by Ben Bova
There’s nothing you can do for him, Jordan told himself, except let him do his work without the rest of us breathing down his neck. He followed his brother and Elyse down the passageway to the area where the living quarters were.
Brandon stopped in front of the door to his quarters. “What now?” he asked Jordan.
“I don’t know about you, but I intend to sort out my clothing and personal supplies. I have a hunch that we’ll be going down to the surface much sooner than we had planned to.”
Elyse looked worried. “What could have made the rovers go blank like that?”
With a shrug, Jordan said, “Malfunctions happen. Mitchell will figure it out. He’s a good man.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Brandon challenged.
Jordan said, “Then we’ll have to go down to the surface and see what’s wrong with them.”
“See what’s happened to them, you mean.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“I’m going down to the hangar deck to check out our landing craft,” Brandon said.
“Good idea,” Jordan said. “But let’s give Mitchell a chance to reestablish contact with the rovers. No need to jump into the unknown just yet.”
“The hell there isn’t! Something’s going on down there and we’ve got to find out what it is.”
“Bran, whatever’s going on down there, have you considered the possibility that it might be dangerous?”
Elyse looked suddenly alarmed. “Dangerous?”
“Apparently the rovers think so,” Jordan said.
Impatiently, Brandon said, “There’s always a certain amount of danger when you’re dealing with the unknown.”
“That’s true,” said Jordan. “And it’s my responsibility to see to it that we minimize the danger as much as we can.”
“So we just sit up here in orbit with two dead rovers on the surface and a laser beacon shining at us?”
“You think it’s a beacon?” Elyse asked.
“What else?”
Jordan made himself smile as he said, “Bran, there’s a difference between what you want it to be and what it actually is.”
“Do you want to bet?”
Now Jordan’s smile turned genuine. “No thank you. For what it’s worth, Bran, I agree with you. I think it’s probably a beacon, too. But that doesn’t mean we should go barging down there before we’ve considered all the possibilities.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that I intend to do what all bureaucrats do when they face a new problem: call a meeting.”
* * *
By midafternoon Thornberry had given up in exasperation his attempts to reestablish contact with the two rovers.
When Jordan returned to the command center, Thornberry was alone at his console, sagging wearily in its spindly, wheeled chair, his rumpled shirt stained with sweat. He looked thoroughly defeated.
Jordan sat at the next console, beside him, and said softly, “You’ve done all you can, Mitch. Go get something to eat.”
Thornberry didn’t move. Instead he muttered, “I am maintaining a kindly, courteous, secret, and wounded silence as a gentle reproof against those two knock-kneed, goggle-eyed, outrageously obstinate machines.”
Chuckling at the Irishman’s wry humor, Jordan repeated, “Get something to eat. And then come over to my quarters at fifteen hundred hours. We’ve got to plan out what we should do next.”
Once Thornberry shambled out of the control center, Jordan called Brandon, Elyse, Meek, and Hazzard to join him in his quarters at 1500.
They all arrived promptly and sat around the coffee table, the expressions on their faces ranging from apprehensive to frustrated to downright worried.
Pulling the wheeled chair from his desk up to the little glass coffee table, Jordan said, “The five of you represent the chief technical groups of our team. We need to plan out what our next step in exploring New Earth should be.”
“Send a team down to see what happened to the rovers,” Brandon said immediately. He was sitting tensely on the sofa, next to Elyse. Hazzard sat at her other side, Meek and Thornberry in the armchairs, facing each other across the coffee table.
“And find out what that laser is all about,” added Elyse.
Turning to Meek, Jordan asked, “How much biological data did we get before the rovers blanked out?”
“Air samples,” said Meek. “Nothing startling. There are single-celled creatures in the air, the equivalent of bacteria and protists. A few insect analogs. Dust, of course. Some pollen.”
“Anything harmful?”
“I don’t have enough data to determine that. Yamaguchi’s looking over what we’ve got so far. If you send a team to the surface they should wear biohazard suits, to be on the safe side.”
Turning to Thornberry, Jordan asked, “Mitch, do you have any idea at all of why the rovers died?”
The roboticist shrugged his heavy shoulders. “As far as I can tell, they just shut themselves down. They must have encountered something beyond the limits of their programming.”
“Maybe somebody shut them down,” said Brandon.
“Somebody? Who?”
“Whoever’s shining that laser at us.”
“But there’s no sign of intelligence down there,” Thornberry argued. “No radio signals, no buildings, no roads…”
“There’s the laser,” Jordan pointed out.
Hunching forward in his chair, Brandon ticked off points on his fingers. “Whoever built that laser is using it to attract our attention. They disable the rovers before the machines can get close enough to the laser for us to see what’s there. Isn’t it obvious? They don’t want machines, they want us. They want us to come down and meet them.”
“So they can cook us and eat us,” Hazzard muttered, half-joking.
“I doubt that cannibals use lasers,” Jordan said.
Meek pointed out, “But they wouldn’t be cannibals, not at all. We’re a different species from them.”
“Like beef cattle are different from us,” Hazzard maintained.
No one laughed.
* * *
They debated the situation for another hour, but Jordan realized that there was only one decision they could reasonably make.
“All right, then,” he said at last. “We can send another rover or two down, or we can send a team of people. Which should it be?”
“People!” Brandon snapped.
Thornberry countered, “I’d like to send a couple of rovers to different places around the planet and see what happens to them. See if they operate normally.”
“That would mean the area around the laser beacon is a special place,” said Meek.
“A dangerous place,” Jordan said.
Brandon shook his head. “I think they’re making it abundantly clear that they want us to come down and meet them. In person.”
“Meet who?” Jordan asked. “If there are intelligent aliens down there, capable of building a laser and disabling our rovers, why are they being so coy? Why not try to contact us? Send us a radio message. Blink the laser, use it as a communications beam.”
“Yeah,” Thornberry agreed. “If they’re intelligent they could send up a spacecraft of their own to greet us properly.”
Meek shook his head. “It’s obvious that they don’t think the same way we do.”
“Is it?” Brandon countered. “Seems to me they’re very deliberately trying to get us to go down there and meet them.”
“Luring us in,” Jordan muttered.
“But why?” Elyse asked. “Why are they behaving this way?”
Jordan looked around the table at their faces, then said, “There’s only one way to find the answer to that question. We’ll have to send a team down to the surface.”
“Right!” said Brandon.
DECISIONS
It took another whole day to get a landing party assembled and checked out. Jordan gathered the entire group in the wardroom and had them push all six tables together. Once all
twelve of them were seated, he began to announce his decisions.
“As you know,” he began, “I try to manage our group on a consensus basis. We’re not a hierarchical organization, not like a university department. While we have leaders in the various fields of interest, such as astrobiology—”
Meek dipped his chin in acknowledgment.
Jordan went on, “All of you have been cross-trained in different specialties.”
Thornberry interrupted, “And we have a squad of robots to help us.”
Nodding, Jordan resumed, “That’s right. The robots are going to be of enormous help.”
“Like the two rovers dozing down on the surface,” Brandon sneered.
Thornberry shot him a dark scowl.
“Now, about the landing team,” Jordan said, hoping to forestall an argument. “I’ve decided to go myself. Bran, you’re our planetary astronomer: I think you’re an obvious choice. And you, Harmon, you’re our astrobiologist.”
“I could go,” said Paul Longyear, the biologist. “Professor Meek could stay in real-time link with me.”
“No, no, no,” Meek said, wagging a forefinger vigorously. “I’ll go to the surface myself. You stay here and monitor the biosensors, Paul.”
Longyear looked crestfallen, but said nothing.
Rank hath its privileges, Jordan repeated to himself, a little surprised that Meek was so insistent on going himself. His estimation of the man rose a notch.
“I want to go, too,” said Elyse. She was sitting beside Brandon, as usual.
Gently, Jordan said, “I’m afraid we won’t need an astrophysicist on this jaunt. Later, once we know more about what’s going on down there, we’ll set up a permanent base and we’ll all go to the surface.”
Elyse was obviously unhappy with Jordan’s decision, but Brandon looked relieved.
Jordan decided to keep Thornberry on the ship; the roboticist had launched two additional rovers to different points on the planet’s surface, and they were performing perfectly well, sending up reams of data. The two defunct rovers near the laser site remained quite dead, to Thornberry’s exasperated disgust.
“Mitch, you’ll be our mission controller,” Jordan told him. “Our contact with the ship.”
Thornberry’s heavy-jowled face contorted into an apologetic frown. “I hope I can keep in touch with you better than those two blasted deadbeats.”
“What about me?” Hazzard asked, from the far end of the table. “Why can’t I go with you?”
“We need you to run the ship, Geoff,” Jordan told him. Hazzard nodded acquiescence, but his expression was far from pleased.
He pointed out, “I could fly the plane that’s already down there back to the ship. Maybe recover the rovers while I’m at it.”
“You can do that from here, remotely,” said Jordan, “once we’ve reactivated the rovers.”
“Guess so,” Hazzard muttered.
“If something should … go wrong down on the surface,” Jordan added, “you’ll be in charge of the ship, Geoff. You’ll have to make the decision about what to do next.”
Dead silence. None of them wanted to face such a possibility.
Pointing to Silvio de Falla, the geologist, Jordan said, “We’ll need you on the team, Silvio.”
De Falla, short, swarthy, with a trim dark beard tracing his jawline, and large brown eyes, nodded wordlessly. But his smile spoke volumes.
“That’s it, I think,” Jordan said. “The four of us. Any questions? Suggestions?”
There were plenty, and Jordan patiently let everyone have his or her say. Finally, when the comments became patently repetitious, he concluded, “Very well, then. This afternoon we check out the landing vehicle and tomorrow we go down to the surface.”
* * *
His dreams that night were confused, jumbled, yet somehow menacing. Jordan saw himself in the beautiful, deadly Vale of Kashmir once again, but he was all alone, none of the team that should have been with him were there, not even Miriam. He was toiling down a dirt road that seemed endless, alone, not another soul in sight. Slowly, as gradually as summer wasting into autumn, the air began to thicken. It grew darker and harder to breathe. Jordan was choking, gasping, staggering as he tried to catch his breath, coughing up blood …
He snapped awake and sat up in bed, soaked in cold perspiration.
“Nerves,” he told himself. “You’ll be all right once you get down to the planet’s surface.” Still, he felt cold despite his compartment’s climate control. His hands were trembling.
He lay back on the bed and tried to think if there might be something he’d forgotten in his preparations for the landing. Four of us, he recounted. Planetary astronomy, astrobiology, and geology. Plus me. Their fearless leader. Four will be enough. If something goes wrong, if we die down there—he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember a quote from Shakespeare. What was it? From Henry V: something about, “If we are marked to die we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.”
Honor. We’re not going down there for honor. Then for what? He almost laughed. For curiosity. To poke into the unknown.
No, it’s more than that, he realized. Brandon’s right. Something—or somebody—is down on that planet and whatever or whoever it is, it apparently wants to meet us. And I want to meet it, whoever or whatever it might be.
There’s nothing down there that could kill us. At least, I don’t think there is. Nothing we know of. The sensors haven’t shown us anything dangerous. But what conked out the rovers? The unknown can be dangerous, he reminded himself.
Briefly he thought about taking a tranquilizer, but instead turned resolutely on his side and commanded himself to sleep.
He felt dreadfully alone.
DEPARTURE
Put on a good air, Jordan told himself as he showered. Exude confidence. Keep your fears to yourself. They’re unreasonable, anyway. Whenever you have nothing to do, the memories gang up on you. Get out there and get to work. Summon up the action of the tiger.
He gave a cheerful greeting to the handful of people already eating their breakfasts in the wardroom. Brandon was nowhere in sight. Nor Elyse.
Meek came in, smiling happily. “Good morning, all,” said the astrobiologist. “It’s a good day to go exploring, isn’t it?”
Jordan wondered if Meek was putting on a false optimism, too.
Breakfast finished, Jordan and Meek made their way down to the bowels of the ship, to the hangar deck where the landing vehicles were housed. The feeling of gravity was noticeably lower here, closer to the ship’s centerline.
Three sleek, silvery, delta-winged rocketplanes stood side by side inside the big, metal-walled hangar space. One side of the hangar was an air lock large enough to accommodate a rocketplane. Jordan saw that one of the four parking spaces was empty, where the plane that had already been sent to the surface had once been.
One of the planes gone, he thought. And this is only our third day here.
Their footsteps echoed off the metal deck and the bare hangar walls as Meek and Jordan approached the nearest rocketplane. Jordan could see his brother’s face through the windscreen of the vehicle’s cockpit.
Eager as a puppy, Jordan thought. If it were up to Bran, we would have flown down to the surface yesterday or even the night before, ready or not.
Clambering through the plane’s hatch, Jordan made his way toward the cockpit, hunching slightly because of the low overhead. Meek, gangling right behind him, had to duck even lower. The plane’s interior smelled new, unused. That will change, Jordan told himself.
They squeezed through the cargo bay, where a spring-wheeled excursion buggy big enough to carry six people was stowed, together with a pair of inert robots. I hope they work better than the rovers, Jordan thought.
The cockpit had six reclinable chairs. Brandon was already ensconced in the pilot’s seat, and the central screen of the control panel showed Geoff Hazzard’s dark, unsmiling face.
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“I’ll be standing by at the remote control panel here in the bridge,” Hazzard was saying. “Your vehicle’s programmed to land itself, but I’ll be right here in case there’s any problems.”
Brandon nodded briskly. “How much of a lag time is there between you and this ship?”
Hazzard’s eyes flickered once, then he answered, “Microseconds. If I have to take over, you won’t even notice a lag.”
“Good.”
“Ready to go?” Jordan asked.
Brandon turned around in the chair and broke into a big smile. “Now that you two are here, Jordy.”
Meek, hunched over so much that his hands were clasping his knees, asked, “Where’s de Falla?”
“Back in the equipment bay, checking out our biosuits and the other gear. Thornberry’s going over the buggy remotely, from the bridge.”
“Shouldn’t de Falla be here when we take off?” Meek asked.
“He will be,” Brandon said.
As if on cue, Silvio de Falla ducked through the hatch, his dark liquid eyes large and round, his teeth flashing as he smiled brightly. “Field equipment checks out,” he reported. “Thornberry says the buggy’s ready. We’re good to go.”
“All right, then,” said Brandon. “Everybody sit down and strap in.”
Jordan slipped into the right-hand seat beside his brother. A tiny control yoke poked out from the instrument panel in front of him, and a console studded with levers and switches sat between the two seats. As he pulled the safety harness over his shoulders he wondered if he should remind Brandon that he shouldn’t touch any of the controls. The ship flies itself, he knew, and Geoff can take over if he has to.
He decided not to mention it. Brandon seemed happy as a kid in a toy store. Why spoil his fun?
Turning slightly in his chair, Jordan saw that Meek and de Falla were in the two seats behind him, fastening their safety harnesses.
Eagerly, Brandon said to Hazzard’s image on the display screen, “You can start the countdown, Geoff.”
Hazzard nodded gravely, then said, “Jordan, mission protocol says you have to give the word.”