New Earth

Awakening

He opened his eyes slowly.

His eyelids felt gummy. Slowly he reached up with both hands to knuckle the cobwebs away. My name is Jordan Kell, he told himself. I’ve been asleep for eighty years.

He was lying on his back in the cryosleep capsule, looking up at the softly muted glow of the ship’s ceiling panels. The coffin-sized capsule smelled like an antiseptic hospital room, cold, inhuman. A shudder went through him, his body’s memory of the years spent suspended, frozen by liquid nitrogen.

Peering down the length of his naked body he saw that all the tubes for feeding and muscle stimulation had been removed. Nothing but faint scars here and there.

They’ll fade away soon enough, he thought.

Well, we must have made it, he told himself. Eight point six light-years. Eighty years to reach Sirius.

Then a pang of doubt hit him. Maybe we’re not there! Maybe something’s gone wrong!

The robot slid into his view. It was a semi-anthropomorphic design, man-shaped except that it rolled along on tiny trunions instead of having legs. Its silicone-covered face had two glittering optronic eyes, a slit of a radiator where a human nose would be, a speaker grill for a mouth.

“Are we…?” Jordan’s voice cracked. His throat felt dry, raw.

The robot understood his unfinished question. “The ship has arrived in orbit around Sirius C,” it said. Its synthesized voice was the rich, warm baritone of a noted dramatic actor back on Earth.

“Good,” Jordan croaked. “Good.”

“Diagnostics show that you are in satisfactory physical condition,” the robot reported. “Your memories have been uploaded successfully from the central computer back into your brain.”

“The others…?”

“Their uploads are under way,” said the robot. “You are the first to be revived, as per mission protocol.”

Rank hath its privileges, Jordan thought.

The robot turned away briefly to the row of diagnostic monitors lining one wall of the narrow compartment. When it came back to Jordan’s open capsule it bore a ceramic cup in one metal hand.

“A stimulant,” it said, “and a lubricant for your throat.”

Tenderly, the robot lifted Jordan’s head with one silicone-skin hand and brought the cup to his lips, like a mother feeding a baby. He grasped the cup with both his trembling hands, grateful for its warmth.

Tea, Jordan realized once he’d taken a sip of the steaming brew. Tea with honey. Stimulant, lubricant, warmer-upper. Good old tea. He almost laughed.

“Do you feel strong enough to get to your feet?”

Jordan thought it over, then replied, “I can try.”

The robot gently helped him up to a sitting position. Then Jordan swung his bare legs over the edge of the capsule and carefully, tentatively, stood up. He felt a little wobbly, but only a little. Not bad for a fellow who’s a hundred and thirty-two years old, he thought.

The little cubicle’s walls were bare, off-white. It was hardly big enough to contain Jordan’s cryosleep capsule, a marvel of biotechnology sitting there like an elongated egg that had been cracked open. The life-support equipment and monitors blinked and beeped softly against the opposite wall.

Each member of the expedition had a cubicle of his or her own; the robots assisted with the reawakening process.

Staying at his side, the robot led Jordan three steps to the closet where his clothes were stored. He pulled the door open and saw himself in the full-length mirror inside the door.

He was a trim, well-built middleweight, standing almost 175 centimeters in his bare feet. Normally he weighed a trifle under seventy-five kilograms, but as he looked down at his bare body he saw that his long sleep had cost him some weight. The skin of his legs was still puckered from the freezing, but beneath the wrinkles it looked pink, healthy.

His face was slightly thinner than he remembered it, his arched aquiline nose a little more obvious, his cheekbones a bit more prominent, the hollows beneath them more noticeable. He saw that the neat little mustache he had cultivated so carefully over the years had grayed noticeably; it looked somewhat ragged. I’ll need to attend to that, he thought.

Then, with a shock, he realized that his dark brown hair had turned completely silver.

They didn’t tell us to expect that, he said to himself.

Back on Earth he’d often been called elegant, sophisticated. At this moment, farther from Earth than any human being had ever traveled, he felt shabby, weary, and strangely detached, as if he were watching himself from afar.

Jordan shook his head, trying to force himself to accept where he was and who he was. While cryonic freezing preserved the body, it also tended to degrade the synapses of the brain’s neurons. All the members of the team had downloaded their memories into the ship’s computer before they’d left Earth and gone into cryosleep.

With deliberate concentration, Jordan tested the upload. He remembered leading the team into the ship’s luxurious interior. He remembered climbing into the sleep capsule, watching it close over him. Childhood memories floated before him: the Christmas he deduced that Father Christmas was really his parents; tussling with his brother Brandon; graduating from Cambridge; Miriam—he clenched his eyes shut.

Miriam. Her last days, her final agony.

My fault. All my fault. My most grievous fault.

It would have been good to have erased those memories, he thought.

Slowly, carefully, he pulled on cotton briefs, a turtlenecked white shirt, dark blue jeans, and comfortable loafers. Then he studied himself for a moment in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet’s door, his steel-gray eyes peering intently. You don’t look elegant and sophisticated now, he told himself. You look … bewildered, and more than a little frightened.

Then he realized, “I’m hungry.”

The robot said, “A very normal reaction.” It sounded almost pleased. “The wardroom is less than thirty meters up the passageway, in the direction of the ship’s command center. The dispensers offer a full selection of food and beverages.”

With a crooked smile, Jordan said, “You sound like an advertising blurb.”

The robot made no reply, but it turned and opened the door to the passageway.

Jordan hesitated at the doorway.

“The wardroom is to the right, Mr. Kell.”

Jordan tried to recall the ship’s layout. The living and working areas were built into the wheel that turned slowly to give a feeling of gravity. Leaving the robot behind him, he walked carefully along the passageway. Although the floor felt perfectly flat, he could see it curving up and out of sight ahead of him.

The wardroom was empty as he entered it. Of course, he realized. I’m the first to be revived. I’m the team leader.

It was a pleasantly decorated compartment, its walls covered with warm pseudowood paneling, its ceiling glowing softly. Six small tables were arranged along its russet-tiled floor; they could be pushed together in any pattern the team wanted. At present they were all standing separately, each table big enough to seat four people.

Very comfortable, Jordan thought. Of course, crew comfort was a major goal of the mission designers. This far from home, a few luxuries help to keep us happy. And sane. Or so the psychotechs decided.

One entire wall of the wardroom was taken up by machines that dispensed food and drink. But Jordan’s attention instantly was drawn to the wall opposite, a floor-to-ceiling display screen.

It showed the planet that the ship was orbiting. A lush green world with deeply blue oceans and fleecy white clouds, brown wrinkles of mountains and broad swaths of grasslands. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

Jordan marveled at the sight. It really is a New Earth, he thought.

Data Bank

Even while the massive floods, droughts, and killer storms of the greenhouse climate shift were devastating much of Earth, astronomers were detecting several thousand planets orbiting other stars. Most of these exoplanets were gas giants, bloated spheres of hydrogen and helium, totally unlike Earth. But a few percent of them were small, rocky worlds, more like our own.

One in particular raised hopes of being really Earthlike: Sirius C. It was almost the same size as Earth, and although its parent star was a fiercely blazing blue-white giant, much larger and hotter than the Sun, the planet’s orbit lay at the “Goldilocks” distance from Sirius where its surface temperature was not too hot, and not too cold for liquid water to exist.

On Earth, liquid water means life. Beneath the frozen iron sands of Mars, liquid water melting from the permafrost hosts an underground biosphere of microbial life forms. In the ice-covered seas of Jupiter’s major moons, living organisms abound. In the planet-girdling ocean beneath the eternal clouds of giant Jupiter itself, life teems and flourishes.

But Sirius C was a challenge to the scientists. The planet shouldn’t exist, not by all that they knew of astrophysics. And it couldn’t possibly bear life, Goldilocks notwithstanding, not sandwiched between brilliant Sirius A and its white dwarf star companion, Sirius B. The dwarf had erupted in a series of nova explosions eons ago. The death throes of Sirius B must have sterilized any planets in the vicinity, boiled away any atmosphere or ocean.

But there it was, a rocky, Earth-sized planet, the only planet in the Sirius system, orbiting Sirius A in a nearly perfect circle. Spectroscopic studies showed it had an Earthlike atmosphere—and oceans of liquid water.

Might there be a chance that the planet did harbor some kind of life forms? The astrobiologists worked overtime concocting theories to support the hope that the Earth-sized planet might indeed host an Earth-type biosphere. The popular media had no such problem. They quickly dubbed Sirius C “New Earth.”

For nearly a full century, while governments and corporations all over the world toiled to alleviate the catastrophic results of the climate change, Earth’s eagerly inquisitive scientists hurled robotic space probes toward Sirius C. Even at the highest thrust that fusion rockets could produce, the probes took decades to reach their objective, more than eight light-years from Earth. Yet once they arrived at the planet, what they saw confirmed the most cherished hopes of both the scientists and the general public.

Sirius C was indeed a New Earth. The planet bore broad blue seas of water, its continents were richly green with vegetation. There was no sign of intelligent life, no cities or farmlands or roads, no lights or radio communications, but the planet truly was a New Earth, unpopulated, virginal, beckoning.

Impatient to explore this new world in greater detail, the International Astronautical Authority asked the World Council to fund the human exploration of Sirius C. The Council procrastinated, citing the enormous costs of mitigating the disasters caused by the global climate shift. Then the lunar nation of Selene stepped forward and offered to build a starship. Shamed into grudging cooperation, the Council reluctantly joined the effort—meagerly.

They named the starship Gaia, after the Earth deity who represented the web of life. Gaia would travel to Sirius more slowly than the robotic probes, to protect its fragile human cargo. It would take some eighty years for the ship to reach Sirius C.

Men and women from all around the world volunteered for the mission. They were carefully screened for physical health and mental stability. As one of the examining psychotechnicians put it, “You’d have to be at least a little crazy to throw away eighty years just to get there.”

But the crew of Gaia would not age eighty years. They would sleep away the decades of their journey in cryonic suspension, frozen in liquid nitrogen, as close to death as human bodies can get and still survive.

Gaia was launched with great fanfare: humankind’s first mission to the stars. The explorers would spend five years mapping the planet in detail, studying its biosphere, and building a base for the backup missions to work from.

By the time the ship arrived in orbit around Sirius C, eighty years later, only a handful of dedicated scientists back on Earth were still interested in the mission. Most of the human race was struggling to survive the catastrophic second wave of greenhouse flooding, as the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica melted down. The backup missions had been postponed, again and again, and finally shelved indefinitely by the World Council.

Even the eagerly waiting scientists saw nothing, heard nothing from the explorers, for it would take more than eight years for messages to travel from Sirius back to Earth.

Alone

Alone in the wardroom, Jordan poured himself another cup of tea, then sat at one of the tables and stared in fascination at the planet sliding by in the wall screen’s display.

It certainly looks like Earth, he thought. The data bar running along the base of the screen showed that the planet’s atmosphere was astonishingly close to Earth’s: 22 percent oxygen, 76 percent nitrogen, the remaining 2 percent a smattering of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and inert gases. The biggest difference from Earth was that Sirius C had a much thicker ozone layer high in its atmosphere: not unexpected, since the star Sirius emitted much more ultraviolet light than the Sun.

Jordan shook his head in wonder. It’s like a miracle, he said to himself. Too good to be true. But then he realized that this was the first planet orbiting another star that human eyes had seen close up. What do we know about exoplanets? Perhaps Earthlike worlds are commonplace.

Enough speculation, he told himself. Get to work. Time to go to the command center and see what the mission controllers have to say to us.

Clasping his half-finished mug of tea in one hand, Jordan went back into the passageway and walked to the command center. It was a smallish compartment with a horseshoe of six workstation consoles curving around a single high-backed chair whose arms were studded with control buttons. Display screens covered the bulkheads, most of them showing the condition and performance of the ship’s various systems; others offered views of the planet they orbited.

Jordan slipped into the command chair and frowned briefly at the keypads set into its armrests. He tried to remember which one activated the communications system. The symbols on each pad had always reminded him of children’s sketches. The propulsion system’s symbol was a triangle with wavy lines emanating from it. Life support a heart shape.

Communications was the headset symbol, he recalled. Touching that pad, Jordan called for the latest message from Earth. He reminded himself that the message he was about to see was sent from Earth more than eight years ago. It takes messages eight point six years to travel from Earth to Sirius.

A woman’s face appeared on the main screen, above the row of consoles. She was a handsome woman, with dark hair pulled tightly back off her face. Strong cheekbones and a fine, straight nose. Her eyes were large and so deeply brown they looked almost black—and unutterably sorrowful.

“I am Felicia Ionescu, the newly appointed director of the International Astronautical Authority,” she said, in a carefully measured alto register. “This message is being sent to reach you on the day that your ship attains orbit around the planet Sirius C.”

Recorded more than eight years ago, Jordan repeated to himself.

“I hope that you have all survived the flight to Sirius and that you are well, and ready to begin the exploration of the planet.”

Jordan thought her welcoming message was strangely heavy, bleak. Where’s the congratulations? Where are the clichés about how all of Earth is thrilled that you’ve reached your destination?

“When you departed from Earth,” Ionescu went on, “eighty years ago, we were recovering from the worldwide flooding caused by the global greenhouse warming.” She took in a breath. “Unfortunately, now—eighty years later—a new wave of flooding has struck, caused by the continued warming of the global climate.”

Her image disappeared, replaced by pictures of devastation: cities drowned, coastlines inundated, storms lashing fleeing refugees. Jordan stared in open-mouthed horror.

“Because of these calamities,” Ionescu’s voice said over the views of disaster, “the World Council has been unable to authorize the backup missions that were in the IAA’s original program plan.”

The screen showed her face once more. She looked miserable. “I will work to my utmost to get the World Council to fund backup missions, eventually. But, for the present, you twelve members of the Gaia mission are alone in your exploration of Sirius C. I wish you well.”

And her image winked off.

The News from Earth

For long moments Jordan sat in the command chair, shocked beyond words. He could feel his heart thudding beneath his ribs, his stomach roiling.

Alone, he thought.

At last he pulled himself to his feet. Very well, then, he told himself. Alone. We have everything we need for a five-year stay at Sirius C. We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got and then we’ll go home.

Yes, he thought. Now to break the cheery news to the rest of the team.

As resolutely as he could manage, Jordan marched back to the wardroom. Only one other person was there: Mitchell Thornberry, the roboticist, standing before the wall-screen display of New Earth.

“Hello, Mitchell.”

Thornberry turned to face Jordan, a wide smile breaking across his fleshy face. “Top o’ the morning to ya.”

He was a solidly built man from the University of Dublin, just about Jordan’s own height but thicker, heavier in the torso and limbs. His jowly face almost always displayed a quizzical little smile, as though the ways of his fellow humans amused him slightly. Or puzzled him.

Thornberry was wearing a loudly patterned open-necked shirt hanging over rumpled trousers. He looked as if he’d just come in from an afternoon picnic.

“And a very pleasant good morning to you, sir,” said Jordan. And he thought, I’ll wait until they’re all here, the whole team together. No sense breaking the news eleven separate times.

“Well, we made it,” Thornberry said, jabbing a finger toward the wall screen.

“It’s uncanny, isn’t it?” Jordan said. “It could be Earth’s twin.”

Thornberry shrugged. “It is what it is.” Heading toward the dispensing machines, he added, “I’ll let the scientists argue about how the planet could be so Earthlike. Me, all I’ve got to do is set up a working base down there on the surface and tend to me robots.”

Pecking at the food dispensers, Thornberry pulled out a thick sandwich of beef cultured from the biovats, and a tall glass of chilled fruit juice.

“They should have packed some beer aboard for us,” he grumbled as he brought his tray to the table where Jordan was sitting.

“No alcoholic beverages,” Jordan reminded him. “The health and safety experts agreed on that.”

“Ahhh,” Thornberry growled. “A bunch of pissant academics with water in their veins.”

Jordan smiled at the Irishman. Then he remembered that he too was hungry. He went to the dispensers and selected a salad from the ship’s hydroponics garden. Then he returned to his cooling tea and sat down beside Thornberry.

“Wasn’t your hair darker?” Thornberry asked, his thick brows knitting.

“It was,” said Jordan, unconsciously fingering his mustache.

“Do you feel all right?”

“Yes. Fairly normal,” Jordan replied as he sat down next to Thornberry. “A little shaky. I wonder how effective the memory uploading really is.”

“Good enough,” Thornberry said. “I can remember what we had for dinner the night before we left. And the Guinness that went with it.” Then he sank his teeth into his sandwich.

“And you?” Jordan asked. “How do you feel?”

Thornberry swallowed before answering, “All right, more or less. Cold. Deep inside, I feel cold. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel warm again.”

“Psychosomatic, I imagine.”

“Oh? And who made you a psychotechnician?”

That stung. Of the dozen men and women on the ship, Jordan alone was neither a scientist nor an engineer. He was merely the head of the mission.

As brightly as he could manage, Jordan changed the subject. “The artificial gravity system seems to be working fine, after all these years.”

Thornberry shrugged. “It’s just a big Ferris wheel. Nothing exotic about it.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Here we are!”

Turning, Jordan saw his younger brother, Brandon, entering the wardroom, together with Elyse Rudaki, the Iranian astrophysicist.

Brandon looked like an improved edition of Jordan: younger, taller, handsomer. Brandon’s nose was thinner, nobler, his eyes a shade lighter. When he smiled he could light up a room. Like Jordan, he wore a turtleneck shirt and comfortable denim jeans.

Elyse looked like royalty: tall, slim, elegant, her sculpted face unsmiling, utterly serious. Her complexion was light, almost pale, a stunning contrast to her thick, lustrous dark hair, which she had piled high on her head, making her look even taller, more regal. Although she was wearing a casual blouse of light blue atop darker slacks, Jordan pictured her in a glittering red and gold sari.

But he thought she seemed somewhat uncertain of herself, as if slightly disoriented from drugs or drink. The upload, Jordan told himself. It’s not perfect. Then he thought, Perhaps she’s frightened. We’re a long way from home. Or perhaps you’re just projecting your own fears.

Getting to his feet again, Jordan smiled as he held out a chair for her. “Welcome to Sirius C, Elyse.”

Before she could reply, Brandon gasped, “My god, Jordy, your hair’s turned totally white!”

Forcing a smile, Jordan replied, “I prefer to think of it as silver. Rather becoming, don’t you think?”

“I guess so,” Brandon said uncertainly. “Are you … do you feel okay?”

“I feel fine,” Jordan assured him.

Still looking doubtful, Brandon turned toward the wall display and called to the voice-recognition system, “Display screen, show us news broadcasts from Earth.”

“No, wait…”

“Don’t get huffy with me, Jordy. We can look at the planet any time. I want to see what’s happening back home, don’t you?”

With a resigned nod, Jordan replied, “I suppose so.”

Elyse still stood beside him while Jordan held her chair. The wall screen broke into a dozen separate pictures. The IAA is beaming news and entertainment vids to us, Jordan remembered. It’s all automatic, preprogrammed. And it’s all eight years old.

The screens showed cities that looked unfamiliar to Jordan, women dressed in strange styles, newscasters wearing what looked like uniforms, sports matches that looked superficially like football and cricket and even tennis, but not quite right. Distorted. Changed.

Where’s the flooding and disasters Ionescu showed me? Jordan wondered. Then he realized that newscasts and entertainment vids carefully avoided such unpleasantries.

“Palm trees in Boston?” Brandon marveled.

Elyse said, “The fashions are very revealing.”

“Must be summertime,” said Thornberry.

“Everywhere?”

“Eighty years have passed on Earth,” Jordan pointed out. “Everything is slightly different. It’s not the same world that we left behind us.”

Thornberry wiped his mouth with his napkin and commented, “That’s the way things were back home some eight years ago. It’s taken eight and a half years for those signals to get from Earth to here.”

“Eight point six years,” Jordan murmured.

“Ah, who’s counting?” Thornberry wisecracked.

But Brandon did not smile. “Look at them. Going about their lives perfectly normally.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any war,” said Elyse, her voice hushed, subdued. “No violence.”

“Or the news nets aren’t showing any,” said Brandon.

“Or mission control decided not to let us see any,” Jordan said.

“Saints alive!” Thornberry pointed at one of the scenes. “Look! There’s people scuba diving through a drowned city.”

They all stared at the underwater scene.

“It looks like Sydney,” Thornberry muttered. “Look! There’s the opera house, half underwater.”

“But not a word about us,” Brandon grumbled.

“That newscast is eight years old,” Thornberry pointed out.

Brandon insisted, “They knew we’d have arrived at our destination. But there’s nothing in the news about it.”

“I think I know why,” Jordan said.

Outcasts

Thornberry looked up at Jordan from beneath his shaggy brows. “Do you, now?”

“What is it?” Brandon demanded.

“Let’s wait until the others get here,” Jordan said. “I’ll explain it to all of you at once.”

Thornberry looked curious, Elyse worried. Brandon put on the irritated look that Jordan had seen all his brother’s life: half sulking, half impatience.

One by one the other members of the team filtered into the wardroom: three more women, five men. They all looked uncertain, a bit shaky. Only to be expected after an eighty-year sleep, Jordan thought. You didn’t look too peppy yourself, those first few minutes.

How will they feel once they’ve heard the news I have to tell them? he asked himself.

The others helped themselves to food and drink, then slowly sat at the tables and watched the screen displays from Earth.

Brandon sat himself beside Elyse and said, “All right, Jordy. We’re all here. What is it that you’ve got to tell us?”

Jordan stepped in front of the wall screen and looked at the eleven of them. Four women, seven men, their eyes focused on him.

“I’m afraid I have some disappointing news,” he began. “There isn’t going to be a backup mission.”

“What?”

“No backup? But the IAA—”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s been a second wave of greenhouse flooding,” Jordan tried to explain. “Even worse than the original floods, five generations ago. The World Council has reneged on the backup missions, they’ve got too much reconstruction and resettlement to do.”

“But we’ve seen nothing about such flooding on the news vids,” said Harmon Meek, springing to his feet.

The team’s astrobiologist, Meek was a scarecrow of a man, tall and almost painfully thin, all bones and gangling limbs. He was dressed almost formally, in a starched white shirt and a dark brown ascot, no less, with neatly creased trousers of charcoal gray. His thick mop of sandy blond hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a brush in eighty years; his eyebrows were so pale they were almost invisible, and the cold blue eyes beneath them looked terribly perplexed.

“I’m afraid the vids were edited by the IAA,” Jordan said.

“Nonsense!” Meek snapped. “I don’t believe you.”

Jordan smiled wanly at the astrobiologist, so full of righteous indignation. He commanded the communications system to show Ionescu’s message.

Meek sank back into his chair and the team watched the message from Earth, with its scenes of devastation, in shocked silence.

“That’s Volgograd,” said Tanya Verishkova, in a choked whisper. “Flooded.”

“Look at the refugees.”

“Miles of ’em.”

“So that’s the situation,” Jordan said, once the images winked off. “It doesn’t change our circumstances, really. But it means that when we leave, there won’t be a backup team to take over from us, or on its way.”

Geoffrey Hazzard, the astronautical engineer and nominal captain of their ship, muttered, “Just like Apollo.”

“What do you mean?” Elyse Rudaki asked.

Hazzard was an African-American from Pennsylvania, tall and rangy, his skin the color of mocha, his long-jawed face slightly horsy-looking, although his dark eyes were large and expressive.

“The first missions to the Moon,” he explained. “They put a dozen men on the Moon inside of a few years, then stopped altogether. It was more than half a century before anybody went back.”

“Well,” Jordan said, trying to put up as good a face as possible, “we all knew we’d be pioneers in exploring New Earth. Now we’re even more so.”

From his seat beside Elyse, Brandon gave out a bitter laugh. “Pioneers, are we? We’re all outcasts, that’s what we are.”

“Outcasts, is it?” Thornberry snapped.

Pointing to the wall-screen displays of the news vids from Earth, Brandon said, “Outcasts. Gone and forgotten. Twelve people, sent to explore a planet—a whole world! Just the twelve of us.”

Mildly, Jordan said to his brother, “Bran, we’re merely the first twelve to be sent here. There will be others, you know. In time.”

“You think so.”

“Sooner or later. There’s got to be.”

Thornberry said, “We’ve got robots, remotely controlled roving vehicles, all sorts of sensors and satellites. There’s more than just the twelve of us.”

“Think about it,” Brandon replied, almost sneering. “Think about what we’re doing. We’ve spent eighty years getting here. Eighty years. We’re supposed to explore this planet for at least five years. Then we head back to Earth, another eighty years.”

“But we haven’t aged,” Elyse said.

“What of it? When we get back home, damned near two hundred years will have passed. Two hundred years! We’ll be strangers in our own world. We’re already strangers. Outcasts.”

As mildly as he could manage, Jordan said, “No one forced you to join this mission, Bran. We’re all volunteers. We all knew the risks.”

“Oh, sure, volunteers,” Brandon retorted. “I volunteered because my department head made it clear that if I didn’t I wouldn’t get tenure; I’d be an assistant professor for another ten years or more.”

“I volunteered willingly,” said Elyse. “I considered it an honor.”

“Very noble of you,” Brandon muttered.

“Come to think of it,” Thornberry said, rubbing his jaw, “the university’s president didn’t ask me if I wanted this mission. He told me I was the only man on the faculty who could do the job.”

“Well, that’s quite an honor,” Jordan said.

“Maybe,” Thornberry replied, drawing out the word. “But I got the impression that what he meant was that I was the only man on the faculty that he could spare.”

“You see?” Brandon said. “We’re expendables. Outcasts.”

“Who’s an outcast?” Meek demanded angrily. “I’m certainly not.”

“Aren’t you?” Brandon countered. “We’ve thrown away everything we knew back on Earth to take part in this mission, this fool’s errand. When we get back to Earth—if we get back—we’ll be strangers in our own world.”

Jordan started to say, “Bran, why don’t you—”

But Brandon plowed on, “Don’t you see? They picked us for this mission because we’re expendable. If we don’t get back it’ll be no loss to anyone.”

“Expendable?” Meek snapped. “I’m not expendable. Young man, I’ll have you know that I was selected over the top people in the field of astrobiology. The very top.”

Brandon gave Meek a condescending smile. “Are you married?”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”

“You’re single. Lifelong bachelor, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Any dependents?”

Frowning, Meek replied, “No direct family, no. I have a couple of distant cousins.”

“I don’t have any direct family, either,” said Brandon. “Except for my big brother, here.”

Thornberry, with his curious little smile, said, “You know, Brandon me lad, you didn’t have to come on this jaunt. You could’ve said no.”

“That’s not true,” Brandon said, with some heat. “I wasn’t really given a choice. Were you?”

Seeing their tempers rising, Jordan said, “I think we’ve beaten this subject into the ground, don’t you?”

But Meek was nettled. “Now look here, Dr. Kell. You may think lightly of yourself, but I regard us—all of us, including your brother—as the cream of the crop. The absolute cream.”

“Especially yourself,” Brandon sneered.

“Now that’s enough,” Jordan said firmly. “We are here and we have a job to do. It’s a big job, a huge job, and it’s the most important mission human beings have ever undertaken. Enough said. The subject is closed.”

Brandon glared at his brother, then finally shrugged, grudgingly. Meek still looked nettled.

Jordan commanded the display screen to resume showing the planet below them. Enough of eight-year-old newscasts and messages of regret, he told himself.

The wardroom fell silent as the twelve of them stared at the planet sliding past on the wall screen.

“It looks so much like home,” Elyse breathed.

“Yes, doesn’t it,” said Jordan.

Examination

For long moments the twelve of them stared silently at the display screen and its view of New Earth sliding slowly below them.

Then Hazzard hauled himself to his feet. “I’d better go check out the ship’s systems.”

“The ship’s perfectly fine,” said Thornberry. “The automated safety program would’ve alerted us if anything was amiss.”

Hazzard nodded slowly. “Yeah, I know, but after eighty years I oughtta scan the screens. Automated maintenance and self-repair are okay, but I’ll feel better if I take a look for myself.”

As Hazzard went to the wardroom hatch, the team’s physician, Nara Yamaguchi, looked at her wristwatch and announced, “It’s three minutes before ten A.M., ship time. If we start the physical exams immediately, we can get them finished before dinnertime.”

Her announcement was greeted by moans and grumbles. But Jordan said, “Dr. Yamaguchi has the responsibility of checking our physical conditions. Let’s cooperate with her, please.”

Yamaguchi made a stiff little bow to Jordan and said, with an almost impish grin, “Mr. Kell, you are first on my list.”

Rank hath its privileges, Jordan repeated to himself.

Yamaguchi was a stubby, chubby young Japanese physician, a specialist in internal medicine. Her face was round, with a snub nose and eyes almost the color of bronze. Her hair was dull brown, chopped short in pageboy style. She was no beauty, yet she radiated intelligence and good humor, and she had the reputation of being an excellent diagnostician.

Jordan followed her down the passageway to the ship’s small infirmary: little more than an examination table, a desk bearing a trio of display screens, and diagnostic scanners built into two of the walls and the ceiling. There were a couple of cubicles with beds in the next compartment, he remembered. Sitting on the examination table, Jordan removed his belt and shoes.

“Anything metal in your pockets?” Yamaguchi asked.

Jordan pulled the phone from his shirt pocket and handed it to the physician, who placed it on her desk. Funny, he thought. This instrument links me with the ship’s communications system, it’s a computer, a camera, a personal entertainment system, and a lot more, yet we still call it nothing more than a phone. The old name hangs on, despite all its varied functions.

Yamaguchi instructed, “All right, just lie back and let the scanners go over you.”

Jordan looked up at the softly glowing light panels of the ceiling and listened to the soft hum of the machines behind them. He knew his body was being probed by X-rays, sculpted magnetic fields, positrons, and neutrinos. All in little more than the blink of an eye.

“It’s a pretty soft life I’ve got,” Yamaguchi said as she sat at her desk, studying her readout screens. “The scanners do all the work, the computer makes the analysis, and I take the credit.”

“We’re a healthy bunch,” Jordan said. “Youngish … well, no one past middle age, physically. All of us are healthy. Or at least we were when we went into cryosleep.”

“Maybe too healthy,” Yamaguchi said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Four women, eight men. It could cause problems.”

Jordan felt surprised. He hadn’t felt any interest in sex since Miriam died. And the others … “The psych team passed on the arrangement,” he said.

“They won’t be stuck here for five years.”

“Do you think there might be problems?”

“Probably not with Dr. Meek; he’s accustomed to bachelorhood. I don’t know about you, though.”

Jordan blinked with surprise. “I’ll be all right,” he said.

“Sure you will,” she replied, with a mischievous grin. “Your brother seems to have paired up with Rudaki, and Verishkova followed Thornberry around all through our training classes like a puppy dog.”

“I didn’t realize,” Jordan admitted.

“That leaves Hazzard, Zadar, de Falla, Longyear,” Yamaguchi ticked off on her fingers. “All young and physically fit. I’ll bet even I start to look good to them before very long.”

“There’s Trish Wanamaker.”

Yamaguchi nodded. “I can always put saltpeter in the drinking water.”

“Seriously?” Jordan gasped.

She laughed. “We have much more effective medications. But I hope I won’t have to use them.”

Jordan nodded, wondering what would happen if the need to calm down some of the men arose.

Yamaguchi returned her attention to her display screens. “You can sit up now.”

“Passed with flying colors?” Jordan asked as he bent down to reach for his shoes.

“Almost,” Yamaguchi replied, peering at the readouts. She looked up at Jordan. “You’ve lost the pigmentation in your hair.”

“Yes. A bit disconcerting.”

“It’s not a problem, except cosmetically. But it is kind of strange.”

“I think it looks rather distinguished.”

Yamaguchi smiled minimally, but then she turned back to the screens. “There is something that concerns me, though.”

The virus, Jordan thought. It’s still detectable.

He got to his feet, pulled on his belt, and took his phone from Yamaguchi’s desktop. The physician was intently studying her computer screens.

“You were exposed to a bioengineered virus when you were in India,” Yamaguchi said, her eyes still on the screens.

Jordan sagged back onto the exam table. “The biowar,” he said. “There were lots of gengineered bugs in the air.”

Yamaguchi nodded, then finally looked up at Jordan. “This one’s nestled in your small intestine.”

“It’s harmless,” said Jordan, with a confidence he did not truly feel. “The medics back on Earth concluded that it’s dormant and will remain so.”

“For how long?”

“Indefinitely, they told me.”

Yamaguchi said nothing, but her face had tightened into a concerned mask.

“After all,” said Jordan, “I passed all the physical exams Earthside. They allowed me on this mission.”

Pointing at the central computer screen, Yamaguchi said, “Your record shows that your wife died of a similar virus.”

Jordan felt his face flame red.

“Her immune system had already been compromised by a different infection,” he explained. “Mine wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” said Yamaguchi.

“I’m really in fine health,” Jordan insisted.

“Yes, so the scans show,” Yamaguchi admitted. “But your little hitchhiker worries me.”

“It’s dormant,” Jordan repeated.

“For how long?” Yamaguchi asked again.

“It’s been several years—not counting our time in cryosleep.”

“Cryogenic temperature didn’t harm it,” the physician muttered. “According to your file, the medical team back on Earth was hoping that the virus wouldn’t survive freezing.”

With a sardonic little smile, Jordan replied, “They used me and my hitchhiker for an experiment—to see what long-term cryonic immersion would do to the virus.”

“Didn’t bother it a bit,” Yamaguchi murmured.

“Look, we have all sorts of bacteria and viruses in our bodies constantly, don’t we? Most of them don’t affect us at all. Some of them are even beneficial, aren’t they?”

“This one isn’t. It was designed to kill people.”

Like it killed Miriam, Jordan admitted silently. Aloud, he said, “Well, it hasn’t killed me.”

Yamaguchi didn’t reply, but the expression on her face said, Not yet.

“So what do you want to do, send me home?”

Yamaguchi almost laughed at the absurdity of that. “No,” she said. “As long as you’re asymptomatic there’s nothing we can do. Except…”

“Except?”

“Let me study the literature and see how much I can learn about these engineered viruses. Maybe there’s some way to destroy them.”

“Perhaps they have a built-in limit to their life spans,” Jordan suggested.

Yamaguchi shook her head hard enough to make her hair swish back and forth. “No, no, no. They’re not nanomachines, with off-switches built into them. They’re viruses, alive but dormant. Not even stem-cell therapy can deal with them.”

“Perhaps nanomachines?” Jordan suggested.

With a nod, Yamaguchi said, “Specifically designed to attack the virus and nothing else. That could work—if we had the nanotech facilities aboard ship.”

“Which we don’t,” Jordan said.

“We can’t. Safety regulations. We can’t run the risk of having nanomachines infecting the ship.”

“Yet they use nanotechnology on the Moon. Out in the Asteroid Belt.”

“But not on Earth,” Yamaguchi said. “And not on this ship.”

“I suppose not,” Jordan sighed. “I’ll just have to live with the virus, the way I have been.”

Yamaguchi said, “I want to check you on a weekly basis. Make certain your little bugs are remaining dormant. And in the meantime I’ll see if there’s anything in the ship’s medical library that might help us get rid of them.”

“I’d appreciate that,” said Jordan. And he remembered Miriam’s final days. The pain. The unbearable pain.

Brothers

When Jordan returned to the wardroom, most of the men and women were still there, sitting around the tables, deep in conversations.

“Who wants to be next?” Jordan asked.

They all looked up at him, standing just inside the hatch.

Geoffrey Hazzard, back from the command center, got to his feet. “Might’s well get it over with.”

As he brushed past Jordan and stepped out into the passageway, most of the others got to their feet, as well.

“I suppose we should get to our quarters and settle in a bit,” said Harmon Meek.

“I know it’s a bit daft,” said Thornberry as he headed for the hatch, “but I feel like I need a nap.”

Meek looked down his nose at the beefy engineer. “That’s ridiculous. You’ve been sleeping for eighty years, man.”

“Yes. A bit of strange, isn’t it?”

Brandon started to leave too, but Jordan touched his sleeve to hold him back. “Wait a moment, Bran, will you?”

With a glance at Elyse, who looked back over her shoulder at him, Brandon leaned his rump on the edge of the nearest table. Jordan waited until Elyse and the others left the wardroom, then turned to his younger brother.

“Bran, do you really feel so … so … alienated?”

“Alienated?”

“What you said earlier, about us being outcasts, expendables.”

Brandon didn’t reply. Jordan looked into his brother’s light bluish gray eyes and thought, It’s almost like looking into a mirror. A very flattering mirror.

“Well?” he prompted.

Brandon turned away slightly, but he answered, “It’s true, isn’t it? None of us are the best and brightest of their professions, are we? I’m certainly not. There are a dozen planetary astronomers who are better than I: better reputations, recognized leaders in the field. I’m just an also-ran.”

“But the IAA picked you for this mission! Of all the people in the field they picked you.”

“Because I’m expendable,” Brandon repeated stubbornly. “Because nobody’s going to miss me for a century or two.”

Shaking his head, Jordan countered, “But the honor of taking part in the first human mission to another star! Surely—”

“Bullshit,” Brandon snapped. “They picked us because we’re expendable. Look at us, Jordan. Aside from you, none of us are leaders in our fields. We’re all expendables. No family ties. Nobody’s going to miss us, whether we come back or not. That’s why they picked us. That’s why we’ve been given this honor.”

Before Jordan could reply, Brandon added, “And now they’ve hung us out to dry. No backup mission. The damned politicians got their glory by sending us out here, they don’t give a damn if we get back or not.”

“You really feel that way?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

Miriam’s death flashed in Jordan’s memory once more. I killed her, he thought all over again. If I hadn’t insisted on that doomed mission to Kashmir she’d still be alive.

“No,” he lied. “I really do feel it’s an honor to be picked for this mission. Especially for a non-scientist, a mere administrator.”

For the first time, Brandon smiled. “Mere administrator,” he said. “One of the world’s most distinguished diplomats. And now head of this mission. They should have given you a whip and a chair. You’re going to need them.”

Jordan smiled. “Riding herd on eleven scientists and engineers shouldn’t be that difficult, really.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I hope not.”

Gazing straight into Jordan’s eyes, Brandon asked, “Tell me the truth now, why did you agree to come on this mission?” Before Jordan could think of a reply, Brandon added, “And don’t tell me about the honor. You’ve already had honors enough for any man.”

“It will look very impressive on my résumé.”

“Your résumé’s already damned impressive,” Brandon said. “Come on now, the truth.”

To get away from the memories, Jordan knew. To get as far away from the Kashmir and Miriam’s death as humanly possible.

“Well?” Brandon persisted.

Jordan shrugged. “The truth? Why, I came along to be with my baby brother. Somebody’s got to keep you out of trouble.”

The sour expression on Brandon’s face told Jordan what his brother thought of that excuse.

“You’re a diplomat,” Brandon said, “a troubleshooter, an administrator—”

“You mean a bureaucrat,” said Jordan.

“What you accomplished in South America wasn’t bureaucracy. You stopped a bloody war.”

Jordan dipped his chin in acknowledgment.

“And China,” Brandon went on. “And the Sahel drought.”

Don’t mention Kashmir, Jordan begged silently. Not India and the Kashmir.

“I just don’t see what made you agree to come on this operation.”

Forcing a smile, he said to his brother, “Adventure. Romance and adventure.”

“Bull.”

“And family ties,” Jordan added.

“More bull.”

Getting away from the memories, Jordan added silently. Getting as far away from anything connected with Miriam as I can. Away from the emptiness and the remorse. Away from the guilt. He ran a hand through his hair, wondering what he could tell his brother.

He decided to change the subject, instead. Jordan pointed to the wall screen. “Look, there’s the terminator coming up. We’re moving into the night side.”

Darkness swallowed the view. In a moment, though, false-color infrared imagery filled the screen. Still, there was nothing much to see, only endless forests.

But then a pinpoint glow of light appeared in the midst of the darkness.

A Glow of Light

“What the hell is that?” Brandon yelped.

“A light,” said Jordan, staring at the screen. “A light in the midst of all that darkness.”

“That shouldn’t be there,” Brandon said.

“Maybe it’s a fire,” said Jordan.

“It’s not flickering.”

“Volcano?”

Brandon shook his head. “Too small. Too steady.”

Without another word they both scrambled toward the ship’s command center, the bridge, where all the system controls were.

“I’d better call the others,” Jordan said as they hurried along the narrow passageway between the wardroom and the command center.

The command system’s screens showed that the ship’s systems were humming along without human intervention or guidance. Four of the screens displayed the planet below them.

The natural-light display showed the pinpoint of light on the planet’s dark side, sliding off toward the horizon now. The other screens showed an infrared view, atmospheric conditions, gravitation measurements.

Jordan slipped quite naturally into the command chair and pressed the communications stud. “Intercom,” he spoke firmly, “connect me to all team members.”

In an instant the communications console showed he was connected.

“This is Jordan. The sensors show a spot of light down on the planet’s night side. We’re trying to determine what’s causing it. I’d like the planetary field team and the sensor engineer to come to the bridge, please.”

They all came, every one of the group, jamming the compartment, making it stuffy with their body heat.

“What on Earth could it be?” Meek asked, his eyes fixed on the light.

“We’re not on Earth,” someone snapped.

Thornberry replied, “On Earth it might be a village. Or maybe a roadside fast-food joint.”

“One light,” murmured Patricia Wanamaker, Thornberry’s aide, the sensor engineer. Of the twelve men and women in the group, she was the only one not from Earth: she had been born in a space habitat orbiting the planet Saturn.

Trish was almost Jordan’s height, heavyset, with a strong jaw set in a squarish, chunky face. Her ash blond hair was chopped mannishly short. Staring at the glow intently, she plumped herself down at one of the consoles.

“We’d better put up a surveillance satellite to cover the area,” Jordan suggested.

Wanamaker nodded without taking her eyes from her console’s screens. “I’ll deploy one of the minisats. Synchronous orbit, so it can hover over the area.”

“Good,” said Jordan.

Geoff Hazzard, standing beside Jordan, said, “I’d better stay here for a while, keep an eye on things.”

Jordan caught his meaning. “Of course,” he said, getting up from the command chair. “I didn’t mean to usurp your seat.”

Hazzard smiled, almost embarrassed. “It’s not my seat, Jordan. Not particularly.”

Still, he settled himself quite naturally into the command chair, his long slim legs stretched out.

Sitting at her console, Wanamaker clipped a communicator over her left ear and began speaking into it in a whisper. The consoles all had voice recognition circuitry, but with six of them jammed in side by side, all the team members had been trained to keep their voices low, so that their commands would not be accidentally picked up by a neighboring console. Even so, while she murmured into the communicator, her stubby fingers twitched involuntarily, as if she were using a keyboard.

At last she looked up and announced, “Satellite launched. It’ll take eighty-six minutes for the bird to attain synchronous orbit.”

Jordan looked around at the team. “Any other suggestions? Anything more we should be doing?”

“Get a spectrum of that light as soon as you can,” said Brandon.

“Put together a team to go down there and look firsthand,” said Silvio de Falla. He was Brandon’s geologist, short, solidly built, usually easygoing. But now he looked intense, eager as a greyhound who had just spotted a rabbit.

“Right away,” Brandon agreed.

“Now wait,” cautioned Meek. “We ought to scout the terrain first, see what we’d be up against.”

“See what kind of topography that area has.”

“Check for gravitational anomalies.”

“I agree,” said Jordan. “I’d like to know what the area is like before we go barging into it.”

“But what if the light disappears before we get there?” Brandon countered.

Jordan spread his hands. “Now listen. We’ve just arrived here. It’s night down where the light is shining. We haven’t even begun to map the surface—”

“The robotic orbiters have mapped the whole planet,” de Falla pointed out.

“But none of the orbiters detected that light,” said Jordan.

“Because it wasn’t there, most likely,” Brandon said.

“Well, it’s there now, and—”

“For how long?” Brandon insisted.

“We have no control over that,” said Jordan, patiently. “But we do have control over our own safety. I don’t want us—any of us—to go blundering into the unknown.”

“For god’s sake, Jordy, that’s why we’re here—to delve into the unknown!”

“And that’s what I intend to do, Bran,” Jordan said. “But it won’t hurt to be a little cautious about it.”

“For what it’s worth,” Hazzard added, “mission protocol calls for a robotic reconnaissance of any area we intend to send humans into.”

Brandon’s expression was somewhere between hurt and sulky, but he said nothing more.

“I think caution is a wise policy,” said Meek. “We’re on our own here. If anything goes wrong, we’ll get no help from anyone else.”

From her console, Trish Wanamaker said, “We could at least send a robot down there.”

Analysis

“Good thinking,” said Jordan. Turning to Thornberry, he asked, “Can you arrange that, Mitch?”

With a happy grin, Thornberry replied, “By god, I’ll send two rovers. There’s safety in redundancy.” And he pushed through the crowded compartment to one of the consoles.

“Can anyone think of anything else?” Jordan asked. “Something we should be doing?”

“I still have to examine more than half of you,” said Yamaguchi. “One at a time.”

“After the exams are finished we should have dinner,” said Meek. “We need to get on a regular schedule sooner or later. I suggest sooner.”

Jordan chuckled. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Still,” glancing at the display screens, “it’s been an exciting first few hours.”

“With more to come,” Brandon added.

Most of the team went back to their individual quarters, although Hazzard, Wanamaker, and Thornberry stayed at the command center. Paul Longyear, the lead biologist, headed for the infirmary with Yamaguchi. Jordan started back toward the wardroom with Brandon, Meek, and Elyse Rudaki.

“A spot of light,” Jordan mused as he sat at one of the tables, facing the wall screen. The light was clearly discernable against the darkness of the planet’s night side. “What could it be?”

“There aren’t any other lights anywhere on the planet,” said Brandon, sitting beside him.

“None that we have seen,” said Elyse, who brought a mug of coffee from the dispenser and sat on Brandon’s other side.

From the dispensing machines, Meek said, “Whatever it is, I suppose it’s some natural phenomenon. A lava puddle, perhaps.”

“Do you think that’s likely?” Jordan asked.

“We don’t know what’s likely and what’s not, not yet,” said Meek, as he carried a tray bearing a teapot, a cup, and a plate of cookies to the table. Carefully arranging them on the table, he sat down and added, “This is a new world, after all. It might look superficially like Earth, but we shouldn’t expect it be precisely like our planet.”

“I suppose not,” Jordan agreed.

Elyse shook her head. “Everything about this planet is strange, unexpected.”

Brandon said, “Of course.”

“How can it be here? How can it exist and bear life?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” said Meek.

“But it shouldn’t be here at all,” Elyse continued. “Not with an atmosphere and oceans. They should have been boiled away when the Pup went through its nova phase.”

“The Pup,” Meek groused. “Astronomer’s humor.”

With a glance at Elyse, Brandon countered, “Sirius has been known as the Dog Star since ancient times.”

“In the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog,” said Meek. “I’m not totally ignorant.”

Undeterred, Brandon went on, “So when Sirius B was discovered, a dwarf star accompanying the Dog Star, naturally it was called the Pup.”

“Naturally,” said Meek, scornfully.

“The point is,” Elyse said, totally intent, “when the Pup exploded it should have scoured that planet clean.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Perhaps it did,” Jordan said, “but the planet has had enough time to regenerate its biosphere.”

“That would take billions of years,” Elyse countered. “Sirius itself can’t be more than five hundred million years old, and its companion must have been formed at the same time. The Pup couldn’t have gone nova more than a few tens of millions of years ago.”

“You’re certain of that?” Meek challenged.

“Within a factor of ten or so,” said Elyse.

“That’s a pretty big margin of error,” Meek sniffed.

“Not bad for an astrophysicist,” said Jordan, smiling at her.

“Even so,” Elyse insisted, “the planet hasn’t had time to recover from the Pup’s nova explosions. It’s impossible.”

“But there it is,” Meek said, jabbing a finger toward the wall-screen display. “You can’t deny that it exists.”

“But how can it be?”

Mildly, Jordan replied, “That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Of course.”

“Another thing,” Brandon said.

Jordan groaned inwardly. Bran won’t let the argument stop. Is he trying to impress Elyse or just trying to top Meek?

“Sirius C is the only planet in the system,” Brandon pointed out. “There’s nothing else. No other planets, not even asteroids or comets. The Sirius system is totally clean, except for this one planet.”

“A planet very much like Earth,” added Meek.

Elyse said, “Between Sirius’s gravitational pull and the Pup’s, all the minor bodies must have been swept away.” Then she added, “Perhaps.”

“Do you really think so?” Jordan asked.

Elyse smiled a little. “No, not really. It’s the only explanation I could think of.”

“The system’s totally clean, except for that one Earth-sized planet,” Brandon murmured.

“It is very strange,” said Elyse.

“Scary, almost,” said Brandon.

The four of them fell silent, each wrapped in their own apprehensions. Inexplicably, Jordan flashed back to the hell of Kashmir and Miriam wasting away from the man-made toxins of the biowar.

With a force of will he raised his eyes to the display screen and said, “Well, strange or scary or whatever, we’re here to find out what this planet is all about, and by heaven that’s what we’re going to do.”

As if on cue, Trish Wanamaker’s voice came through the speaker set into the overhead. “The minisat will reach synchronous orbit in fifteen minutes.”

With heartiness he did not truly feel, Jordan said to his companions, “Let’s get back to the command center and see what the surveillance satellite has to show us.”

“But I haven’t even started my tea!” Meek bleated.

With Meek grumbling about his tea, the four of them trooped back to the command center. The ship was over the daylit side of the planet once again.

But one of the screens showed what the surveillance satellite was seeing: the darkness of the night side, broken by that single unblinking point of light.

Trish Wanamaker turned slightly in her console chair as they filed into the command center. “Starting a spectroscopic analysis of the light,” she said, over her shoulder.

“Good,” said Jordan, standing beside Hazzard, who was still slouched nonchalantly in the command chair.

Brandon and Elyse stood close to each other; Meek remained by the hatch, a skinny scarecrow with narrowed, searching eyes. Thornberry was nowhere in sight.

“Here’s the spectrum,” Wanamaker said, tapping at the console’s touchscreen.

One of the smaller display screens on the console showed a graph with a sharply peaked curve rising steeply against the grayish background.

“That can’t be right,” Hazzard muttered.

“Put it on your main screen,” Brandon told Wanamaker.

She whispered into her microphone, and the single, sharp-peaked curve appeared on the console’s central screen, like a steep mountain rising out of a jagged plain.

“That’s the spectrum of the light down on the nightside?” Elyse asked, her voice hushed, awed.

Wanamaker nodded once.

“Jesus Christ,” Brandon said, also amazed. “It’s a laser beam!”

PREPARATION

“That’s a laser shining down there?” Jordan asked, unbelieving.

“A single wavelength,” Wanamaker said, sounding just as stunned as Jordan felt.

“Not a single wavelength,” Brandon corrected.

“A damned narrow set of wavelengths,” Wanamaker admitted. “But they’re bunched together. That’s the signature of a laser beam, nothing else.”

Jordan couldn’t take his eyes off the display screen. The sharp peak twinkled, glittered against the background.

“Lasers occur in nature, don’t they?” he asked.

“In interstellar nebulae,” said Elyse. “Not in the middle of a forest.”

Hazzard said, “I remember seeing a paper about a natural laser in a planetary atmosphere.”

“Speculation,” Wanamaker said. “Never been proven. Or observed, for that matter.”

“It’s artificial,” Brandon said tightly, no doubt in him. “Man-made.”

“Not man-made,” Meek corrected.

“Better get Thornberry back here,” said Jordan.

Once Thornberry entered the command center he gaped at the display and immediately started asking Wanamaker how much the minisat could tell them about the terrain in the vicinity of the light.

“The area’ll be in daylight in another six hours,” Wanamaker responded. “We’ll be able to see it a lot better then.”

“I’m going to dinner,” Meek said. “I never got to finish my tea, you know. I’ll be back in two hours.”

Jordan watched him go, bemused slightly by Meek’s cool insistence on feeding. The rest of them stayed in the command center, swapping theories and speculations until the region where the laser was slid into the daylit side of the planet. Meek rejoined them, but kept silently aloof from the guessing games.

The area turned out to be a high plateau, heavily wooded. None of the surveillance satellite’s sensors could make out a building or roads or any signs of civilization or even a rough camp.

“Nothing but that damned spot of light,” Brandon muttered.

Thornberry shook his head, scowling at the displays. “I’ve already set up a scouting team: a pair of rovers that can get through wooded terrain. They’ll be ready to go in an hour or so.”

Jordan glanced at his wristwatch. “Wait. I suggest we have dinner and then retire for the night. We can continue this in the morning, when we’re fresh, and the area is in daylight.”

“Go to bed?” Brandon yelped. “How do you expect any of us to sleep with that going on?”

“It’s getting late,” Jordan said calmly. “We’re all tired. I know I am. You make mistakes when you’re tired.”

“But—”

“That light will still be there in the morning.” Before Brandon or anyone else could object, Jordan added, “And even if it’s not, we know its exact location and we can investigate the area thoroughly.”

“I vote we stay at it and launch the rovers without delay,” Brandon said.

Jordan smiled at him. “I didn’t ask for a vote, Bran. Get some dinner and then go to bed. We’ll all feel sharper, stronger, after a good night’s sleep.”

“We’ve been sleeping for eighty years,” Hazzard said mildly, an ironic curve to his lips.

“I’m tired,” Jordan said. “I assume the rest of you are, too.”

“Not me!” Brandon snapped.

A flash of memory raced through Jordan’s mind: six-year-old Brandon kicking and struggling as their father carried him upstairs to bed, yowling that he wasn’t tired, that he didn’t want to go to bed, that he wasn’t the least bit sleepy—then falling asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.

“All of us,” Jordan said gently. “The planet will still be there when we wake up tomorrow morning.”

“You’re right,” said Thornberry. “By the time the rovers are ready to land down there, it’ll be dark again. I’m not happy with the idea of landing me rovers in the dark, night-vision sensors or no.” He went to the hatch and stepped through.

“I’ve set the sensors on the minisat,” Wanamaker said, pushing her blocky body up from the console chair. “If anything changes the system will alert us.”

Hazzard shrugged. “Might’s well eat and then catch some zees. The ship can take care of itself without us.”

Elyse glanced at Brandon, then wordlessly followed the others through the hatch. Brandon gave Jordan a resentful glare, then he too went to the hatch.

Jordan stood there alone in the control center for a few silent moments, listening to the electrical hum of the instruments, the hushed whisper of the air circulation fans, staring at the display screen that showed the laser’s sharp-peaked spectrum.

It can’t be a laser, he said to himself. Even though he knew that it couldn’t be anything else.

Jordan’s quarters were identical to all the other living spaces aboard the ship: a fairly spacious compartment partitioned into a bedroom/lavatory and a sitting room that held a desk, a sofa, and two armchairs with an oval coffee table between them, and wall screens that were glowing with a faint pearly luster. There was a minikitchen in one corner, stocked with a refrigerator, freezer, and microwave oven. The bachelor’s friend, Jordan thought as he eyed the microwave. Then he went past the shoulder-high partition, sat on the bed, and began pulling off his shoes.

The wall screens were blank, although they could be programmed to show anything from the art collection of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to the latest entertainment or game vids. Or any of the ship’s sensor displays, as well.

Jordan felt very tired. Strange for a man who’s only been awake for a few hours and done nothing more strenuous than lifting a salad fork. But emotional stress can be just as exhausting as physical, and he recognized the demands that his body was making. Or is it a form of fear, he wondered, fear of the unknown. Fear of what we’re going to find down there.

Fear of what’s going on in your own body, a voice in his head reminded him. Fear that the virus lying dormant in your gut will wake up and begin to slowly, painfully kill you.

He pulled the bedcovers over him, expecting to stare wide-eyed into the darkness after all the excitement of the day. Instead he quickly fell asleep. His last waking thought was that it couldn’t be a laser down there. It couldn’t be.

Excursion

Well before 7 A.M., with nothing more than a quick cup of coffee in him, Jordan strode from his quarters toward the command center. As he expected, Brandon was already there, standing behind Thornberry, who was seated at the same console as the evening before.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Brandon greeted.

“Good to see you at work so early,” Jordan replied. “Did you sleep well?”

“Hardly at all.”

Over his shoulder, Thornberry said, “I slept like a rock, I did. A trick I learned when I served with the disaster teams in Africa. Never stand when you can sit, never stay awake when you can sleep, and never pass a latrine without using it.”

Jordan laughed politely. Brandon made a face behind Thornberry’s back.

The command chair was empty; Hazzard had not risen yet, Jordan surmised. Still, he stepped past the chair to stand beside his brother.

“I presume the light is still shining,” he said.

Brandon nodded tightly. “Bright and steady.”

“Are you ready to launch your rovers?” Jordan asked the roboticist.

Thornberry pointed to the center screen of his console and explained, “Got them loaded into a rocketplane and found a good landing spot for them, an open glade less than five klicks from the spot where the light’s emanating from. Be ready to launch in half an hour, we will.”

“Good.”

Slowly the command center began to fill with people. Hazzard slid into the command chair. Elyse came in and stood silently beside Brandon. Meek and Wanamaker and all the others jammed into the compartment, buzzing with low, tense conversations.

We should have made this area bigger, Jordan thought. Perhaps we can enlarge it. Then he told himself, No, that probably won’t be necessary. After all, we’re going to spend most of our time here down on the surface of the planet. At least, that’s what the mission plan calls for.

“Launch in thirty seconds,” Thornberry announced.

The digital clock in the corner of his console counted down: twenty seconds, ten, five …

“Launch,” said Thornberry.

Jordan felt the ship shudder slightly. Launching the minisat had been no big deal, he realized, but launching a rocketplane bearing two sizable rover vehicles makes a noticeable jolt.

Thornberry turned in his console chair. “They’re away. It’ll take nearly an hour for them to enter the atmosphere.” Then he smiled and added, “I’m going to grab some breakfast while I’ve got the chance.”

Jordan and most of the others headed for the wardroom. Brandon, Elyse, and Hazzard remained in the command center.

“Call me if anything … happens,” Jordan said to his brother. He realized he was going to say, if anything goes wrong. He had caught himself just in time.

In the wardroom, while Jordan and Thornberry both took merely juice and coffee, Trish Wanamaker loaded her breakfast tray with muffins, reconstituted eggs, faux bacon, juice, and hot tea.

Harmon Meek was already sitting at one of the oblong tables, his breakfast of cereal, toast, and tea neatly arrayed before him. Jordan led Wanamaker and Thornberry to the same table. Once they were all seated, Jordan marveled at how Trish could stow away so much food so quickly. Her chubby little hands were moving like a concert pianist’s.

“What d’you think that light might be?” Thornberry asked, between sips of juice.

“Laser,” said Trish, despite her mouth being stuffed with food.

Shaking his head, Thornberry argued, “How could a laser be there? There’s nobody down there, no signs of any people—”

“No signs we recognize as human,” said Meek, with a slightly superior air. “But then whoever put that laser down there wouldn’t be human, would he? Or it, I mean.”

“But there’s no sign of anything artificial,” Thornberry insisted. “Nothing down there but trees and rocks.”

“No sign that we can detect,” Meek countered. “That’s why we’re sending your rovers down there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Thornberry admitted grudgingly. “Right.”

“Somebody’s down there,” Meek said firmly. “That laser didn’t get there by itself.”

Trish looked up from her half-demolished breakfast and asked, “But who could it be? I mean, who put that laser down there in the middle of the forest? And why?”

Jordan murmured, “Sherlock Holmes.”

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“I believe it was Holmes who said that it was useless to speculate in the absence of facts.”

“Hah,” said Meek. “Excellent point. We’re just wasting our time until the rovers start to transmit some useful information to us.”

“Which they should be doing in another hour or so,” Thornberry said, with a glance at his wristwatch. “The rocketplane ought to be hitting the atmosphere in a couple of minutes.” He pushed his chair back and got to his feet.

Jordan rose, too. Trish kept gobbling her breakfast and Meek pointed to the wall screen. “You’ll pipe the imagery here, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Jordan said. Then he and Thornberry headed for the command center.

Brandon and Elyse were still standing close enough to touch, Jordan saw. Is there a romance going on? he wondered. Brandon’s always been a fast worker, but even for him this would be something of a record. Then he recalled, Of course, they knew each other all through the training period and embarkation, before we went into cryosleep.

Hazzard had put the imagery from Thornberry’s console onto the command center’s main screen, but all it showed was hash.

“Blackout,” Hazzard said. “Atmospheric entry plasma sheath blocks transmissions.” Then he added, “Temporarily.”

The screen suddenly cleared and Jordan saw a world of jagged peaks and thickly leafed trees scudding past as the rocketplane skimmed above a heavily forested chain of mountains. Thornberry hurried to his console chair, then turned back with an almost apologetic expression on his fleshy face.

“Entry and landing’s automated,” he said.

From his command chair, Hazzard said, “I’ve set up the override program. If we need to, I can fly the bird.”

Thornberry nodded.

“It’ll be fine,” Jordan assured him.

Still, they were all tense as they watched the ground rushing up toward the camera. The rocketplane’s speed slowed noticeably, but still there was nothing to see but an endless forest stretching to the horizon in every direction.

“The sky is blue,” Elyse said, in a half whisper.

“Those trees are damned tall,” said Brandon.

“Final retroburn,” muttered Thornberry. The rocketplane seemed to hover in midair momentarily.

“There’s the clearing,” Hazzard called out, pointing.

“Ah, she’s gliding in like a blessed angel,” said Thornberry.

Jordan watched as the open, grassy glade expanded to fill the display screen, tilted slightly, then straightened out and rushed up. The ground looked smooth, covered with green grass. The view bumped once, twice, then all motion stopped.

“She’s down,” Thornberry sighed, as if a gigantic weight had just been taken off his shoulders.

Hazzard flexed his fingers, then recited, “Log entry: oh-eight-forty-two hours, this date, spacecraft one landed on Sirius C. Fill in geographical coordinates.”

Jordan let out a gust of breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. She’s down, he told himself. The craft has landed safely.

The camera atop the landing craft slowly revolved, showing a broad grassy glade surrounded by tall, straight-boled trees, darkly green. Mountains in the distance, their peaks bare rock. The glade was flat and smooth, not a rock or boulder in sight, as if the area had been specifically cleared for the rover’s touchdown. The sky above was turquoise blue, dotted with puffy white clouds.

The first view from the surface of New Earth, Jordan thought.

“Send this view to Earth right away,” he said to Hazzard.

“Won’t get there for more’n eight years,” Hazzard replied.

“Yes, but send it. Send it now.”

“Right.”

For the next three-quarters of an hour they watched as the rocketplane automatically checked all its internal systems and activated its sensors. Meek and the others filtered into the command center and watched with Jordan as the numbers scrolled along the bottom of the main display screen: atmospheric pressure, temperature, composition—all were well within the limits that had already been recorded for New Earth by the earlier robotic probes.

We can breathe that air, Jordan told himself. Then he added, If it’s not full of dangerous microbes.

“Activating rovers,” Thornberry said, in the flat, almost mechanical tone of a mission controller. The command center fell completely silent, but Jordan could sense the excitement vibrating among the onlookers. He felt it himself.

The view switched to show the shadowy interior of the rocketplane. One side swung open and down, turning into a ramp. Brilliant, glaring sunlight streamed in.

“Rovers check out,” Thornberry reported tersely. “Out you go, lads.”

His console’s main screen split to show two views, from the cameras mounted atop the two rovers. Hazzard flicked his fingers across the keyboard built into his chair’s armrests and two of the wall screens above the consoles lit up to show the view from each of the two rovers. The machines trundled down the ramps and out onto the smooth grassy ground.

“Over the river and through the woods…” somebody singsonged. Brandon, Jordan thought.

“There’s no river.” Elyse’s voice, clearly.

The rovers plunged into the forest, at ten kilometers per hour. Jordan watched, fascinated, as the thick-boled trees glided past. There was precious little foliage between the trees, hardly any bushes at all. The woods looked almost like a well-tended park.

“Look,” said Brandon. “There’s a little stream.”

“A babbling brook.”

“Look out for animal life,” said Meek. “The equivalent of squirrels or other arboreal forms.”

His biologist, Paul Longyear, hurried to one of the unused consoles, muttering, “The sensors should be taking bio samples of the air.”

Longyear was a young Native American with a complexion the color of dried tobacco leaf, dark hair braided halfway down his back, and deep onyx eyes.

“Can’t those pushcarts go any faster?” Brandon demanded.

Thornberry shot him a grim look over his shoulder as he replied, “Sure they can. But not over territory we haven’t mapped yet. I don’t want these darlings bumping into trouble.”

“Maybe there’s tiger traps down there,” somebody snickered.

“We don’t have any idea of what’s down there,” Jordan said, loudly enough to stop the chatter. The terrain had been mapped from orbit, of course, but the forest covered the ground too thickly to see details smaller than a few meters.

Onward the rovers trundled, among the sturdy trees, maneuvering around rocks and boulders, some of them big as houses.

“Should be getting to the spot where the laser is,” Thornberry muttered. “Any minute now.”

And at that precise moment, all the screens went blank.

Frustration

“What the hell?” Thornberry exclaimed.

Jordan stared at the suddenly dark screens. What’s gone wrong? he asked himself.

While Thornberry growled into his microphone, Longyear announced from his console, “Bio sensors have crapped out, too.”

“Everything’s down,” Thornberry said, bewildered. Then he added a heartfelt, “Damn!”

“What’s the problem?” Brandon wondered.

“Run the diagnostics program,” Hazzard suggested.

“I’m trying,” said Thornberry. “No response. They’re dead as doornails. Both of ’em.”

“Can’t you do something about it?”

Shaking his head, Thornberry said, “The down side of making machines smart enough to operate on their own is that they operate on their own. They’re clever enough so that when they sense something down there that’s out of their database, they protect themselves by going into hibernation mode until we can restart ’em.”

“So restart them.”

“I’m trying, dammitall!” Thornberry roared. “But the little toothaches don’t respond.”

“Some anomaly down there.”

“A black hole, maybe.”

“Be serious!”

Jordan said to himself, Very well, you’re supposed to be the leader of this group. Show some leadership.

“Mitch, would you keep on trying to reestablish contact? Geoff, lend him whatever help you can.” Turning to the others, Jordan said, “The rest of us should clear out and let Mitchell and Geoff try to sort this out.”

They reluctantly began to shuffle out of the command center. Brandon took Elyse’s arm and led her toward the hatch.

Jordan looked back at Thornberry. The roboticist was poking away at his console’s touchscreen, muttering darkly. But his console’s displays remained stubbornly blank.

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.

“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.”

Jordan waved one hand in the air. “By all means, start the countdown.”

“Okay,” said Hazzard, “countdown clock is started. You launch in three minutes. And counting.”

Jordan sank back into the chair’s padding and squirmed a little to make the safety harness clasping his shoulders more comfortable. He glanced at Brandon, who was staring straight ahead. Pretending to be a spaceship captain, Jordan thought, smiling inwardly. Bran will never grow up, not completely. That’s my department. I’m the sober brother, all grown up and serious; he’s still something of a boy.

“Pumping out hangar deck,” Hazzard’s voice stated flatly.

Inside the cockpit they barely heard the clatter of the pumps sucking the air out of the hangar. Jordan felt himself tensing, though: excitement, fear, wonder, worry—all of them bubbling inside him.

“Rotating,” said Hazzard.

The rocketplane turned slowly toward the air lock hatch. Out of the corner of his eye, Jordan saw his brother lick his lips.

“Opening air lock hatch,” Hazzard announced.

The massive hatch slid open silently. Jordan saw the infinite darkness of space, speckled by bright unblinking stars. Where’s the planet? he wondered.

“Launch in fifteen seconds.”

As the synthesized voice of the automated countdown system ticked off the seconds, the rocketplane rolled to the edge of the open hatch. Despite himself, Jordan tensed in his chair. Then the rocket engine roared to life and Jordan felt a hard, firm push against his back. The rocketplane flung itself out of the hangar and into empty space.