Thunderbird by Jack McDevitt Read Free Book Online Page A

heard.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    T HE THOUSAND - LIGHT - YEAR STORY got the biggest play by the media. Garth Chanowitz mentioned it to ABC’s local anchorman, Brock Mellon. “How far is a thousand light-years in miles?” Brock asked.
    Despite all his awards, and his obvious mathematical capabilities, Chanowitz was not good in front of a microphone. He needed to think about the question. “There are approximately ten trillion kilometers in one light-year, so for a thousand it would be, ah, ten quadrillion.”
    â€œMiles, Professor. What does that equate to in miles?”
    â€œOh. Six. Six quadrillion. Maybe a better way to think about it is that if somebody on that world had turned on a giant spotlight, bright enough to be seen looking out your window over there, and if they’d done it when Richard the Lionheart was running things in Britain, we wouldn’t have seen it yet.”
    â€œAnd you were there yesterday?”
    â€œWe were.”
    â€œAmazing. What does that tell us about whoever put that thing on Johnson’s Ridge?”
    Garth frowned as if he were giving the notion serious thought. “Excellent question, Brock,” he said, stalling. “I just don’t know. All we can be certain of is that they were pretty smart.”
    Brad Hollister caught the interview in the morning while eating his routine 4:00 A.M. breakfast. The reaction was taking hold around the globe. It gives a whole new meaning to the term spacewalk, Joe Scarborough was saying. Other commentators were asking whether rocket-powered moonflights were now obsolete? “This story just keeps getting bigger,” said Loretta MacLeary on CNN. “We’re experiencing our first encounter with a nonhuman technological civilization. But who would have ever thought that the aliens would be gone?” On CBS, Joe Pendergast was talking about the impact, and especially the dangers, of meeting another intelligent species. “If we were smart,” he said, “we’d close down the Roundhouse. Get rid of it.”
    Donna, who usually slept until seven, came into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down. “You should have invited that guy onto the show,” she said, referring to Garth.
    â€œYeah. I wish I’d thought of it.” He shook his head. “You notice, by the way, that we never have a meeting with an alien. It’s always an
encounter
.”
    Brad had been following the Roundhouse story since the beginning, when Lasker dug up the boat on his land out near the Pembina Escarpment, which had once been the western shore of Lake Agassiz. The lake had been there until the glaciers in the north melted. It had then drained, leaving the vast plain that today formed the Dakotas, Minnesota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.
    Lasker’s property, during that era, would have been several hundred feet underwater.
    Brad had mocked people who’d speculated about a connection between the ancient lake and the boat, which resembled something that might have been manufactured last week by Dakota, Inc. He’d gone out to the farm to look at it. Whatever idiots had put it together had screwed up the washroom: The toilet and sink were too small and the showerhead too low to accommodate any adult. He’d used it as a running joke on the air for two weeks. But then the world got a surprise: The sailboat was constructed of an unknown element that was close to plastic but was actually something else. “They’re telling us,” Lasker had said on Andrea Hawk’s talk show, “that it’s extremely tough. That they can’t tell how old it is.”
    Adam and MSNBC’s Walt Casik were inside the command post that had been set up outside the Roundhouse. Casik was looking at a picture ofone of the Eden moons and the ocean. “Tell me, Adam,” he said, “do we have a presence on the other side? In the Eden, umm, what do you