Ben walked in, almost an hour later than normal. He wasn't looking forward to the next few days, tearing down equipment, archiving data, trying to imagine what he would do once the lab was closed. At first, the meaning of Henri's words didn't sink in.
"She went."
"Who went? Where?" Ben asked.
Joan and Henri just rolled their eyes again. They did that to Ben a lot, he thought. Joan answered.
"Angela. She swept."
Ben's froze. His hand was still holding his coat, an inch from the hook, his arm outstretched clumsily as his head swiveled to face his co-workers.
"She what?"
Fourteen months ago, the first probe had swept, and then returned. The hundreds of round-trips since had yielded tremendous amounts of data. All of the readings confirmed Angela's hypotheses. And yet, the funding was cut off. Angela had only swept a few live payloads, and only one of those was a vertebrate. According to the time-line in her funding request, human trials were still a year or more away.
"And she's late," Henri added, softly. Ben dropped his coat. "She took a current scheduled to cycle seventy-four minutes, but that was more than five hours ago."
"The coil?" Ben managed to stammer his question.
"It was here when Henri arrived this morning. I checked it when I got here. The readings say it returned on schedule. We sent it back. It came back again, empty."
Empty.
"She left a message," said Henri. "Said she was sure it would be safe. 'The committee worries too much,' she said. So she was going to prove it.""
She was gone. Angela was gone. First, the lab was being shut down. Now, Angela was gone. And with the lab closed, they'd never get her back. He'd never see her again. His mind emptied. Perhaps he stood there for several minutes; perhaps for hours. He didn't know. What would he do now? Finally he was brought back to consciousness when Joan touched his arm.
"Clearly," she said, "we have to go get her."
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