“Only a couple of them saw anything. At the time it was happening, I don’t think they thought anything about it. Only afterward, when I told them what it was.”

“They didn’t get scared?”

“Afterward, maybe. A little bit.”

“How about you?”

“If I scared that easily, I’d find another line of work.”

Esterhaus had always assumed that people who saw moonriders were lunatics. That the visual records they came back with were faked. But Cavanaugh looked solid, unimaginative, honest. Utterly believable.

Still, it was hard to account for the images on the record. Dark globes in formation. Furthermore, they’d been seen since by others. Reginald Cottman, on October 3, while hauling cargo out to the Origins Project, halfway between 61 Cygni and 36 Ophiuchi. And Tanya Nakamoto, on another Orion Tours cruise, had seen them at Vega. A construction crew, four or five people, had reported a sighting a couple weeks ago at Alpha Cephei.

Physicists had been trying to explain them away without invoking extraterrestrials. The general public was excited, though of course it doesn’t take much to do that. It was why The National was interested. Gregory MacAllister, his editor, didn’t believe a word of it, but it was a hot story at the moment. And a chance to cast ridicule, which was what The National did best.

The reality was that this was a bad time for interstellar flight. Several bills were pending before Congress that would reduce funding for the Academy and other deep-space programs. The World Council was also talking about cutting back.

Meantime, the number of moonrider sightings was increasing. MacAllister suspected Orion Tours had tricked the passengers on Cavanaugh’s ship, had put together an illusion, and he’d hired an ex-pilot to demonstrate how it could be done. It was, after all, only a matter of running some images past a scheduled flight. How hard could it be?