Starborne

“What the year-captain thinks is a better question,” Heinz says. “But your list sounds good to me. Why don’t you go down the hall right now and let him know that you’ve picked his landing crew for him?”

“I mean to,” Huw replies. “Just as soon as I finish this game.”

He puts down his next stone. Leon stares sadly at the board and offers a countermove into Huw’s territory, but Huw heads it off with three quick moves that leave Leon’s stones encircled in a sea of black. Heinz and Paco come over to watch. Leon is one of the most experienced players on board, and Huw is still regarded as a novice; but Huw is murdering him with the aplomb and panache of an expert. He is playing now with the unsparing swiftness of the formidable Roy; he is playing almost on the extraordinary level that Noelle herself, the ship’s unquestioned champion these days, has attained. Leon seems rattled. He makes his moves too hastily, and Huw replies to each one with some crushing new onslaught. Two new enclosures sprout on the board, black stones throttling white. Leon peers at them for a time and shakes his head.

“I resign,” he says. “This is hopeless.”

“Indeed,” Huw agrees. He offers Leon his hand. “A good game, doctor. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Leon says, not very cordially.

“You will all excuse me, please,” says Huw. “I will speak with the year-captain now.”

Huw rises to go out of the lounge. He is a big, thickly built man, rumpled and inelegant-looking, who walks with the ponderous but confident rolling stride of someone accustomed to walking the deck of a seagoing vessel. As he crosses the room, he pauses to pat Paco appreciatively on the back, as though expressing admiration for his clowning. But also he blows a kiss in Sylvia’s direction. Then he proceeds down the corridor to the control cabin, where the year-captain is usually to be found.

Huw and the year-captain are old friends, if anyone can be said to be a friend of the year-captain’s. They are the only two members of the expedition who actually have worked together in any sort of way before they were chosen for the voyage.

Unlike the year-captain, who has chosen to reinvent himself every ten or twelve years with an entirely new career, Huw has devoted himself single-mindedly to planetary reconnaissance since he was a very young man. He is by nature an explorer. Some vagrant gene in his makeup has sparked an insatiable curiosity in him, not at all typical of his era: he seeks to move outward, ever outward, journeying through the realms of the universe, seeing everything that is there to be seen. The moons and planets in the vicinity of Earth first, of course. But it had always been his intention to be part of the first interstellar mission, which was already in the planning stages before he was born, and so he has spent his life designing, building, and testing equipment for use in the exploration of unfamiliar environments. Huw is a descendant, so he likes to claim, of Prince Madoc of Wales, who in the twelfth century set out with two hundred followers westward into the Atlantic and came to a land unknown, where he saw many strange things. And returned to Wales and recruited colonists, and went back to the land on the far side of the Atlantic to found a settlement of God-fearing Welshmen in the New World and to convert the Aztecs and other heathen to Christianity.

Was it so? Of course it was, Huw would say. The account of Madoc’s voyage was right there in the chronicle of Caradoc of Llancarfan, theHistorie of Cambria, now called Wales, and who was he to call the learned Caradoc a liar? It was well known, Huw would tell you, it was a fact beyond question, that certain Aztec words were much like Welsh, and that Indians as far north as the Great Plains had been found to be speaking the pure Welsh tongue like true Silurians when the later European explorers arrived. And did Madoc’s blood truly run in Huw Morgan’s veins? Who could say it did not? There wasn’t a Welshman alive who couldn’t trace his ancestry, one way or another, to the glorious kings of olden days, and Madoc had been one of the greatest of those kings: there was no questioning of that.

And so this jovial ruddy-faced son of Madoc had gone up from the green and placid precincts of happy Earth to ride in a silver bullet across the sun-blasted plains of Mercury, he had prowled the parched wastelands of Mars, he had risked even the corrosive atmosphere of Venus. He was a designer and builder of the equipment that protected him, the sealed and armored land-rovers, the doughty spacesuits. When he was done with Venus the moons of the outer worlds attracted him. Outward, ever outward: and it was on Ganymede of Jupiter that his path and that of the man who one day would be the year-captain of the Wotan first intersected.

They knew of each other, of course. Earth’s population in these latter days was so small, and the number of those of their particular cast of mind so few, that they could hardly not have heard of each other. But even a small world like Earth is quite big enough for two roving men to move about freely without bumping into one another, especially if they are periodically making excursions to adjacent planets.

Lifewas what the man who one day would be the year-captain of the Wotan was looking for. Not his own life; he had already found that, knew precisely where its center was located. But life outside himself, far outside, the life of other worlds. Mercury had none: the sun had baked it clean in the horrific intervals of daylight between the long spells of terrible night. The hidden landscape of Venus was too difficult to explore with any thoroughness, though it was not beyond hope that some organisms comfortable in blast-furnace heat under a carbon-dioxide sky might have evolved there. Still, none could be found. And on Mars — grim, red, dusty Mars — microfossils four billion years old spoke of ancient bacteria and protozoa, but it did not seem as if they had left any living descendants on that harsh and uninviting world.

The moons of Jupiter and Saturn, though — Io, Callisto, Iapetus. Titan, Ganymede—

“I’m going to Ganymede to look for microbes,” the man who would be year-captain said, five minutes after his first meeting with Huw. “Build me an ice-sled and a proton-storm suit. And come with me.”

They were very different kinds of men. Huw, cheerful and outgoing and exuberant, was surprised to find himself drawn so strongly to someone so remote, inaccessible, unsympathetic. It was the attraction of opposites, perhaps. They were mirror images of one another. And yet they wanted the same thing.

Huw was puzzled by the odd combination of flightiness and profundity that was the Scandinavian man’s mind: the curious episode of the career in the theater with which he had interrupted his scientific work, for example, a thing that made no sense to Huw, and the peculiar medieval yearnings toward some sort of transcendental consummation that he occasionally expressed, and which also seemed pure foolishness to Huw. But despite all that, they quickly found themselves drawn toward one another. They both were fearless, hungry, determined to seek things that lay outside the placidities of the tame housebroken civilization into which they had been born.

So they went to Ganymede together.

Ganymede was the biggest of Jupiter’s moons, an immense ice-ball, cratered by billions of years of battering from space, grooved by the heavings of fierce internal forces. There had been an atmosphere here once, though now it lay in frozen heaps: ammonia, methane. Together the two men skated in Huw’s cunningly shielded sled in eerie pale sunlight over fields of muddy brown ice beneath the mighty eye of Jupiter. The great planet, ceaselessly spewing primordial energy, spit angry swarms of protons against them, but the magnetic fields of their suits deflected the onslaught. Could anything live, endure, replicate, under such a bombardment? In theory, perhaps, yes. They found no sign of life on Ganymede, though, nor on big Callisto nearby. Not a microbe, not the merest speck. Nothing.

But volcanic Io was a different matter. An ocean of molten sulfur with a frozen surface; ice of sulfur dioxide forming white frost clinging to a silicate landscape; geysers spouting fiery plumes of elemental sulfur fifty kilometers high that came raining down as sulfuric snow, pastel yellow and orange with undertones of blue; and volcanoes everywhere, eternally belching, sending dense clouds of sulfur-dioxide debris booming skyward that tumbled back to ground like a rain of cannonballs. Here, on the night side of this dire turbulent terrain, under a black sky glittering faintly with the lethal electrical discharges from Jupiter’s huge relentless magnetosphere, the two explorers collected the first extraterrestrial life ever found: sturdy one-celled entities, closer in nature to bacteria than anything else, sulfur-loving things, bright dots of scarlet against yellow ice, spreading slowly and happily across the face of the frightful little world of which they were the supreme and absolute rulers.

Huw danced wildly, ecstatically, around those little colored splotches, flinging high his hands, shouting thick-tongued nonsensical syllables that he wanted to believe were Welsh. His companion remained motionless, regarding him quizzically.

“Come on, damn you,” Huw cried. “Dance! Dance! A celebration of life, damn you!” He took the other man by the hand, pulled him along with him, led him in a reluctant lurching acknowledgment of their great discovery.

And then it was on to Titan for them, Saturn’s chilly Titan, big enough to have held its atmosphere, a place where methane sleet fell steadily out of a hazy hydrogen-cyanide sky. Luck was with them here too. By the gloomy shores of hydrocarbon lakes, under a thick layer of faintly glowing lemon-colored smog, they stared at sprinkles of orange against a gray shield of ammonia-methane ice. These, too, were living creatures. Biological processes of some sort were taking place here, anabolism, catabolism, ingestion, respiration, reproduction, whatever. Living creatures, altogether different from those of Io and unutterably different from anything native to Earth.

Those two sets of alien splotches are still the only forms of extraterrestrial life that the human race has ever discovered, and the two men who found them stand face-to-face now in the control cabin of the Wotan.

“We’ve been talking about the people who’ll be going on the landing party,” Huw says.

“There’s been no decision about a landing party,” the year-captain replies evenly.

“We can at least speculate about the makeup of the party.”

“You can at least do that. But we don’t have any assurance yet that we’ll want to make a landing at all.”

“If we do,” Huw says. “Let’s assume that much, shall we, old brother?”

“All right. If we make a landing, then.”

“If we do,” Huw says, “my feeling is that a group of three is our best bet: a biologist, a planetographer, and—”

The year-captain says, “Do I understand that you’re proposing yourself as a candidate for my job, Huw?”

Huw, bewildered, snakes his head. “Why do you say that?”

“Naming the landing party is my prerogative. Here you’ve already worked out the proper number of people to go, and, I assume, the names of the actual personnel as well. Captain’s work. All right: you want to be captain, Huw, you can be captain. We’ll call a ship assembly and I’ll nominate you as my successor, and then you can pick anybody you like to go down for a look at Planet A. Assuming that you regard it as desirable to make a landing in the first place.”

Huw is still shaking his head. “No, you don’t understand — I’m not trying to — I don’t want — I wouldn’t want—”

“To be captain?”

“Not at all. Not in the slightest bit. We both know that the captain can’t be part of the landing party. Listen, man, for Christ’s sake, I am not trying to usurp your captainly prerogatives and I most assuredly don’t want to be the next captain myself. I simply came down here to have a little preliminary discussion with you about the makeup of a possible landing party, and—”

“All right,” the year-captain says, as calmly as though they are discussing whether it is getting close to time for lunch. “So tell me who you think ought to be the ones to go.”

Huw, flustered and crimson-faced, says, “Why, you and me, of course. Me to drive the buggy, you to examine the biological situation. And Marcus or Innelda to work out the overall planetary analysis. That’s a big enough party to do the job, but not so big that we’d be putting an enormous proportion of the whole expedition at risk in one basket.”

The year-captain nods. But he says nothing. He sits there silently, inscrutable as ever. Perhaps he is considering the best reply to make to what Huw has said; perhaps he is simply sitting there with his mind blanked out in the proper Zen-monk fashion, allowing Huw to fidget. Indeed, Huw fidgets. Huw thinks he knows this man better than anyone else alive, and perhaps that is true. But, even so, he does not know him nearly well enough. He has transgressed on some inviolable boundary here, he realizes, but he is not sure what it is.

After a very long while the year-captain says, “You and me and Marcus. Or Innelda. All right. Certainly those are qualified personnel. And who is to become the next captain? Have you worked that out too?”

“Man, man, I don’t give a bloody damn who is captain! What I care about is the landing party! You and me, old brother, the way it was on Io, on Callisto, on Titan — !”

“Yes. You and me. And Marcus or Innelda. We agree on that. It’s a logical group, yes, Huw. But also we will need a new captain.” He smiles, but to Huw the smile seems no warmer than the landscape of Callisto or Ganymede. “We should hold the election immediately, I think. And then, once my successor is chosen, I’ll name the members of the landing party as my last act in office, and they will be the ones that you’ve proposed. You really want to go, do you, Huw?”

“Stop playing idiotic games with me. Of course I do!”

“Then find me a new year-captain,” the year-captain says.

At Lofoten I was taught how to put all vestiges of ego aside and live as a purely unattached entity, undistracted by irrelevant yearnings and schemes. And thereby to be a more perfect being, who will be more nearly likely to attain the dissolution of self that is the highest goal of the disciplined mind.

I absorbed the teachings fully, yes, I did, I did. Even though the nagging feeling remained in me that by trying to make myself perfectly unattached I was in fact acting out the ultimate in self-aggrandizement, because I was setting out to try to turn myself into a god, and what is that if not self-aggrandizement? I remember how my Preceptor smiled as I told him all that. Obviously he had been down the same path himself. It was, he said, the paradox of striving toward unstrivingness, a circular trap, and there was no way out of it except right through the middle of it. Scheme as hard as you can to free yourself of the need for scheming. Drive yourself ever onward toward liberation from the slavery of goals. Exert merciless self-discipline in the pursuit of freedom from compulsive achievement.

Well, so be it, I told myself. You are an imperfect being seeking to follow a course of perfection, and it’s altogether likely that you’ll hit a few problems along that way. I did my best, given the inherent limitations of the material I was required to work with, and by and large I think that the Lofoten experience got me closer to whatever it is that I’m searching for than anything I had previously done. But look at me now! Oh, just look! Where is all my nonattachment? Where is my freedom from fruitless and distracting striving?

I want to be part of the team that lands on Planet A.

I want it desperately. Desperately.

I feel excitement gathering in me night and day as we get closer to that place. I feel it in my fingertips, in my throat, in my chest, in my balls. A new world! The new world, for all we know! If it is to be the place where we build our settlement, then the first ones of us who set foot on it will become figures of myth in millennia to come, culture-heroes, even gods. Do I want my remote descendants to think of me as a god? Apparently I do. Oh, Lofoten, Lofoten, you seem even farther away than you actually are! All those salutary plunges into icy pools, all that naked sprinting through the snow, all the fasting, all the meditation, the focusing of the mind on that clear white light, and yet here I am hungry for godhood, and how idiotic it is, how contemptible, how absurd. Yet undeniable. I want to go down there.

Which means I must find someone to replace me as captain. But who? Who? No one is stepping forward. No one seems even remotely interested. They are quite content to let me remain in the job. Like sheep, all of them, and none wants to be shepherd in my place. I should have thought of all this when I first let myself in for this year-captain business. Perhaps I did; perhaps I thought that it would be just another valuable spiritual discipline for me, to take on the responsibility of running the ship. Perhaps I had in mind, even, the great increment of virtue that would accrue to me by denying myself the right to be part of an exploring party. Certainly I’m capable of such nonsense. And now I have trapped myself in it.

Noelle reports that the transmission difficulties she has been experiencing in recent weeks have seemingly cleared up during the course of our move to this sector of space. Perhaps her “sunspot” theory really was correct, and some wholly local force was filling her mind with static back there. We’ll see. It’s a positive development, anyway, and those are always welcome. She still seems very tense and strange, though. Sits there in the lounge half the day and half the night, playing Go as though playing Go is the most important thing in the universe, taking on all corners and beating them with the greatest of ease. What a mystery that woman is! In this ship of strange creatures she is surely the strangest by some distance.

Unless Paco has botched his calculations, we are just a few days away now from the vicinity of Planet A. Given the uncertainties of my own situation, I find myself half hoping that the place will be so obviously unsuitable for colonization that we won’t even want to take an exploratory look at it. But that’s contemptible idiocy. Ten to one we’ll be sending a team down to prowl around. Huw, certainly. And Innelda, I think. And — me? That remains to be seen, I guess. The extent of my fear that I won’t be eligible to go is a good measure of the failure of my Lofoten training, and my anxiety level in that area is, well, embarrassingly high.

What I need to do now is call everyone together and hold an election. And get this thing settled before I lose whatever respect for myself I may happen to have.

The Articles of the Voyage specify that a simple majority is sufficient to elect,” the year-captain says. “In the event of there being more than two candidates, a simple plurality will be sufficient, providing it represents more than thirty-three percent of the total population of the ship. I call now for nominations.”

As is the case when all fifty of them are assembled in general meeting, they are gathered in the great central corridor of the top deck, fanned out in several directions from the place where the year-captain stands. His back is against the gray bulkhead that forms the corridor’s aft end. From there he can face them all. His eyes rove this way and that, looking onward from Leon to Elliot to Huw, from Giovanna to Sylvia to Natasha, from David to Marcus to Zena to Heinz.

No one says anything.

Chang and Roy, Noelle and Elizabeth, Paco, Hesper, Marcus, Bruce. Jean-Claude. Edmund. Althea. Leila. Imogen. Charles. The year-captain looks here, he looks there. Expressionless faces look back at him.

“The post of year-captain becomes vacant in five days,” the year-captain says, though that fact hardly comes as news to them. “I call for nominations to the post of year-captain.”

An ocean of uneasy faces. Frowns, sidewise glances. Silence. Silence.

Paco says, finally, “I nominate Leon.”

“Declined,” says Leon, almost before Paco has finished speaking the words that place his name in nomination. “I can’t be ship’s doctor and year-captain as well.”

“Why is that?” the year-captain asks. “Holding the one responsibility doesn’t preclude holding the other.”

“Well,” Leon says, glowering, “in my mind it does. I don’t want the job. Declined.”

“Very well. Do I hear another nomination?”

His eyes begin roving again. Innelda, Sieglinde, Julia, Giovanna. Michael. Celeste. Chang and Elizabeth, Hesper and Marcus, Paco and Heinz. Imogen. Zena.

Someone. Anyone.

Elizabeth says out of another long stark silence, “I nominate you to succeed yourself.”

The year-captain closes his eyes just for a moment. “I don’t choose to retain the office,” he says quietly.

“There’s nobody better qualified.”

“Surely that isn’t so. Surely. I decline the nomination.” He looks around again, a little desperately, now. No one says anything. The wild thought crosses his mind that this is a conspiracy of the whole group, that they are determined by their obstinacy to force him to reassume the captaincy by default. He will not let them do that to him. He will not.

“Well, then,” he says, “I’ll place some names in nomination myself. There’s nothing in the Articles preventing me from doing that, is there?”

This is unexpected. Startled glances are interchanged. Everyone looks troubled. There is no one in front of him, except perhaps Noelle, who does not show visible signs of fearing to be among those who are named.

“Heinz,” the year-captain says. “I nominate Heinz.”

Cool as usual, Heinz says, “Oh, captain, you know that that’s a bad idea.”

“Is that a refusal?”

Heinz shrugs. “No. No, I’ll let the nomination stand. What the hell, why not? But anybody who votes for me is crazy.”

“Are there any other nominations?” the year-captain asks. “If I hear none, nominations are closed.” He stares at them almost imploringly. Heinz is an impossible candidate, and surely they all know that; the year-captain has put his name in nomination only for the sake of getting the process moving. But what if no one rescues the situation now? Can he blithely allow the captaincy to go to Heinz?

Rescue comes from an unlikely quarter. It is Heinz himself who says, smiling wickedly, “I nominate Julia.”

There are gasps at his audacity. But it is just the sort of thing, the year-captain thinks, that one would expect from Heinz. He looks toward Julia. Heinz has taken her by surprise. Her handsome face is flushed with sudden color.

“Do you accept?” he asks her.

Flustered though she is, she hesitates only a moment. “I accept, yes.”

The year-captain feels a flood of relief, and something much like love for her, for that. “Thank you,” he tells her, trying to maintain a purely businesslike tone. “Are there any further nominations? Or does someone want to make a motion that nominations be closed?”

Paco says, troublesome to the end, “I nominate Huw.”

“Declined,” Huw snaps back. And swiftly says, “I nominate Paco.”

“You bastard,” Paco says amiably, and nearly everyone laughs. Not, however, the year-captain, who sees the proceedings degenerating rapidly into farce and does not like that at all. He glances from one to another of them, trying to silence the laughter that is still rolling nervously around the group. His gaze comes to rest on Noelle. She is the only calm one in the group. As usual she stands by herself, her expression serene and impassive, as though she is present at this meeting only in body and her mind is actually on some remote planet at this very moment. Perhaps it is. Very likely she is in contact with Yvonne and is reporting on the election to her as it unfolds.

“Will you allow your nomination to stand?” the year-captain asks Paco.

“Sure. I might even vote for myself too.”

The year-captain fights back his anger. “We have three nominees, then,” he declares in his most solemn official tone. Any more than three, he knows, and it will be difficult or perhaps impossible to achieve the prescribed 33 percent plurality, the seventeen votes required to elect. “A motion to close nominations, please.”

“So moved,” Elizabeth says.

“Seconded,” says Roy.

They will vote by notifying the ship’s intelligence of their choices. The year-captain, watching them line up at the terminals, runs through quick calculations in his mind. The women, he thinks, will mostly vote for Julia, not merely because she, too, is a woman, but because they mistrust the flip, irreverent manner of Heinz and generally dislike Paco’s coarse jeering attitude toward most matters of importance. Probably most of the men will take the same position. So Julia will be the new year-captain. It is not a bad outcome, he feels. She is a calm and decisive person, certainly capable of handling the job. Heinz, in a spirit of mockery, has done him a great favor: the year-captain can feel only gratitude. And he is grateful to Julia, too, for allowing the nomination to stand, busy as she already is with her responsibilities on the drive deck. She is doing it for him, he knows. She understands, though he has never spoken of it with her, how eager he is to lay down his captaincy and go forth to Planet A’s surface as part of the exploratory mission.

The voting takes just a few minutes. The year-captain, who is the last to vote, casts his own vote for Julia.

“Very well,” he says, looking up at the grid through which the voice of the ship’s intelligence emerges. “Let’s have the totals, please.”

And the intelligence tells them that Julia has received five votes, Heinz has received two, Paco has received one. The other forty-two votes are abstentions.

For an instant the year-captain is stunned. He can scarcely find his voice. Then his Lofoten training somehow kicks in, and he manages to say, almost calmly, “We have failed of a proper plurality, it seems.”

“What do we do now?” Zena asks. “Take another vote?”

“That would be useless,” the year-captain says, slowly, heavily. He stares at their faces, once again struggling with the rage that he knows he dares not allow himself to express. “You’ve made your position plain enough. Nobody here wants the job.”

“We wantyou to have the job!” Elizabeth cries.

“Yes. Yes. I do see that. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Some of them look frightened. He must be letting the fury show, he realizes.

“So be it,” he says. “The election has failed. I yield to what you apparently want of me. I will stay in office a second year.”

In their secret place belowdecks Julia attempts to offer him consolation for the bitter outcome of the election. But his Lofoten skills have carried him through the crisis; he has already begun to reconcile himself to the loss of the Planet A trip. There will be other worlds to visit beyond this one, and someday he will no longer be year-captain and will be allowed to go down and explore them; or else this will be the planet where they are going to settle, in which case he will be seeing it soon enough. Either way, there is no real reason for him to grieve. So the year-captain accepts, and gladly, the comfort other breasts, and her lips, and her thighs, and of the warm place between them; but Julia’s words of sympathy he brushes gently aside. He does tell her, though, how touched he was by her gesture of willingness to take the captaincy from him so that he would be able to join the landing party. What he does not speak of is that sensation that seemed so much like love for her that passed through him at the moment of her acceptance of the nomination. It was, he has subsequently come to see, not really love at all, only a warm burst of gratitude. Love and gratitude are different things; one does not fall in love simply as a response to favors received. He is fond of Julia; he likes and respects her a great deal; he certainly takes great pleasure in all that passes between them in their little private cubicle. But he does not think he loves her, and he does not want to complicate their relationship with discussions of illusory states.

Noelle, unworldly as she often seems to be, shows surprising awareness of the meaning and consequences to him of the election. “You’re terribly disappointed, aren’t you, at not being able to be part of the landing mission?” she says when they meet the next morning for the daily transmission to Earth.

“Disappointed, yes. Not necessarilyterribly disappointed. I very much wanted to go. But I’ll survive staying behind.”

“Do you mind very much having to be year-captain for a second term?”

“Only insofar as it keeps me from leaving the ship,” he says. “The work itself isn’t anything I object to. I simply accept it as something I have to do.”

She turns toward him, giving him that forthright straight-in-the-eyes look of hers that so eerily seems to deny the fact other blindness. “If one of the others had been elected year-captain,” she says, “then you and I wouldn’t be meeting like this any more. I would be getting briefings from Julia or Paco or Heinz about the messages to send to Earth.”

That startles him. He hadn’t considered that possibility at all.

“I’m glad that didn’t happen. I would miss you,” she says. “I like being with you very much.”

Her quietly uttered words unsettle him tremendously. The statement is too simple, too childlike, to carry with it any deeper meaning. Of that he is certain, or at least wants to be certain. She has said it as though they are playmates and this is their daily game, the loss of which she would regret. And yet she is not a child, is she? She is a woman, twenty-six years old, a beautiful and intelligent and mysterious woman. I like being with you very much. Yes. Yes. The simple straightforward phrase makes something stir in him, something disturbing and turbulent and troublesome, the strength of which is all out of keeping with the innocence of her words. He stares at her smooth, broad forehead, seeking some understanding of what may be going on behind it. But she is utterly opaque to him, as she has always been.

Noelle getting her briefings from Heinz — Noelle and Paco—

There is some sort of leap of connections within the year-captain’s whirling mind and he finds himself wondering whether Noelle has had any sort of intimate involvement with anyone aboard ship, other than her daily meetings with him. Sexual, emotional, anything. Mostly she spends her time in her cabin, so far as he knows, except for the hours each day that she is in the gaming lounge playingGo, or the tune consumed in taking meals, bathing, official meetings, and so forth. Certainly there has been no gossip about her going around. But what does that mean? He doesn’t think there’s been any gossip about him and Julia, either. The starship is big — the biggest spacegoing vessel ever built, it is, by a couple of orders of magnitude — and it is full of nooks, crannies, hideaways. All sorts of undetected things might be going on. Noelle and Paco? Noelle and Huw? Noelle and Hesper, for God’s sake, down in Hesper’s little chamber of Hashing colored lights that she would never be able to see?

All these wild thoughts astound him. He finds himself suddenly lost in a vortex of crazy nonsense.

Nothing is going on, he tells himself. Not that it should matter to you one way or the other.

Noelle leads a life of complete chastity. There are no probable alternatives. She comes occasionally to the baths, yes — everyone does that — and sits there unselfconsciously naked in the steamy tub, but what of it? She does not flirt. She does not join in the cheerfully bawdy byplay, the double entendres and open solicitations, of the baths. She has never been known to go into one of the little adjacent rooms with anyone. On board this ship she lives like a nun. She has always lived that way. Very likely she is a virgin, even, the year-captain thinks.

A virgin. Strange medieval concept. The word itself seems bizarrely antiquated. No doubt thereare such creatures somewhere — past the age of twelve or thirteen, that is. But one doesn’t ever give them much thought, any more than one thinks about unicorns.

Whatever else she may be, Noelle is certainly an island unto herself. She and faraway Yvonne dwell joined in an indissoluble union, into which no one else is ever admitted by either sister. If she is indeed a virgin, then the virginity, perhaps, may be essential to the manifestation of her telepathic powers. Untouched, untouchable. And so she would not ever — she has not ever—

What in God’s name is happening here?

This is all craziness. His head is full, suddenly, of absurd puerile speculations and suspicions and theories. He is behaving exactly like the lovesick adolescent that he never was. Why? Why? He wonders just how much Noelle means to him. Certainly she fascinates him. Is he in love with her, then? At the very least, her strangely impersonal beauty exerts a powerful effect on him. Does he want to go to bed with her? Then go to bed with her, he tells himself. If she’s interested, of course. If she is not in literal truth the nun he was just imagining her to be.

The year-captain is grateful now for Noelle’s blindness, which keeps her from seeing the way his face must look as all this stuff goes coursing through his mind.

As he struggles to regain his equilibrium, she says, “Is there anything wrong?”

She can tell. Of course. She doesn’t need to see his face. She is equipped with a horde of secret built-in receptors that bring her a steady stream of messages about the way he is breathing, the chemical substances that are flowing from his pores, and all the other little physiological betrayals of internal psychological states that a sufficiently keen observer is able to detect even without eyesight. The naturally augmented auxiliary senses of the blind.

“I was just thinking,” he says, not entirely dishonestly, “that I would miss these sessions with you too. Very much, as a matter of fact.”

“But we don’t have to miss them now.”

“No. We don’t.”

He takes her hand between his and presses it there, lightly, for a moment. A small gesture of mild affection, nothing more. Then he suggests they get down to work.

“I’ve been getting mental static again,” she says.

“You have? Since when?” He is glad that the subject is changing, but this is a jarring, unwelcome shift.

“It began during the night. A feeling like a veil coming over my mind. Coming between me and Yvonne.”

“But you can still reach her?”

“I haven’t tried. I suppose so. But I thought everything was better, and now—”

“We’ve been travelling between stars the past few months,” he points out. “Now we’re getting close to one again.”

“When I was on Earth,” Noelle says, “I was only ninety-three million miles from a star, and Yvonne and I had no transmission problems whatever, even when we were far apart.”

“Even when you were as far apart as you could get on Earth,” he says, “you and your sister were standing side by side, compared to the distances between you out here.”

“I still don’t think distance has anything much to do with it. I think it’s something connected with stars, but I don’t know what it can be. Stars that are not the sun, maybe. But I don’t really understand.” Now she is the one who takes his hand, and holds it rather more firmly than he had been holding hers a moment ago. “I hate it when anything gets between me and Yvonne. It scares me. It’s the most terrifying thing I can imagine.”

The time has arrived now to emerge from nospace and set about reaching a decision about whether to attempt a landing on the world that Zed Hesper has labeled Planet A. Now is the moment when they will discover whether the Wotan can indeed jump in and out of nospace in any controllable way; and once that test is behind them, they will be able to learn whether the information that Zed Hesper’s instruments have brought them — all that impossibly detailed data about stars and planets and atmospheric composition and polar ice-caps — constitutes a genuine report on real components of the real universe, or is merely a set of imaginary constructs having no more connection with reality than the chants and potions of a prehistoric sorcerer.

Julia has the responsibility for the first part of the business, bringing the starship out of nospace. Accomplishing that is mostly a matter of giving the drive intelligence the appropriate orders in the appropriate command sequence, and then giving the command — in the presence of the year-captain, and with him supplying the proper official countersign — that activates the whole series of orders. And then waiting to see whether what happens next is anything like what is supposed to happen.

So is it done, step by step. And it comes to pass that the maneuver is successful.

It seems at first as if nothing has happened. There had been no perceptible sensation when they originally shunted into nospace, and there is none coming out, either. No sense of being turned inside-out (or outside-in), no banshee wails in the corridors, no flashing of gaudy colors up and down the visual spectrum and perhaps a little way beyond.

Indeed, there is no indication whatever that anything has changed aboard the Wotan. Except that — suddenly, astoundingly, miraculously — the throbbing gray nothingness of interlacing energy fields which was all that any of them had had to look at for the past year is gone from the viewplate, and the voyagers find themselves staring at jet-black sky, a dazzling golden sun not very much different from the one under which they had been born, and a bright scattering of planets. One, two, three, four, five, six planets, so it seems.

That is a stunning sight, after a fall year of staring at the majestic but featureless woolly wrapper of nospace that has surrounded the ship like a second skin. The voyagers who stand by the viewplate break into cheers, applause, giddy laughter, even a few sobs.

The year-captain is on the phone to Zed Hesper, who remains holed up in his scanning room down below. “What do you say, Hesper?” the year-captain asks. “Is this the place, or is this the place?”

This is the place, Hesper opines. They have accurately navigated the murky seas of nospace — Paco must be congratulated — and are sitting right in the middle of the solar system that contains his Planet A. Planet A itself is the fourth of the six worlds of this G2 sun, Hesper reminds him.

But it is not so easy to tell, at least not merely by glancing into the viewplate, which of the six planets is the fourth from its primary. If the Wotan ’s position in relation to this solar system were optimally inclined to the plane of its ecliptic at a nice ninety-degree angle, one could perhaps casually line the planets up in their actual order of distance from the sun just by peering at the screen. But the Wotan is not so conveniently positioned. At the place where they have emerged from nospace the voyagers have a skimming, edge-on, rim-shot kind of view of this solar system. And each of the six worlds is chugging along in its own orbit, naturally, some of them at perihelion at the moment and others at aphelion, and from the point of view of the Wotan, confronting the whole system on the skew as it is, they are strewn randomly around the sky.

Hesper knows which of the six is Planet A, though. Hesper knows all manner of things of this sort. He tells the year-captain, and the year-captain brings the eye of the viewplate to focus on the world they hope to explore.

It looks like a world.

It looks likethe world. The world of their dreams; their home away from home; the New Earth that they have crossed this immense gulf to find.

All of Hesper’s data-analogies and equivalencies have turned out to be smack-on-the-nose accurate. It is a miracle, the information that the sharp-nosed little man has managed to conjure out of the scrambled nospace numbers with which he works. Planet A seems to be exactly what he said it would be, an Earth-size world, more or less, with what appear to be blue oceans and patches of green vegetation and brown soil. There is a sprawling tentacular ice cap at the northern pole and a smaller, more compact cap at the southern one. There seem to be thin clouds scudding through what seems to be an atmosphere.

“Break out the champagne!” Paco yells. “We’re home!”

But there is no champagne, the supply that they brought from Earth having been exhausted the night of the six-month anniversary party and the newly synthesized batch still undergoing its second fermentation; nor are they “home,” however much this place may superficially resemble Earth; nor is there any guarantee that they will be able to settle here. Far from it. The year-captain can’t help thinking that the odds against their finding the right planet on the first attempt are about the same as those of four poker players being handed royal flushes on the same deal.

Still, all the early signs are promising. And the year-captain is neither surprised nor greatly displeased by Paco’s boisterousness. Boisterousness is one of Paco’s specialties. Besides, they have at least managed successfully to find their way to this place. That calk for a little jubilation, whether or not the planet turns out to be one they can use.

Julia has some more work to do now: braking the starship in such a way that it will glide down into orbit around Planet A. Because nospace travel takes place outside the classical Newtonian conceptual framework of the laws of motion, the “acceleration” that the stardrive imparted to the Wotan during its journey and the “velocity” that the ship thereby attained bear no relation to the starship’s movements now that it has departed from nospace. It is traveling, in fact, at the same speed it had been making at the instant it shunted from realspace to nospace in its departure from Earth. Since it had been positioned at that time in orbit not far above the surface of Earth, it is still moving now at its former orbital velocity. The starship is essentially still in orbit around Earth. But Earth is no longer nearby.

So Julia must make the necessary adjustments. The Wotan is not equipped for extended travel through realspace, but the braking motor with which the starship is equipped will be sufficient for a maneuver of this sort. It is a simple operation; Julia copes with it with ease.

Meanwhile Marcus and Innelda, whose main areas of expertise are in planetary survey work, are doing an instrument analysis of the world that they hope to explore. There is no sense expending the reaction mass needed to launch a drone probe, let alone sending a manned expedition down there, if Hesper’s readings of Planet A’s atmospheric makeup and gravitational force and other significant characteristics are incorrect.

But Hesper’s figures continue to be right on the mark. The gravity is reasonable, even alluring: .093 Earth-norm. A handy nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, a little shorter on oxygen and heavier on nitrogen than might be ideal, but probably breathable. Traces of carbon dioxide, argon, neon, helium, none of these deployed in perfect Earthlike proportions but basically close enough to be okay. No sign of free atmospheric hydrogen, which would be a bad thing, indicating disagreeably low temperatures. Definite and heartening presence of water vapor in the air, not a lot, but enough. A dry place, mostly, this planet, but dry like Arizona, not dry like Mars. And there is just a touch of methane, too, precisely as Hesper had predicted — indicating a strong likelihood that the processes of life are going on down there. Not a certainty — the methane could be bubbling up out of subterranean vents, perhaps — but nevertheless there’s a decent probability that living things are growing and eating and digesting and farting, maybe, and dying and decaying, all of which are methane-producing processes, on the cheerful turf of Planet A.

Innelda and Marcus turn in a positive report. Everything their instruments have told them leads to the conclusion that Planet A is a good bet for colonization. There is water at least in moderation; there is air that is recognizable as air; the gravity is okay; at least in a general way the place appears to be capable of sustaining life, Earth-type life. But on the other hand, it is not possible to detect the presence of higher life-forms already in possession of the place. There are no cities visible from up here, no roads, no construction of any sort. No radio emission comes from Planet A, or anything else in any part of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. No artificial satellites are in orbit around it. All this is to the good. It is not the intention of the voyagers to move in on thriving alien civilizations and conquer them, or even to wheedle permission with gifts of beads and mirrors to settle among them. The Articles of the Voyage specifically state that the Wotan is to refrain from making landings on any world that is seen to be inhabited by apparently intelligent beings, leaving the definition of “intelligent” up to the year-captain, but making it quite clear that any sort of intrusion on a going civilization is definitely to be avoided.

There are, presumably, enough habitable but uninhabited worlds available within relatively easy reach to make such an intrusion not only morally undesirable but also unnecessary. This may or may not be the case, the travelers realize, but it is a good working assumption with which to begin their galactic odyssey. There are those on board who have already pointed out that policies can always be revised, much farther down the line, if circumstances demand such a revision.

The year-captain is suspicious, of course, of the encouraging data that Marcus and Innelda have brought him. It is inherent in his wary nature that he will believe that it is much too good to be true that the very first planet they have located should conveniently turn out to be suitable for colonization. Unless, of course, every solar system in the galaxy has one or two Earth-type planets in it — but in that case, why have there been no signs thus far of intelligent life anywhere in the galactic neighborhood? If there are millions or even billions of Earth-type worlds in the galaxy, is it at all probable that Earth itself should be the only one of those worlds to evolve a civilization?

So, then: Is Earth, that green and pleasant world, the one-in-a-billion galactic fluke, and, if so, how come they have struck a second such fluke so easily? Or are there planets of this kind all over the place and it is the human race itself that is the improbable statistical anomaly? The year-captain has no idea. Perhaps there will be some answers later on, he thinks. But he is made definitely uneasy by the swiftness with which they have discovered this apparently habitable but evidently uninhabited world.

The action now shifts to Huw’s department. He is the chief explorer; he will mount and launch an unmanned probe to provide them with actual and tangible samplings of the planetary environment that awaits them.

The Wotan carries three robot drones, and has the technological capacity to assemble others if anything happens to these. But constructing replacements for the original three would require a considerable redeployment of the ship’s resources of matériel and energy, and Huw understands very clearly that every effort must be made to bring each drone back successfully from a launching. He runs simulated landings nonstop for three days before he is ready to send one of the little robot vessels forth.

The outing, though, is carried off perfectly. The drone emerges smoothly from the belly of the starship and spirals downward to its target with absolute accuracy. Taking up an orbital position some 20,000 kilometers above the surface of Planet A, it carries out an extensive optical reconnaissance, sending back televised images that continue to provide confirmation for the belief that no higher life-forms are to be found down there.

After circling Planet A for one entire ship’s day — making several orbital adjustments during that time to ensure full visual coverage of the planet’s land surface — the drone enters landing mode and descends to the great rolling savannah in the heart of the biggest and driest of Planet A’s four continental landmasses. There — guided by Huw, who is sitting at a set of proxy controls aboard the Wotan — it adapts itself to surface locomotion by extruding wheels and treads and sets out over a circular route with a radius of a hundred kilometers, gathering at Huw’s command atmospheric samples, soil, water, minerals, bits of vegetation, all manner of interesting odds and ends. Having accomplished this, it goes airborne again and moves on to the opposite hemisphere, where conditions are more or less the same though a trifle less barren, and takes a second set of samples. Then Huw, well satisfied with the robot drone’s accomplishments, keys in the command that summons it back to the Wotan.

For nine working days a team of seven expedition members, garbed head to toe in space gear as a cautionary measure, analyzes the drone’s haul in one of the sterile isolation rooms on the Wotan’s laboratory level. The year-captain, who has allocated the biological research to himself, finds bacteria in the soil samples, various kinds of protozoa in the water, and several heavily armored little ten-legged insectlike creatures in one of the drone’s collecting jars. He stares at these with awe and reverence: they are the first multicelled extraterrestrial beings ever discovered, though he suspects and hopes that they will not be the last.

Biological analysis reveals nothing obviously toxic in the soil samples or in the water. Analysis of the air samples indicates the strong likelihood that the atmosphere of Planet A will be accessible to lungs that have evolved in the air of Earth. The bacteria, when cultured in juxtaposition with microorganisms of terrestrial origin, engage in no interaction with them whatever, neither killing them nor being killed by them. This may or may not be a good sign — it remains to be seen whether the biochemistry of Planet A will be compatible with that of Earth, and the indifference of one set of bacteria to the other would raise the possibility that human settlers will be unable to digest and assimilate the foodstuffs that they find on this world.

Other little troublesome questions necessarily must go unanswered at this point. Are there airborne viruses somewhere down there, carrying fascinating new diseases? A few well-spaced scoops of atmospheric samples won’t necessarily reveal that. What about lethal amino acids in the meat of the Planet A equivalents of sheep and cattle, if there happen to be any such animals? Or murderous alkaloids in the local versions of apples and asparagus? The drone samples can’t tell them any of that. These are matters that can only be discovered the hard way, in the fullness of time, by direct experience.

Huw says, “All that’s left to do now is for us to send down a manned expedition, captain.”

The year-captain is aware of that already. Still, Huw’s words give him a good jab in the solar plexus. He hopes he has not allowed his pain to show. He has, by now, chosen the team that will descend to make the reconnaissance, and, of course, he is not a member of that team. And, Lofoten training or not, he will probably always continue to feel occasional moments of dark regret over the necessity of remaining behind.

“We only want volunteers for this mission, of course,” the year-captain says. “Huw, do I hear you volunteering to be the leader?”

Huw grins broadly. “You have persuaded me to do my duty, old brother.”

“Innelda?” says the year-captain. “What about you?”

Innelda, slim, imperious, almond-eyed, is taken no more unawares by the request than was Huw. Everybody on board has been trained to some degree in the techniques of analyzing alien landscapes — their lives ultimately may depend on the quickness with which they react to unfamiliar conditions — but Innelda’s knowledge in that area isn’t just part of her survival training, it is her scientific specialty.

“And finally,” the year-captain says — there is great suspense involved in this choice; everyone is wondering about it — “we want to know something about the plant and animal life down below. Its biochemistry, primarily. Whether we’re going to be able to make use of anything for food, or will have to set up alternative food-sources using genetic manipulation of the foodstock we’ve brought with us from Earth.” His glance comes to rest on Giovanna. “This falls into your domain, I would think,” he tells her.

The general reaction is one of surprise. Not that he would ask the biochemist Giovanna to make the journey — she is at least as qualified for the third slot as the year-captain himself, and perhaps more so — but that he has chosen two women for the group. Everyone has heard by this time of Paco’s primordial little pronunciamento about the inadvisability of risking useful wombs by letting any women at all go down to Planet A. And here is the year-captain sending not just one woman buttwo, a full 8 percent of the ship’s female complement. Is this some sort of direct rebuke of Paco? Or does the year-captain actually agree with Paco’s thesis, and is this the year-captain’s furious way of telling them all that his only recourse, now that they have prevented him from undertaking the trip, is to send Giovanna?

Nobody knows, and no one is going to ask, and the year-captain plainly is not going to say. Huw, Innelda, and Giovanna it will be, and that is that. Huw and Giovanna, everyone recalls now, were lovers in the earliest days of the journey; they are still good friends; doubtless they will work well together. The choice meets with general approval.

What is actually uppermost in the year-captain’s mind, however, is the simple fact that he is risking three priceless and irreplaceable lives on this enterprise. Men, women: that makes no difference to him. But he doesn’t want to lose anyone, and there is the possibility that he will, and he hates that idea. The trick is to choose a landing party made up of people who will be useful down there yet whose loss, if they should be lost, will not seriously cripple the ship.

The planetary mission is absolutely necessary, of course. So far everything about Planet A’s habitability has checked out admirably, at least from this modest distance, and it is now incumbent on them to send someone down there who can learn at close range what the place is like. And those who are sent may very well not come back. There is always the possibility that ugly and even fatal surprises will be waiting on that alien world for the first human explorers. More to the point, though, there is risk even in the brief journey down from orbit. The drone probe in which the mission is to be made has been designed for maximum simplicity and reliability of operation, and it has been tested and retested, naturally. But it is only a machine. Machines fail. Some of them fail quickly and some of them fail only after thousands or hundreds of thousands of operations; but failure modes often are uncomfortably random things, and even a mechanism designed to fail no more often than once in a hundred billion times may nevertheless fail the very next time it is used.

Failure — an explosion en route, a bad landing, a bungled lift-off — would mean loss of personnel. The Wotan’s personnel are not readily expendable, although some, just now, are less indispensable than others. The year-captain has given much thought to that in making his choices. There is a considerable degree of redundancy of skills aboard ship, yes, but certain people are more vital to the present purposes of the voyage at this point than others, and it would be a heavy blow to lose any of those. Huw is one of those — nobody is better equipped than Huw to cope with the unpredictabilities of an alien world’s terrain — but for that very reason he has to be part of this first mission. The year-captain hopes he comes back, of course, for there will almost certainly be other missions of this sort beyond it and Huw will be needed for those. But there is no avoiding sending Huw out on this one. Giovanna and Innelda would be serious losses, but there are others on board who could do their work almost as well. If they had been unwilling or unable to go, he might have chosen any of eight or ten others. But some had never been on the year-captain’s list. The ones he would not risk under any circumstances at this stage in the voyage are Hesper and Paco and Julia and Leon, Hesper because he is the one who finds them their worlds, Paco is the one who aims the ship toward them, Julia, the one who makes the ship follow the path that Paco has chosen, and Leon the one who keeps them in the prime of health while they wait to reach their new home. Since it is not at all sure at this moment that Planet A will be acceptable, other planets may need to be found, other galactic jumps must be planned for. Without the basic skills of those four, there is not likely ever to be demand for the skills of the others on board, the gene-bank operators and the agronomists and the construction engineers and such.

There is one other non-expendable person: Noelle. The year-captain regards it as unthinkable to be sending Noelle out on a journey like this one. Noelle, you are a rare and precious flower. You are Earth’s salvation, Noelle. I would never place you at risk, never. Never.

The year-captain summons her now. “Is transmission quality all right today?”

The interference effect has been coming and going lately. The frequency of its occurrences is without discernible pattern. In any case it seems to have no connection with their position in space or with their proximity to any particular star.

This is one of the better days, Noelle tells him.

“Good,” he says. “Send forth the word, then. Let them know, back there on Earth, that we’re about to make our first planetary landing. Tell them to keep their fingers crossed for us. Maybe even to pray for us, if they can. They could look up how it’s done in some of the old books.”

Noelle is staring at him in bewilderment.

“Pray?”

“It means asking for the special favor of the universal forces,” he explains. “Never mind. Just tell them that we’re sending three of our people out to see whether we’ve found a place where we can live.”

For Huw this is the big moment of his career, the time when he takes the center of the stage and keeps it for all time. He is about to become the first human being to set foot on a planet of another star.

He has spent the past three days reconfiguring the largest of the Wotan’s three drone probes for manual operation. Unlike the probe that has already gone down to Planet A, and a second one just like it that is also on board, this one is big enough to hold a crew of three or four people, and is intended for follow-up expeditions precisely of this sort. It is default-programmed for proxy operation from the mother ship, but Huw intends to be his own pilot on the trips to and from the planetary surface. And now, after three days of programming and simulations and rechecks, he has pronounced the little vessel ready to go.

There has been one change in the personnel of the mission since the original three were named. During some celebratory horseplay in the baths involving Heinz, Paco, Natasha, and two or three others, Innelda has slipped on a soapy tile — she says she was pushed, somebody’s sly hand on her rump — and has badly sprained her leg. Leon says that she will be able to move about normally within five or six more days; but at the moment the best she can do is hobble, and Huw is unwilling to delay the expedition until she recovers, and the year-captain has backed him on that. So Marcus, whose planetographic expertise duplicates Innelda’s in many ways, has been chosen to replace her. Innelda is irate at missing her chance, but her protests to the year-captain fall on deaf ears. She will discover, before very long, that whoever it was who gave her that rude shove in the baths has done her a considerable favor; but that is the kind of thing that becomes apparent only after the fact.

The space suit — clad figures of Huw, Giovanna, and Marcus constitute a grand and glorious procession as they march through the bowels of the ship toward the drone-probe hangar. Virtually everyone turns out to see them off, everyone except Noelle, who is drained and weary after her morning colloquy with her distant sister and has gone to lie down in her cabin, and the still-angry Innelda, who is sulking inher cabin like brooding Achilles. Huw leads the way, waving majestically to the assembled onlookers like the offshoot of the great Prince Madoc of Wales that he believes himself to be. Certainly his Celtic blood is at high fervor today. What is a little trip to Ganymede, or even Venus, next to this?

He and Giovanna and Marcus settle into their cozy slots aboard the probe. Hatches close. Pressurizing begins. The Wotan’s launch bay opens and the probe slides forward, separates itself from its mother ship, emerges into open space.

A tiny nudge of acceleration, the merest touch of Huw’s finger against the control, and the probe breaks from orbit and begins to curl planetward. Soon enough the brown-blue-green bulk of Planet A is the only thing the three explorers can see from the port in front of their acceleration chairs. It is astonishing how big the planet looks as they near it. It is only an Earth-size planet, but it looms like a Jupiter before them. A year in the seclusion that is nospace has given them the feeling that the Wotan is the only object in the universe. But now there is another one.

Though Huw is definitely in charge, and can override anything at any moment, the real work of calculating the landing orbit is being done by the Wotan’s drive intelligence. That’s only common sense. The intelligence knows how such things are done, and its reaction time is a thousand times quicker than Huw’s. So he watches, now and then nodding approvingly, as the landing operation unfolds. They are coming down near the coast of the least parched of the four desertlike continents. The climate appears to be the most temperate here, milder than in the interior and, so it would seem, blessed with somewhat higher precipitation levels. Huw is planning a trek to the ocean shore to try to get a reading on what sort of marine life, if any, this place may have.

The ground, visible a few hundred kilometers below, seems pretty scruffy here, though: dry buff-brown fields, isolated patches of low contorted shrubs, a few minor blunt-nosed rocky outcroppings, but nothing in the way of really interesting geological formations. To the east, low hills are evident. Planet A does not appear to have much in the way of truly mountainous country. To Huw the landscape looks elderly and a little on the tired side. It is a flattened, eroded landscape, well worn, one that has been sitting out here doing nothing very much for a very long time.

Not really a promising place to found New Earth, he thinks. But we are here, and we will see what there is to see.

“Touchdown,” he tells the year-captain, sitting up there 20,000 kilometers away in the control cabin of the Wotan, as the drone makes a nice unassisted landing right in the heart of a large, broad, shallow bowl-shaped formation, perhaps the crater of some ancient cosmic collision, set in a great dry plateau.

The landscape, Huw observes, does not seem all that wondrously Earthlike when viewed at very close range. The sky has a faint greenish tinge. The position of the sun is not quite what he would expect it to be: out of true by a few degrees of arc, just enough to be bothersome. The only living things in sight are little clumps of yellow-headed shrubs arrayed here and there around the sides of this sloping basin; they have peculiar jet-black corkscrew-twist trunks and oddly jutting branches, and they, too, seem very thoroughly otherworldly. Even the way they are situated is strange, for they grow in long, right elliptical rings, perhaps a hundred bushes to each ring, and each ring spaced in remarkable equidistance from its neighbors. As though this is a formal garden of some weird sort. But this is a desert, on an apparently uninhabited world, not anybody’s garden at all. Something feels wrong to him about these spacing patterns.

The surrounding rock formations, jagged black pyramidal spires fifty or sixty meters high, have the same nonspecific wrongness. They announce, however subtly, that they have undergone processes of formation and erosion that are not quite the same as those the rocks of Earth have experienced.

It is understood that Huw will be the first one to step outside. He is the master explorer; he is the captain of this little ship; this is his show, from first to last. He is eager to get outside, too, to clamber down that ladder and sink his boots into this extrasolar turf and utter whatever the first words of the first human visitor to a world of another star are going to be. But he is too canny an explorer to rush right out there, however eager he may be. There are housekeeping details to look after first. Determination and recording of their exact position, external temperature readings to take, geophysical soundings to make sure that the ship has not been set down in some precarious unstable place and will fall over the moment he starts to climb out of it, and so forth and so forth. All of that takes close to an hour.

While this is going on Huw notices, after a time, that he has started to feel a little odd.

Uneasy. Queasy. Even a little creepy, maybe.

These are unusual feelings for him. Huw is a robust and ebullient man, to whom such sensations as dismay and apprehension and disquietude and agitation are utterly foreign. He is generally prudent and circumspect, useful traits in one who finds his greatest pleasure in entering unfamiliar and dangerous places, but a tendency toward anxiety is not part of his psychological makeup.

He feels a good deal of anxiety now. He knows that what he feels can be called anxiety, because there is a strange knot in the pit of his stomach, and a curious lump has appeared in his throat that makes swallowing difficult, and he has read that these feelings are symptoms of anxiety, which is a species of fear. Up until now he has never experienced these symptoms, not that he can recall, nor has he experienced very much in the way of any other sort of fear, either.

How very peculiar, he thinks. This place is far less threatening than Venus, where the temperature at its mildest was as hot as an oven and one whiff of the atmosphere would have killed him in an instant, and he hadn’t felt a bit of this stuff there. The worst that could have happened to him on Venus was that he would die, after all, and though he was far from ready for dying, Huw quite clearly had understood ahead of time that he might be putting himself in harm’s way by going there. Likewise when he had visited Mercury, and Ganymede, and roaring volcanic Io, and all the rest of the uncongenial but fascinating worlds and worldlets that his ventures had taken him to. So why these sensations of — fear! — as he sits here, fully space-suited, inside the sealed snug-as-a-bug environment of this elegantly designed and sturdily constructed little spaceship?

It is almost time for extravehicular now. Huw steals a glance at Giovanna, cradled in the acceleration chair to his right, and at Marcus, on his other side. He can see only their faces. Neither one looks very cheerful. Marcus is frowning a little, but then, Marcus almost always frowns. Giovanna’s expression, too, might be a bit on the apprehensive side, and yet it might just be a look of deep concentration; no doubt she is contemplating the experiments she intends to carry out here.

Huw remains mystified at his own attack of edginess. Is that a droplet of sweat running down the tip of his nose? Yes, yes, that is what it seems to be. And another one trickling across his forehead. He appears to be doing quite a bit of perspiring. He is actually beginning to feel very poorly indeed.

Something I ate, maybe, he tells himself. My digestion is fundamentally sound but there is always the odd apple in the barrel, isn’t there?

“Well, now,” he says to Giovanna and to Marcus, and to everyone listening aboard the Wotan. “The moment has arrived for me to go out and claim this land in the name of Henry Tudor.”

He makes sure that his tone is a ringing, hearty one. His little private joke stirs no laughter among his companions. He doesn’t like that. And how curious, he thinks, that he needs towork at sounding hearty! He runs through one final suit-check and begins to set up the hatch-opening commands.

“When I go out,” he says, “you stay put right where you are until I call for you, all right? Let’s make sure I’m okay before anybody tries to join me. I’ll give the signal and you come out next, Giovanna. We check how that goes and then I’ll call for you, Marcus. Is that clear?”

They confirm that it is quite clear.

The hatch is open. Huw crawls through the lock, pauses for a moment, begins to descend the ladder in slow stately strides, trying to remember those lines of poetry about stout Cortez silent on that peak in Darien — feeling like some watcher of the skies, was it, when a new planet swims into his ken?

His left boot touches the surface of Planet A.

“Jesus Goddamn Christ!” Huw cries, a piercing anachronistic yawp that rips not only into the earphones of his fellow explorers but also, alas, into the annals of exploration as the first recorded statement of the first human visitor to an extrasolar planet.

“Huw, are you all right?” Giovanna asks from within, and he can hear the year-captain’s voice coming over the line from the Wotan, asking the same thing. It must have been one devil of a yell, Huw thinks.

“I’m fine,” he says, trying not to sound too shaky. “Turned my ankle a little when I put my foot down, that’s all.”

He completes the descent and steps away from the drone probe.

He is lying about his ankle and he is lying about feeling fine. He is, as a matter of fact, not feeling fine at all.

He is experiencing some sort of descent into the jaws of Hell.

The — uneasiness, anxiety, whatever it was — that he was feeling a few minutes ago on board the probe is nothing at all in comparison to this. The intensity of the discomfort has risen by several orders of magnitude — rose, actually, in the very instant that his boot touched the ground. It was the psychic equivalent of stepping on a fiery-hot metal griddle. And now he has passed beyond anxiety into some other kind of fear that is, perhaps, bordering on real terror. Panic, even.

These feelings are all completely new to him. He finds it almost as terrifying to realize that he is capable of being afraid as it is to be experiencing this intense fear.

Nor does Huw have any idea what it is that he might be afraid of. The fear is simplythere, a fact of existence, like his chin, like his left kneecap. It seems to be bubbling up out of the ground into him through his feet, passing up into his calves, his shins, his thighs, his groin, his gut.

What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell—

Huw knows he needs to regain control of himself. The last thing he wants is for any of the others to suspect what is going on inside him. No more than a few seconds have passed since his emergence from the probe, and his initial anguished screech is the only sign he has given thus far that anything is amiss.

Now the strength gained through a lifetime of self-confident high achievement asserts itself. This can’t be happening to him, he tells himself, because he is not the sort of man to whom things like this happen: Q.E.D. The initial feeling of shock at that first touch of boot against ground has given way to a kind of steady low-level discomfort: he seems to be getting used to the effect. Does not like it, does not like it at all, but is already learning how to tolerate it, perhaps.

He walks five or six paces farther away from the probe, stops, takes a deep breath, another, another. Squares his shoulders, stands as erect as is possible to stand. Pushes the welling tide of terror back down his body millimeter by millimeter, down through his legs, his ankles, his toes.

There.

It’s still there, trying to get back up into his chest to seize his heart and then move on beyond that to his lungs, his throat, his brain. But he has it, whatever the hell it is, in check. More or less. Its presence baffles him but he is holding it at bay, at the expense of considerable mental and moral energy. It requires from him a constant struggle against the profound desire to scream and weep and fling his arms around wildly. But it is a struggle that he appears to be winning, and now he can proceed with the business of taking a little look around this place.

Now he hears a moaning sound just to his left, which calls to his attention the fact that someone else is out here with him. One of the others has left the probe without waiting for the go-ahead signal; the moan is probably an initial response to the hot-griddle effect of making direct contact with this planet’s surface.

“Hey!” he yells. “Didn’t I say to stay in there until I called you out?”

It is Marcus, Huw realizes. Which is even worse: Giovanna was the one whom he had chosen to be the second one out of the probe. Marcus has exited the ship on his own authority and out of turn, and now, moving in what seems like an oddly dazed and disoriented way, he is wandering around in irregular circles near the base of the ladder, scuffing his boot against the soil and stirring up little clouds of dust.

“I’m coming out too,” Giovanna says over the phones. “I don’t feel so happy being cooped up in here.”

“No, wait—” Huw says, but it is too late. Already he sees her poking out of the hatch and starting to climb down. The year-captain is saying something over the phones, apparently asking what’s taking place down there, but Huw can’t take the time to reply just now. He is still fighting the bursts of seemingly unmotivated terror that feel as though they are pulsing up through the ground at him, and he needs to get his crew back under control too. He jogs over toward Marcus, who has stopped scuffing at the ground and now is walking, or, to put it more accurately, staggering, in a zigzag path heading away from the probe on the far side.

“Marcus!” Huw calls sharply. “Halt where you are, Marcus! That’s an order!”

Marcus shambles to a stop. But then after a couple of seconds he starts moving again in an aimless, drifting, stumbling way, traveling along a wide curving trajectory that soon begins to carry him once more away from the probe.

Giovanna is out of the ship now. She comes up alongside Huw, running awkwardly in this light-gravity environment. He peers through the faceplate of her suit and sees that her forehead is shiny with bright beads of sweat and her eyes look wild. Marcus is continuing to put distance between himself and the probe.

“I don’t know,” Giovanna says, as though replying to a question that Huw has not asked. “I feel — weird, Huw.”

“Weird how?” He tries to make his voice sound completely normal.

“Scared. Strange.” A look of shame flickers across her face. “Like I’m having some sort of a nightmare. But I know that I’m awake. Iam awake, right, Huw?”

“Wide awake,” he says. So he is not the only one, then. Both of them are feeling it too. Interesting. Interesting. And oddly reassuring, after a fashion, at least so far as he is concerned personally. But it sounds like bad news for the expedition. Huw clamps his gloved hand over Giovanna’s wrist. “Come on. Let’s go after Marcus before he roams too far.”

Marcus is perhaps thirty meters away now. Still maintaining his grip on Giovanna’s wrist — Huw isn’t certain how much in command of herself she is just now, and he wants to keep the group together — Huw trots over the flat dusty ground toward him, half dragging Giovanna along at his side. After a moment she seems to get into the rhythm of it, coping with the slightly lessened gravity and all, and they start to move with some commonality of purpose. It takes them a minute or so to catch up with Marcus, who halts, wheeling around to face them like a trapped fox, and then lurches toward them, holding out both his hands to them in a gesture of desperate appeal.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” he begins to mutter, in a kind of whining sob. Invoking the archaic name, a name having no real meaning for him or any of them, but somehow bringing comfort. “I’m so afraid, Huw!”

“Are you, now, boy?” Huw asks. He takes the proffered hand and indicates to Giovanna that she should take the other one. And then the three of them are holding hands like children standing in a ring, staring at each other bewilderedly, while the year-captain in orbit high overhead continues to assail Huw’s ears with questions that Huw still is unable to answer. The rough sound of sobbing comes over the phones from Marcus. Giovanna is showing better self-control, but her face is still rigid with fright.

Huw checks his own internal weather. It’s still stormy. For as much time as he is in motion, taking charge of things and behaving like the strong, efficient leader that he is, he seems able to fight the panic away. But the moment he stops moving, it threatens to break through his defenses again.

Being close to the other two helps, a little. Each one now is aware that the disturbance is a general one, that all three of them are affected in the same basic way. So long as they stand here holding hands, some kind of current of reassurance is passing between them, providing a little extra measure of strength that can be used in resisting the sweeping waves of pure unmotivated fear that continue relentlessly to attack them.

“What’s it like for you?” Huw asks.

Marcus can’t seem to utter articulate speech. He makes a ghastly little stammering sound and trails off into silence. But Giovanna is in better shape, apparently. “It’s like everything I was ever afraid of when I was a girl, all rolled into one big horror. The nightmares that won’t stop even after they wake me up. The eye that opens in the wall and stares at me. The insects with huge snapping jaws coming out of the closet. The snakes at the bottom of my bed.”

“It started to hit you inside the drone?”

“As soon as we landed, yes. But it’s worse out here. A lot worse. Are you getting hit with the same stuff?”

“Yes,” Huw says distantly. “Pretty much the same.”

Pretty much, yes. Teeth itching, tingling, seemingly expanding until they fill his mouth. A throbbing in his groin, and not the good kind of throbbing. Jagged blocks of ice moving about in his belly. And always that steady pounding of dread, dread, dread. A relentless neural discharge activating the terror-synapses that he had not even known he owned.

No wonder there don’t seem to be any higher life-forms on this planet. Animal evolution has met its match here. Any nervous system complicated enough to operate the various homeostatic processes that are involved in upper-phylum life is too complicated to withstand this constant barrage of fear and trembling. No neural hookup more elaborate than those of bugs and worms can put up with it for long without giving way.

“What do you think it is?” Giovanna asks. “And what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know and I don’t know,” he tells her.

Then, addressing himself to the Wotan, he says, “We’re having a little problem down here. We’ve all come out of the probe ship and we find that we seem to be suffering from some sort of a collective psychological breakdown. No reason for it apparent. It’s just happening. Has been since the moment of touchdown. As though this place is—”

From Marcus, suddenly, comes a dismal retching sound.

“ — haunted in some way,” Huw finishes.

Marcus has pulled free of them and is clawing at the helmet of his suit. Before Huw can do anything, Marcus has his faceplate open and he is breathing the unfiltered air of this alien world, the first human being ever to do such a thing. He is, in fact, vomiting into the air of this alien world, which is why he has opened his faceplate in the first place. Huw watches helplessly as Marcus doubles over in the most violent attack of nausea Huw has ever seen. Marcus falls to his knees, quivering convulsively. Hugs his belly, spews up spurts of thin fluid in what seems like an endless racking process.

Marcus is not a pretty sight as he does this, but he is, at the very least, providing a useful test of the effects of the atmosphere of Planet A on human lungs, which is something that they would have had to carry out sooner or later during the course of this landing anyway. And the effect so far is neutral, which is to say that Marcus does not appear to be suffering any obvious damage from breathing the stuff. Of course, he may be in such a state of desperate psychic disarray by now that a little lung corrosion would seem like only an incidental distraction.

Eventually Marcus straightens up. He looks numbed and addled but fractionally calmer than before, as though that wild eruption of regurgitation has steadied him a little.

“Well?” Huw says, perhaps too roughly. “Feel better now?”

Marcus does not reply.

“Give us a report on the atmosphere, at least. Now that you’re breathing the stuff, tell us what it’s like.”

Marcus stares at him, glassy-eyed. Lips moving after a moment. Speech centers not quite in gear.

“I— I—”

No good. He’s all but unhinged.

Huw, strangely, finds that he has grown almost accustomed to the panic effect by this time. He doesn’t like it — he hates it, actually — but now that he has come to understand that it is not a function of some sudden character disintegration of his own, but seems, rather, to be endemic to this miserable place, he is able to encapsulate and negate the worst of its effects. His flesh continues to crawl, yes, and cold bony fingers are still playing along the stem of his medulla oblongata, and unhappy intestinal maneuvers seem distressingly close to occurring. But there is work to do here, tests to be carried out, things to investigate, and Huw focuses on that with beneficial effect.

He says, speaking as much to his listeners aboard the Wotan as to Giovanna and the hapless Marcus, “There are a lot of possibilities. One is that this place is inhabited by sentient life-forms that we aren’t able to detect, and they’re beaming some kind of mind-scrambling ray at us that’s doing this to us. Pretty far-fetched, but at this point we can’t rule anything out. Another thought is that it’s the planet itself, radiating psychic garbage at us right out of the ground, a kind of mental radioactivity. Which is likewise on the improbable side, I admit. But both of those ideas, crazy as they sound, seem more acceptable to me than my third notion, which is that human beings come equipped with some kind of inherent terror syndrome that goes into operation when we arrive at a habitable planet that isn’t Earth, almost a sort of wizard’s spell, but one that was hard-wired into our nervous systems somewhere during the evolutionary process to prevent us, God only knows why, from settling on some other — Marcus! Damn you, Marcus, come back!”

Marcus has fled right in the middle of Huw’s windy hypothesizing, and is running now — not lurching, not staggering, butrunning, as fast as his legs will take him — across the rough parched landscape of the landing zone.

“Shit,” Huw mutters, and sets out after him.

Marcus is heading up the sloping side of the basin in which they have landed. He moves with lunatic fastidiousness around the borders of the elliptical groves of yellow-headed bushes, running in figure-eight patterns past them, up one and down the next, as he ascends the shallow rise. Huw ponderously gives pursuit. Marcus is young, long-limbed, and slender; Huw is fifteen years older and constructed in quite the opposite way, and high-speed running has never been one of his pastimes. Running seems to intensify the disagreeable quality of this place too: each pounding step sends a jolt of electric despair up the side of Huw’s leg on a direct route to his brain. He has never experienced such raggedness of spirit before. It is a great temptation to give over the chase and drop down in a fetal crouch and sob like a baby.

But Huw runs onward anyway. He knows that he needs to get a grip on Marcus, since Marcus seems incapable of getting a grip on himself, and put him back on board the probe before he does some real harm to himself as he sprints around this desert.

Marcus is moving, though, as if he plans to cover half a continent or so before pausing for breath, and Huw very quickly finds himself winded and dizzy, with a savage stitch in his side and a sensation of growing lameness in his left leg. And the terror quotient has begun to rise again, back to the levels he was experiencing right after leaving the probe. He can force himself to run, or he can fight off the demonic psychic radiation of this place, but it seems that he can’t do both at once.

He pulls up short, midway up the slope, gasping in hoarse noisy spasms and close to tears for the first time in his adult life. Marcus has vanished over the rim of the basin, losing himself among the black corona of fiercely fanged lunar-looking rocks that forms its upper boundary.

Giovanna, bless her, comes jogging up next to him as he stands there swaying and quivering.

“Did you see which way he went?” she asks.

Huw, pulling himself together with one more huge expenditure of effort, points toward the rim above them. “Somewhere up there. Into that tangle of pointy formations.”

She nods. “And are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m absolutely wonderful. Let’s go up there and find him.”

They hold hands as they scramble up the rise. There is, once again, some benefit conferred by actual physical contact, even through their heavy gloves. Huw sets a slower pace than before: he is getting troublesome messages from his chest now that indicate it would be a smart idea not to try to do any more running for the time being. The slope of the basin is not quite as shallow as it had seemed from the landing site. And the ground is rough, very rough, unexpected little sandy pits everywhere and nasty tangles of flat, wiry vines and a tiresome number of sharp, loose rocks in just the places where you would prefer to place your foot.

But eventually they get to the top. On the far side there is a fairly steep descent to a sprawling valley pockmarked with more of the yellow bushes, which grow in the same elliptical grove. Here, too, each grove is bizarrely set with mathematical precision at identical distances from all of its neighbors. Some tall, ugly, sparse-leaved trees are visible beyond them, and in the hazy region farther out there seems to be a completely flat savannah that runs clear to the horizon.

At first there is no sign of Marcus.

Then Giovanna sucks in her breath sharply and points. Huw follows the line of her arm down the hill. Marcus. Yes.

Marcus is lying about a hundred meters downslope from them, facedown, his arms wrapped around a flat-faced rectangular boulder as though he is hugging it. From the angle that Marcus’s head makes against his shoulders, Huw knows that the news is not going to be good, but all the same he feels obliged to get himself down to him just as fast as his aching legs and overtaxed heart will permit. The anxiety that he feels now is of an entirely different quality from the one with which this planet has been filling his mind for the past couple of hours.

He kneels at Marcus’s side. Marcus is not, Huw sees now, actually hugging the boulder; he is simply sprawled loosely against it with his arms splayed out over it and his cheek pressed to the flat surface of the rock that he must have hit when he tripped and fell. There is a deep cut, virtually an indentation, along one side of his head. A trickle of blood is coming from the corner of Marcus’s mouth, and another from one of his nostrils. His lips are parted and slack. His eyes are open, but not functioning. He is not breathing. His neck, Huw assumes, is broken.

Huw is hard pressed to remember the last time he saw a dead person. Twenty years ago, perhaps; thirty, even. Death is not a common event in Huw’s world, certainly not death at Marcus’s age. There are occasional unfortunate accidents, yes, few and far between, but in general death is not considered a normal option for people less than a century old. The idiotic, meaningless death of this young man on this alien world strikes Huw with massive impact. Above and beyond the special things that Planet A has been doing to his mind since the moment of landing, completely separate from all of that, Huw feels a pure hot shaft of grief and shock and utter despondency run through the core of his soul. He sags for a moment, and has to steady himself against this unexpected weakness. This planet is teaching him things about the limits of his resilience, which he once had thought was boundless.

“What can we do?” Giovanna asks. “Is there something in the medical kit that will—”

Huw laughs. It is such a harsh laugh that she flinches from him, and he feels almost like apologizing, but doesn’t. “What we have to do,” he says, as gently as he can, “is pick him up and carry him back to the ship, I suppose. That’s all. The other option, the practical thing to do, would be to leave him right here, with a cairn to mark the place, but we really can’t do that, you know. Not without permission. The one thing we can’t do is bring him back to life, Giovanna.”

The year-captain cuts in once more, wanting to know what’s going on.

“We have a casualty here,” Huw says somberly. He is furious with himself, though he knows that none of this is his fault. “There’s something about this goddamned place that drives you crazy. Marcus panicked and bolted and ran. Up the hill, down the other side. And tripped and fell headlong against a rock and broke his stupid neck.”

Silence, for a moment, at the other end.

“Are you saying that he’s dead, Huw?” the year-captain finally asks.

“I’m saying that, yes.”

“Do you want to talk to Leon?”

“About what?” Huw asks savagely. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Marcus is really dead and he’s going to stay that way. He can’t be fixed, not by me, not by Leon if I bring him back up there, not by Jesus Christ himself. Believe me.” There’s Jesus Christ again, Huw thinks. The old myths keep surfacing. Something about this planet makes you want to invoke divine aid, it would seem. “Or Zeus, for that matter,” Huw says, still angry, angry at the year-captain, at Marcus, at himself, at the universe.

Once again the year-captain is slow to respond.

“I think what we have here is an uninhabitable planet,” Huw says, as the silence from above stretches intolerably. “That’s not a final conclusion but it looks pretty overwhelming. There’s something very peculiar here, some kind of a psychic field, that starts operating on you the moment you make surface contact with the planet, and it, doesn’t let up. You just go on and on, feeling horrible, every minute you’re here. Some minutes are worse than others, but none of them is ever any good. Do you understand what I’m saying, year-captain?”

“We’ve been following your ground conversations. We have some idea of what it’s been like.”

“You haveno idea, none. You only think you do. What shall I do with Marcus? Bury him here?”

“No. Bring him back with you.”

“You think he isn’t really dead?”

“I think salvaging what we can of him for the ship’s organ bank makes more sense than putting him in a hole in the ground,” the year-captain says, sounding brusque. “You’re going to start back up here right away, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“That would be aborting the mission, captain. Do you want me to do that?”

“You said the place is uninhabitable.”

“I saidI think it’s uninhabitable. We’ve only experienced one small patch of it. Suppose this psychic field, if that’s what it is, is a factor only in this one region? The least I can do is check out some other area before we write the mission off as a complete failure.”

“It’s cost us one life already, Huw.”

“Exactly. That’s why I want to make absolutely sure that we can’t use this planet before we give up on it. Marcus will really have died in vain if we let one bad experience spook us away from a planet that might have worked out for us had we only bothered to take a little more time for a good look at the rest of it.”

Still another spell of nonresponse now from on high. Huw wonders what effect Marcus’s death is having on the year-captain and the rest of them up there. He himself is growing almost numb to it, he realizes. Marcus’s twisted form, lying right at his feet, seems to him to be nothing more than a badly constructed doll now.

Once more Huw is compelled to break the silence himself. “Are you ordering me to abort the mission, captain?”

“No. I’m not doing that. What’s your actual plan, Huw?”

“I was originally going to make a trek to the seashore near here, but there’s no sense in that now. What we’re going to do is make a landing on a second continent, a brief reconnaissance. If we get the same kind of negative results there too, we’ll head for home right away. Bringing Marcus with us, as you request. What do you say?”

“Go ahead,” says die year-captain. “Check out a second continent, if that’s what you want to do.”

Huw closes Marcus’s faceplate and signals to Giovanna, and together they carry the dead man up the slope, down the far side, and across the basin to the ship. It is not an easy task, despite Marcus’s slenderness and the slightly lessened gravitational pull. The dispiriting emanations of this planet claw at their souls, robbing them of will and strength. But somehow they manage. They load Marcus into his acceleration chair and slide into their own.

Giovanna says, “You’re really going to investigate some other site before we go back?”

“I really am, yes. Don’t you think you can handle it?”

“I think it’s a waste of time.”

“So do I,” Huw says. “But we’ve worked very hard to get ourselves here. If I don’t make one more attempt at seeing if we can cope with this world, I’m going to wonder for the rest of my life whether I was too hasty in leaving. Humor me, Giovanna. I can’t turn back this fast.”

“Even with Marcus sitting here next to us and—”

“Even with,” he says. As he speaks, he is busy requesting lift-off assistance from the drive intelligence. The drone probe works its way through its sealing maneuvers, the hatch swings closed, and the usual array of readouts begins to announce the little ship’s readiness for going airborne. Huw does not attempt to take direct command of the vessel himself; he is too drained by what has occurred here, and he wants simply to sink back in his acceleration chair and let things happen around him, at least for a little while.

They are in the air now. Heading eastward, flying at an altitude of a thousand kilometers, crossing a calm gray-green ocean with an almost waveless surface that has a curiously greasy look. Night begins to descend around them, and very quickly they are in darkness. This planet has no moon. The stars, against that pure black backdrop, are nearly as intense in their gleaming as they would be in space. Huw, studying the sky, tries to arrange the unfamiliar patterns into constellations. That one, he thinks, is something like a tree with huge feathery branches, and he traces another outline that strikes him as reminiscent of a dog’s head, and another that seems to be a warrior about to throw a spear. He tries to point these figures out to Giovanna, but she is unable to see them no matter how carefully he directs her to the key stars, and gradually Huw loses them himself in the general confusion of the bright cosmic clutter.

The probe is over land again. A greenish dawn is breaking. Huw assumes manual control and searches for a good place to bring them down.

This continent is one big desert, a sea of orange dunes. Perhaps it doesn’t radiate nightmare waves like the continent in the western hemisphere, but it doesn’t look like a very good bet for settlement all the same. From the air Huw sees nothing that might be a river, a lake, even a stream — just sand and more sand, and squat flat-topped hills separating one cluster of dunes from another, and some isolated patches of dismal scrubby vegetation. Still, he has come here for the purpose of finding out something particular about this side of the planet, and he intends to follow through on that intention.

Huw sets the probe down carefully in a windswept area where the dunes have been pushed aside, and begins the hatch-opening procedure. But already the wrongness of this world is manifesting itself once more upon them, here in the first instants of their second landfall. He can feel the icy, invisible skeletal fingers scrabbling at his brainstem again, the queasiness expanding in his gut, the conviction that a web of some constricting fabric is being woven around his heart.

There is a curse on this filthy place, he tells himself.

He glances over at Giovanna. She nods. She’s feeling it too.

“Let’s go outside anyway,” Huw says.

“What for?”

“To say that we did. Come on.”

Giovanna shrugs and releases herself from her acceleration chair and follows him out. As before, the waves of fear intensify as they make actual contact with the surface of the ground. Huw looks upward at the brightening morning sky. An unreasoning conviction begins to grow in him that there are winged creatures circling around up there, though he has not seen any form of animal life at all, airborne or otherwise, since their arrival on this world: huge gliding monsters overhead with sharp teeth and great curving black wings, he is sure of it, batlike beasts that even now are making ready to swoop down on them and wrap those dreadful wings around their faces.

There is nothing in the sky. No monsters. Not even a cloud.

He fears them, even so. He imagines that he can hear the slashing sound of their swift descent, the heavy rustling of those immense wings as they enfold him. He feels the dry, rough, rasping texture of them. Smells the parched, burned odor of them. His breath shortens and his heart pounds. He puts his hand to his throat. He is choking. He is definitely choking.

He takes it for a moment more. Then, suddenly, Huw pulls his faceplate open and fills his lungs with the air of this terrible planet.

It is cold, harsh, thin air, the kind of air that Mars would have, perhaps, if Mars had any air at all. There is a disagreeable medicinal undertaste to it, bitter stuff: some unfamiliar trace element, no doubt, present in a quantity larger than Huw is accustomed to getting in his air. But he sucks it in anyway in great sighing gusting intakes of breath.

Giovanna is looking at him worriedly. “Why are you doing that?” she asks.

Huw doesn’t want to say anything to her about airborne monsters, about huge rough-skinned wings clamping remorselessly down over his head to cut off his intake of air. He simply says, “I’ve come a long distance to get here. I want to breathe the air of another world before I leave.”

“And if breathing it is dangerous?”

“Marcus was breathing it,” Huw says. “It’s just air. Oxygen and nitrogen and CO₂and some other things. What danger can there be in that?”

“Marcus is dead now.”

“Not from breathing the air,” says Huw. But after a couple of further inhalations he fastens his faceplate again. His sampling of the atmosphere of Planet A leaves an unpleasant chemical aftertaste in his nostrils and throat, but he suspects that there’s little significance to that, if any: for all he knows, it’s mere imagination, just another of Planet A’s cheery psychic tricks, one more turn of the screw.

They are here to explore. So they dutifully walk around a little, fifty meters this way, thirty the other. Giovanna prods at the sandy soil and discovers a colony of shining, metallic-looking insects just below the surface, and they occupy her scientific curiosity for a minute or two.

But it is only too obvious that the same malaise of soul is afflicting them here as on the other continent. Huw keeps watching the sky for monsters; Giovanna is unable to focus her concentration very long on her investigations. The same fidgety fitfulness is afflicting them both, though neither has admitted it to the other yet. Whatever the effect is, it doesn’t seem to be a phenomenon confined to a single locality, not if two random landings have produced the same results, but must emanate from the core of this world to its entire surface.

Huw looks toward Giovanna. She is outwardly calm, but her face is pale, sweat-shiny. Evidently she, like him, has already learned some techniques for holding Planet A’s terrors at bay; but clearly it is as much of a full-time struggle for her as it is for him. A planet where you are always thirty seconds away from a wild shriek of horrible baseless fear is not a wise place to choose for mankind’s second home.

“It’s no good,” he says. “We might as well clear out of here.”

“Yes. We might as well.”

They return to the ship. Marcus, unsurprisingly, is right where they left him in his acceleration chair. To find him anywhere else would have been real occasion for shock, and yet Huw is unable to avoid wincing as he sees the strapped-in corpse lying there. Giovanna, coming in behind him, appears to avert her eyes from the sight of Marcus as she enters her chair.

“Well?” she asks, as Huw starts setting up flight instructions. “Do we try one more time somewhere else?”

“No,” says Huw. “Enough is enough.”

The year-captain says, “You think it’s absolutely hopeless, then? That we wouldn’t ever get used to the mental effects?”

Huw spreads his thick-fingered hands out before him, studying their fleshy tips rather than looking up at the other man. This is the third day since Huw’s return to the starship. He and Giovanna have just emerged from postmission quarantine, after a thorough checkout to ascertain whether they have picked up potentially troublesome alien microorganisms down below.

“I can’t say that we wouldn’tever get used to them,” he tells the year-captain. “How could I know that? In five hundred years, a thousand, we might come to love them. We might miss all that stomach-turning disorientation if it were suddenly taken away. But I don’t think it’s very likely.”

“It’s hard for me to understand how a planet could possibly put forth a psychic effect so powerful that—”

“It’s hard for me to understand it too, old brother. But I felt it, and it was real, and like nothing I had ever felt in my life. A force, a power, acting on my mind. As though there’s some physical feature down there that has the property of working as a giant amplifier, maybe, and setting up feedback loops within the nervous system of any complex organism. I’m not saying that that’s what it actually is, you understand. I’m simply telling you that the effect isthere, for whatever reason, and it makes your flesh crawl. Mademy flesh crawl. Made Giovanna’s flesh crawl. Sent Marcus into such wild panic that he lost his mind completely. Of course, as I say, there’s always a chance that we could learn to live with it after a while. The human species is very adaptable that way. But would youwant to live with it? What sort of price would we have to pay for living with it, eh, captain?”

The year-captain, monitoring Huw’s facial expressions and vocal inflections with great care, is grateful that he had had someone like Huw available to send on this mission. Huw is probably the most stable man on board, and certainly the most fearless, though it has crossed the year-captain’s mind that noisy, blustering Paco runs him a close second. Huw has been shaken deeply by the landing on Planet A: no question of that. And it isn’t simply Marcus’s death that has affected Huw so deeply. The planet itself seems to be the problem. The planet must be intolerable.

It is a matter of some regret to the year-captain that Planet A isn’t going to be suitable. He wants the expedition quickly to find a place where it can settle, before their long confinement aboard the Wotan starts creating debilitating psychological effects. And he is sorry that he will not get a chance to explore Planet A’s surface himself, awful though the place seems to be. But the intense negativity of Huw’s report leaves him no choice but to write Planet A off and get the starship heading out on the next leg of its quest.

He has said none of this aloud, though. Huw, left waiting for the year-captain to reply to his last statement, eventually speaks up again himself. “It’s a lousy world for us in any case, you know. Parts of it are dry and other parts are even drier. We’d have a tough time with agriculture, and there doesn’t seem to be any native livestock at all. We—”

“Yes. All right, Huw. We aren’t going to settle there.”

Huw’s taut face seems to break up in relief, as though he had privately feared that the year-captain was going to insist on a colonizing landing despite everything. “Damn right we aren’t,” he says. “I’m glad you agree with me on that.” The two men stand. They are of about the same height, the year-captain maybe a centimeter or two taller, but Huw is twice as sturdy, a good forty kilos heavier. He catches the year-captain in a fierce bear-hug. “I had a very shitty time down there, old brother,” Huw says softly into the year-captain’s ear.

“I know you did,” says the year-captain. “Come. We’re going to hold a memorial service for Marcus now.”

The year-captain isn’t looking forward to this. He had never expected such a thing to be part of his captainly responsibilities, and he has no very clear idea of what he is going to say. But it seems to be necessary to say something. The people of the Wotan have taken Marcus’s death very heavily indeed.

It isn’t that Marcus was such a central member of the society that the members of the expedition have constructed. He was quiet, maybe a little shy, generally uncommunicative. At no time had he been part of the contingent ofGo players, nor had he sought to establish any sort of regular mating relationship aboard the ship. He had had brief unstructured liaisons, the captain knows, with Celeste and Imogen and Natasha, and possibly some others, but he had, so it seemed, always preferred to remain in the little pool of a dozen or so voyagers who avoided any kind of formal extended sexual involvement with one particular person.

No, it is simply the fact that Marcus is dead, rather than that he figured in any large way in the social life of the ship, that has stirred them all so deeply. They had been fifty; now they are forty-nine; their very first venture outside the sealed enclosure that is the starship had afflicted them with a subtraction. That is a grievous wound. And then, too, there is the unbalance to reckon with. There will not now be twenty-five neatly deployed couples when the engendering of children begins. Whether the voyagers would indeed have clung to the old bipolar traditions of marriage on the new Earth is not something that the year-captain or anyone else knows at this time, of course. Those traditions have long been in disarray on Earth, and there is no necessary reason for reviving them in their ancient strict formality out among the stars. But now it is quite certain that some variation from tradition is going to be required eventually, because ideally everyone will be expected to play an active role in populating the new world, or so the general assumption goes at this point, and now it will be impossible to match every woman of the expedition with one and only one man. That may be a problem, eventually. But the real problem is that the people of the Wotan had come to feel that they were living a life outside all mortality, here within this machine that floats silently across space at unthinkable velocities, and that sweet illusion had been shattered the very first time a few of them had emerged from their ark.

It was Julia who suggested to the year-captain that a memorial service would be a good idea. A general catharsis, a public act of healing — that was what was needed. Everyone is stunned at the death, but some — Elizabeth, Althea, Jean-Claude, one or two others — seem altogether devastated. Bodies are self-healing these days, up to a point; minds, less so. Since the return of the landing party Leon has been dispensing psychoactive drugs to those in need of chemical therapy; Edmund, Alberto, Maria, and Noori, all of whom have some gift for counseling, are making their help available to the sorely troubled; the year-captain has even, to his great surprise, seen the usually uninvolved Noelle embracing a weeping, shaky Elizabeth in the baths, tenderly stroking Elizabeth’s shoulders as she sobs. Some communal acknowledgment of their general bereavement may be the best way of putting the matter to rest, Julia thought, and the year-captain agrees.

Everyone gathers at the usual place for a general assembly, and the year-captain puts his back against the usual bulkhead, facing them all.

He finds it difficult, at first, to locate the proper words. It is not a matter of stage fright — he of all people wouldn’t worry about that — but rather of a sense of inadequacy, of fundamental awkwardness. The year-captain’s dispassionate nature is perhaps not the one best suited, aboard this ship, for the task at hand. But he is the captain, chosen overwhelmingly by their vote at the time of departure, and ratified again a year after that. He is the one who must speak to this issue.

“Friends—” he begins, as his hesitation begins to pass from him. Every face is turned toward him. “Friends, we are all greatly wounded by the loss of Marcus, and now we must all pray for healing. But where do we turn when we go to pray? To whom do we address our prayers? We are a race that has outlived its gods. We are proud, I think, that we are beyond all superstition, that we live in a realm of the altogether tangible, the accurately measurable. But yet — yet — at a time like this—”

They are staring at him intently. Wondering where he’s heading, perhaps.

“Marcus is dead, and no words will bring him back. Prayer itself, even if there were gods and the gods were listening to us, would not be capable of doing that. If there are gods, then it was the will of the gods that Marcus be gathered to them, and we would have no choice but to bend to that will. And if, as we are all so confident, there are no gods—”

He pauses. He looks from one to another to another, from Heinz to Huw to Paco, from Elizabeth to Noelle to Celeste, looks at Leila, looks at Roy, Zena, seeking for signs of restlessness, puzzlement, irritation. But no. No. He has their attention completely.

“In ancient times,” he goes on, “this might have been easier for us. We would have said it was the will of the gods, or the will of some particular god, perhaps, that Marcus should die young in a strange and hostile place, and then we would have gone on about our work, secure in the knowledge that the workings of the gods are so mysterious that we need not seek explanations for them beyond the circular one that says that what has happened was fated to be. That was in a simpler era. We modern folk have dispensed with gods; we are left with the problem of finding our own explanations, or of living without explanations entirely. I urge the latter choice on you.

“Marcus’s death was an accident. It needs no explanation. There have always been risks in any venture of exploration, and even though most of the human race has forgotten that, we of all people should keep it constantly in mind. Courageously Marcus came out here to the stars with us to help in the task of finding a new home for the human race. Courageously he went down with Giovanna and Huw to the surface of the world we see out there; and there he encountered a force too strong for him to understand or handle, and it destroyed him. So be it. The simplest explanation is the best one here. Humanity is no longer, in general, a risk-taking race. But we are the exceptions. We fifty human beings have chosen to revive the willingness to take risks that most of us have lost. Marcus is only the first victim of that willingness. He is gone, and we mourn his loss. We mourn that loss because he was young, someone who had great contributions to make in the world we will someday build and who will not now make those contributions; and because he has been deprived of knowing the joy that the fulfillment of our mission ultimately will bring us; and because he was one of us. Mainly, I think, we mourn him because he was one of us.

“But is that a reason to mourn, really? Hestill is one of us. He always will be. As we go onward among the stars, to Planet B and Planet C and, if necessary, Planets X and Y and Z and beyond, we will carry Marcus with us — the memory of Marcus — the first of our martyrs, the first to give his life in this great quest on which we all are bound. It wasnecessary for some of us to go down to the surface of that planet. Marcus went. Marcus died. He was performing his function as one of us, and he died because of it. Others of us, I very much suspect, will meet with similar fates as this voyage goes along. So be it. We willingly embraced all risks when we left home and friends and family and world behind to undertake this voyage across the universe. We gave up the assurance of a long and safe and comfortable life on Earth in return for the rewards — and perils — of a venture such as no human beings have ever undertaken before. And as our work unfolds, we are not likely, any of us, to find it altogether comfortable, and certainly not very safe.

“So Marcus is dead, much too soon. So be it. So be it. He is beyond all pain now, beyond all uncertainties and insufficiencies, all knowledge of failure and defeat now. In that we should find comfort. But also we must see to it, friends — for our own sakes, not his — that Marcus’s death was not without purpose. We must go on, and on and on and on if need be, from one end of the cosmos to the other, if we must, to find the world that we are to settle. And when we get there — and wewill get there — we must see to it that our children and our children’s children remember always the name of Marcus, the first of the martyrs of our enterprise, who gave his life so that their world could be. When we write the histories of our voyage, the name of Marcus will be written in letters of fire. We will make Marcus immortal that way. As all of us will be immortal — glorious figures of myth, demigods, even gods, perhaps — in the minds of the people of that new world. We who are without gods to pray to ourselves will become gods, I think, to the settlers of the new Earth of the years to come. Immortal gods, all of us. And Marcus has simply entered his immortality earlier than the rest of us, that’s all.”

Again he pauses. Looks from face to face. Too grand? he wonders. Too high-flown?

But everyone is utterly silent and still; everyone’s eyes are on him, even the blind eyes of Noelle. He has captured them. As in the old days, the Hamlet days, the Oedipus days. Yes. A successful performance, one of his best. Perhaps even accomplishing something useful.

Good. Quit while you’re ahead, he thinks.

He says in a different tone of voice, a sudden downward shift of rhetorical intensity, “One thing more, and then we’ll break this up. This afternoon we’ll begin calculating the course for our next shunt, which will take us — what is it, Hesper, eighty light-years? ninety? — to another possible colony-world. Actual departure time will be announced later. Naturally, I have no idea whether this second destination is going to work out any better than the first one did. We’re simply going to go out there and have a look, just as we did here. At this point we have no particular expectations, one way or the other. Of course, I hope that it’s the world we’re seeking, and I know you all feel the same way. But there are others waiting to be explored beyond that one, if need be, and, if need be, we will go onward until we find what we want. I thank you all for listening. Meeting dismissed.”

Paco, Hesper, Julia, Sieglinde, Roy, and Heinz begin the process of working out the course that will take the Wotan to Planet B. The year-captain goes off with Noelle to send the communiqué to Earth that will report on the failure of the mission to Planet A and the death of Marcus.

He is worried about the effect that such news will have on the people of Earth. The people of Earth are accustomed to success. For them, he thinks, this voyage is a sort of fairy-tale adventure, and fairy tales are supposed to have benign outcomes, even though the occasional wicked witch may be met with along the way. The fact that one of the adventurers has actuallydied from his encounter with some dark magical force may not fit the pattern that they expect to be enacted out here. They may insulate themselves from further jolts, he fears, by retreating from their Interest in the Wotan’s voyage, by decoupling themselves entirely from their involvement in the enterprise.

Still, they have to be told. It would be wrong to withhold the truth from them. They know that a planetary landing has been made; they must be allowed to know the outcome of it.

“How is transmission quality today?” he asks Noelle.

“Some interference. Not too serious.”

“All right, then. Are you ready to go?”

“Whenever you are.”

He begins to dictate the message that he has drafted a little while before. Glancing at his text now, he sees that it amounts to a litany of unbroken gloom. Abortive mission … severe and inexplicable zones of psychic disturbance everywhere … violent irrational reactions by landing personnel … deplorable fatal accident … immediate withdrawal from planetary surface … abandonment of exploration effort … It’s all true, but it sounds terrible. He tries to soften it a little, improvising as he reads, inserting little phrases like “hopeful first attempt” and “encouraging to have found so Earthlike a planet, whatever its drawbacks, so quickly.” He speaks of their coming departure for Planet B and his optimistic sense that the galaxy is so replete with worlds of the appropriate size, temperature range, and atmosphere that there can be hardly any doubt at all of the forthcoming discovery of an adequate planet for settlement.

There. Let them chew on that for a while.

Noelle tires quickly as she pumps his words across the universe to Yvonne. The strain on her is all too obvious. Her shoulders sag, her head slumps forward, there is a tense flickering of the musculature of her face. There is more interference with the transmission today, apparently, than Noelle has indicated to him. And yet she goes gamely onward, until at last she looks up at him with a seraphic smile of relief, sighs wearily, and announces, “That’s it. I think she’s got it all.”

“What does she say?”

“That she’s very sorry about Marcus. That she wishes us all better luck on Planet B.”

Is Noelle telling him the truth? For one wild moment the year-captain finds himself thinking that this whole business of instantaneous mental contact between two sisters scores of light-years apart is nothing more than a fantasy and a fraud, that Noelle has merely been pretending to be sending his communiqués to Earth and is inventing all of Yvonne’s responses.

No. No. No. No.

An idiotic thought. He banishes it angrily from his mind. Noelle is incapable of such duplicity. And even if she were, she simply could not have managed to invent — to improvise, yet — all of Yvonne’s bulletins from Earth, the little details of ongoing daily life there, the occasional messages from relatives of the members of the expedition. For example, the year-captain’s father, who is a painter. He works in archaic modes — angels, demons, saints, all rendered with meticulous realism. He lives near the southern tip of Africa, on a dry rocky promontory eternally bathed in hot sunlight and planted with grotesque succulent things native to the region. In the past thirty years the two of them have met only twice. They have never had much fondness for each other. And yet the year-captain’s father, who is 130 years old, has quite surprisingly sent birthday greetings recently via the Yvonne-Noelle loop to his son, who is less than half his age. He has spoken of his recent paintings, his garden, the inroads time is beginning to make on his stamina. How could Noelle have known any of that? The year-captain wonders what upwelling of stress within himself has led him to these absurd and unworthy suspicions of the blameless Noelle. The failure of the planetary landing, he supposes. The death of Marcus. No doubt that’s it. He’s been under great pressure. They all have. He resolves to get some extra rest once they have returned to nospace travel.

Assuming Noelle will want her usual nap after this demanding transmission, he starts to leave her cabin. “Wait,” she says. “Where are you going?”

“The baths, I think.” Spur of the moment: he hadn’t been planning on it.

“I’ll go with you, all right? And then afterward, perhaps, we could go to the gaming lounge.”

He is puzzled by this. “You don’t want to get some sleep now?”

“Not this time, no.” Indeed, despite her show of fatigue a few minutes before, she seems strangely full of energy now, not at all depleted as she normally is when she has finished transmitting to Yvonne. This despite the problem of the static — or because of it, maybe? He will never understand her.

But a good soak in the baths right now strikes him as a welcome notion, and if Noelle doesn’t feel like napping today, that’s entirely her own affair. She drops her clothing quite casually, with seeming innocence. As though she is completely unaware how provocative that might seem to be, with just the two of them here in her cabin like this. But in her eternal darkness she probably gives no thought to the effect that the sight of her nakedness might have on others. Or perhaps she does.

He waits just a moment, an oddly tense one, to see what she will do next. Take him by the hand, lead him to the bed? No. Nothing at all like that. She reallyis an innocent. Calmly she opens the cabin door and gestures for him to precede her into the hall.

They go down the corridor to the baths together.

Sieglinde, Huw, and Imogen are there when they arrive. The brawny Sieglinde is in the tepid tub by herself; beefy Huw and petite, golden-haired Imogen are sharing the hot tank. Huw and Imogen are a couple these days, apparently, at least some of the time, and this seems to be one of the times. She is stretched full length in the tub, all but submerged, her head against Huw’s shoulder, her shining hair outspread in the water, the pink tips of her small breasts rising above the surface. He is so much more massive than she is that she seems like a doll beside him.

Huw lifts an eyebrow as Noelle and the year-captain enter, one naked, one not. Public nudity is not an extraordinary thing aboard the starship, and people sometimes come to the baths already undressed, but it is not a widespread custom. The year-captain wonders whether Huw is assuming an intimacy between him and Noelle that does not at all exist. The thought annoys him. He is aware that there is much ignorant conjecture aboard ship about his sexual habits, and he finds the furtive gossip more amusing than bothersome; but he isn’t eager to enmesh Noelle, who might be disturbed at finding herself the subject of such rumors, in these lascivious whisperings.

“May we join you?” the year-captain asks, sliding out of his clothes. The question is routine politeness. Huw gestures grandly, and the year-captain and Noelle slip into the tub on the side opposite from Imogen and Huw. There’s no need for helping Noelle; she makes her way over the side of the tub as easily as if she were sighted. As they settle into the warm water the side of Noelle’s thigh presses up against the year-captain’s, though, which he assumes is accidental, the tub being as small and as crowded as it is, and Noelle’s sense of spatial perception not as accurate in water as it is where sound waves travel unimpeded. The year-captain automatically moves a couple of centimeters to his left; but a few moments later, as further positional adjustments are made by the occupants of the tub, he feels Noelle coming in contact with him again. It is hard now not to believe that this is deliberate, that all of this is, the suggestion that they go to the baths together, the casual stripping in her cabin, the nude promenade through the corridor. But why? Noelle is a beautiful woman, yes; highly attractive, even, and fascinating in her enigmatic cool dignity; but after all this time she still has played no role that he knows of in the pattern of sexual entanglements aboard the starship, and though she certainly seems to be offering herself to him now, the year-captain finds it difficult to accept the belief that she actually is. He prefers to look upon her as guileless and her present behavior as innocent. He continues to think of her as an asexual being, given over wholly to the bond with her distant sister and needing no other. Possibly she’s just in a playful mood just now, without any genuine erotic subtext; or perhaps she is experimenting with a new way of unwinding from the tensions of her message-sending. In any case he has no intention of responding to the invitation she seems to be extending, whether or not it’s real. As always, a sexual involvement with Noelle strikes him as a potentially explosive thing. He doesn’t think it could ever be the kind of coolly recreational coupling that his affair with Julia is. There were bound to be immense messy complications, somehow. Noelle is of vital importance to the voyage; so is he; he will not risk involving them in something that carries with it such a high probability of diverting their energies into troublesome areas.

Nevertheless, this time the year-captain allows his thigh to remain in contact with hers. It would be rude to pull away a second time.

“You spoke very well,” Imogen says to him, “about Marcus the other day. I was extremely moved. I think we all were.”

“Thank you.” It seems like a mindless kind of reply to make, but he can’t think of any other response.

“He was so difficult to get to know,” Imogen says. She and Marcus had been lovers for a brief time early in the voyage. Imogen is one of the ship’s metallurgists; she is also assistant medical officer. Everyone has odd combinations of specialties. “Even in bed, you know?” she says. “Right here in the baths is where it happened, the first time. We were just sitting side by side, the way I am with Huw now, neither of us saying very much, and then Marcus turned to me and smiled and touched my wrist and gestured with his head toward one of the side rooms. Didn’t say a word. And we got right up and went in there. Not a word out of him the whole time.”

Huw is smiling benignly, as though Imogen is merely speaking of having gone off with Marcus to play a few games ofGo. But quite possibly he doesn’t see much difference between the one recreation and the other, except thatGo requires heavier thinking.

Imogen says, “It was like that every rime, the whole week that we were together. He was good, very good, in fact, but he never said a personal thing about himself, never asked anything about me. Friendly but distant: a mystery man. I liked him, though, I admired him, I respected his intelligence, his seriousness. I believed that sooner or later he’d open up a little. And then one afternoon we were sitting in here together and Natasha was here too, and he turned to her just the way he had turned to me the week before, and that was that for Marcus and me. It was over, as simply as that. But I always thought that Marcus and I would have a chance to get to know each other eventually, later on, maybe much later on. And now we never will.”

“Such a waste,” Sieglinde says, from the other tub.

“A fine young man,” says Huw. “It ripped me apart, watching him crack up down there. It ripped me apart.”

The year-captain nods abstractedly. This conversation is a necessary one, he supposes, part of the healing process for them, but it is making him uncomfortable. And the pressure of Noelle’s bare thigh against his in the tub is having an unsettling effect on him.

“They are very sad for us, the people on Earth,” Noelle says. “You know, they love us very much, they follow everything that we are doing with the greatest interest. The expedition to Planet A — it was the only thing they talked about on Earth all week, my sister says. And then — to learn that Marcus had died—” She shakes her head. “They are having memorial services for him today everywhere on Earth, do you know?”

“How wonderful,” Imogen says. “How good that will be for them. And for us as well.”

The year-captain looks at Noelle in surprise. That little detail, the thing about the memorial services, comes as news to him. Noelle had said nothing about that during the transmission meeting. Is she still in contact with Yvonne at this moment, receiving a steady flow of reports of Earth’s reactions to the death of Marcus? Or — he hates the idea, but it will not stay buried — is she simply inventing things as she goes along?

“You didn’t tell me that,” he says, a little reproachfully. “About the services.”

“Oh. Yes. Everywhere on Earth.”

“We are the big news,” Sieglinde says, with her usual coarse guffaw. “We fly around the universe, we live, we die, we find nasty planets, it is the great event for them. The only event. We astonish them, and they are unaccustomed to astonishment. Sheep, is what they are! Lazy as sheep! We should make up deaths every now and then, even if there aren’t any more, just to keep them excited. To keep them interested in us. Also to remind them that there is such a thing as death.”

Everyone turns to look at her. Sieglinde’s face is red with anger, fiery. She has a capacity for stirring herself up mightily. But then she grins — smirks, really — and the high color fades as swiftly as it had come.

More gently she says, “It was very bad, the thing about Marcus. I am greatly troubled by it, still. Such a quiet boy. Such a good mind he had. We must have no more losses of that kind, year-captain, do you hear me?”

“I wish we hadn’t had even that one,” he replies.

There is a dark moment of silence in the room.

“Well,” Huw says finally. He heaves his bulky body out of the water. He is reddened from the heat, looking at least half boiled. “We should be moving along, I think.” Reaching down with one hand, he lifts little Imogen out of the tub as easily as though she were a child, pulling her up over the tiled rim and letting her feet dangle in the air a moment before setting her down. They go off to the cold showers, and then dress and leave.

“I will be going also,” Sieglinde announces. “There is work I should be doing in the control cabin.”

Noelle and the year-captain are left alone in the baths. They sit facing the same way, thighs still touching. It is suddenly a highly awkward situation, with the other three gone. The tension of the moment in her cabin when Noelle had removed her clothes now returns to the year-captain, if indeed it has ever left. The nearest of the three lovemaking chambers next to the baths is just a few meters away. They could very easily stroll over to it right now. But the year-captain has no idea what Noelle wants him to do. He has no very clear idea what he himself wants to do. Again he waits, resolved to take his cue from her.

And again Noelle offers him nothing more than the usual simple innocence, the usual sweet indifference to the possibilities of the situation.

“Shall we go to the gaming lounge now, year-captain?”

“Of course. Whatever you say, Noelle.”

They return to her cabin first. He remains outside while she dresses; then they go up to the gaming lounge, where they find Paco and Roy playing, and also Sylvia and Heinz. The year-captain sets up the third board for himself and Noelle.

It is several weeks since he has played. The expedition to the surface of Planet A has kept him sufficiently distracted lately. He sinks quickly into the game now, but for all his skill, he doesn’t stand a chance. Noelle, playing black, greets him with an aggressive strategy that he has never seen before, and her swarming warriors devour his white stones with appalling swiftness, hollowing out his forces and setting up elliptical rings of conquered territory all over the board. It’s a complete rout. The game is over so quickly that Roy and Heinz, glancing over simultaneously from their own boards in the moment of Noelle’s triumph, both grunt in amazement as they realize that it has ended.

Everything had been calculated, and checked and rechecked, and today is the day of our departure for the world that at this point we call, with such drab unpoetic simplicity, Planet B. Let us hope that we have reason to give it some more colorful and memorable name later on: let us hope that it is to be our new home. Hope costs us nothing. It does no harm and perhaps accomplishes some good.

I found myself, as the hour of the new shunt approached, standing in front of the viewplate, looking out at the solar system we were about to leave. Down over there, the broad brown breast of Planet A itself, turning indifferently on its axis, giving us not an iota of its attention. We are like gnats to it. Less than gnats: we art nothing. In the most offhand of ways it has claimed one of our lives, and now it swings onward around its golden sun as it always has, ignoring the unwanted and unwelcomed visitors who briefly disturbed its solitude and now soon will be gone. What folly, to think that this heartless place could ever have been our home! But Marcus’s life was the price we had to pay for learning that.

It isn’t an evil world, of course. There isn’t any such thing as an evil world. Worlds are indifferent things. This one simply is not a world we can use.

And now — Planet B — Planet C, perhaps — Planet Z—

I stood by the viewplate, watching this alien sky, this strange repellent planet that we had come here to explore, its yellow sun, its neighbor worlds wandering the dark sky all about us, and the hint of other stars in the sky behind them, mere bright specks, betokening the vastness of the universe in which we are soon once more to be wandering; and then, in a twinkling, the whole scene was gone, wiped from my sight in a single abolishing stroke, and I was looking once again at the rippling, eddying, shimmering blankness that is nospace. We had successfully made our shunt. How I had missed that dazzling gray emptiness! How I rejoiced now at seeing it once more!

So again we are outside space and time, crossing through unfathomable nowhere on our route from somewhere to somewhere, and I realize that I have in some fashion begun to become a denizen of nospace: I am happiest, it seems, when we have ripped ourselves loose of the fabric of normal space and time and are floating in this quiet featureless other reality, this void within the void, this inexplicable strangeness, this mathematical construct, that we call nospace. Nospace travel is only a means to an end; why, then, do I take such pleasure in returning to it? Can it be that my secret preference, unknown even to me, is that we never find any suitable world at all, that we roam the galaxy forever like the crew of the accursed Flying Dutchman? Surely not. Surely I want us to discover that Planet B is a warm and friendly land, where we will settle and thrive and live happily ever after.

Surely.

The journey, Paco tells me, will take five or six months, or perhaps as many as eight — he can’t be entirely certain, the mathematics of nospace travel being the paradoxical business that is. No less than five, no more than eight, anyway. And then we do the whole survey-mission thing all over again, with better luck, let us hope, than this time.

The chances are, of course, that B won’t work out any better than A did. Our requirements are too fastidious: a place with our kind of atmosphere, a place with actual H₂O water, one that isn’t too hot or too cold, that doesn’t already belong to some intelligent species, et cetera, et cetera. But Hesper has more worlds up his sleeve, eight or ten of them by now that strike him as promising prospects. And there will be others beyond those. The galaxy is unthinkably huge, and we are, after all, still essentially in Earth’s own backyard, bouncing around a sphere no more than a hundred light-years in diameter, out here in one small arm of the galaxy, 30,000 light-years from the center. The galaxy in its entirety has — how many stars? two hundred billion? four hundred billion? — and if only one out of a thousand of those has planets, and one planet out of a thousand falls within the criteria for habitability that we must impose, then there are more potential worlds for us out there than we could ever reach in our lifetimes, or in those of the children that may be born aboard this starship as our voyage proceeds. Surely one of those will work out for us.

Surely.

They are well along now in this leg of their journey, and interference problems have developed again for Noelle. The static, the fuzziness of transmission quality, that first had begun to set in in the fifth month of the voyage, and that had at some points become severe and at others had almost vanished, has returned again in much greater force than before. There are some days when Noelle can barely make contact with her sister at all.

Though the voyage is uneventful now, one serene day following another, the year-captain insists on making the daily transmissions to Earth. He continues to believe that that is an important, even essential, activity for them: that the people of Earth are vicariously living the greatest adventure of their languid lives through the men and women of the Wotan, and derive immense psychological value from their daily dose of news from those intrepid travelers who fearlessly roam the distant stars. It does his crew some good, too, to get word from Earth regularly of the things that are taking place there, such as they are.

But now, day by day, the transmission problems are becoming more extreme, and Noelle must struggle with ever-greater outlay of effort to maintain her weakening connection with far-off Yvonne. She is working at it so hard that the year-captain has begun to fear for her. He is feeling the strain himself.

“I have the new communiqué ready to send,” he tells her edgily. “Do you feel up to it?”

“Of course I do.” She gives him a ferocious smile. “Don’t even hint at giving up, year-captain. There absolutelyhas to be some way around this interference.”

“Absolutely,” he says. He rustles his papers restlessly. “Okay, then, Noelle. Let’s go. This is shipday number—”

“Wait,” she says. “Give me just another moment to get ready, all right?”

He pauses. She closes her eyes and begins to enter the transmitting state. She is conscious, as ever, of Yvonne’s presence. Even when no specific information is flowing between them, there is perpetual low-level contact, there is the sense that the other is near, that warm proprioceptive awareness such as one has of one’s own arm or leg or hip. But between that impalpable subliminal contact and the actual transmission of specific content lie several key steps. Yvonne and Noelle are human biopsychic resonators constituting a long-range communications network; there is a tuning procedure for them as for any other transmitters and receivers. Noelle opens herself to the radiant energy spectrum, vibratory, pulsating, that will carry her message to her Earthbound sister. As the transmitting circuit in this interchange she must be the one to attain maximum energy flow. Quickly, intuitively, she activates her own energy centers, the one in the spine, the one in the solar plexus, the one at the top of the skull; a stream of energy pours from her and instantaneously spans the galaxy.

But today there is an odd and troublesome splashback effect: Noelle, monitoring the circuit, is immediately aware that the signal has failed to reach Yvonne. Yvonne is there, Yvonne is tuned and expectant, yet something is jamming the channel and nothing gets through, not a single syllable.

“The interference is worse than ever,” she tells the year-captain. “I feel as if I could put my hand out andtouch Yvonne. But she’s not reading me and nothing’s coming back from her.”

With a little shake of her shoulders Noelle alters the sending frequency; she feels a corresponding adjustment at Yvonne’s end of the connection; but again they are thwarted, again there is total blockage. Her signal is going forth and is being soaked up by — what? How can such a thing happen?

Now she makes a determined effort to boost the output of the system. She addresses herself to the neural center in her spine, exciting its energies, using them to drive the next center to a more intense vibrational tone, harnessing that to push the highest center of all to its greatest harmonic capacity. Up and down the energy bands she roves. Nothing. Nothing. She shivers; she huddles; she is visibly depleted by the strain, pale, struggling for breath. “I can’t get through,” she murmurs. “Yvonne’s there, I can feel her there, I know she’s working to read me. But I can’t transmit any sort of intelligible coherent message.”

A hundred, two hundred, however many light-years from Earth it is that they are, and the only communication channel is blocked. The year-captain finds himself unexpectedly beleaguered by frosty terrors. They can report nothing to the mother world; they can receive nothing. It should not matter, really, but it does. It matters terribly, somehow. The ship, the self-sufficient autonomous ship, has become a mere gnat blowing in a hurricane. There is darkness on all sides of them. The voyagers now hurtle blindly onward into the depths of an unknown universe, alone, alone, alone.

He sits by himself in the control cabin, brooding. He has failed Noelle, he knows, fleeing helplessly from her in the moment of her need, overwhelmed by the immensity of her loss, for it is her loss even more than it is theirs. All about him meaningless readout lights flash and wink. He is dumbfounded by the depth of the sudden despair that has engulfed him.

He had been so smug about not needing any link to Earth, but now that the link is gone he shivers and cowers. He barely can recognize himself in this new unraveled man that he has become. Everything has been made new. There are no rules. Human beings have never been this far from home, and the tenuous, invisible bond between the sisters had been their lifeline, he realizes now, and now the sisters are sundered and that lifeline is gone. It is gone. The water is wide and their ship is very small. He walks out into the corridor and presses himself against the viewplate; and the famous grayness of the Intermundium just beyond, swirling and eddying, the grayness that had been so beautiful to him and so full of revelations, mocks him now with its unbearable immensity. Mocks and seduces all at once. Leap into me, it calls. Leap, leap, lose yourself in me, drown in me.

Behind him, the sound of soft footsteps. Noelle. She touches his hunched, knotted shoulders. “It’s all right,” she whispers. “You’re overreacting. Don’t make such a tragedy out of it.” But it is. Her tragedy in particular, hers and Yvonne’s. He is amazed that she can even think of giving comfort to him in this moment, when it is he who should be comforting her. Noelle and Yvonne have spent their lives in the deepest of unions, a union fundamentally incomprehensible to everyone but them, and that is lost to them now. How brave she is, he thinks. How strong in the face of this, her great disaster.

But also, he knows, it is his disaster, his tragedy, theirs, everybody’s. They are all cut off. Lost forever in a foggy silence. Whatever triumphs they may achieve out here, if ever any triumphs there are to be, they will never be able to share them with the mother world. Or at least will not be able to share them for a century or more, until the news of their accomplishments creeps finally back to Earth on whatever conventional carrier wave they use to send it. None of the fifty who sailed the stars aboard the Wotan can hope still to be alive by then.

From the gaming lounge, far down the corridor, comes the sound of singing. Boisterous voices, Elliot, Chang, Leon. They know nothing, yet, of what has happened.

Well, Travelin’ Dan was a spacefarin’ man

Who jumped in the nospace tube —

The year-captain still has not turned. Something that might have been a sigh or might perhaps have been a sob escapes from Noelle, behind him. He whirls, seizes her, pulls her against him. Feels her trembling. Comforts her, where a moment before she had been comforting him. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” he murmurs. With his arm around her shoulders he swings around, pivoting so that they both are facing the viewplate. As if she could see. Nospace dances and churns a couple of centimeters from his nose, just beyond that transparent shield. That shimmering grayness, that deep infinite well of nothingness, his great Intermundium. It frightens him now. He feels a fierce wind blowing out of the viewplate and through the ship, the khamsin, the sirocco, the simoom, the leveche, a sultry wind, a killing wind coming out of the gray strangeness, all the grim, dry deadly winds that rove the Earth bringing fire and madness, hot winds and cold ones, the mistral, the tramontana. No, he thinks. No. He forces himself not to fear that wind. He tells himself that it is a wind of joy, a cool sweet wind, a wind of life. Why should he think there is anything to fear in the realm beyond the viewplate? Until today he has always loved to stand here and stare into it: how beautiful it is out there, how ecstatically beautiful, that is what he has always thought! And it is. It is. Noelle is quivering against him as if she sees what he sees, and he begins to grow calm, begins to find beauty in the sight of the nospace realm again. How sad, the year-captain thinks, that we can never tell anyone about it now, except one another.

A strange peace unexpectedly descends on him. He has found once more that zone of calm that he had learned, in his monastery days, the secret of attaining. Everything is going to be all right, he insists. No harm will come of what has happened. And perhaps some good. And perhaps some good. Benefits lurk in the darkest places.

Noelle playsGo obsessively, beating everyone. She seems to live in the lounge twenty hours a day. Sometimes she takes on two opponents at once — an incredible feat, considering that she must hold the constantly changing intricacies of both boards in her memory — and defeats them both: two days after losing verbal-level contact with Yvonne, she simultaneously triumphs over Roy and Heinz before an astounded audience of fifteen or twenty of her shipmates. She looks animated and buoyant; they all have been told by now what has happened, but whatever sorrow she must feel over the snapping of the link she takes care to conceal. She expresses it, the others suspect, only by her manicGo -playing. The year-captain is one of her most frequent adversaries now, taking his turn at the board in the time he would have devoted to composing and dictating the communiqués for Earth. He had thoughtGo was over for him years ago, but he, too, is playing obsessively these days, building walls and the unassailable fortresses known as eyes. There is satisfaction and reassurance in the rhythmic clacking march of the black and white stones. But Noelle wins every game she plays against him. She covers the board with eyes.

The quest for Planet B serves, to a considerable degree, to distract the voyagers from the problems that the disruption of contact with Earth has created. Expectations quickly begin to rise. Suddenly there is great optimism about Planet B among the members of the expedition. If there are no more cozy messages from home, there is, at least, the counterbalancing pleasure of contemplating the possibility that a wonderful new Earthlike home lies at the end of this stretch of their voyage.

Hesper has refined his correlation techniques and is able to provide them with a plethora of data of high-order reliability, so he claims, about the world toward which they go. It is, he says, the second of five planets that surround a medium-size K-type star. Whether a star of that spectral type can be hot enough to sustain temperatures in the range agreeable for protoplasmic life is something that arouses some debate aboard ship, but Hesper assures everybody that the star that is their destination is a K of better-than-median luminosity, and that Planet B is close enough to it so that there should be ample warmth, perhaps even a little too much for complete comfort.

How can Hesper know all this stuff? No one can figure it out: it is a perpetual mystery aboard the ship. He doesn’t have access to direct astronomical observation of the target system, not out here in nospace; they all are aware that he is simply playing around with a bunch of cryptic reality-analogs, a set of data-equivalents that he decodes by means of methods that nobody else can comprehend. Still, he was right enough about Planet A, so far as the question of its size, temperature range, atmospheric makeup, and other salient points was concerned. Hesper had indeed missed one small detail about Planet A that made it notably unsuitable for human settlement, but that was one that no instrument yet devised could have detected in advance of an actual manned landing.

What Hesper says about Planet B is even more encouraging than his preliminary reports on its unhappy predecessor. Planet B, Hesper asserts, is a planet of goodly size, with a diameter that is something like 15 percent greater than that of Earth, but it must be made up largely of the lighter elements, because its mass is no bigger than Earth’s and its gravitational pull, presumably, is about the same. It definitely has an atmosphere, according to Hesper, and here the news is very good indeed, the good old oxygen-nitrogen-and-a-smattering-of-CO₂, mixed pretty much the way human lungs prefer to have it, except that there’s a tad more CO₂than is found on Earth. Possibly a tad more than a tad, in truth — a bit of a greenhouse effect, Hesper admits, probably giving rise to a sort of steamy Mesozoic texture for the place. But the Mesozoic on Earth was a life-friendly era, a time of gloriously flourishing fauna and flora, and there should be nothing to worry about, Hesper tells them. Think tropical, he says; and, child of the sunblasted tropics that he is himself, his eyes light up with the thrill of anticipation. All will be well. It will be a planet-size Hawaii, he indicates. Or a planet-size Madagascar. Warm, warm, warm, lots of moisture where moisture does the most good, a shining, humid paradise, a sweet lush leafy Eden.

Well, maybe so. Some of the older members of the crew remember that the Mesozoic was the dinosaur era, and they don’t see anything particularly enticing about setting up a colony in the midst of a lot of dinosaurs. But there isn’t any logical necessity to the analogy, which others promptly point out. Evolution doesn’t have to follow the same track on every world. High humidity and tropical temperatures from pole to pole and an extra dollop of CO₂in the air may have given rise to a dominant race of giant reptiles on Earth, sure, but on Planet B the same circumstances may have brought forth nothing more complex than a tribe of happy jellyfish dreamily adrift in the balmy oceans.

Oh, the oceans. A bit of a puzzle there, Hesper has to concede. His long-distance proxy-equivalent hocus-pocus has, at least so far, failed to turn up evidence that thereare any oceans on Planet B. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering the apparent prevalence of water molecules in the atmosphere and the generally high global mean temperatures, which might reasonably have been expected to induce a lot of rainfall. But Planet B’s surface, as manifested in the surrogate form of Hesper’s long-range data, seems to have the same even texture everywhere, no inequalities of albedo or temperature or anything else significant, so either there is a single vast planetary ocean or none at all. The latter is by far the more probable hypothesis. So a little mystery exists in that quarter — one that will have to await resolution for a while, until they are much closer and can carry out some direct optical inspection of the place itself.

And then, one would assume, once there has been a good look-see from low orbit and the place is found worthy of further checking out, there will be the whole thing of sending down a drone probe again, followed, if everything looks good, by a manned ship, an exploratory party. Everyone has started to assume that thingswill look good down there, in fact that things will be downright ideal, and therefore that an exploratory party is ultimately in the cards. Which brings up some questions that have already arisen once before in the course of the voyage — the makeup of the landing party that will go down to confirm the usefulness and beauty of Planet B, and the concomitant issue of the expiration of the year-captain’s second year in office.

That second year is almost up now. And he will want to be part of any exploration team that goes down to visit Planet B, of course. So they have the troublesome business of an election to deal with, once again.

It is dealt with, quietly and quickly, in a caucus consisting of the dozen members of the expedition who care most about these matters.

“He is essential and indispensable,” Heinz says. “There’s no other plausible possibility for the job, is there? Is there?”

“Well, is there?” Paco asks. “You tell us.”

“Obviously there’s no one,” says Elizabeth. “He’ll have to be reelected.”

“You three have it very neatly worked out, don’t you?” Julia says.

Heinz gives her a quick look. “You don’t like it? Does that mean you’re volunteering to run again yourself?”

“You know I would, if I thought it would do any good. But I have to agree with you that if we took another vote, I wouldn’t be elected. He would.”

“And he will be,” says Heinz. “Just as he was last year.”

Huw says, “He’ll erupt. He’ll absolutely explode.”

“If we hand hima fait accompli ?” Sylvia says. “Simply tell him that he’s been reelected again by acclamation, and appeal to his sense of duty?”

“His sense of duty,” says Huw, “is directed entirely toward the exploration of the planets we discover. He didn’t sign on to be captain for life. It’s a job that’s supposed to rotate from year to year, isn’t it? So why would he let himself be stuck with it forever if it permanently disqualifies him from doing the one thing that he signed on to do?”

They consider that for a while. It’s a valid enough point; but in the end they agree that there’s no one else on board who can rally the necessary support. The year-captain has established himself in everyone’s mind as the captain-for-life; replacing him now with somebody else would have something of the quality of an insurrection. And who would they choose, anyway? Roy, Giovanna, Julia, Huw, Leon? Those who are qualified, even remotely, for the captaincy are either unwilling to take the job or else unsuitable by virtue of their existing responsibilities.

In the end, they decide quietly to canvass the ship’s entire complement and present the year-captain with the results of the tally. This is done; and the vote confirming his reelection is unanimous. Huw, Heinz, Julia, and Leon agree to be the members of the delegation that will bring this news to the year-captain. At the last moment Noelle, who has been present in the gaming lounge while this part of the operation is under discussion, asks to be included in the group.

“No,” says the year-captain instantly when he is apprised of what has been going on. “Forget it. Don’t waste your time even thinking about it. My term is coming to its end, thank God, and you have to start finding somebody else to be captain.”

“The vote, you know, was unanim—” Leon begins.

“So? What of it?” the year-captain demands, speaking over him. “Did anyone consult me? Did anyone take the trouble to ask me whether I was going to be a candidate for reelection? Which I most emphatically do not intend to be. I took this second term with the greatest reluctance and I’m not going to take a third term under any circumstances whatsoever. Is that clear?”

Of course it’s clear; it’s been clear to everybody for a long time. But they can’t accept his refusal, because the ship must have a captain, and no other satisfactory and electible prospect for that job is on the horizon. They tell him this, and he tells them once again how adamant he intends to be about his desire to give up his office, and for a time everyone is speaking at once. A great deal of heat is generated, but not much light.

In a moment of sudden stillness that pops with almost comic predictability into the general hubbub, Noelle’s quiet voice abruptly is heard for the first time: “Is the rule about not being able to be part of the landing expedition the thing that makes you not want to go on being captain?”

“Of course it is.”

“And that’s the only reason? There’s nothing else?”

He considers that for a moment. “Nothing of any real significance, I suppose.”

“Then why don’t we change the rule?” Noelle asks.

They all look thunderstruck by the sheer simplicity of her suggestion, even the year-captain. Leon is the first to speak, finally. “The rule isn’t just an arbitrary nuisance. Planetary landings are risky things, and we are under orders not to risk the life of the year-captain in adventures of that sort.”

“But if there isn’t going to be any year-captain at all unless we allow the one we have to take that risk,” Julia says, “then what good is the—”

“Besides,” Leon continues implacably, “we have all agreeda priori to abide by the terms of the Articles of the Voyage. We have no right to abrogate or modify any of those terms unilaterally. Without consultation with Earth, and the permission of—”

Now it is Noelle who cuts in. “There’s no way we can consult with Earth,” she points out. “The contact has been severed. You know that.”

“Even so,” says Leon, “we have an obligation to maintain and uphold—”

“What obligation? To whom?” Heinz says. And Huw calls out boomingly, “Hear, hear! Hear, hear!”

There is another round of hubbub. This time the year-captain restores order by rapping on the cabin wall with the flat of his hand until they are all silent.

Then he says, in a chilly take-no-prisoners voice, “We have here the seeds of a compromise, I think. I’ll agree to accept the captaincy for another year provided we amend the Articles of the Voyage to permit me to take part, at my sole discretion, in any future missions of planetary exploration that may occur during my term in office.”

“It can’t be done,” Leon cries. “Earth will have a fit!”

“Earth won’t ever know a thing,” says Heinz. “We’re permanently out of touch with Earth. Isn’t that so, Noelle? No contact with your sister any more, and no hope of restoring it?”

“That’s so,” Noelle says, in a tone that barely rises above a whisper.

“Well, then. We’re on our own from now on, right?” declares Heinz triumphantly. “Sorry, Leon. We can’t let ourselves worry about what positions Earth may take about decisions that we choose to make. We just have to make the best possible decisions for ourselves in the light of changing circumstances that Earth couldn’t begin to understand anyway.” He turns toward the year-captain. “Let’s hear it once more, captain, just to be sure that we have it right. You’ll take the job for another year, under the condition that we change the rules so that you can go off for a look at Planet B, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“And if we don’t change the present rules about planetary landings, there’s nothing else that could induce you to stay on in office?”

“Nothing.”

Now Heinz faces the others again. “So it’s a take-it-or-leave-it situation, friends. We can have the year-captain on his terms or not at all. Under the circumstances, considering that Earth’s wishes in this matter are not only unknown but are unknowable and irrelevant as a result of the unfortunate breakdown in communications with Earth, I propose that we regard ourselves as free agents from this point onward, and that we call a general assembly and put the matter of amending the Articles to a vote.”

“Seconded,” Huw and Julia say at the same time.

Leon sputters but says nothing.

So there is an agreement of sorts. The delegates leave, and later in the day the proposal is put to a vote of the entire voyage, and it is passed handily, with Leon the only voice in opposition. The year-captain accepts the outcome with reasonably good grace. Despite it all, he is almost as uneasy as Leon about amending the Articles; there is something disturbingly nihilistic about doing that, a kind of blithe lawless willfulness that offends his sense of the proper order of things. Theyhave, after all, promised most solemnly to govern themselves by the terms of the Articles, and here they are tinkering with those terms behind Earth’s back, so to speak, without the slightest sort of by-your-leave.

But Heinz is right. With contact apparently lost for good — Noelle continues to have no luck in reaching Yvonne — Earth has ceased to be a major factor in their calculations: has ceased to be a factor at all, really. Where an Article proves itself to be unworkable, they themselves must be the only judges of whether it is to be amended. Besides, the Articles call for a change in the captaincy every year, and that rule has been, if not amended, then simply ignored. And so, in consequence of that, they must now dispense with the one about penning up the year-captain aboard the ship. Once again some new planet is about to swim into their ken, as Huw likes to say, and this time the year-captain does not intend to be left behind when they go down to look at it. That’s the essential thing now. He does not intend to be left behind.

So my third term as year-captain now begins. I think I should perhaps get used to the idea of bolding this job for the rest of my life.

The election was a grubby thing, of course, a lot of shameless political bargaining. But the deal is done: they have their quid, I have my quo, and that’s that. I’m used to being captain by now. Ironic, considering how elaborately I always used to go out of my way to spare myself from taking on the responsibilities of society; but what I used to do can’t be allowed to control my sense of what must be done now.

The ship has to have a captain. I seem to be the right person for the job. What I need is to continue traveling the course I chose for myself long ago, which means continued exploration of one kind or another. What Earth needs—

Yes, what Earth needs. I must never forget about that.

Poor old Earth! All the ancient squalor is gone, most of the pain — and yet something is wrong. Disease and hunger are conquered. Life is just about eternal if you want it to be that way. War is something we read about in history texts, something anthropological and remote, an odd obsolete practice of our ancestors, like cannibalism or bloodletting. And yet! Something wrong! I think back through all that I know of human history, and I know a great deal, really — the plagues, the massacres, all the episodes of torture for the sheer fun of it, the great and petty vilenesses, the whole catalog of sins that Sophocles and Shakespeare and Strindberg understood so well — and I wonder why we aren’t more jubilant about what we have attained in our own time. What I have to conclude is that we are a driven race, never satisfied with anything, even with utter blissful contentedness. There’s always something missing, even in perfection. And our awareness of that missing something is what drives us on and on and on, forever looking for it.

Which is what caused the massacres and all of that — a sense even among our primitive forebears that something needs to be fixed, by whatever ham-fisted methods happen to be available at the moment. Our methods have become more humane and also more efficient as we grow more — well, civilized — but that need, that hunger, still operates on us. And now has pushed us out among the stars to grapple with unknown worlds.

Or am I projecting my own needs and hungers and awareness of inadequacies onto the whole human race? Are most of us quite happy with our lived in this glorious modern age, and do those happy ones feel sorry for the pitiful maladjusted few who were willing to go off on this wild voyage into the dark?

I don’t relieve that. I don’t want to believe that, at any rate. And we will go onward, we fifty, until we find what we are seeking. (We forty-nine, I should say now, but the old phrase is ingrained so deeply!) And when we find it, which I am certain we will, I want to think that for a moment, at least, we will know a little peace.

I wish we were still in touch with Earth.

I worry about Noelle. She seems to be all right, even in the absence of the contact with her sister that has nourished and sustained her all her life. But is she, really? Is she?

The breakdown in the communication link with Earth has been the subject of much discussion, naturally.

Whether it is a total and irreversible breakdown is not entirely certain yet. Yes, Noelle had said, at the meeting between the year-captain and the delegation that had come to apprise him of the election results, that there was no way of restoring contact with her sister; but — as she admitted privately to the year-captain the next day — she had simply been saying that by way of bolstering Heinz’s arguments in favor of amending the Articles of the Voyage. In truth Noelle has no idea whether contact can be restored, and she feels just a little guilty for having given everyone the notion that it can’t be. “I did it because I wanted everyone to go along with the deal that was taking shape,” she confesses, but only to the year-captain. “If we can’t speak with Earth any more, we don’t need to worry what they’ll think about our changing the Articles, isn’t that so? But it’s always possible that I’ll regain Yvonne’s signal sooner or later. It’s happened before that the signal has weakened and then become strong again.”

She does, she says, still feel Yvonne’s mental presence somewhere within her. But, as has been true for days now, she is unable to pick up any verbal content in what Yvonne is sending, and she suspects — it is only a guess, but she thinks there’s real probability to it — that nothing she’s sending Earthward is reaching Yvonne, either. She still makes daily attempts at reopening the link, but to no avail. For all intents and purposes they are cut off from Earth and very likely will remain cut off forever.

No one believes that the problem is a function of anything so obvious as distance. Noelle has been quite convincing on that score: a signal that propagates perfectly for the first sixteen light-years of a journey ought not abruptly to deteriorate a couple of light-minutes farther along the road. There should at least have been prior sign of attenuation, and there was no attenuation, only noise suddenly cutting in, noise that interfered with and ultimately destroyed the signal.

“It’s some kind of a force,” Roy suggests, “that has reached in here and messed up the connection.”

A force? What kind of force?

Noelle’s old idea that what is intervening between her and her sister is some physical effect analogous to sunspot static — that it is the product of radiation emitted by this or that giant star into whose vicinity they have come during the course of their travels — is brought up again, and is in the end rejected again. There is, both Roy and Sieglinde point out, no energy interface between realspace and nospace, no opportunity for any kind of electromagnetic intrusion. That much had been amply demonstrated long before any manned voyages were undertaken. Hesper’s scanning instruments, yes, are able to pick up information of a nonelectromagnetic kind out of the realspace continuum, information that can be translated into comprehensible data about that continuum; but no material thing belonging to realspace can penetrate here. The nospace tube is an impermeable wall separating them from the continuum of phenomena. They are effectively outside the universe. They could in theory pass, and perhaps they already have, right through the heart of a star in the course of their journey without causing any disruption either to the star or to themselves. Nothing that has mass or charge can leap the barrier between the universe of real-world phenomena and the cocoon of nothingness that the ship’s drive mechanism has woven about them; nor can a photon get across, nor even a slippery neutrino.

But something, it seems,is getting through, and is doing damage. Many speculations excite the voyagers. The one force thatcan cross the barrier, Roy observes, is thought. Thought is intangible, immeasurable, limitless. The ease with which Noelle and Yvonne maintained contact on an instantaneous basis throughout the first five months of the voyage has demonstrated that.

“But let us suppose,” Roy says — it is clear from his lofty tone that this is merely some hypothesis he is putting forth, an airygedankenexperiment — “that the interference Noelle is experiencing is caused by beings of powerful telepathic capacity that live in the space between the stars.”

“Beings that live between the stars,” Paco repeats in wonderment. Plainly he thinks that Roy has launched into something crazy, but he has enough respect for the power of Roy’s intellect to hold off on his scorn until the mathematician has finished putting forth his idea.

“Yes, between the stars,” Roy goes on. “Orin the stars, or surrounding them. Who can say? Let us suppose that each of these beings is capable of emitting mental transmissions, just as Noelle is, but that their sending capacity is far more powerful than hers. As these transmissions go flooding outward, perhaps each one sweeping out a sphere with a radius of many light-years, the trajectory of the Wotan carries them in and out of these spheres and the telepathic impulses cross the nospace barrier just as readily as the thoughts of Noelle and Yvonne do. And it is these alien mental emanations, let us suppose, that are smothering the signal coming from Earth.”

Paco is ready to jump in now with objections; but Heinz is already speaking, extending Roy’s suggestion into a different area of possibility.

“What if,” Heinz says, “these beings that Roy has suggested are denizens not of the space between the stars but of nospace itself? Living right here in the tube, let us say, and as we travel along we keep running into their domains.”

“The nospace tube must be matter-free except for the ship that moves through it,” Sieglinde observes acidly. “Otherwise a body moving at speeds faster than light, as we are, would generate destructive resonances, since in conventional physical terms our mass is equal to infinity, and a body with infinite mass leaves no room in its universe for anything else.”

“Indeed true,” Heinz replies, unruffled as always. “But I don’t remember speaking of these beings as material objects. What I imagine are gigantic incorporeal beings as big as asteroids, as big as planets, maybe, that have no mass at all, no essence, onlyexistence — great convergences of pure mental force that drift freely through the tube. They are the native life-forms of nospace. They are not made up of anything that we can regard as matter. They are something of a nature absolutely unknown to us, occupying this otherworldy zone that we call nospace, living out there the way angels live in Heaven.”

“Angels,” Paco snorts.

“Angels, yes!” cries Elizabeth, as though inspired, and claps her hands in a sort of rapture of fantasy.

“Of course, I don’t mean that literally,” says Heinz, a little sourly. He casts an annoyed look in Elizabeth’s direction. “But let’s postulate that they are there, whatever they are, these alien beings, these strange gigantic things. And as we pass through them, they give off biopsychic transmissions that disrupt the Yvonne-Noelle circuit—”

“Biopsychic transmissions,” Paco repeats mockingly.

“Yes, biopsychic transmissions, causing accidental interference — or maybe it’s deliberate, maybe they are actuallyfeeding on the sisters’ mental output, soaking it up, reveling in the energy flow that comes their way—”

“’So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, angels affect us oft, and worshipped be,’” says Elizabeth.

“What?” Huw asks, mystified as usual by her.

“She’s quoting poetry again,” Heinz once more explains to him. “Shakespeare, I think.”

“John Donne.” says Elizabeth. “Why do you always think it’s Shakespeare?”

“Shakespeare is the only poet he’s ever heard of,” Paco says.

“’Hear, all ye angels, progeny of light,’” says Elizabeth. “’Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand.’”

“Now,that’s Shakespeare for sure,” Heinz says.

“Milton,” Elizabeth tells him sweetly. Heinz only shrugs. “Shakespeare is ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us,’” she continues. “Shakespeare is ‘Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’”

Elizabeth is an inexhaustible reservoir. She is capable of going on indefinitely quoting scraps of verse about angels, and is certainly willing to do so, but Heinz’s improbable little burst of poetic fancy, which Heinz plainly has come to regret almost immediately, has excited everyone in the room and no one cares to listen to her further recitations, because they all have things of their own to say. Paco, unsurprisingly, wants to bury the whole idea beneath a mound of manly contempt, and stolid Huw is having a great deal of trouble grasping the idea of noncorporeal life-forms at all, let alone angels, and Heinz keeps insisting that he was simply reaching for a figure of speech, not making a serious suggestion; but nearly everyone else finds it a striking concept, if a trifle implausible, and those others who have serious reservations about it are too abashed by the general enthusiasm to speak up openly against it. And in any case the term “angels” seems a convenient shorthand for whatever may be out there causing the problem.

Almost everybody is fascinated by the idea and they all want to provide individual embellishments of the general theme, speculating about whether the “angels” are benign or malevolent, whether they are supremely intelligent or mindless, immortal or evanescent, and so on and so on. Giovanna suggests that they could even be responsible for the sinister effects that she and Huw and Marcus had experienced during their visit to Planet A. Why not? Perhaps these space beings, these “angels,” are troubled by humanity’s incursion into interstellar space and are taking steps to thrust it back. But Huw, practical as ever, suggests that they wait to see if the same things happen to those who make the landing on Planet B before coming to any conclusions of that sort.

Where the space beings might live is discussed too, but not with any clarity. It is generally agreed that whether the “angels” live within the tube as proposed by Heinz, or in some sector of realspace just outside it as pictured by Roy, is unimportant to decide at the moment; the basic concept is what needs exploration. And a consensus has definitely emerged in the group this afternoon that the interference Noelle is experiencing is in all likelihood the work of some kind of alien intelligence into whose vicinity they keep moving from time to time. That idea arouses wonder in all, even Huw. Even — however much he tries to conceal the fact — in Paco.

The year-captain, who has not been present for any of this, arrives at the lounge now, and stands perplexed by the entrance for a few moments as the talk of angels and biopsychic transmissions swirls about him.

“What angels?” he asks after a while. “Where?”

They try to explain, two or three talking at once. Heinz is silent, arms folded, looking smug. He has overcome his initial annoyance at the excitement his casual choice of words has caused, and now he likes the idea of having stirred everyone up over so ethereal a theory. Sly worldly Heinz, postulating angels in the nospace tube! He isn’t really serious, at least not about the angel part of it, the year-captain sees. But should any part of his wild idea be taken seriously? The year-captain, when he has heard them out and managed to grasp something of what they are babbling at him, seems to think so. “Angels,” he says, looking pensive and grave. “Well, why shouldn’t that be so? As good a metaphor as any other. It’s certainly worth investigating.”

They turn, all of them, and stare at him. They are all more or less aware of his background in monasticism — in mysticism, even: those years at that odd monkish retreat near the Arctic Circle, that strange interlude in his life between his time as an explorer of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and his enrollment in the crew of the Wotan. He never speaks of that period to anyone on board, nor do any of them really understand why he chose to withdraw from the world at the peak of a great scientific career and enter a monastery, any more than they understand why, much earlier, after training to be a scientist, he chose to go on the stage. He has always been a complete mystery to them, which is one reason they prefer him to remain as their captain. But they are all agreed that he is a serious person, a deep thinker — unlike Paco, say, or Heinz — and if he, the true philosopher of their group, finds something of interest in this “angels” hypothesis, then very likely there must be something in it.

What to do now, though? If they are indeed in the presence of alien beings of extraordinary nature and power, can some way be found of opening a dialog with them?

Innelda suggests asking Hesper to put his scanning devices to work in an attempt to determine their location. Roy proposes an all-out campaign to find them by conventional radio means after the voyagers have emerged from the nospace tube to investigate Planet B. Huw, gamely trying to enter into the spirit of a thing that is basically uncongenial to his pragmatic nature, puts forth the idea that they ought to aim radio transmissions at the things while stillwithin the nospace tube, since if the “angels” are in it with them they might well have the capacity to detect electromagnetic energy as well as thought waves.

Then Heinz says, “There’s one other thing we can try. Regardless of where these creatures actually live, it would seem that their energy-wave, their thought-manifestations, whatever it is, can come inside the tube here with us, since Noelle’s thought-beam is being affected by them. Very well. We should be able to reach them the same way, by mental transmission. Noelle could try to speak directly to them. Ask them who they are, where they live, why they’re suppressing her contact with Earth.”

“Yes!” someone shouts — it is Elliot — and Maria echoes her, and then Jean-Claude. “Of course! Noelle should try! Noelle! Noelle!”

All eyes are on Noelle.

She looks flustered, even a little frightened, but to some degree amenable nonetheless. Softly she says, smiling shyly, “I’ve nevertried to talk with angels before, you know. If that’s what they are. But if you all want me to try—”

“Yes,” the year-captain breaks in, saying the word in a tone of voice that often is better understood aboard the ship as meaning No. “We should definitely consider the project, a little later on. But this isn’t the moment for it, really. We’re coming within range of the solar system of Planet B. We have that to deal with first; we can worry about speaking with angels afterwards.”

An end has been made, then, at least for the time being, to the excitement over Heinz’s angel theory.

Heinz and Roy’s theory, really, though Roy’s crucial role in propounding it has quickly been overshadowed in the general consciousness by Heinz’s quickness with a lively metaphor. Nobody on board is religious in the way that term once had been understood, but the long months of isolation aboard the starship, perhaps, may have conjured a streak of irrationality in some of the voyagers, and of fierce playfulness in others. “Angels” is what everybody now calls the hypothetical alien beings that hypothetically surround the ship. Even hard-core skeptics like Paco and Huw use the term for lack of any better one.

But there will be no immediate attempt at a telepathic foray by Noelle for the purpose of making contact with supposed incorporeal creatures of extraterrestrial origin that may be lurking in their vicinity of nospace or realspace. As the year-captain has pointed out, the impending arrival of the Wotan at Planet B is a matter of higher priority just now.

The year-captain wonders what the Abbot would have said about his suppression of the angel discussion. He thinks about the Abbot’s disapproval whenever he does something that is blatantly manipulative or selfish; and that is certainly what he has done just now, something both manipulativeand selfish, though he hopes he is the only one aboard who fully understands that.

His ostensible reason for derailing the conversation — that they need to concentrate instead on the challenge of Planet B — is legitimate enough. But behind it lies something else entirely, a matter of compassion, of concern for the most delicate member of the ship’s community. He could see, even if none of the others could, the look of fear on Noelle’s face, and he could hear the little quaver in her voice. Suppose these angels, or whatever they are,did exist, and suppose shecould in some fashion open her mind to them, how did anyone know what would become of her? His mind had gone at once to all those Greek myths of women who had wanted to be embraced by this or that god in all his might, and had been granted their wish, and had been consumed unto ashes by the full glory of the deity. They needed to consider, very carefully indeed, all the consequences of a mental union between Noelle and one of these supposed creatures of the void, before shoving her into the attempt.

So the desire to protect Noelle lurks beneath his stated reason for tabling the project. And because — he isn’t sure why — he is reluctant to reveal that underlying desire to the others, he has chosen to hide it behind an acceptable but secondary explanation that would achieve the same goal. That was a manipulative act, he feels.

The selfishness is hidden one further layer down. What if Noelle tries to speak with these creatures, and succeeds, and actually strikes some détente with them under which the communications channel linking her to her sister could be reopened? What, then, would become of his own hard-won deal giving him the right to participate in the Planet B landing expedition in return for accepting a third year as captain? Many of them, he suspects, had voted for the change in the Articles of the Voyage only because they believed that contact with Earth had been forever lost and they were under no obligation now to obey inconvenient regulations that Earth had imposed upon them. But if that contact were to be restored—

He has put the “angel” thing aside, therefore, for three good and proper reasons, one that is simply sensible, one that is tenderhearted, and one that is out-and-out selfish.

But the year-captain knows that the Abbot, if only he could be consulted in these matters, would focus on the third of those reasons, and would ask him whether it was likely that the other two would have had much force in his mind if the third one had not been driving him; and there would be no good answer to that. There never were any good answers to the Abbot’s questions. He never condemned; he left that job to you yourself; but he could never be fooled, either.

Alone in his cabin now, the year-captain closes his eyes and the formidable figure of the Abbot rises vividly in his mind: a small, compactly constructed man, a fleshless man, bone and muscle only, ageless, indefatigable. He was probably about a hundred years old, but no one would have been greatly astonished had it been demonstrated that he was twice that age, or three times it, or that he had come into the world in the latter days of the Pleistocene. He seemed indestructible. An unforgettable face: broad forehead, dense mat of curling dark hair, piercing violet eyes, firmly jutting nose, practically lipless mouth. No one knew his name. He was simply the Abbot. Had he founded the monastery? No one knew that, either. The residents of the monastery did not indulge in historical research. They were there; so was he; he was the Abbot. Beyond that, very little mattered.

The year-captain revered him. In the hour before dawn, when he would arise and go down to the icy shore for the first of the day’s rituals of discipline, he would always find the Abbot already there, kneeling by the water’s edge, holding his hands beneath the surface. Not to mortify the flesh, not to incur the sin of pride by demonstrating how much self-inflicted damage he could tolerate, but simply to focus his concentration, to clarify the operations of his mind. All of the Lofoten exercises were like that. One performed them for their own sake, and not to convince others or even oneself of one’s great holiness. Holiness was beside the point here; the monastery, in this entirely secular age, was entirely secular in its orientation.

The year-captain relives, for the moment, those Lofoten days. The jagged chain of bleak rocky islands, rising like the spines of some submerged dinosaur’s enormous back from the sea off Norway’s fjord-sundered northwest coast. A stark landscape here. The dark, stormy Vestfjord that separated them from the mainland. The white-covered alpine peaks towering steeply in the background, a wall of wrinkled granite. The sparse grassy patches; the sodden cranberry moors; the broad ominous breast of the Atlantic curving off toward the west. Once these had been fishing islands, but the swarms of silvery cod were long extinct, and so were the fishing villages that had harvested the abundant catch. Mostly the islands were empty now, except for the one where the monastery sat, a neat row of stone buildings a short way inland from the sea.

The Gulf Stream flows here; the climate is harsh but not as extreme as the Arctic location might suggest. After Ganymede and Io and Callisto and Titan, these Lofoten islands might seem almost like paradise. There are no cranberry bogs on Ganymede. There are no grassy patches. One would derive no spiritual benefit from thrusting one’s bare hands into the waters of one of Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes, only a quick death. It was after his final excursion to the moons of Saturn that he had entered the monastery, leaving Huw to reap the glory of their exploit all alone. Returning from Saturn, he had felt a need to — was it to flee the society of his fellow humans? No, not flee, exactly, but certainly to withdraw from it, to go to some quiet place where he could reflect on the things he had seen and learned, the prevalence of living things in places like Titan and Io, the stubbornness of the life-force in the face of the most hostile of surroundings. What, if anything, did that stubbornness mean? What kind of ticking mechanism was this universe, and what forces had set it going? He didn’t really expect answers to those questions; he wasn’t entirely sure that answers were what he was really looking for. He wanted simply to ask the questions over and over again, and to discover, perhaps, some pattern of meaning thatconnected, rather than “answered,” them. Lofoten was there and available to him; Lofoten was suddenly irresistible. So it was to Lofoten he went — he was Scandinavian himself, and had always known of the place; going there was like coming home, only more so — and it was on Lofoten that he stayed, going down to the icy sea to clarify his mind by numbing his hands, until at last the enterprise of the starship beckoned to him and he knew he had to move on.

The Abbot had known it even before he had. “I have come to request permission to leave,” he had said, and the Abbot, smiling a smile as cool and remote as the light of the farthest galaxies, had said, “Yes, it is the time when you must carry us to the stars, is that not so?”

Huw says, “We’ll go down and take a look at it, won’t we?” And then, when the year-captain remains silent: “Won’t we?”

The Wotan has made the shunt out of nospace successfully once again, and Julia has executed the appropriate braking maneuvers, and now the starship hangs in orbit a couple of million kilometers above the surface of the second world of this nameless K-type sun’s solar system. For three days they have been studying the characteristics of that world via the ship’s instruments. Huw and the year-captain are looking at it now, a furry gray-white sphere centered perfectly in the view-plate. A planet-shaped blanket of thick cloud, with a planet hiding behind it.

What kind of planet, though?

“We have to go down and give it the old once-over, don’t you think?” Huw asks. There is something of a touch of desperation in his voice. The year-captain has been at his most opaque today, his inner feelings as thoroughly shrouded as the surface of that planet in the viewplate.