Under Strange Suns Read Free Page B

squirted attitude jets, adjusting itself to point in the direction of Alpha Centauri. The starship looked like a flattened tube of girders with a blockish engine cluster at one end and a slowly spinning ring at the other. A voice was explaining the mission while scrolling text along the bottom of the screen provided essentially the same information.
    “Doctor Yuschenkov and the other three crew members of the Eureka II –Colonel Brown, Doctor Abrams, and Doctor Chandra–have completed the final checks for initiating humanity’s historic first interstellar voyage. Ground Control reports that attitude corrections are complete and final countdown is underway for initiating the Y-Drive, as Doctor Yuschenkov’s Graviton Drive has come to be called. Plans call for a four-week outward trip to what some have begun calling Planet Best Bet, orbiting Alpha Centauri. The crew will remain in orbit for a month of study, then will return to Earth, arrival scheduled for approximately three months from today.”
    Another voice replaced the first, sounding distant. It was counting down. When it reached zero Brooklynn saw the central portion of the engine cluster strobe red. The Eureka II disappeared and the blackness where it had been appeared to ripple momentarily, then subside.
    * * *
    Three months later Brooklynn was again eating pizza with her mother and watching television, this time at home. Reporters in various locations consumed airtime, repeating variations of the same basic message: “We expect them anytime.”
    “Don’t get anxious, Brooklynn,” her mother said for the third, or maybe fourth, time. “They aren’t coming on a train. There is no timetable. Today is just the earliest they are expected. Remember, Uncle Brennan is in charge. He might have decided to stay a day or two longer to look around.”
    Brooklynn spent the rest of the day flipping through the news channels, waiting. Her mother let her stay up an extra half-hour before putting her to bed.
    It took Brooklynn a week before her excitement turned to worry. And it took three months for her mother to sit her down and say, “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

Chapter 1
    D OCTOR MEHMET AZZIZ SAT ERECT IN his office chair, still trim and lanky despite the gray in his beard. Across the desk from him sat his research assistant, Constantine Pappas. Azziz could not help but see the parallels to a day over twenty years past when he’d sat facing Doctor Yuschenkov and heard for the first time about the Y-Drive. It was the same office, but he wondered if Doctor Yuschenkov would recognize it. The bones were the same, as the University had been without funds for new construction for over a decade, and irregularities in the floor and scuffs on the door demonstrated that maintenance funds had dried up as well.
    The windfall from Y-Drive patent licensing had never occurred, Thomas Coutts University having relinquished all intellectual property rights claims after Yuschenkov’s disappearance in a doomed attempt to distance itself from the cloud that had formed about the name Yusechenkov. But despite the fears the failure of the Eureka II had engendered, the promise of the Y-Drive remained too great for others not to risk pursuing the technology. In the long run, the University would have been better off weathering the public acrimony and hanging onto the patents.
    Electronic facades transformed the office into something that would leave Doctor Yuschenkov awed. Gone was the heavy wooden desk. In its place were assembled glass panels holding staggering computing power. It was desk, filing system, research library, blackboard, workshop, classroom lectern, conference room. The perfect tool for a paperless academia, an academia in which a physical appearance by a lecturer in a real auditorium in front of actual live students was a rarity. Gone was the vanity wall. The walls themselves were floor to ceiling display screens. One meter-square section he’d