karpik was chief of the communications watch at Indigo Station, near the outer limits of Confederate space. His title, chief, was largely nominal since, except during major operations, he was the onlyperson on the watch. The Delta Kay mission had ceased to be a major operation. Sensor packages had been laid at strategic points, data from the three ships had been relayed and stored, the on-station experts had expressed their admiration for the efficiency with which the researchers had carried out their assigned tasks, but they were predicting it would be months before we knew what we’d learned. There had been a journalist with the Sentinel, reporting to a pool. The pool had filed stories that went on about the majesty of it all until Rondo thought he was going to throw up. Then the fleet had announced its homebound schedule, and the experts and journalists had retired down to Cappy’s gumpo shop, and he hadn’t seen them since.
    There was still some tracking data coming in, and a few other odds and ends,