Return to Glory by Jack McDevitt

Author:Jack McDevitt [McDevitt, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64524-074-7
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2023-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

The Gold

Signal

with Larry Wasserman

I was with Isabel Shelby on the day we’d been waiting for, that the world had been waiting for. It was the day when the signal should be coming in from the Ranger. The confirmationsignal. It was coming from the first interstellar flight, which would have reached Proxima Centauri, slightly more than four light-years away. It was an automated mission, and had required almost twenty-three years to get there. As far as we knew it had actually arrived four years earlier and transmitted a radio signal confirming its success. That was the signal we were waiting for. If all had gone well, the Ranger was inside the star system and approaching Proxima b, an Earth-mass planet in the Goldilocks Zone. It had been traveling at 60,000 miles per second. I was twenty-seven then, born the same year the vehicle had left Earth.

Proxima Centauri is invisible to the naked eye in terrestrial skies. The target world, Proxima b, was close to its sun, and needed only slightly more than eleven days to complete an orbit. Scientists expected that the planet had water, and temperatures would be moderate. Everybody was excited because we might be about to make our first contact with extraterrestrial life.

Isabel and I were seated in a restaurant enjoying a late lunch when it happened. Monitors fitted on opposite walls were carrying the coverage. The anchor looked out at us and raised a triumphant fist as a voice announced, “We’re here! Congratulations to all.”

The voice was automated and had originated on the ship. We received a video of the planet it was approaching and informed us that all was proceeding on schedule. The target world, Proxima b, grew larger. It was one of three worlds in the system. The Ranger was on the dark side, so we could make out no details, except that there was a moon. We would have to wait a few days before we got close enough to see details.

An earlier flight had been planned. Forty years before the Ranger launched, there’d been an effort to send the Coragio to the same destination. But the sky had become so filled with debris that we’d been unable to get parts up to Unity Station, where the ship could be assembled. Thousands of satellites crowded the heavens. They’d been colliding for decades, blasting each other at twenty and thirty thousand miles an hour, scattering fragments until we’d reached a point that the odds of getting a vehicle through were dicey. At best.

Two engineers had been lost during the construction of the Coragio and the project had been given up. They’d tried again with the Ranger and fortunately it had worked. No one had been killed, but the additional maneuvering and planning to get people and equipment to the station had driven everyone crazy.

***

Isabel and I have been friends since grade school. She’s an inch or two taller than I am, with black hair and features that draw stares from every guy in the area. I like to think of myself as reasonably attractive, but not when she’s in the room.

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