Michael Shara & Jack McDevitt - Lighthouse

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Lighthouse by Michael Shara And Jack Mcdevitt

Some life changing events work on more than one level....

* * * *

Illustration by Broeck Steadman

* * * *

The applause after a dissertation defense is always polite, sometimes cool, but rarely sustained.

Kristi Lang smiled and blushed as all fifty members of her department rose to their feet and

cheered. Her fellow graduate students were the rowdiest of all, whistling and banging their

coffee cups in unison on chairs and tabletops. Greg Cooper, the department head and her

mentor, let it go on for a full minute.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said finally, "thank you very much."

If anything, the noise intensified.

He needed a gavel.

Kristi stood, engulfed in the moment. She nodded, raised her hand, mouthed a thank you. A

fresh round of applause, and finally it began to lessen.

She had discovered a new type of astronomical body. A special kind of brown dwarf. They

were calling it a chimera now, but Greg had told her yesterday that they'd eventually be

referred to as Lang Objects.

Greg was tall and thin, with an angular jaw, angular nose, dark hair, intense eyes. His students

referred to him as Sherlock Holmes because of his world-class problem-solving skills and his

intensely mediocre abilities with a violin. "All right," he said, signaling for quiet. "Let's pull

ourselves together." That brought laughter. "I wouldn't want to cancel the wine and cheese."

The people around her were reaching for Kristi's hand, patting her on the back. Tim Rodgers,

tanned and good-looking and brilliant, gave her an approving smile. He was impressed.

Maybe even envious.

The time-honored Q and A had to be observed. Greg called for questions. Hands went up. He

stepped aside and gave her the lectern.

Tim remained standing while the others took their seats. He was finishing his own thesis, and

had been, until recently, at the top of everybody's list of People Who Would Go Somewhere.

Now he was a distant second.

"Okay, Kristi," he said, "you've established the existence of a new class of object. How'd it

happen?"

The explanation was simple enough. She'd been doing analytical studies of billions of brown

dwarfs and had noticed a few anomalies. Way too much deuterium. But that wasn't the big

news. She was holding that for later.

"We eventually found two thousand oddballs," she said. Brown dwarfs were failed stars. The

chimeras, the Lang Objects, were anomalous. Odd. And not easy to account for with

conventional physics.

"You briefly mentioned actinides," came another question. "But I don't see the connection.

Please elaborate."'

Kristi smiled and tried to look modest. "Think DNA," she said. "Common origin. Common

purpose."

The comment puzzled everyone. Brows furrowed. They whispered to one another and waited

for her to explain herself.

* * * *

In fact, her inspiration had come that past summer from a set of police blinkers mounted over

a cabin on Kilimanjaro.

Hemingway's mountain. Now the site for the Yuri Artsutanov Space Elevator. Kristi had been

on her way to the Clarke Research Station, poised overhead in geosynchronous orbit. She was

hunting for the photons that she hoped would help explain the existence of the anomalous

chimeras.

There were nearly two thousand of them, all young, concentrated in the spiral arms of the

Milky Way, interlopers, deuterium-rich freaks that had no business existing. Clad in shorts

and a Columbia University t-shirt, Kristi drove a Jeep across the savanna. The sky was heavy

with clouds, and the smell of cool moisture hung in the late morning air. Storm coming, and

she was already late. If she didn't hustle, she stood a good chance of missing her ride. The

weather guy had said clear, bright and sunny, beautiful weather. She'd spent the last few

months completely absorbed by her research, had analyzed a million images, looked for the

needle in a billion haystacks, written a killer proposal that even Greg Cooper in his Holmes

role couldn't fault. But here she was going to be left standing at the station. Scheduling rides

on the Yuri was no easy proposition.

Not that it would matter in the end. Jeff would make the observations and deliver the

petabytes to her account. They'd be perfectly de-biased and flat-fielded, even if she never

floated through the observatory hatch. Still, the karma would be wrong. It was once in a

lifetime, and she needed to be there when the evidence came in.

* * * *

The rim of Kibo, the summit crater, popped momentarily into view as she passed three

thousand meters, and then promptly vanished into the gathering clouds. Raindrops began to

spatter against the windshield. She started the wipers. The road was wide and designed to take

heavy traffic, but it was still uphill all the way, sometimes at an almost impossible angle. The

rain intensified, and pounded on the roof.

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Michael Shara & Jack McDevitt - Lighthouse

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