Return to Glory

Return to Glory Copyright © 2022 by Cryptic, Inc. All rights reserved. Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2022 by Edward Miller. All rights reserved. Interior design Copyright © 2022 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved. See copyright information page for individual story copyrights. Ebook Edition ISBN 978-1-64524-074-7 Subterranean Press PO Box 190106 Burton, MI 48519 subterraneanpress.com Manufactured in the United States of America Table of Contents Dangerous Information: An Introduction by Tom Easton Unlikely Gifts: The Emerson Effect The Jersey Rifle Voice in the Dark Tau Ceti Said What? The Oppenheimer Club What’s the Point of Being Alive If You’re a Tree? Deep Space: Tidal Effects Standard Candles The Cat’s Pajamas Enjoy the Moment Arcturean Nocturne Tea Time with Aliens Cosmic Harmony The Gold Signal High Hopes: Crossing Over Holding Pattern The Big Downtown Return to Glory The Sunrise Club Good News Incoming Tech: Variables Eyes on the Prize The Eagle Project Riding with the Duke The Wrong Way Bring On the Night Looking Back: Leap of Faith Lake Agassiz The Cassandra Project Dig Site Excalibur Timely Visitor DangerousInformation:An Introduction by Tom Easton Back in 2016, at the Kansas City Worldcon (MidAmericon II), I sat down to lunch with Jack McDevitt. I had been thinking about something called parabiosis, in which two mice, one old, one young, have their circulatory systems spliced together so the blood of each flows through both mice. Curiously, the old mouse gets partially rejuvenated by the process, and people were beginning to try transfusions of plasma from young people into old people to see if it could have a similar effect. Together, Jack and I speculated that one’s own young plasma would surely work better than someone else’s. Perhaps a business should start freeze-banking plasma for future use. Then Jack mentioned that he was booked for a time travel panel that afternoon. The result was our one and only coauthored story, “Blood Will Tell,” which appeared in Nature in November 2016. We have been arguing ever since over whose work made the story as good as it was. I may have drafted it, but I insist that it was Jack’s consummately professional and insightful touches that made the story. Jack starting doing short stories in the early 1980s. I started paying attention when The Hercules Text came out in 1986. It dealt with an alien signal bearing a great deal of dangerous information (see the excerpt “Voice in the Dark,” in this volume). When I reviewed it for Analog, I noted that the theme was the moral issue of the scientific conscience: Are there topics humans should not study, things that should be kept secret, at least until our species is more mature? Jack’s point was that in an ideal world scientists should be free to work as they please. But they should not give all their results to governments, which tend to be barbarous. Nor should they destroy their results, for that, in essence, robs the future of its options. Should, then, potentially dangerous information be hidden? If so, who should be the guardian? “Dangerous information” has been a recurring theme for Jack. Two years later, in A Talent for War, he introduced Alex Benedict, an amateur historian with a talent for solving historical mysteries. Jack himself, I said in my review, confirmed “a prodigious talent for SF.” Then came The Engines of God, introducing Priscilla Hutchins, starship pilot extraordinaire, with the mystery involving the deaths of civilizations. And then there was Ancient Shores, a time-travel mystery, and so far, mirabile dictu, there had been no sequels. When I met him for the first time, I asked about that. His publishers, he said were not asking him for sequels. Well, that was a quarter century ago. Jack’s publishers decided they had a good thing going. Both Alex and Hutch became the central characters of their own series; you will meet them briefly in this volume. Hutch resurfaced in Deepsix (2001), and then half a dozen more times. Alex came back in Polaris (2004), and then six more. Even Ancient Shores got a sequel, Thunderbird (2015). Meanwhile, he has been nominated for awards more times than you can count. He won the 2015 Heinlein Award, the 2000 Phoenix Award, a HOMer for Time Travellers Never Die, a Nebula for Seeker, a Campbell Memorial Award for Omega, a Locus Poll Award for The Hercules Text, and a NASA award “for keeping the science in science fiction.” To top it all, the International Astronomical Union put his name on an asteroid. Of course, there were also a great many short stories, of which some of the best are in this volume. A recurring theme here too is “dangerous information.” Put another way, he is deeply concerned with the biggest of big questions: “What is our relationship with the cosmos? Are we unique? Are we one of many? Has the universe, in some manner, been designed for us? It’s a question with the profoundest philosophical implications. It’s the great enigma” (see “Tidal Effects” in this volume). For the most part, Jack finds his big questions in deep time (alien civilizations that died eons ago), astronomy and cosmology (pulsars, alien signals), and the impact of technology (alien and home-grown)—or even the knowledge that such technology exists—on human civilization. One of his iconic short stories is “Cryptic,” in which radio astronomers detect a pair of worlds emitting radio signals. Then one stops, perhaps because it lost a war. You can find a copy at https://www.baen.com/Chapters/1596061958/1596061958___3.htm or you can buy a copy of Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003Y8XR5U/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1), which Subterranean Press released in 2010, well before most of the stories in this book were published. It has long been debated, both in science fiction and in the field of science, technology, and society studies, just how the detection of an alien intelligence Out There would affect people. People who insist that their favorite religious tome is the sole repository of truth might have serious problems,