by Ben Bova
Meek echoed Jordan’s thoughts. “Well tended by whom?”
Brandon laughed. “Mother Nature.”
Thornberry broke into their conversation. “I’ve laid out the track of the two rovers on your navigation screen, Silvie.”
De Falla glanced at the screen. “I see it.”
Brandon leaned over the side of the buggy. “I can see their tracks on the grass!”
“Good,” said Thornberry. “Follow them right along.”
“Right,” de Falla said.
The trees looked vaguely like pines, Jordan thought. Tall straight trunks with foliage high above. The kind Native Americans used to build their dwellings. What were they called? Then he remembered, lodgepole pines. Good for construction.
De Falla followed the tracks of the robotic rovers as they rolled into the forest. The way was easy, the trees were spaced widely enough to allow ample passage through them. Not much foliage between the trees, just a few clumps of bushes here and there.
“Butterflies!” de Falla called out. Jordan followed his outstretched pointing arm and saw a dozen or so bright yellow creatures flittering around the bushes at the base of a tree.
“We should have brought a net,” Brandon joked.
“A mature forest,” Meek observed primly. “The trees’ canopies shade the ground, which makes it difficult for smaller shrubbery to grow.”
“There was a war here,” said de Falla. Before anyone could react, he went on, “A war of different forms of plant life, all competing for the sunlight they need to live. The trees won, and the other forms died out.”
“Not entirely,” Jordan said, pointing to a clump of bushes off to their right.
De Falla nodded, but replied, “If we’d been here a few thousand years ago, this whole region would be entirely different. Lots of different species, wouldn’t look anything like this.”
“Life evolves,” said Brandon.
“Ecologies evolve,” de Falla amended.
Meek h’mphed. Jordan smiled to himself: Harmon resents having a geologist making comments about biology. Territorial imperative, academia style.
A massive boulder loomed up ahead. Jordan could clearly see the tracks of the rovers swinging off to the right to get around it. Glancing at the navigation screen, he saw the rovers’ tracks marked in bloodred.
De Falla turned in the same direction to skirt the boulder.
“Look!” Meek shouted. “A squirrel!”
Jordan saw a tiny blur of gray scampering up one of the trees. It stopped, chattered angrily at them, then scooted farther up.
“It couldn’t be a squirrel,” Jordan heard himself say.
“It certainly looked like a squirrel,” Brandon said.
“Convergent evolution,” said de Falla, with awe in his voice. “Similar environment evolves similar species.”
“That’s not what we have here,” Meek said.
With a grin, de Falla replied, “Isn’t it? Sure looks like it to me. Grow a forest and you get squirrels.”
“Stick to your geology, man,” Meek asserted, “and leave the biological questions to those who know something about the field.”
De Falla shrugged good-naturedly.
“Haven’t seen any birds,” Brandon pointed out.
“You will,” de Falla assured him. Then he added, “Probably.”
“They won’t be the same as birds on Earth,” said Meek. “I can assure you of that.”
De Falla looked as if he wanted to argue about it, but he kept his mouth shut.
Meek shook his head. “All the life forms we’ve found in the solar system are completely different from anything on Earth.”
“Different environments,” said de Falla. “None of those worlds is anything like Earth.”
“What about those things in Europa’s ocean?” Brandon asked. “Beneath the ice. Aren’t they like terrestrial algae beds and kelp?”
“Outwardly,” Meek said, “but their biochemistries are very different.”
“Do you think there might be predators in these woods?” Brandon wondered. “You know, something like bears or wolves?”
Before Meek could reply, de Falla said, “That’s why we brought the stun guns with the rest of the equipment.”
“Maybe we ought to take them out and have them handy,” Brandon suggested.
Meek said firmly, “Predators will be wary of us, they’ve never seen anything—”
De Falla tromped on the brakes so hard they all jolted forward in their seats.
“The rovers,” Jordan said, pointing.
The two rovers were sitting about a hundred meters ahead of them, parked side by side among the trees, squat oblong shapes on multiple little wheels. They looked unblemished, factory-new, gleaming in the sunlight filtering through the trees’ canopies high overhead.
“Mitch, are you still there?” Jordan called.
“Right here,” Thornberry replied, his face filling the control panel screen.
“We see the rovers.”
“Yes, I’ve got them on camera.”
Brandon started to get up from his seat. “Let’s go see what’s wrong with them.”
Jordan half-turned and gripped his brother’s wrist. “Let’s scout the area a little first.” To de Falla he said, “Silvio, can you get us a little closer?”
De Falla nodded once and nudged the throttle. The buggy edged forward, slowly.
“I don’t see anything,” Brandon said.
“No footprints,” said Meek. “No sign of tracks in the ground. Except the rovers’ own, of course.”
When they got to about twenty meters’ distance, Jordan asked de Falla to stop. He stood up at his seat, gripping the seat back in front of him for balance, and scanned the ground around the rovers. Meek was right, he saw. The grass was undisturbed except for the tracks of the rovers themselves.
They were flat, ungainly vehicles resting on springy wheels designed to traverse over rough territory. Sensor pods and antennas studded their tops. Powered by a self-contained miniature nuclear electric system, they had a design life of six months. But they hadn’t lasted six hours on the surface of New Earth.
Cautiously, the four men got out of the buggy and approached the rovers. Both were silent, unmoving. Jordan laid a hand on the cover of the nearer rover’s miniature nuclear power plant. Cold. That shouldn’t be, he thought. The power plant should be warm, if it’s still functioning.
Jordan realized he couldn’t get to his shirt pocket for his phone with the biosuit covering him. Feeling slightly annoyed, he trotted back to the buggy and slid into his seat.
“Mitch, the rovers are cold, as if their power systems have shut down.”
“I’ll activate the robots,” Thornberry said. “They’ll do a diagnostic.”
The two robots suddenly stirred to life, got up from the rear of the buggy, and rolled across the grassy ground toward the rovers.
“Now we’ll get to the bottom of this,” said Thornberry’s image.
An hour later, as Jordan sat in the buggy, Thornberry’s face looked bitterly unhappy.
“They’re just dead,” he growled. “As if somebody drained the deuterium out of their reactors.”
“How could that be?” Jordan asked.
“How should I know?” Thornberry snapped.
“Should we fly a pair of new fusion reactors in to replace the dead ones?”
“I suppose so. But I just can’t understand what would conk out their power systems. It’s uncanny, it is. Downright spooky.”
Jordan tried to smile at the puzzled roboticist. “You’ll figure it out, Mitch, sooner or later.”
Thornberry shook his head and began to mutter his mantra, “I am maintaining a kindly, courteous, secret, and wounded silence—”
“Hey! Look!”
Jordan snapped his attention to his brother, who had walked a little way farther among the trees.
Standing again, Jordan called, “Bran, what is it?”
“I thought I
saw somebody out there.” He pointed deeper into the woods.
“Somebody?”
Meek and de Falla both strained to look in the direction Brandon was pointing.
“A man, it looked like,” said Brandon.
CONTACT
All three of them hurried to where Brandon was standing, gazing into the trees.
“A man?” Jordan asked, a little breathless.
“A figure,” Brandon said, still looking. “I thought it was a man. In some sort of a robe.”
“An optical illusion,” Meek sniffed.
“Dammit, Harmon, I know what I saw!”
“You know what you thought you saw,” replied Meek. “The mind plays tricks on us sometimes. I remember once, when I was a graduate student—”
Brandon strode off in the direction he’d been pointing.
“Bran! Wait!” Jordan shouted after him.
“He must’ve left footprints,” Brandon said over his shoulder.
Meek shook his head. “Nonsense,” he huffed.
De Falla flailed his arms. “I don’t know if he really saw a man, but there are surely insects here.”
“Really?” said Meek.
Jordan strode to his brother’s side. Brandon was peering at the ground, searching.
“It was right about here,” he murmured.
The ground looked undisturbed to Jordan. No footprints except their own.
“I could’ve sworn I saw him.”
“It doesn’t seem all that likely, Bran,” Jordan said gently. “Perhaps it was an animal of some sort.”
“Standing on its hind legs?”
Jordan shrugged. “This is all new territory. We don’t know what to expect.”
“Maybe we’d better get those guns.”
“Not a bad idea,” Jordan agreed. The two brothers went back to the buggy and pulled out a pair of slim dart-firing rifles.
“Do you think these things could stop a bear?” Brandon asked, heading back toward the spot where he thought he’d seen someone.
“They do on Earth,” Jordan said, hefting the rifle in one hand. It felt light, more like a child’s toy than a weapon that could protect them.
De Falla shouted, “Look! Birds!”
They looked up as a flock of brightly colored birds swooped past, wings glittering in the sunlight. They certainly look like birds on Earth, Jordan thought, no matter what Meek thinks.
“Squirrels, insects, birds,” Brandon said. “Why not people?”
Turning slowly, Jordan looked all around him. He saw de Falla and Meek gazing at the birds as they flew off into the distance. The two inert rovers, with the robots bent over them. Their own buggy. And Brandon standing beside him with that sullen, stubborn look he’d known since childhood, cradling the rifle in his arms.
“There’s absolutely no sign of intelligent life on this planet, Bran. You know that.”
“I know what I saw.”
Gripping his brother’s shoulder, Jordan smiled and said, “Well, if you’re right, we’ll run into him again, I imagine.”
“You’re humoring me, Jordy.”
“Perhaps I am,” Jordan admitted. “What else can I do?”
“Help me look for him!”
“I don’t think we should get too far away from the others. And the buggy.”
“Keeping your line of retreat open?”
“It’s the sensible thing to do, don’t you agree?”
“Sensible,” Brandon said. “But wrong.”
And he started off deeper into the forest.
“Bran, wait,” Jordan called, trotting after him.
“I saw a man,” Brandon insisted. “A man in a long robe. It was sort of bluish.”
Jordan grabbed for his brother’s arm again and dragged him to a halt. “All right. You saw a man. But there’s no sign of him now.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“If he exists, we’ll see him again, no doubt. In the meantime, I think it’s foolish to go crashing off into these woods before we know more about what this place is like.”
Brandon stood there glaring at his brother for several silent moments. Then, very deliberately, he clicked open the neck ring of his biosuit and lifted up the edge of his bubble helmet. The helmet deflated into a sagging lump of nanofabric and Brandon pulled it off his head entirely. Jordan was so shocked he didn’t know what to do, what to say.
“There,” Brandon said. “I’m breathing this world’s air. It’s not harming me.”
Jordan had to swallow hard before he could say, “How do you know that? There could be microbes, viruses, all kinds of—”
“Good morning, sirs.”
They whirled around toward the sound of the softly melodious voice. Standing fifteen meters before them was a tall, lean, totally bald, vaguely oriental-looking man in an ankle-length pale blue robe, holding a small furry creature in the palm of one hand and gently stroking it with the other.
ADRI
“I am Adri,” the man said, his voice soft, almost a whisper. “Welcome to New Earth.”
Jordan stared at the man, blinked once, twice, then gaped at him again. Standing beside him, Brandon was equally goggle-eyed.
The man smiled gently. “I hope I haven’t shocked you. The question of a first meeting is always very delicate, don’t you think?”
His face was spiderwebbed with age, Jordan saw. He was quite tall, a few centimeters taller than Meek, and appeared to be very slim beneath his long robe. His eyes were almond shaped, pale blue. The hue of his skin was faintly brownish yellow, almost gray. His cheeks were gaunt, hollow. His hands were thin, with long talonlike fingers that slowly stroked the furry thing he was holding.
Meek and de Falla came running up to them.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Meek. De Falla said nothing, he simply stared.
“I am Adri,” the man repeated, with a gentle smile. “I hope you’ll forgive the somewhat dramatic scenario we’ve concocted to produce this first meeting.”
“It was a surprise,” Jordan admitted. Then he said, “My name is Jordan Kell. This is my brother, Dr. Brandon Kell, Dr. Harmon Meek, and Dr. Silvio de Falla.”
“You said we,” Brandon snapped, almost accusingly. “There’s more of you?”
“Oh, my, yes. Of course. There would have to be, wouldn’t there?”
Jordan asked, “Who are you? How many of you are there?”
Looking slightly embarrassed, Adri replied, “Oh, there’s a goodly number of us here. I’m afraid we’ve kept ourselves hidden from your orbiting cameras.”
“You look human,” Jordan said, his voice hollow with awe. “You speak English.”
“Yes. We thought it best to make our first meeting as comfortable for you as possible. There’s no way to entirely avoid the shock, of course, but we do want to make it as easy for you as we can.”
“Then you’re not really human?” Meek asked.
“Oh yes, I’m as human as you are.”
“Convergent evolution,” de Falla said, his voice awed.
Adri shook his bald head. “Not quite. It’s a bit more complicated than that.” He slid the little pet into the folds of his robe, then clasped his long fingers together, as if in prayer.
But only for a moment. Pointing to the rifle still in Jordan’s hands, Adri said softly, “If those are weapons, you won’t need them here. There are no dangerous animals in this forest.”
Ignoring that, Brandon asked, “This is your home world? You live on this planet?”
“Yes. Of course,” said Adri. “I would be pleased to show you our community.”
“By all means!” said Brandon.
“Wait a moment,” Jordan said. “We should report this to the others.”
“Your colleagues aboard the ship. Of course. I’ll be happy to greet them.” Adri started toward the buggy, the four men following him. Brandon rushed ahead, dumped his rifle in the back of the buggy, then slipped into the driver’s seat. Jordan heard him speaking excitedly ov
er the communications link.
Jordan moved beside Adri, who paced along leisurely. The glossy-furred animal peeked out from the robe, big round eyes glittering, then ducked back inside again. Meek came up on Adri’s other side, and de Falla trailed a few paces behind.
“By the way,” Adri said, “you really don’t need those protective coverings you’re wearing. There’s nothing in the air here that can harm you.”
Jordan felt his brows knitting. “How can you know that? How can you be so sure?”
Pointing to Brandon, still jabbering excitedly with Thornberry, Adri replied, “He’s breathing the air.”
“He’s an impetuous young man,” said Jordan.
“But he’s unharmed.”
Jordan stared at the alien for a long, wordless moment, thinking, Can we trust him? Does he know what he’s talking about? Is he telling us the truth?
Turning to Meek, Jordan asked, “Harmon, what do you think? Would it be all right to get out of the biosuits?”
Glancing toward Brandon, Meek answered, “Let your brother be our guinea pig. He’s volunteered for the honor.”
Jordan asked Adri to sit beside Brandon so that Thornberry and the others aboard the ship could see him. On the smallish display screen their expressions were almost comical as they crowded around Thornberry: wonder, surprise, open-jawed awe. That must be what I looked like a few minutes ago, Jordan thought.
They were all talking at once. Thornberry began to look irritated as the rest of the team jostled him.
“I am pleased to meet you all,” Adri said, his voice suddenly strong enough to cut through their jabber. “I am delighted that you made the journey here, and I wish you well.”
Literally pushing the others away, Thornberry admitted, “To say that we’re surprised would be a grand understatement.”
“I understand,” said Adri.
Standing outside the buggy at Adri’s side, Jordan wondered, “Why aren’t you surprised? You seem almost to have been expecting us.”
Adri turned to him with his patient smile. “We’ve been observing you for a long time: watching your video broadcasts, monitoring your radio emissions. We detected your ship taking up an orbit around this planet. We projected a laser beacon to inform you of our presence. You quickly grasped its significance and sent your pair of machines here.”