Aurora by David A. Hardy Read Free Book Online Page B

doing research and some lecturing. At last she decided that it was once again time to experience the real world. By now she had been forty-eight, but looked perhaps twenty-two. During all this time she had formed no strong personal relationships, though generally she seemed to be well liked. Some men, spurned, put about a rumor that she had lesbian tendencies, but she laughed these off. The plain fact was that she simply was not interested.
    Unable to find a fulfilling job in Britain—or, for a while, any job at all for which she was not “overqualified”—she left for the United States. There she found the climate—cultural, scientific and atmospheric—much more to her liking. She had flirted with NASA but found it lacking, dogged by problems as it had been since the Challenger shuttle tragedy, and moved on to the California Institute of Technology. In the academic atmosphere of CalTech she seemed to be in line for a professorship, only to find that this time her declared and apparent youth worked against her, despite her obviously superior experience and qualifications. She had left in high dudgeon and found a position as a geologist in a California oil company, GeoTek. The job mainly involved using advanced computer techniques and high-definition satellite imagery, but there were enough field trips to keep her interested and satisfied.
    The personnel at GeoTek consisted mainly of bright young men and women, and she fitted in well. For a while. Whether it was real or imagined she couldn’t tell, but after a time she began to feel that her colleagues were looking at her strangely, and so she left. A number of similar positions followed. She worked on an ocean-floor mining project; then for an environmental organization doing research on the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic; then there was a spell among the observatories on Mauna Kea on Hawaii....
    Her stay in the Pacific Islands sparked an interest in volcanology, and for some years she visited the Earth’s wildest places, researching plate tectonics and continental drift. She gradually found she preferred these desolate and rugged areas to the more populated areas of Planet Earth.
    She took up painting again, as a hobby, and produced some spectacular canvases of volcanoes, rift valleys and glaciers; accurate yet romantic, some of them were almost worthy of comparison with nineteenth-century American “field” artists of the Hudson River School, like Frederic Church and Thomas Moran, who had travelled to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone or Antarctica and exhibited their massive canvases to an awed and sometimes disbelieving public. They had been responsible for these areas becoming National Parks.
    Always Aurora kept half an eye on what was happening in the field of space research, hoping for a resurgence in interest in manned missions, such as had fired mankind in the 1960s and 1970s, but the picture was dismal. Still, she was at JPL when the Voyager images came in from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, becoming excited by the volcanoes and geysers on Io and Triton.
    Several times she had to call upon her secret computer program in order to explain away her appearance and start a new life, but it was difficult, and she lived in constant fear of meeting someone who had known her twenty or more years ago. She had become an expert forger, with the help of computers and high-definition printers. She changed her appearance, too, more than once, growing and cutting or even dying her hair, sometimes wearing glasses, other tricks.... Also, in order for her to get work, each new self needed qualifications. Really, though, this was only a matter of altering the name and dates on the genuine ones she possessed—no one would be likely to query her abilities once they saw her results.
    Increasingly she experienced that feeling, which she had once mentioned to Lefty, of “searching for something”. The problem was, she had no