by Ben Bova
Staring up through a break in the trees, he could make out the largest of the planet’s two moons directly overhead. The natural satellites had merely been designated in the official log as moon one and moon two, although the name “Big One,” as it had been dubbed by a crew member, seemed to have stuck and was in general use now by almost everyone. The smaller moon, “Little Two,” would not be visible until well after nightfall. Big One was close, the features on its barren surface easily visible, even in the light of day.
He stretched tired muscles and leaned against the thickness of a large deciduous tree with deep crimson-and-green triangular leaves. He couldn’t see too far through the trees as he looked back down the long, gentle uphill grade they’d just climbed, but his legs and back told him they had come a long way. Gareth took great pride in how well he kept in shape, and was never a stranger to the ship’s exercise and recreation area, but even he had been winded by the strenuous workout he’d received today. He took another swallow of chilled water from his canteen, letting the cool liquid slide slowly down his throat, and regarded the others in the party.
There were ten of them, not including himself, and he noted with pleasure that nearly all of them were still out of breath from the brisk pace that Hannah had set through the thick woods. All but one of them were younger than he—truly younger, not the visage of youth gained by rejuvenation or cryo—and he smiled with an inward satisfaction that he was in better condition than they. The oldest member of the party was the xenoguide, Hannah Cee, and she had not been fatigued in the least by the exertion. While the rest refreshed themselves with cold water and fresh fruit or snack bars from their packs, she had impatiently continued to the crest of the rise and peered carefully over before coming back to rejoin the group, where she dug wordlessly into her own pack, searching for something.
“Well, Hannah?” he asked. “How’s it look?”
She said nothing; she didn’t even acknowledge his question. Instead, she retrieved what she wanted: a cylindrical roll of hard candy. She peeled back the wrapper and, not offering to share, popped one of the brightly colored confections into her mouth. She sucked on the treat for several seconds, the only sound she made was the gentle clicking of the candy against her teeth as she rolled it about her mouth with her tongue, and looked around the clearing—left, right, above their heads—as if trying to locate something high up in the trees.
It had taken Gareth Anmoore a long time to get used to her, nearly all the sixteen years they had served together. One of the men in the group, a young anthropologist who had signed on for this survey at their last stop, had overheard the captain’s question and raised his head curiously in Hannah’s direction, then looked to him, puzzled why his captain would tolerate such a thing. Gareth smiled again, deciding that the young man had mistakenly thought the xenoguide was either hard of hearing or was ignoring the captain altogether, and the man clearly wondered why the question had not been repeated. Gareth caught his eye and nodded in the direction of the rest of the party, dismissing him, and watched as he joined his companions.
No. Hannah had heard him all right. When she had an answer with which she was satisfied, she would speak, but not before. There was a time when the habit had irritated him, but once he’d learned that anything the woman said was worth listening to, he found that it was always prudent to allow her as much time as she needed. There was no need to repeat the question.
She turned her attention to him finally and approached, nodding, and bit loudly into the candy. He could hear the candy crunching as she chewed it into small bits. As she stopped before him, he caught the scent of strawberry for just the briefest of moments before the fruity aroma was lost on the steady breeze sifting through the trees.
“They do not know,” she said in her heavy frontier-world accent, “that we are here.” She nodded again and regarded him directly, and lifted her eyebrows in a silent question that told him she was waiting for his decision to continue up the hill. Her eyes twinkled in anticipation, and with her brow lifted he could see the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. The pale lines stood out sharply against her deeply tanned skin, and he knew she had spent many long hours in the sun without the protective goggles that were regulation for surface work. He had no plans to mention the violation to her.
Regulations—and common sense—had dictated that they set the landing shuttle down in a remote area of the forest and hike in to the valley. The shuttle had been left in a glen about five kilometers west of the river valley, holographically shielded to minimize detection. The electronic camouflage was so effective that the two crewmen left behind to guard the lander should have little cause to move the craft to keep their presence secret.
Gareth checked the group and noted that they appeared rested, and had had sufficient time to replace canteens and packs.
“All right,” he said at last. “Let’s get set up.” He reshouldered his own pack and nodded to Hannah, who led them the short distance to the top of the hill. The others were already setting up monitoring equipment when he reached the top. Most of them had been here at the observation site before and concentrated on their own tasks, paying scant attention to anything else. The seeming nonchalance of the survey party made what he saw upon clearing the top of the hill all the more fantastic.
“My God,” he whispered when he viewed the sight that lay below. “It’s even more fabulous than the aerial scans suggested.” The recordings had not done the visage justice, he realized as he studied the intricacies of the native village. No, “village” was far too inappropriate a word, one better suited to more primitive dwellings. What he gazed at now was a town.
Hannah turned, and for a moment allowed just the hint of a smile to appear at one of the corners of her mouth.
You knew what my reaction would be to this, didn’t you? he asked silently, appreciating the woman’s skill at being able to surprise him. He let his gaze sweep the peaceful settlement in the valley several kilometers below them and, when he looked again at Hannah, found himself staring at her back.
Her work done, for the moment, she had moved away from the group and had found a quiet spot on the trunk of a fallen tree to rest and take food and drink from her pack. Although she sat and ate casually on the tree trunk, Gareth knew that she continued to keep a close watch on their surroundings. The place where they now stood overlooking the town had been carefully selected: The terrain was difficult and unsuited to regular transportation routes. With so much wilderness available on the planet, and with game so abundant in areas of the forest considerably easier to traverse than this remote spot, it was unlikely that even the most diligent of hunters would come this way. Still, she kept a watchful eye for any sign that they might be discovered. Gareth trusted her completely and turned to the others, who had by now completed the setup of the observation equipment.
Just as well that you’re not looking at me now, Hannah, he mused as he watched the survey party busy themselves at their duties, because you’ve always been able to read me like a book. His initial reaction of wonder at seeing the beautiful town below had subsided to an acceptance of the realities of what they were doing here. As much as he wanted to allow himself to enjoy the excitement he felt at the discovery of this new race, he instead concentrated on the main reason for his accompanying the survey party: his personal assessment, as commanding officer of the mission, of the technological development of the natives. Later, perhaps, the two could share a private moment of giddy joy at the wonderful discovery they had made here; but, for now, they had other duties to perform.
A pair of cameras had been set up on tripods and two men were already recording separate areas of the town. Another was scanning through the structures with a handheld camera, his eye pressed close to the telescopic viewfinder, recording buildings and individual objects of interest at random as he came across them. He wore a lightweight headset and spoke frequently into it.
There was a flatscreen tablet on one of the small, folding stands they had
set up, and Gareth picked it up. It was linked to the handheld camera and he watched the image as the crewman surveyed the town. Most of what he saw as the camera panned first left, then right—occasionally holding and zooming in on one feature or another—resembled most of the recordings he had been viewing for the last week. Even though the close-up views on the flatscreen were incredibly detailed, he still found himself preferring to look at the valley itself.
“Have you found them yet, Jonato?” Gareth asked, not taking his eyes from the quiet town.
“No, sir. Not yet,” Jonato answered, sweeping the camera steadily over the settlement. “Hold on, sir, and I’ll check with the other party.” He spoke softly into the headset for a few seconds, then turned. “They’ve reached their observation point on the other side and are set up, but there are a lot of heat sources down there—ovens, open fires, boilers—and they’re having a hard time pinning them down. Shouldn’t take them too much longer, though.”
“Fine. Let me know when they have something.”
The young cameraman nodded and went back to his work. Gareth was pleased with the time and effort they had all put into this since the discovery of the natives was made. He had felt some trepidation about this at the beginning, a fear that Jephthah and his message of hatred of the Sarpan might spread to their work here. He need not have been concerned. He had chosen his crew well; these were men and women of science, their excitement over this incredible find holding infinitely more power over their emotions than the ravings of some hatemonger.
“Captain?” Hannah called from her perch on the downed tree. They were old, close friends; but she never addressed him by his first name in front of his crew, in spite of the fact that nearly every person on the survey ship who had served with him before was on a first-name basis.
He crossed to the tree and sat beside her. “Is everything all right?”
She looked at him, not understanding his concern for a moment, then shook her head quickly in apology. “No, no; I am sorry. Everything is fine. But I wonder: We are almost done with the first phase of our observation here. It is almost time that we made a report. What will you say?”
He furrowed his brow and sighed deeply at the question. “I haven’t exactly made up my mind, Hannah, and that’s the honest truth. A lot depends on what we find out down here today. But look at what we’ve already been able to document about them.” He held the flatscreen out to her to emphasize his point, but she refused it with a frown and a wave of her hand.
“I do not need pictures. I did not use them on my homeworld, and they do not help me here to know what my own senses tell me.” She stood, pointed to the valley. “Do you truly need more pictures to tell you that you have found a civilized people here?”
He chuckled softly and set the flatscreen gingerly on the tree trunk. The tablet rocked slightly on the rounded bulk, but did not fall.
“No, I don’t.” He rose and stood at her side, following her gaze over the valley.
The town was quiet, and from here—without the benefit of the close-up view offered by the flatscreen display—it was impossible to see any of the natives going about their business. There were sailboats visible in the river, and a larger craft, also sail-powered, appeared to be moored at one of the several docks dotting the shoreline. As the big boat drifted in its mooring, he caught sight of a smaller craft, sailless, in the slip next to it, and the dark smoke pouring from a high stack amidships told him it was steam-powered. Smoke curled from dozens of chimneys in the town in long streamers that disappeared on the wind. The buildings seemed to be well designed and constructed from a variety of materials, but even at this distance the unmistakable ruddy red color of bricks was dominant. There was occasional movement, but it nearly always disappeared among the buildings or among the boats moored along the waterfront before he could orient his eyes on just what it was.
He’d already seen the natives, of course, on the recordings. He had already received report after report from the anthropologists. Their lifestyles, what they ate, and how they carried out commerce—all had been covered by them. Chemical and spectrographic analysis of the air and water told him what they manufactured, what they burned, what they ate and what they threw out as garbage. In short, he felt that he knew them as well as one would know the foreign neighbors who might live in the apartment next to yours without really ever meeting or talking with them.
And that, sadly, he would probably never do. For the Paloma Blanca was a planetary survey vessel that had discovered intelligent life only by accident. And once his report was filed, he would most likely be ordered off-planet until ships carrying a team geared for more intensive study of his find could be sent.
“Sir!”
Jonato’s call sliced through his thoughts, and he reached behind him almost automatically for the flatscreen, nearly knocking it off the tree trunk as he did. He glanced at it expectantly, but saw nothing that wasn’t there before.
“Have you got it?”
“We think so. Second team has pinned down a heat source that looks about right approximately four kilometers from here, in the woods north of the town.” The handheld camera dangling in his right hand, Jonato gestured with his free arm to a spot farther up the river valley. “There.”
Gareth strained his eyes in the indicated direction but saw nothing out of the ordinary, then returned his attention to the flatscreen. “Where the hell is it?”
“Sorry, sir, but I don’t have the right angle from here for visual yet; but second team assures me it’s there behind that series of hills.”
His own headset had been hanging loosely around his neck and he fumbled it over his ear, barking into the collar pickup, “Control, Anmoore here. I’m using flatscreen …” He turned the tablet over in his hand, frantically looking for an identification number, but Jonato, overhearing, broke into the communications link.
“Control, put your feed to Captain Anmoore on tablet nine, priority link.”
“Thanks,” he said quickly to the young cameraman, then: “Control, feed me the signals from the handhelds from both teams combined with your overhead. Three-part image, please.”
The flatscreen immediately divided into three separate windowed images. One of them, the signal from Jonato’s handheld, blurred unsteadily as the man reoriented his camera on the location of the heat source. The image from the second team was steady, but it offered no more clue as to what was there than had Jonato’s a few moments earlier—whatever it was, was located in a slight depression and was effectively shielded from view on both sides of the valley, despite their higher elevation. The third image, however, was being sent by an observation shuttle hovering above the town at too high an altitude to be seen, and it showed the same oval object they’d detected a few days earlier from orbit. A mixture of brown and green, the object blended almost perfectly with the ground below it and had remained undetected throughout most of their surface scans as long as it was immobile. In fact, only by watching the slight change in coloration as it moved could one even see it at all.
But now, as it had when first detected, it seemed to move slowly, with no indication as to purpose or design. The orbital recordings they had were limited and inconclusive regarding what it was, registering only its size, color and density, and the fact that it was a mobile heat source of some kind. Unlike the steam-powered boats, whose purpose and nature were self-evident, this object had been a mystery to them and was the main reason for his presence today.
The object had been moving north, with the wind, but according to its orientation on the flatscreen it was slowly rotating to a heading that took it in a more westerly direction. Could these be controlled? he wondered.
There was a slight buzz in his ear, then, “Captain Anmoore?”
“Go ahead.”
“We’ve got a second heat source, sir, that’s originated near the first.”
He stared hard at the flatscreen, trying to find it. The first object was centered in its window, and nothing else a
ppeared to be moving. The other two images showed only the wooded hills that maddeningly hid the objects from view. Gareth tapped the overhead view with a fingertip, outlining the window in which it appeared and opening a menu. He tapped the latter hurriedly, canceling the two useless views and expanding the overhead image to fill the entire flatscreen.
There! In the upper right corner was another of the green-brown oval shapes. This one, too, first started moving to the north, but was now swinging around to fall in behind its companion, which appeared to have slowed down to allow the second object to catch up. There was no question in his mind now that these were controlled objects.
He was aware that there was an increased chattering of voices all around him, but he was so involved with the image on the flatscreen that he paid little heed to what anyone was saying. It was Hannah’s hand on his shoulder that finally made him look up to see what had caused the sudden commotion.
One of the objects was just now clearing the top of the hills, and as he compared it with what he saw on the flatscreen he realized that from its position it must be the second of the pair. Farther behind the first, it was not only rising faster but appeared to be gaining speed. He watched it in silence for several moments, and was startled when the other hove boldly above the line of hills. It too had gained speed and was closer than he had originally imagined, giving him a better look. The green-brown coloration apparently was limited only to the upper portion of the things and gradually diffused into a lighter color, leading him to believe that the darker coloring was intended only to make them harder to see from the air. There were markings of some kind on the sides, slightly below what would be the widest point, but he couldn’t quite make out what they were.
It occurred to him suddenly that now that the objects were clear of the hills, the cameras could give him a closer view, and he returned his attention to the flatscreen. Calling up the menu, he brought back the other two windows and gasped loudly enough that Hannah turned to him and, against her nature, stood closer to afford herself a better look at the screen. She, too, stared openmouthed at what she saw.