Read Spindrift for Free Online

for everyone when I say that I’m very pleased that you agreed to participate in this conference and that your creation has borne fruit at long last.”
    â€œYes, but…”
    â€œWe’ll now open the floor to comments.” Cole gave him an admonishing glance, silently telling him to shut up. Then he pointed to a stuffy-looking academic who’d picked up his placard and placed it end up on the table, indicating his desire to speak. “Dr. Waterstone…”
    Â 
    Many hours later, Ramirez found himself alone in his room, gazing through the window and, once again, wondering why he was there.
    His quarters were located on the second floor of the southwest wing, a cozy but comfortable suite with a private bath, a modest luxury that he’d almost forgotten after nine years in Dolland. The window overlooked the small graveyard of the adjacent chapel; floodlights along the manor’s roof eaves illuminated rows of eroded slate tombstones, each marking the final resting place of a member of one of the families that had possessed Wiston House since the mideighteenth century. The last mellow glow of twilight had fallen over the distant hills; he’d cracked open a window to get some air, and now he could hear the crickets commencing their evening concerto.
    The conference had dragged on through the rest of the morning and late into the afternoon, interrupted only by lunch in the main hall and teatime in the library. He’d spoken little since his presentation, save to answer the occasional question from another attendee. Indeed, no one except Shillinglaw, Cole, or Sinclair seemed willing to acknowledge his presence, even though it soon became obvious that, even after having been absent from the scientific community for nearly a decade, he was still the person in the room most knowledgeable about extraterrestrial intelligence.
    That was to be expected. Even before his conviction, the field had shrunk until it’d largely consisted of little more than a dozen specialists, all of whom had been struggling for recognition. Humankind had finally gone to the stars, true enough, but when no alien races had been found out there, the view that Homo sapiens was alone in the cosmos had gradually gained widespread acceptance. In its wake had come Dominion Christianity, with a belief system based upon a misreading of the anthropic principle; it wasn’t natural selection that favored the human race as the inheritors of the galaxy, but the will of God. The fact that, so far, only one habitable world had been discovered was enough to bolster this particular article of faith; if the Western Hemisphere Union hadn’t nearly bankrupted itself by building a small fleet of starships that it had already dispatched to the 47 Ursae Majoris system, then subsequent vessels would’ve doubtless contained legions of Dominion missionaries.
    Even if none of the conference members were Dominionists—and Ramirez suspected that one or two might be—enough remained skeptical of Raziel’s findings that, for the rest of the day, the sessions had bogged down in endless debate over fine points of data. At first, Ramirez tried to defend his findings, but after a while he realized that few seemed willing to listen to him. It wasn’t because of what he’d said, but because of who he was. The message had been accepted, but the messenger was to be ignored. So finally he’d gone silent, sucking on hard candies and absently playing with the wrappers, while scientists who’d earned their credentials while he was doing hard time in Dolland split hairs over the mathematical permutations of the Spindrift signal that even a postgrad physics student could have correctly interpreted.
    So why was he there? He didn’t know. All things considered, though, he might as well be somewhere else.
    There was no chain-link fence around Wilton Park, and no one had put him back in manacles after dinner. Leaning