“I was just thinking,” he says, not entirely dishonestly, “that I would miss these sessions with you too. Very much, as a matter of fact.”
“But we don’t have to miss them now.”
“No. We don’t.”
He takes her hand between his and presses it there, lightly, for a moment. A small gesture of mild affection, nothing more. Then he suggests they get down to work.
“I’ve been getting mental static again,” she says.
“You have? Since when?” He is glad that the subject is changing, but this is a jarring, unwelcome shift.
“It began during the night. A feeling like a veil coming over my mind. Coming between me and Yvonne.”
“But you can still reach her?”
“I haven’t tried. I suppose so. But I thought everything was better, and now—”
“We’ve been travelling between stars the past few months,” he points out. “Now we’re getting close to one again.”
“When I was on Earth,” Noelle says, “I was only ninety-three million miles from a star, and Yvonne and I had no transmission problems whatever, even when we were far apart.”
“Even when you were as far apart as you could get on Earth,” he says, “you and your sister were standing side by side, compared to the distances between you out here.”
“I still don’t think distance has anything much to do with it. I think it’s something connected with stars, but I don’t know what it can be. Stars that are not the sun, maybe. But I don’t really understand.” Now she is the one who takes his hand, and holds it rather more firmly than he had been holding hers a moment ago. “I hate it when anything gets between me and Yvonne. It scares me. It’s the most terrifying thing I can imagine.”
The time has arrived now to emerge from nospace and set about reaching a decision about whether to attempt a landing on the world that Zed Hesper has labeled Planet A. Now is the moment when they will discover whether the Wotan can indeed jump in and out of nospace in any controllable way; and once that test is behind them, they will be able to learn whether the information that Zed Hesper’s instruments have brought them — all that impossibly detailed data about stars and planets and atmospheric composition and polar ice-caps — constitutes a genuine report on real components of the real universe, or is merely a set of imaginary constructs having no more connection with reality than the chants and potions of a prehistoric sorcerer.
Julia has the responsibility for the first part of the business, bringing the starship out of nospace. Accomplishing that is mostly a matter of giving the drive intelligence the appropriate orders in the appropriate command sequence, and then giving the command — in the presence of the year-captain, and with him supplying the proper official countersign — that activates the whole series of orders. And then waiting to see whether what happens next is anything like what is supposed to happen.
So is it done, step by step. And it comes to pass that the maneuver is successful.
It seems at first as if nothing has happened. There had been no perceptible sensation when they originally shunted into nospace, and there is none coming out, either. No sense of being turned inside-out (or outside-in), no banshee wails in the corridors, no flashing of gaudy colors up and down the visual spectrum and perhaps a little way beyond.
Indeed, there is no indication whatever that anything has changed aboard the Wotan. Except that — suddenly, astoundingly, miraculously — the throbbing gray nothingness of interlacing energy fields which was all that any of them had had to look at for the past year is gone from the viewplate, and the voyagers find themselves staring at jet-black sky, a dazzling golden sun not very much different from the one under which they had been born, and a bright scattering of planets. One, two, three, four, five, six planets, so it seems.
That is a stunning sight, after a fall year of staring at the majestic but featureless woolly wrapper of nospace that has surrounded the ship like a second skin. The voyagers who stand by the viewplate break into cheers, applause, giddy laughter, even a few sobs.
The year-captain is on the phone to Zed Hesper, who remains holed up in his scanning room down below. “What do you say, Hesper?” the year-captain asks. “Is this the place, or is this the place?”
This is the place, Hesper opines. They have accurately navigated the murky seas of nospace — Paco must be congratulated — and are sitting right in the middle of the solar system that contains his Planet A. Planet A itself is the fourth of the six worlds of this G2 sun, Hesper reminds him.
But it is not so easy to tell, at least not merely by glancing into the viewplate, which of the six planets is the fourth from its primary. If the Wotan ’s position in relation to this solar system were optimally inclined to the plane of its ecliptic at a nice ninety-degree angle, one could perhaps casually line the planets up in their actual order of distance from the sun just by peering at the screen. But the Wotan is not so conveniently positioned. At the place where they have emerged from nospace the voyagers have a skimming, edge-on, rim-shot kind of view of this solar system. And each of the six worlds is chugging along in its own orbit, naturally, some of them at perihelion at the moment and others at aphelion, and from the point of view of the Wotan, confronting the whole system on the skew as it is, they are strewn randomly around the sky.
Hesper knows which of the six is Planet A, though. Hesper knows all manner of things of this sort. He tells the year-captain, and the year-captain brings the eye of the viewplate to focus on the world they hope to explore.
It looks like a world.
It looks likethe world. The world of their dreams; their home away from home; the New Earth that they have crossed this immense gulf to find.
All of Hesper’s data-analogies and equivalencies have turned out to be smack-on-the-nose accurate. It is a miracle, the information that the sharp-nosed little man has managed to conjure out of the scrambled nospace numbers with which he works. Planet A seems to be exactly what he said it would be, an Earth-size world, more or less, with what appear to be blue oceans and patches of green vegetation and brown soil. There is a sprawling tentacular ice cap at the northern pole and a smaller, more compact cap at the southern one. There seem to be thin clouds scudding through what seems to be an atmosphere.
“Break out the champagne!” Paco yells. “We’re home!”
But there is no champagne, the supply that they brought from Earth having been exhausted the night of the six-month anniversary party and the newly synthesized batch still undergoing its second fermentation; nor are they “home,” however much this place may superficially resemble Earth; nor is there any guarantee that they will be able to settle here. Far from it. The year-captain can’t help thinking that the odds against their finding the right planet on the first attempt are about the same as those of four poker players being handed royal flushes on the same deal.
Still, all the early signs are promising. And the year-captain is neither surprised nor greatly displeased by Paco’s boisterousness. Boisterousness is one of Paco’s specialties. Besides, they have at least managed successfully to find their way to this place. That calk for a little jubilation, whether or not the planet turns out to be one they can use.
Julia has some more work to do now: braking the starship in such a way that it will glide down into orbit around Planet A. Because nospace travel takes place outside the classical Newtonian conceptual framework of the laws of motion, the “acceleration” that the stardrive imparted to the Wotan during its journey and the “velocity” that the ship thereby attained bear no relation to the starship’s movements now that it has departed from nospace. It is traveling, in fact, at the same speed it had been making at the instant it shunted from realspace to nospace in its departure from Earth. Since it had been positioned at that time in orbit not far above the surface of Earth, it is still moving now at its former orbital velocity. The starship is essentially still in orbit around Earth. But Earth is no longer nearby.
So Julia must make the necess
ary adjustments. The Wotan is not equipped for extended travel through realspace, but the braking motor with which the starship is equipped will be sufficient for a maneuver of this sort. It is a simple operation; Julia copes with it with ease.
Meanwhile Marcus and Innelda, whose main areas of expertise are in planetary survey work, are doing an instrument analysis of the world that they hope to explore. There is no sense expending the reaction mass needed to launch a drone probe, let alone sending a manned expedition down there, if Hesper’s readings of Planet A’s atmospheric makeup and gravitational force and other significant characteristics are incorrect.
But Hesper’s figures continue to be right on the mark. The gravity is reasonable, even alluring: .093 Earth-norm. A handy nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, a little shorter on oxygen and heavier on nitrogen than might be ideal, but probably breathable. Traces of carbon dioxide, argon, neon, helium, none of these deployed in perfect Earthlike proportions but basically close enough to be okay. No sign of free atmospheric hydrogen, which would be a bad thing, indicating disagreeably low temperatures. Definite and heartening presence of water vapor in the air, not a lot, but enough. A dry place, mostly, this planet, but dry like Arizona, not dry like Mars. And there is just a touch of methane, too, precisely as Hesper had predicted — indicating a strong likelihood that the processes of life are going on down there. Not a certainty — the methane could be bubbling up out of subterranean vents, perhaps — but nevertheless there’s a decent probability that living things are growing and eating and digesting and farting, maybe, and dying and decaying, all of which are methane-producing processes, on the cheerful turf of Planet A.
Innelda and Marcus turn in a positive report. Everything their instruments have told them leads to the conclusion that Planet A is a good bet for colonization. There is water at least in moderation; there is air that is recognizable as air; the gravity is okay; at least in a general way the place appears to be capable of sustaining life, Earth-type life. But on the other hand, it is not possible to detect the presence of higher life-forms already in possession of the place. There are no cities visible from up here, no roads, no construction of any sort. No radio emission comes from Planet A, or anything else in any part of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. No artificial satellites are in orbit around it. All this is to the good. It is not the intention of the voyagers to move in on thriving alien civilizations and conquer them, or even to wheedle permission with gifts of beads and mirrors to settle among them. The Articles of the Voyage specifically state that the Wotan is to refrain from making landings on any world that is seen to be inhabited by apparently intelligent beings, leaving the definition of “intelligent” up to the year-captain, but making it quite clear that any sort of intrusion on a going civilization is definitely to be avoided.
There are, presumably, enough habitable but uninhabited worlds available within relatively easy reach to make such an intrusion not only morally undesirable but also unnecessary. This may or may not be the case, the travelers realize, but it is a good working assumption with which to begin their galactic odyssey. There are those on board who have already pointed out that policies can always be revised, much farther down the line, if circumstances demand such a revision.
The year-captain is suspicious, of course, of the encouraging data that Marcus and Innelda have brought him. It is inherent in his wary nature that he will believe that it is much too good to be true that the very first planet they have located should conveniently turn out to be suitable for colonization. Unless, of course, every solar system in the galaxy has one or two Earth-type planets in it — but in that case, why have there been no signs thus far of intelligent life anywhere in the galactic neighborhood? If there are millions or even billions of Earth-type worlds in the galaxy, is it at all probable that Earth itself should be the only one of those worlds to evolve a civilization?
So, then: Is Earth, that green and pleasant world, the one-in-a-billion galactic fluke, and, if so, how come they have struck a second such fluke so easily? Or are there planets of this kind all over the place and it is the human race itself that is the improbable statistical anomaly? The year-captain has no idea. Perhaps there will be some answers later on, he thinks. But he is made definitely uneasy by the swiftness with which they have discovered this apparently habitable but evidently uninhabited world.
The action now shifts to Huw’s department. He is the chief explorer; he will mount and launch an unmanned probe to provide them with actual and tangible samplings of the planetary environment that awaits them.
The Wotan carries three robot drones, and has the technological capacity to assemble others if anything happens to these. But constructing replacements for the original three would require a considerable redeployment of the ship’s resources of matériel and energy, and Huw understands very clearly that every effort must be made to bring each drone back successfully from a launching. He runs simulated landings nonstop for three days before he is ready to send one of the little robot vessels forth.
The outing, though, is carried off perfectly. The drone emerges smoothly from the belly of the starship and spirals downward to its target with absolute accuracy. Taking up an orbital position some 20,000 kilometers above the surface of Planet A, it carries out an extensive optical reconnaissance, sending back televised images that continue to provide confirmation for the belief that no higher life-forms are to be found down there.
After circling Planet A for one entire ship’s day — making several orbital adjustments during that time to ensure full visual coverage of the planet’s land surface — the drone enters landing mode and descends to the great rolling savannah in the heart of the biggest and driest of Planet A’s four continental landmasses. There — guided by Huw, who is sitting at a set of proxy controls aboard the Wotan — it adapts itself to surface locomotion by extruding wheels and treads and sets out over a circular route with a radius of a hundred kilometers, gathering at Huw’s command atmospheric samples, soil, water, minerals, bits of vegetation, all manner of interesting odds and ends. Having accomplished this, it goes airborne again and moves on to the opposite hemisphere, where conditions are more or less the same though a trifle less barren, and takes a second set of samples. Then Huw, well satisfied with the robot drone’s accomplishments, keys in the command that summons it back to the Wotan.
For nine working days a team of seven expedition members, garbed head to toe in space gear as a cautionary measure, analyzes the drone’s haul in one of the sterile isolation rooms on the Wotan’s laboratory level. The year-captain, who has allocated the biological research to himself, finds bacteria in the soil samples, various kinds of protozoa in the water, and several heavily armored little ten-legged insectlike creatures in one of the drone’s collecting jars. He stares at these with awe and reverence: they are the first multicelled extraterrestrial beings ever discovered, though he suspects and hopes that they will not be the last.
Biological analysis reveals nothing obviously toxic in the soil samples or in the water. Analysis of the air samples indicates the strong likelihood that the atmosphere of Planet A will be accessible to lungs that have evolved in the air of Earth. The bacteria, when cultured in juxtaposition with microorganisms of terrestrial origin, engage in no interaction with them whatever, neither killing them nor being killed by them. This may or may not be a good sign — it remains to be seen whether the biochemistry of Planet A will be compatible with that of Earth, and the indifference of one set of bacteria to the other would raise the possibility that human settlers will be unable to digest and assimilate the foodstuffs that they find on this world.
Other little troublesome questions necessarily must go unanswered at this point. Are there airborne viruses somewhere down there, carrying fascinating new diseases? A few well-spaced scoops of atmospheric samples won’t necessarily reveal that. What about lethal amino acids in the meat of the Planet A equivalents of sheep and cattle, if there happen to be any such animals? Or murderous alkaloids in the loca
l versions of apples and asparagus? The drone samples can’t tell them any of that. These are matters that can only be discovered the hard way, in the fullness of time, by direct experience.
Huw says, “All that’s left to do now is for us to send down a manned expedition, captain.”
The year-captain is aware of that already. Still, Huw’s words give him a good jab in the solar plexus. He hopes he has not allowed his pain to show. He has, by now, chosen the team that will descend to make the reconnaissance, and, of course, he is not a member of that team. And, Lofoten training or not, he will probably always continue to feel occasional moments of dark regret over the necessity of remaining behind.
“We only want volunteers for this mission, of course,” the year-captain says. “Huw, do I hear you volunteering to be the leader?”
Huw grins broadly. “You have persuaded me to do my duty, old brother.”
“Innelda?” says the year-captain. “What about you?”
Innelda, slim, imperious, almond-eyed, is taken no more unawares by the request than was Huw. Everybody on board has been trained to some degree in the techniques of analyzing alien landscapes — their lives ultimately may depend on the quickness with which they react to unfamiliar conditions — but Innelda’s knowledge in that area isn’t just part of her survival training, it is her scientific specialty.
“And finally,” the year-captain says — there is great suspense involved in this choice; everyone is wondering about it — “we want to know something about the plant and animal life down below. Its biochemistry, primarily. Whether we’re going to be able to make use of anything for food, or will have to set up alternative food-sources using genetic manipulation of the foodstock we’ve brought with us from Earth.” His glance comes to rest on Giovanna. “This falls into your domain, I would think,” he tells her.
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