The Seed of Earth

CHAPTER NINE

Dawes had never known four weeks could move so slowly.

The novelty of being spaceborne wore off almost at the beginning. In nospace, there was no sense of motion, no rocket vibration, no feeling of acceleration. The ship hung motionless. And the hundred passengers, crammed mercilessly into their tiny vessel, began to feel like prisoners in a large cell.

During that first week, the hundred colonists concentrated on getting to know each other - but in a distant, guarded way, as if each had something to hide from all the others, that something being his inmost self. After a week, Dawes knew the names of almost all of his fellow selectees, but he knew little else about them. Each of the hundred cloaked himself in his private tragedy and made little effort to form friendships.

There were exceptions. Phil Haas, the West Coast lawyer who had left wife and children behind, circulated among the entire group, making friends, talking to people, encouraging them, soothing them. Mary Elliot, the plump, motherly woman who was the oldest of all the hundred selectees at thirty-nine, did the same. And soon it became evident that Haas would be an ideal Colony Director, with Mary Elliot as his wife.

The ship was cramped. There was hardly any room in the sleeping quarters except for sleeping; the lounges aft were small and low of ceiling, while the galley just barely held all of them at table. The narrow companionways that ran the length of the ship would pass two abreast, no more. There was little in the way of recreation aboard ship: a few books, a few music-tapes, nightly film showings. Most of the books and music and films were stowed away in the cargo hold with the other possessions of the colony-to-be.

As 'day' dragged into 'day' and week into week, Dawes found himself going stale with the monotony and constant discomfort. He counted days, then hours, until landing. He slept as much as he could, sometimes fifteen and sixteen hours a day, until he could sleep no more.

Little cliques were forming aboard the ship as the weeks passed. Groups of six or eight took shape: people from the same geographical area, or people of the same general age and intelligence groups, who saw something to share in their common misfortune. Dawes joined none of these groups. He was the youngest member of the colony, at twenty - by some fluke of the computer, none of the other men was less than twenty-five, and most were in their early thirties - and he stood to one side, unable to mingle at ease with the older people. Many of them had lost wives, families, homes that had been built and furnished with care and expense, jobs that had cost them outlay of energy and vigorous exertion. He felt guilty, in a way, that he had lost nothing more serious than his education and his chosen profession. Conscious that the other selectees were adults and he himself something less than that, though more than a boy, Dawes established and observed the gulf between them, and made few friends.

In the third week an election was held. Phil Haas was chosen Colony Director, running unopposed. He announced that he would serve for one year and then would hold new elections. The colonists assembled, granted him the right to rule by decree until a constitution could be adopted, and some sort of colonial council established.

Dawes wondered about the unanimity of the election.

Certainly their were other men among the fifty who yearned for power. Why had they kept politely silent while Haas was being acclaimed? Men like Dave Matthews, Lee Donaldson: strong men, capable men, outspoken men. Perhaps they were just biding their time, Dawes thought. Waiting, letting Haas handle the difficult task of getting the colony in motion, then making their bids.

Dawes shrugged. He had no interest in playing politics. He kept to himself, intending to do his job as a colonist as best he could, without looking for trouble.

Let others fight among themselves for responsibilities; he was content to drift passively along. After all, he thought, he hadn't asked to be sent here. Nor was he going to ask for any great share in the responsibilities.

At the end of the fourth week, finally - it seemed like the fourth century since blasting off from Earth - a shipwide announcement sent the Osiris colonists scuttling back to their protective cradles.

'The time is 1443 hours, ship time. In exactly twelve minutes, at 1455 hours, we're going to make a transition out of nospace and back to rocket drive. We'll enter the atmosphere of Osiris at 1600 hours and take three hours to complete our landing orbit. We'll touch down on the day-side of Osiris at 1900 hours, which will be exactly noonday down below. Everybody strap down now.'

Dawes' fingers quivered nervously as he lashed himself into the acceleration cradle. This was it! Landing in less than five hours!

He wondered about Osiris. The Colonization Bureau had prepared a couple of mimeographed sheets about the planet for distribution to the colonists, but the information on them was scanty. He knew that the planet was roughly Earthsize - 8100 miles in diameter - and that the soil was arable; that the air was like the air of Earth, only with a trifle less oxygen, a trifle more nitrogen, not enough of a difference to matter; that the planet had seven continents, of which two were polar and thus uninhabitable. Survey team reports were never tremendously reliable: the survey teams moved with desperate haste, often scouting an entire solar system in a day or two, and once they found a world to be reasonably suitable they rarely bothered to look for drawbacks. According to the survey team report, there was no intelligent life on Osiris, at least not on the temperate northern continent that had been chosen for the colony. It was an easy statement to make; so far intelligent life had been discovered nowhere else in the universe. Many planets had species no more than a hundred thousand years away from intelligence, but nowhere but on Earth was there a culture, a civilization, as much as a language. Or so the findings had been so far.

At 1455 hours came the shock of transition. The Einstein generator lashed out, smashing a gap in the fabric of nospace, and the Gegenschein slipped through the aperture and back into the universe of real things. Instantly the rocket engines came into play, guiding the ship into orbit round the planet below. In a series of ever-narrowing spirals the Gegenschein would glide downward, matching velocities with Osiris, until its path grazed the skin of the planet and the ship came to rest at last.

Lying pinioned in his acceleration cradle, Mike Dawes clenched his teeth against the pounding of the rockets.

The Gegenschein was not insulated very well against engine vibration; it was strictly functional, a tube designed to transport people from one world to another, without pretensions to comfort.

He regretted the lack of a vision screen. It might have been inspiring to see Osiris growing steadily ahead as the Gegenschein landed. Much more inspiring than lying on your back in a badly ventilated compartment, Dawes thought, lying in the half-darkness. Somewhere ahead in the night was Osiris, Vega IX, four billion miles from the fourth brightest star in Earth's sky. Would Sol be visible in Osiris' night sky? Probably - as an insignificant white dot of negligible magnitude.

No one spoke as the Gegenschein plunged planetward.

Each man in the compartment was alone with his dreams and memories now. The minutes passed; at 1600 hours Captain McKenzie announced that the ship had entered Osiris' atmosphere at last. The actual landing was still three hours away, as the ship swung round the planet, coming closer and closer to the surface.

1900 hours. Within his cradle Mike Dawes struggled to keep his stomach under control. The last hour had been a bumpy, bouncing ride downward through thickening layers of atmosphere. Atmospheric eddies jounced the golden ship; a storm layer buffeted it. But the journey was ending. The Gegenschein hung low over Osiris' northern temperate continent, dropping, dropping...

Landing.

The impact shuddered through the ship. The Gegenschein wobbled only an instant before the landing-jacks took effect, digging into the ground.

Captain McKenzie said, 'We've landed right on the nose. Welcome to Osiris, ladies and gentlemen.'

We're here, Dawes thought.

He longed to burrow through the ship's wall and see the new planet. But an hour more passed before the colonists could leave the ship. First, the routine atmospheric tests ('as if they'll take us all back home if they discover that the air's pure helium,' Sid Nolan grumbled.)

Then, the cooling-off period of fifteen minutes while nozzles beneath the ship's belly sluiced decontaminating fluids onto the landing area to deal with the radiation products and chemical poisons of the rocket exhaust.

After that, the opening of the hatch, the lowering of the catwalk. No gantry lift waiting for them; descent from the ship would be by ladder only. Phil Haas and Mary Elliot were the first people out; after them came the others, filing in slow shuffle along the companion way until they reached the hatch.

Dawes was the twentieth to leave the ship. He stepped out onto the lip of the hatch.

Osiris lay before him. The ship had landed in a clearing at the shore of a glittering blue lake. Beyond the expanse of pinkish-red sand, the soil became more fertile; not far away loomed a dark, ominous-looking forest, and high beyond rose arching black cliffs.

Gray clouds lay heavily in the dark-blue sky like greasy puffs of wool. High overhead burned giant Vega, with its disc the apparent size of the sun of Earth, even at a distance of four billion miles. The air smelled subtly different - thin, with a salt tang to it that was nothing like the tang of the open ocean. And it was cold. The temperature was about fifty, but an icy wind came sleeting down out of the forest, cutting into him as he stood staring sixty feet above the ground.

He hadn't expected it to be this cold. For no specific reason he had anticipated tropic heat. But Osiris, at least this continent at this time of year, seemed bleak, inhospitable, uninviting.

'Come on, kid,' someone said behind him. 'Don't stand there all day. Get down the ladder.'

Dawes smiled apologetically. 'Sorry. Just taking it all in.'

'You've got plenty of time for that.'

Dawes reddened and scrambled hastily down the catwalk. The others were waiting below. The pinkish sand crunched underfoot. Feeling for the first time, Dawes thought with awe and wonder, the touch of a human foot.

Chill winds swept down on him as he stood huddling into himself for warmth, waiting for Haas to organize things, to take charge. As the colonists filed out of the ship, they wandered about aimlessly on the sand, moving without direction or purpose or words, all of them struggling to minimize the shock of concrete realization that they were alone on an alien planet, never to see Earth again.

At last all hundred had disembarked, as well as Captain McKenzie and his crew.

Haas had obtained a whistle from somewhere. He blew it now.

Attention! Attention, everybody!'

The wanderers returned to the group. Silence fell. The wind hooted through the distant forest.

Haas said, 'Captain McKenzie tells me that he intends to blast off for Earth as soon as possible. Our first job, then, is to unload the ship. We'll do it in bucket-brigade fashion. Noonan, pick a team of five men and go with Captain McKenzie: you'll be the ones to get the crates out of the ship. Sanderson, choose three and arrange yourselves near the ship to take the crates as they come out. We'll pass them along until they've been placed over there, at the end of the beach, beyond the five hundred yard safety zone the Gegenschein is going to need.' Haas paused. 'Matthews, take four colonists and go scouting around the area. Look around for any lurking wildlife, and yell if you see anything. The rest of you just stay in the area; no wandering off.'

Dawes was passed over by the heads of the teams; he shrugged, thrust his hands in his pockets, and stood to one side. The cargo hatch in the belly of the ship was lowered open, and Noonan and his team entered, while the Gegenschein crew clambered back up the catwalk to ready their ship for departure. In a few minutes, crates began appearing, heavy wire-bound wooden crates that contained all of Earth that there had been room to bring along.

Others lugged the crates across the clearing, out of the way of the ship's rocket-blast area. The job took nearly an hour. Haas inventoried each crate as it appeared, checking it off against a master list. When half had appeared, he whistled again and rotated the teams, letting the tired men rest and putting fresh ones to work. Dawes took his place in the second team, hauling the crates away from the ship and over to the supply dump.

The cargo hold was nearly empty when Dave Matthews came trotting out of the forest, shouting for Haas.

The colony director turned. 'What is it, Dave?'

Matthews raced up, panting. Dawes and a few others stopped work to listen to him.

Matthews gasped, 'Aliens 11 saw aliens!'

Haas frowned. 'What?'

'Skulking around in the edge of the forest. Dark shadowy things. They looked like men, or apes, or something.'

A twinge of fear went through Dawes. But Haas smiled. 'Are you sure, Dave?'

'How can I be sure? They ran away as soon as I went toward them.'

'Did anyone else in your team see them?' Haas asked, looking at the other four members of the scouting patrol.

'Not me,' Sid Nolan said.

'Me neither,' Paul Wilson agreed. 'We came running when Matthews shouted, but we didn't see anything.'

'And the survey team said there was no intelligent life on Osiris,' Nolan pointed out.

Haas shrugged the matter off. 'We'll check later. You might have been mistaken, Dave.'

'I hope so. But I wasn't.'

The affair was allowed to drop there. At the moment, it was more urgent to empty out the Gegenschein.

The work made Dawes perspire, and then he felt colder when a gust of wind came. But he enjoyed the mere activity of moving around, of using his muscles after four weeks of dreary confinement.

At last the ship was unloaded. An assortment of packing-crates and smaller cases sat in disorder five hundred yards from the ship. The crewman bustled busily about, checking off items on a vastly accelerated count-down. It took two days to prepare a ship for blastoff when it was laden with colonists and cargo; empty, it could be readied in only a few hours.

While the crewman worked, the hundred colonists boarded the ship for the last time, to prepare a meal in the galley. It would be their third meal of the day. But it was only midday on Osiris, and Haas had ordered that work would continue until sundown, six or seven hours hence, so they would be adjusted to the new time-schedule from the very start. Dawes was on the clean-up crew after the meal. When he emerged from the ship, finally, he saw Haas and Captain McKenzie in conference. Haas was counting, to make certain everyone was off the ship.

He blew his whistle. 'Attention, all! The Gegenschein is about to blast off! Everyone over by the cargo, right away! The Gegenschein is leaving!'