Flight of Exiles

11

Guido Estelella was an astronaut, the only man on ship—asleep or awake—who had experience in piloting rocket craft from orbit down to the surface of a planet and back up again. He hadn’t been one of the political prisoners, back when the ship had been an orbital jail, a place of exile for Earth’s scientists. He had been a free man, an astronaut by training. It was his joy.

But the same Earth government that made prisoners of thousands of scientists and sent them into orbital exile with their families had also cut space flight down to almost nothing. Orbital flights, mostly to repair communications and weather satellites; a few flights to the Moon each year, bringing workers to the factories there. That was all. No more Mars flights. No further exploration of the solar system. Earth could not afford it.

So when the prisoners coaxed Earth’s government into letting them drive their orbiting prison out toward the stars, Estelella volunteered to join them.

“After all,” he said, “it’s my namesake, isn’t it?”

So he went to the stars, frozen in cryosleep for nearly fifty years, to be awakened when he was needed. Now he was awake and working.

And most unhappy.

Guido Estelella stood in an insulated pressure suit on the surface of the new world. Everyone else called it Major, a contraction from “Alpha Centauri’s major Planet.” But in his own mind, Estelella called it Femina: a woman, a certain kind of woman—beautiful, selfish, treacherous, hot-tempered, dangerous.

He always felt tired here. Maybe it was the high gravity, putting an extra load on his muscles. Maybe it was just the constant fear.

For six weeks now, Guido had been flying a small landing craft down to the ground from the main ship, which was now orbiting five hundred kilometers above the planet’s equator. At least twice each week he carried men and equipment down to the small base camp they had made by the shore of one of Femina’s landlocked seas. The rest of the time he trained youngsters to fly the landing craft. There had been one wreck, killing two men and a girl. There had been several very close calls. Guido had aged more in the past six weeks than he did in his fifty years of cryosleep. Far more.

At the moment he was standing halfway between the stubby, winged landing rocket and the sprawl of equipment and plastic bubble tents that made up the base camp. A strong wind was whipping the green water of the sea into whitecaps, but inside his pressure suit, Guido felt the wind only as a faint screeching sound, muffled by his earphones. What was bothering him wasn’t the wind, but the ugly brownish-yellow cloud that it was carrying toward them from the sea horizon.

“Ship to camp,” a girl’s voice crackled in his earphones. “We’ve confirmed that there’s a new volcano active on the far coast of your sea, and the prevailing wind is bringing the fallout in your direction.”

Guido nodded unhappily inside his helmet. He clicked a button on his waistband panel.

“I think we’d better get the shuttle up and out of here before that cloud arrives.”

“Take off early? But we’re not ready.” It was Dan Christopher’s voice, coming from the camp, much stronger than the ship’s transmission.

Guido began to head toward the shuttle craft. “The last time I saw a cloud like that, it brought with it a lightning storm that kept us grounded for two days. And the rain had such a high sulfur content and so many stones in it that we had to resurface the entire top of the shuttle. The heat shield, even the pilot’s bubble were pitted and etched. I don’t want to get caught on the ground like that again.”

“But you can’t take all of us with you. Some of us will have to stay here during the storm. And the equipment…”

“My first responsibility is for the shuttle. Your equipment is • protected, and you can sit out the storm in the underground shelter.” He reached the shuttle’s hatch, popped open the access panel, and pressed the stud inside. The hatch cracked open and the ladder unfolded at his feet.

“Wait,” Dan’s voice responded. “I’ll send out as many people as we can. How many do you have room for?”

“Four. Unless you want to remove some of the cargo we packed aboard this morning.”

“The deuterium? No chance. It’s worth a helluva lot more than any of us.”

Guido looked at the sea. It was frothing heavily now, steep breakers building up and dumping their energy on the sandy shore. The grass and trees were swaying in the mounting wind. The cloud was closer, spreading, blotting out the sunshine arid the golden sky.

“I can wait about ten minutes,” he said.

Inside the main bubble tent of the camp, Dan frowned and glared at the radio set. The main tent was a hodgepodge of radio equipment, viewscreens, cooking units, tables, crated supplies, folding tables and chairs, and five busy people.

Dan could hear the wind’s growing anger outside. One of the girls seated at an analysis workbench glanced up at the roof of their transparent bubble: the plastic was rippling in the wind, making an odd kind of crinkling noise that they’d never heard before. It had taken them days to get accustomed to things like wind, and the noises that an open world makes. Now it was starting to sound frightening.

“Nancy, Tania, Vic…you three get into suits right away and get to the ship. Ross, you and I are going to stay. Vic, bring the latest tank of deuterium with you.”

“But it’s less than half full,” Vic argued.

Dan waved him down. “I know, but we’d better get it shipboard. No telling how bad this storm can get; might damage the equipment. The deuterium’s far too valuable to risk.”

Vic nodded.

“Get into a suit,” Dan said. “Ross and I will hang on here.”

Ross Cranston glanced sharply at Dan, but said nothing. He didn’t like being second-best to a meter-tall tank of stainless steel, even though he knew that the deuterium gas inside it was more important to the ship than any computer operator.

The two girls and Vic were suited up in a few minutes, moving slowly in the heavy gravity. Vic hefted the tank by its handles, his knees giving slightly under its weight.

“Can you manage it?” Dan asked anxiously. “Yeah.” Vic’s voice was muffled by his helmet. The three of them cycled through the airlock and started trudging heavily through the wind-blown sand and grit toward the sleek little shuttle rocket. Dan watched them through the tent’s transparent plastic. The two girls each grabbed a handle of the tank and helped Vic to carry it.

Turning, Dan saw that Ross was already at the hatch to the underground shelter.

“I’m going to suit up and make a last check of the refining equipment,” Dan told him. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the wind, even though Ross was only a few meters away.

Ross nodded, visibly unhappy.

“Stay by the radio while I’m outside,” Dan said as he reached for one of the two remaining pressure suits hanging stiffly by the airlock.

Ross frowned, but nodded again.

He’s scared, Dan said to himself. Scared of the storm, and scared that I might get hurt and need him to come out and help me.

Neither of them had been on the ground when the first storm had struck, several weeks ago. Two people had been badly hurt when the wind toppled their communications antenna squarely onto the main tent. After that, the underground shelter was dug and the antenna was moved away from the rest of the camp. By the time Dan had his suit zipped up, the shuttle’s rocket engines had roared to life, out-howling even the mounting fury of the storm. Dan reached for his helmet and held it in both hands as he watched the shuttle trundle forward on its landing wheels, then gather speed and scream past the tent toward the beach. Its image shimmered and grew hazy in the heat from its own exhaust, but, squinting, Dan made out the delta-shaped craft as its nose lifted from the ground. It rolled along on its rear wheels for a moment longer, then it seemed to shoot almost straight upward, angling into the sky like a white arrowhead against the gathering darkness of the clouds.

In less than a minute the rolling thunder of the rocket’s takeoff had rumbled away, leaving only the keening of the wind and the flapping of the tent’s supposedly tearproof plastic.

As he put the helmet on, Dan thought, There’s a big difference between seeing storms on videotapes and really being in one.

He checked the suit radio. “I’m going out now, Ross.”

“Okay.”

Dan turned to see Ross through the helmet’s faceplate. The computerman looked scared and sullen.

“If you go down into the shelter, tell me before you leave the radio. I don’t want to be stuck alone out there.”

“I will.”

Dan nodded and opened the inner airlock hatch. While the airlock was busy sealing itself and pumping out the good breathable air, Dan was trying to calm himself.

He wasn’t frightened, he was excited; happy, really. He knew that was dangerous. If you’re scared, like Ross, you don’t take chances. But Dan was soaring high, spaced out on the excitement of being on the surface of a planet, the planet, the new world, facing its dangers unafraid. The storm, the wind, the crashing of the sea, the tossing golden trees, the dust and sand that was blowing through the air in ever-thickening clouds—it was wild and free. Not like the ship. Not like the quiet, orderly world where everything went according to schedule and there was absolutely no difference between one day and the next. This was life!

The airlock lights turned green. Dan clumped heavily to the outer hatch and turned its control wheel. It moved slowly, slowly, then the hatch popped open and a gust of grit-filled air puffed into the airlock.

Dan had to lean hard against the hatch to get it to swing open wide enough for him to go outside. Already his muscles felt strained. The high gravity made everything feel heavier than it should: the suit weighed down on him, the hatch opened grudgingly. It was an effort to lift one booted foot off the floor of the airlock and place it on the sandy soil outside.

The wind caught Dan by surprise. He had heard it long enough, but now he felt it as physical force. Even inside the suit he could feel the wind buffeting him, trying to push him down.

He grinned.

Turning his back to the wind, he began trudging along the edge of the circular tent, heading for the once-gleaming jumble of metal shapes that was the refinery.

It gleamed no longer. Many weeks of being exposed to this corrosive atmosphere had dulled its exterior finish, and the storms and rains had etched and pitted the metal. But the insides still work. Dan told himself as he looked along the length of pipes that led down to the sea. Take in sea water, extract the deuterium, then return what’s left—about 99.97 percent of it. We don’t want much from you, Dan said silently to the sea. Just three hundredths of a percent. Enough to live on.

A shriek of metal against metal made him jump in sudden fear. From inside the helmet, he couldn’t see what was happening. He had to turn around and lean his whole body backward to look up.

One of the solar battery panels—the collection of silicon-based cells that converted sunlight into electricity—had ripped loose from the roof of the refinery’s storage tower. Now it was sliding along the bulbous metal domes of the separation equipment, banging, screeching… It blew free and sailed like a jagged enormous leaf into the wind, pinwheeling as it disappeared into the dust clouds that were blowing everywhere.

“Never worked right anyway!” Dan yelled. The solar batteries had been badly eroded by the sulfur-rich air. Dan had been forced to fly a small generator down from the ship to provide electricity for the base camp.

Everything else on this side of the equipment complex looked tight and safe. Even if the other solar panels rip off, that’s no problem. Unless they tear into the tent.

Dan’s legs were starting to tremble with exertion. He forced himself to plod around the side of the big refinery. As he turned the corner, the wind caught him head-on and nearly toppled him backward. Leaning heavily into the wind, he trudged on.

It was getting very dark now. And the wind was screaming insanely. Dust clouds made it hard to see any distance at all.

Lightning flashed. Dan heard it crackle in his earphones as it flickered out over the sea, brightening the whole scene for an eyeblink’s time. It sent a jolt of irrational fear through him.

Then came the boom of the thunder, distant but menacing. Dan moved on.

He couldn’t see the radio antenna in the darkness and dust. Then another flash of lightning and there it was, swaying like a gigantic, leafless, branchless tree. But it held firm. The new anchor pins were doing their job.

A sudden gust of wind actually lifted one of Dan’s boots off the ground. He swayed for a moment, fought hard for balance, then planted the foot back on the ground.

“Ross?” he called into his helmet microphone.

No answer.

“Ross! Are you there? I’m coming in… be back in a minute.”

Silence. Only the crackling of lightning static in his earphones. He’s gone back into the shelter, Dan realized.

Bending into the wind, Dan clumped forward slowly. It was painful, each step. Another horrible tearing sound, and he saw out of the corner of his eye another of the solar panels flipping off madly, hitting the ground with one corner and bouncing along like a child’s runaway toy.

Then a more ominous sound. A groaning, gut-wrenching sound, like the earth itself being pulled apart. Dan looked up at the metal domes and towers alongside him, but couldn’t see any cause for the…

It moaned again. And fainter, the sound of—flapping. Something soft, something plastic… the tent!

Dan pushed himself madly along the side of the refinery, trying to get to the side where the tent stood. If it still stood. He stumbled and fell face forward, but hardly stopped at all. He crawled on all fours for a few paces, then painfully pushed himself to his feet again. The wind was getting intolerable.

Grabbing hold of a projecting ladder-rung from the metal tower he stood next to, swaying in the howling insanity of the wind, Dan rested for a moment, then pushed on. He rounded the corner and saw what the groaning noise was.

The tent was collapsed and flapping on the ground like some monstrous dying pterodactyl. Dan couldn’t see the airlock, couldn’t tell if Ross had made it to the underground shelter before the collapse. If he hadn’t, he was dead inside there.

Only one thing was certain. There was no way for Dan to get inside to safety.

The storm howled triumphantly.

In the ship’s observation center, at the zero-gravity hub, the only sound was the faintest whispering of the air-circulating fans.

Larry hovered weightlessly at the transparent wall of the big plastiglass blister, staring out at the massive curving bulk of the golden planet below. A huge yellow-brown smear was staining one section of the planet’s surface: the storm.

He touched the plastiglass wall with his fingertips, anchoring himself lightly in place. There was a wall phone within arm’s reach, but he didn’t want to use it, didn’t want to hear what was happening.

“Dan’s still down there.”

Before he turned, he knew it was Valery’s voice. In the golden light coming up from the planet, she looked like an ancient goddess, shining against the darkness of the observation center’s dim lighting. Her face, though, was very human: worried, almost frightened.

Larry said, “The shuttle came back about fifteen minutes ago. Estelella brought the two girls and Vic O’Malley with him. Dan and Cranston stayed. Dan made certain that he sent every gram of deuterium they had processed.”

“And now he’s in the middle of the storm.” Her voice was calm, but just barely. Larry could hear the beginnings of a tremble in it.

“They’ve got the underground shelter. He’ll be all right.”

“Has he sent word? Do you know for sure…?”

Larry jerked a thumb toward the storm cloud. “Can’t get radio transmission through that stuff. We’ve tried every frequency. Too much electrical interference.”

“He could be dead.”

“No. He’s tough and smart. He’ll get through it all right.”

She stared out at the swirling muddy-colored storm cloud.

“It looks alive… like some monster eating—” Val reached out for Larry. “Can’t you do anything! Send the shuttle down for him? Something!”

He took her in his arms and rocked her gently. “There’s not a thing we can do but wait. The shuttle would be wrecked trying to fly through that. All we can do is wait.” And his mind was asking him, If it were you down there and Dan safely up here, would she be this upset?

“It makes you feel so helpless,” Val whimpered.

“I know. I know.”

“How long will the storm last?”

Larry shrugged. “Nobody knows. Not enough data on the weather patterns of this planet. The last one took two days to blow past the camp. But we don’t know if it was an unusually big one, or…” He let his voice trail off.

“Or an unusually small one,” Valery finished for him. “This one looks bigger, doesn’t it?”

Larry didn’t answer.

She kept staring out at the planet, at the storm. “Oh, Larry, if he dies there…”

“It’ll be my fault.”

Val turned sharply enough to bounce slightly away from the plastiglass. “Your fault? Why should it be your fault?”

“I sent him down there, didn’t I?”

“It’s part of his job. He wanted to go.”

Larry said, “I could have stopped him. I could have ordered somebody else to go down instead. I knew it was dangerous down there.”

Val was drifting freely in a small semicircle around Larry. He had to turn his back to the plastiglass to keep his eyes on her. She floated in midair, a golden goddess shining against the night.

“Did you want him to be exposed to danger?” she asked.

“You mean, did I want him to risk getting killed?” Larry closed his eyes and found the answer in his mind. “No, I didn’t.”

“Not consciously,” Val murmured.

“What?”

“You knew he’d be running into danger.”

Nodding, Larry admitted, “Sure. I even thought about going down there with him… but I’m not qualified for any of the jobs that need doing down there. I couldn’t justify taking up space on the shuttle and in the camp, just to show everybody I’m as brave as Dan is.”

“But in the back of your mind you knew he might be killed.”

“Of course. But that doesn’t mean…” He began to see what she was driving at. “Val, you don’t think that I…you can’t believe that!”

“I don’t,” she said. But it sounded weak, unconvincing.

Larry thought, it would certainly settle all the problems if he got killed down there. Then another part of his mind screamed, And that would make you a murderer, whether you planned it beforehand or not!

Valery seemed to sense the turmoil in his mind. She took him by the hand and pushed against the plastiglass wall, driving the two of them into a slow drift across the big, darkened, empty-looking chamber.

“I guess you’re right,” she said over her shoulder to him. “There’s not much we can to except watch and wait.”

“Val… I didn’t want it this way, honestly. I didn’t…”

“I know,” she said soothingly. “I know.”

They touched down on the floor easily, their velcroed slippers catching and holding gently against the carpeting there.

“As long as we’re here,” Valery said, letting his hand go and walking carefully, in a slow zero-g glide, toward the desk and instruments in the middle of the room, “I might as well show you what I’ve found out about the other stars.”

She’s changing the subject, Larry realized, trying to get both our minds off Dan.

Val sat at the desk while Larry stood beside her. She touched buttons on the desktop keyboard and pictures appeared on the viewscreen.

To Larry, they all looked like tiny white dots. The stars were bigger and brighter; in some pictures they were glaringly bright. But the planets around the stars were all featureless blobs of light.

Valery shook her head after showing about twenty of the pictures. “Those are the best we have so far. And it’s all pretty depressing. Nothing even close to being Earthlike.”

Larry blinked at her. “None of those planets…”

“They’re mostly gas giants, like Jupiter. Or little balls of rock, like Earth’s Moon.”

“Can you be sure?”

She ran a hand through her hair. “Oh, I’m still working on it, trying to get better data, more precision in the spectrograms and visuals… but it looks very bad.”

Larry sagged into a half-sitting, half-leaning position against the desk’s edge. “And this goes for both Epsilon Indi and Epsilon Eridani.”

“Yes, both stars. I’m afraid the planet here is the only choice we’re going to have, Larry.”

He sat there a moment longer, his mind turning slowly, wearily. “When … when will you report this to the Council?”

“I want to make the data much more precise,” she answered. “I haven’t shown this to anyone yet… you’re the only one. In a week or two, I’ll report it to the Council.”

He nodded dumbly.

Valery went to turn off the last picture from the viewscreen. “Oops!” She pulled her hand away from the keyboard as if it were burning hot. “I almost hit the ERASE button. That would’ve been stupid.”

“Huh?”

“All this data—weeks and weeks of work—would be erased from the computer’s memory bank if I had touched that button just now.” She pressed the proper button and the viewscreen went blank. Looking up at Larry, she added, “The only two places where the data’s stored are in the computer’s memory bank … and my own head.”

Larry nodded at her, but said nothing.