“The first thing he did when we surfaced was to take a look at the sky. He has a chart of twenty-four marker stars. He knows what their positions should look like if we’re close to Calliope. There’s no way to be precise when you’re dealing with these kinds of distances. We never really knew how far Calliope was. The range was an estimate. Nothing more.”

“So how long will the next jump be?”

“About three hours.”

“Well, that’s not bad.”

“You look tired, Beth.”

“I’d just like to get out of here for a while. I hope we find a place where we can land and walk around a little.”

“I know. I think everybody’d like to get outside and watch a sunset.”

They were finishing the sandwiches when Beth asked how many more jumps they would have to make. “Maybe one more after this next one,” said Hutch. “When we surface this time, we’ll probably be inside the system. Assuming it has planets.”

Wally leaned in. “I told you guys we should have brought some rum. How are we supposed to celebrate with iced tea?”

•  •  •

Derek rejoined Hutch on the bridge. “Good luck to us,” he said.

Barry reported that they were ready to go. Hutch told everyone to belt down and took them under. Derek sat quietly in his chair. They’d run out of conversation. There was nothing left to talk about that they hadn’t worn down. “I don’t think,” he said finally, “that monkey brains were designed for this kind of activity.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” she said. “I don’t much like flying. When I travel at home, I prefer a place we can drive to. I like to watch the countryside go by.”

Derek grinned. “Odd comment coming from a lady who pilots interstellars.”

“It’s true.” She got up. “I’m going back to crash for a couple of hours.”

•  •  •

She never really did get to sleep. After lying for an hour on her bunk, she tried reading. Eventually, she wandered back out to the front porch and joined her passengers. Derek was with them. They were speculating about what they would find. A culture advanced beyond human imagination? Or the bones of a lost civilization? Or possibly nothing at all. There was, of course, the possibility that the signal had actually come from a place far beyond Calliope, that it had simply passed through the system during the moment that it was lined up with the Van Entel. Or that the source had been simply a ship passing through the Calliope system, aiming its transmission at a target that got in front of the supertelescope.

With twenty minutes remaining, she returned to the bridge. She sat down and looked at the window. You didn’t actually look through it. There was no sense of peering out into a void. It was just darkness.