The United Space Corporation had laid down a cautious and definitive procedure for the exploration of strange planets. But, as Mauris told himself lightly, the United Space Corporation would not begin to exist even in its own galaxy for another sixteen hundred thousand years.
Casting discretion aside, Captain Mauris made his way aft toward the airlock. He seized a combination pressure suit and climbed into it impatiently. Then he entered the pressure chamber. He closed the door behind him and threw the switch. The needle remained steady, indicating that the external pressure—the planetary atmosphere —was at par.
Captain Mauris was surprised. He began to feel that it was part of some obliging dream. He pressed a luminous button on the bulkhead, and a heavy door of the entry-port swung open. The Captain took a nylon ladder from its locker and secured one end to the stanchions of the entry-port. He tossed out the bundle of ladder and watched it drop through the misty atmosphere. Then slowly he climbed down.
Captain Mauris stood still and gazed at the terrain through a deceptive half-light. What he could see of it was so reassuringly normal as to be quite improbable. It might have been country in the temperate zones of Earth.
He tried to think of the fantastic chances against landing on such a planet after the Santa Maria had crippled both her stellar and planetary drives in the extragalactic jump. Logically there was no chance. What had happened was merely impossible.
“Luck,” thought Captain Mauris. “Or is it something else?”
With sudden inexplicable determination, he tried to tempt Fate for the last time. He released the safety valve on his pressure suit. Nothing happened. With an audible laugh of triumph and amazement, he began to take off the headpiece. Presently he stepped out of the pressure suit, his oxygen cylinder unneeded.
Captain Mauris stood on an unknown planet and took in the unmistakable scents of summer. He felt drunk— drunk on the sheer fantasy of reality. As he gazed about him he saw, over a patch of woodland, gray streaks of light pushing back the darkness, dulling the stars. And fifty yards from the spaceship, he discerned the edge of a stream whose quiet murmur seemed suddenly to communicate with his awakened sense of hearing.
Giving a wild cry of pleasure, Mauris forgot all about space-frame physicists and the extragalactic jump. He ran swiftly to the banks of the stream, knelt down, and splashed the warm, living water over his face. Then, impatiently, he tore off his stale clothes and waded into the dark, refreshing water.
And as he bathed, the intensity of light grew over the distant trees.
At last he came out of the stream, refreshed and exhilarated. He felt a warm breeze against his body, felt the blood coursing more rapidly through his veins.
He did not bother to dress, but walked wonderingly toward the increasing light.
The vault of darkness was being pushed slowly back, while the stars seemed to slip behind an invisible curtain.
Captain Mauris watched the landscape come quietly to life. Then he looked up at the sky.
“And darkness,” said Captain Mauris as he gazed at the fading stars, “darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
He stood there, feeling the years roll back, feeling the vitality of youth drive back some secret winter. At length he turned around to look at the spaceship, to assure himself of the reality of the journey. There was nothing to be seen. The thin vein of water flowed quietly through vacant land.
Surprised at his own calmness, his lack of distress, he turned again toward the patch of trees. And from the direction that he would learn to call east, there rose the crimson edge of a new sun.
He remembered then and suddenly understood the message of a woman’s voice in a dream of absolute stillness.
THE ENLIGHTENED ONES
Lukas threw a rapid glance at the bank of instruments on the navigation panel. Velocity had stabilized at thirty thousand kilometers, with a constant altitude of three hundred and fifty. Down below—and it was certainly a relief to use the concept “below” once again after several thousand hours of star flight—the red-gold continental masses of Fomalhaut Three swung slowly along their apparent rotation.
Soon the starship Henri Poincari would make its first free-fall transit over the night side of the planet. For all practical purposes, this was the end of the outward journey. Allowing his gaze to return to the procession of continents and emerald-green oceans on the surface of Fomalhaut Three, Captain Lukas felt a faint surge of anticipatory pleasure.
“Orbit maneuver concluded,” he said softly over his shoulder. “O.D. shut down.”
Duluth, the engineer, who was standing expectantly by the control pedestal, stooped down and threw back his master switch. He watched the red power needle slowly fall to zero. Then he stood up and yawned.
“Orbit drive shut down,” he remarked drowsily. “And now Fm going to get me some sleep. . . . Do you know how long we’ve been awake, Skipper?”
Lukas turned from the observation screen and grinned. “What’s the matter, Joe? Feeling old?”
Duluth stretched and yawned even more profoundly. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been on duty more than two days. A man gets just a little fatigued after staying awake maybe sixty hours.”
Lukas watched him with red-rimmed eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I noticed.”
At that moment they heard steps on the companion ladder. A couple of seconds later, Alsdorf, the geophysicist, poked his head through the hatch. He looked fresh, almost bursting with energy, but then he hadn’t needed to stay awake for the maneuvers.
“You two look like death,” said Alsdorf pleasantly. “Come on down to the mess deck. Tony is fixing cocoa and sandwiches.”
“The hell with sandwiches,” said Duluth. “I want to sleep.”
Alsdorf beamed. “Cocoa first, then a sedative. You will need it with all those action tablets you have taken.”
Lukas said, “Well, we got here, Kurt. Now you can earn your living. From here on, I’m a spectator.”
The intercom crackled. “What’s the matter?” complained an indignant voice. “There’s a gallon of hot cocoa waiting for you. Want me to recycle it?”
“Recycle yourself,” growled Duluth. “O.K. We’re on our way, Tony.”
With Alsdorf leading, they went down to the mess deck. Tony Chirico, a dapper Italian biochemist who looked as if he ought to have been a barber, greeted Lukas with a toothy smile.
“So you got us here, Mike. Somebody ought to make a speech about it. Have a sandwich.”
“What’s in ’em?” asked Duluth suspiciously, as he grabbed a pink flask of cocoa and anchored himself to a bench.
“Bombay duck,” said Chirico, “same as usual.”
Duluth gave a mirthless laugh. “Hydroponics garbage a la carte.”
Captain Lukas sat down and sipped his cocoa. He gazed at the observation panel and saw the dark side of Fomalhaut Three tinning slowly into view.
“We’re a fine bunch of heroes,” he remarked. “With the imaginative capacity of bedbugs. Here we knock a hole through space and find a system that nobody has ever seen before, and what do we do? We sit on our backsides, drink cocoa, and grumble about the food. For all we know, this planet we’re riding might have a civilization that’d make all Earth cultures look like a cretin nightmare.”
“A virgin planet,” said Alsdorf with an avaricious gleam in his eye. “Trans-Solar Chemicals will set up an independent station here. . . . With one Kurt Alsdorf as director.”
“A virgin planet,” echoed Chirico with a sardonic grin. “I think we shall awaken her—gently.”
“Can it,” mumbled Duluth, slumping over the table. “You got virgins on the brain.”
“You don’t think we’re going to find any intelligent owners down there?” asked Lukas.
Alsdorf lit a cigarette. “Face the facts, Mike. In the last two decades, seventeen new planets have been listed. The highest animal life discovered so far was the three-legged pseudo-wolf on Procyon Five. You could train it t
o fetch sticks, and that was all.”
Lukas took a good swig of his cocoa. “Well, it’s got to happen someday.”
Chirico laughed. “Sure, everything has to happen someday. Give a monkey with a typewriter enough time and he’ll rewrite Shakespeare with genuine improvements.”
Lukas shrugged. “A few hundred years ago men thought that Earth was unique. Now they only think the human race is unique. ... I hope I’m still around when bright boys like you get the big surprise.”
Alsdorf prodded Duluth and was rewarded with a volley of snores and grunts, “Joe is no longer with us,” he remarked. “We ought to put him to bed. You, too, Mike. ... We need you wide awake when we go down to the surface to hunt out the supermen.” He gave a hearty laugh.
“Enjoy yourself,” grinned Lukas. “Now it’s your turn to lose some sleep. . . . How long will it take to select a touch-down point?”
The geophysicist stared absently through the observation panel. “Nine-tenths water,” he murmured almost to himself. “A good continental survey should take about a hundred hours, but we can probably select a useful area in a quarter of that time.”
Captain Lukas stood up and grabbed Duluth unceremoniously by the collar. “Give me a hand with the body, Tony.” He turned to Alsdorf. “Don’t be softhearted, Kurt. Tumble me out if anything unusual crops up.” With Chirico’s help, he maneuvered the still unconscious Duluth toward the doorway.
Three minutes later Duluth was installed in his bunk, and Mike Lukas headed for his own cubicle. Curiously, he had lost a great deal of his tiredness. As he settled himself luxuriously on his narrow mattress, he reached for a book and a packet of cigarettes.
Chirico watched him, amazed. “You’ve been awake all this time, Mike, and you want to read? You’re crazy. Why don’t you take a nice pill?”
“On your way, nursie. I’m just relaxing. I’ll doze off in a while.”
The small Italian made an economical gesture signifying a verdict of insanity and returned to the mess deck. He found Alsdorf intently studying a pocket slide rule and a scrap of paper on which were a rough pencil sketch of the hemisphere of Fomalhaut Three and a sequence of calculations.
“I’m beginning to think Mike takes his Buddhism seriously,” remarked Chirico, helping himself to another sandwich.
Alsdorf looked up and raised an eyebrow. The Italian took a large bite of his sandwich, then continued. “He’s been awake for fifty-six hours, and now he’s busy reading The Way to Nirvana. . *. Seems to me he’s halfway there already.”
The geophysicist registered a superior smile. “Overtired, Tony. . . . But I have noticed that most of these professional space pilots affect some sort of religion. A convenient safety valve for irrational fears.”
Tony thought it over for a few seconds. “In the last analysis, I’m a Catholic,” he said finally. “We all need something.”
Alsdorf picked up his slide rule. “Not all of us, Tony. I’m with the mechanists. The universe is clockwork, all cause and effect. Frankly, I don’t know how you people ever reconcile superstition with science. You and Mike must be intellectual schizoids.”
Chirico smiled. “You’re a computer, Kurt. Computers don’t go to heaven.”
The geophysicist stood up. “At the moment, I’m more interested in going to the navigation deck. And so are you, you taboo-ridden primitive. There’s work to be done. The sooner it’s done, the sooner we climb a little higher in Trans-Solar Chemicals.”
Chirico said suddenly, “Kurt, what do you want out of life?”
“Power,” said Alsdorf calmly. “And you?”
“I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it. Maybe I just want a sense of direction—to do something that’s worth doing.”
“You want power,” said Alsdorf confidently. “Everybody does. It’s the life force—the mainspring of dynamic evolution.
The Italian beamed. “O.K., Mr. Mephistopheles, let’s go and be dynamic about the landing site.”
They went out into the alleyway and along to the navigation deck, the magnetic bars of their shoes clanking eerily through the silent ship.
The survey, conducted in Olympian remoteness three hundred and fifty kilometers over Fomalhaut Three, proceeded with almost startling efficiency. Visibility was excellent, and it was the first time in Kurt Alsdorf’s experience that none of the delicate probing instruments broke down at the critical moment. Presently a stereo-radar, vegetometer, and other probe instruments united their findings to give a clear and detailed assessment of conditions in the Tropical Zone. It was even possible to do some useful work with the manual telescope.
After fourteen hours, Chirico looked up from his con-tourgrams and said, “This place is better than Earth, by damn!”
Even die impassive Alsdorf could not screen his excitement. “Tony, it’s the best yet. . . . Near-terrestrial temperatures, a one-to-six. oxygen ratio, a four-thousand-kilometer vegetation belt—why, with these conditions we can—”
“If I were you, I’d sit on the hysteria long enough to find out whether anyone is already squatting on Fomalhaut Three.”
The two men turned around to find that Lukas had quietly appeared through the companion hatch.
Alsdorf grinned sheepishly. “Hello, Mike. Still thinking in terms of supermen?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
Chirico said, “By all the laws, you should still be unconscious.”
Lukas walked over to the chart bench and began to inspect the fruits of research. “My, my,” he said dryly. “Just like Earth before we remodeled it with the hydrogen bombs. Now we’ll have to start all over again.”
Alsdorf waved a large telephoto print in front of his face. “Here’s the landing area—as from an altitude of three thousand meters. What do you think of that?”
“Looks fine.”
“It’s got everything, Mike,” said Chirico eagerly. “It’s the classic survey block—a hundred square kilometers of desert, foothills, river, and seaboard. Everything from dense vegetation to bare rockface. Think of the ecology.”
“Ton think of it. I’ll concentrate on getting us down there. . . . When will you be ready to move, Kurt?”
The geophysicist put the telephoto print down on the bench and watched Lukas speculatively. “What’s the matter, Mike? Is this trip going sour on you? Maybe you need a tonic.”
“Don’t we all?” Lukas gazed moodily through the observation panel. “Me, you, and Homo sapiens. We need a new perspective, a revitalized set of values. Space travel arrived when we were getting mentally and emotionally flabby. We reacted to it as to a shot in the arm. But so far, all we’ve done is get nowhere—a lot quicker. . . . We’ve found seventeen new planets, and we haven’t learned a thing. We just grab what we want and push on to the next Garden of Eden. We’re a bunch of traveling snakes in the grass.”
Alsdorf shrugged. “You mix a nice line in metaphors, but they don’t mean anything.”
“There’s one consolation,” said Chirico with a grin. “None of us space snakes has come across any Adam and Eve setup yet.”
“No,” said Lukas somberly. “But we will—and then, God help ’em.”
Alsdorf climbed up into the astrodome and began to readjust the manual telescope. “I’ll have the rest of the data ready in about six hours, Mike—if you can drop the Garden of Eden motif long enough to plan the touchdown.” His tone was heavy with sarcasm.
“On with the good work,” said Lukas. “I’ll go and kick Duluth out of bod and get him to check the volatility tubes.”
He disappeared down the companion ladder.
“Do you think Mike is off his trolley?” asked Chirico thoughtfully.
Alsdorf squinted down the telescope. “Not yet. He’s just got an ingrowing conscience. Space pilots don’t last very long, you know.”
The Italian began to reset the stereo-radar. “What the hell,” he said softly. “We’re all expendable.”
Nine hours later, the Henri Poincare swung slowly out of or
bit into the first vast circuit of an oblique descent spiral. After fifteen minutes it hit the outer fringes of the stratosphere, and the four occupants, each strapped in a contour berth on the navigation deck, prepared to endure an agonizing switchback as the ship reduced its velocity by frictional impact on the thin layers of air.
Lukas, relieved of all responsibility by the automatic decisions of the electronic touch-down phot, managed to achieve some degree of indifference to the tremendous pressures set up by deceleration. Long experience had enabled him to develop a kind of mental block against the worst discomforts of a bouncy touch-down maneuver. His head lay on the pillow facing an observation panel, and during the odd moments when the G forces eased sufficiently to let him use his eyes, he could see an expanding arc of Fomalhaut Three swinging crazily against the jet backcloth of space.
In spite of having a respectable number of voyages behind him, Duluth always took the touch-down drop badly. He would strain instinctively and uselessly against the relentless forces that crushed him down. As the Henri Poincare ploughed jerkily into the thicker layers of air, Duluth felt the deadly ache of resistance tearing at his muscles, and impotently muttered a broken stream of obscenities.
Alsdorf and Chirico, both comparative novices of the touch-down ordeal, had taken the sensible precaution of putting themselves completely to sleep. But even though they were unconscious, their bodies sagged and contorted as if they were twitched by invisible strings.
Presently the ship hit the atmosphere proper. This time the pressure was unendurable. Lukas and Duluth blacked out simultaneously. When they next opened their eyes, the pain was already fading from their bodies. They became conscious of a luxurious feeling of peace. The Henri Poincare had made a perfect touch-down.
Duluth shook his head in momentary bewilderment. “I almost swallowed my bloody tongue,” he remarked hoarsely. He looked around and saw that Lukas was already unbuckling his straps. Alsdorf and Chirico had stopped twitching, but they were still unconscious. “Look at the sleeping beauties,” added Duluth, feeling better. “How long does that lullaby stuff last?”
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