by Ben Bova
“I can’t really say much about the choice we have,” he rumbled. “But I do know something about the life support equipment on board this shin. We’re in no condition to go farther. The air regenerators, the waste cyclers, the cryonics units, the rest of it—everything’s being held together with that leftover gunk from the cafeteria that the cooks call coffee, plus what little hair I have left.”
Several people chuckled. Campbell grinned lazily.
“Seriously,” he continued, “I think it’s foolish to talk about going farther.” He turned toward Dan’s end of the table. “How about you lads in Propulsion and Power? Is your equipment in as bad a shape as mine?”
Dan gestured with one hand. “We haven’t started pulling out our hair yet, but the reactors and generators aren’t going to last another five-six decades. Not even five or six more years.”
“And what choice do we have?” Joe Haller asked. “There’s no evidence of a better planet anywhere.”
“Dr. Loring was searching for such evidence when his accident occurred,” Dr. Polanyi said. “Unfortunately, there was no record of his work in the computer memory core.”
Larry started to reply, but Polanyi went on, “However, I received a call last night from Dr. Loring’s daughter. She believes she has found some of her father’s handwritten notes, and she would like to tell the Council about them.”
“What?” Vat’s got evidence of her father’s work?
Suddenly Larry was totally alert, every nerve tight, every muscle tense.
He forced his voice to stay calm as he asked, “What do you mean, Dr. Polanyi?”
The old engineer shrugged. “Exactly what I said. Miss Loring apparently has uncovered some of her father’s notes, and she feels she can tell us something, at least, about the progress of his work.”
Larry glanced down the table at Dan. He seemed just as surprised as Larry himself felt.
“Then we ought to hear what she has to tell us,” Larry said.
Nodding vigorously, Polanyi answered, “Precisely. I took the liberty of asking her to wait in the outer room. Shall I call her in?”
Larry looked around the table. No dissenting voices. “Yes,” he said. “Ask her to come in.”
Polanyi got up from his seat and went to the door nearest Larry’s end of the table. He slid it open and gestured; Valery stepped into the conference room. She was wearing a dress instead of her usual slacks or coveralls; she looked very serious. And tired.
She must have stayed up all night.
“Why don’t you take your father’s seat,” Larry suggested to her.
She nodded to him and went to the empty chair. Polanyi held it for her.
Dan called, “You have some evidence about your father’s attempts to find other Earthlike planets?”
Valery’s voice was low, weary. “Well, I don’t know if you can call it evidence, exactly. It’s just some scribbled notes that he left in our quarters, in his desk. I found them accidentally last night— I was going to write a letter___” She glanced up at Larry, then turned and looked straight across the table at Polanyi.
“The notes don’t make much sense by themselves, but they reminded me of some of the conversations we had at home___Father liked to talk about his work, you know.”
She hesitated a moment. Larry could see that she was fighting to keep her self-control, struggling to keep her mind away from her father’s accident—and who caused it.
“He was trying to determine what kinds of planets are associated with two particular stars: Epsilon Indi and Epsilon Eridani. Both are orange, K.-sequence stars, somewhat cooler than the sun. Both definitely have planets orbiting around them. That much he was sure of.”
“There are lots of other stars that are just as close as those two, or closer, aren’t there?” Adrienne Kaufman asked.
Valery nodded. “Yes, but they’re almost all red dwarfstars— so dim and cool that the chance for finding a planet with Earthlike temperatures, liquid water, and livable conditions— well, the chances are almost nil.”
“I see.”
Someone asked, “These planets your father was studying, are they like Earth?”
“That’s what he was trying to determine,” Val answered, “when… when he was injured.”
Larry could feel the electric tension around the table.
“As nearly as I could make out from his notes, and from the few conversations we had on the subject,” Val went on, “he had determined that Epsilon Indi—the nearer of the two stars—had more than one planet. Its major planet is a gas giant, like J upiter, completely unfit for us.”
“And the others?”
She shook her head. “He never found out. He had been talking about building better electronic boosters for the main telescope. I guess he needed better magnification and resolution to study the smaller planets.”
“We could build such equipment,” Dr. Polanyi said. “But who would use it? Dr. Loring was our only qualified astronomer.”
“Perhaps we could revive an astronomer who’s now in cryosleep.”
“Are there any?”
Valery raised her voice a notch. “If the Council will allow it, I would like to handle the astronomical work myself.”
“You?”
“I realize that my place is in Computing. But I’ve always followed my father’s work very closely, and I think that I’m the
best qualified person here for continuing his studies___Unless, of course, you want to go to the trouble to revive a sleeping astronomer.”
“But can you make the necessary observations in less than a month? Otherwise we must go into orbit around the Centaurian planet.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Valery replied.
“We’re going to have to take up a parking orbit around the planet anyway,” Dan said firmly.
Everyone turned to him.
“I’ve been checking with all the different groups on board. Mr. Campbell’s little speech earlier was the last stroke. Just about every group says their equipment needs to be overhauled, repaired, rebuilt— We can’t keep expecting the ship to function indefinitely without major repairs.”
He pushed his chair back and stood up. “We can’t make major repairs while we’re running all the equipment full blast. But if we go into orbit around the planet, we can afford to shut down some sections of the ship for weeks or even months at a time.”
“And once we’re in orbit around the planet,” Larry countered, “the temptation to stay and make it our new home might just become overpowering. Right?”
Dan shrugged. “Could be. All I know is that the reactors need deuterium. Our supplies are too low to last much longer—a few years, at most. That planet has water on it, so there must be deuterium there, too. It’s that simple.”
“So we must stop. Whether we want to or not,” Larry said.
Dan nodded, smiling.
Everyone else around the table was nodding, too. Larry saw that there was nothing he could do about it. He was outmaneuvered, outvoted, outsmarted. The whole business of trying to decide what to do was a complete shambles. They were going to fall into orbit around the Centaurian planet, no matter what.
“I believe,” Dr. Polanyi said, “that orbiting the planet may have some definite advantages. We will be able to study it close-up, even go down onto the surface with exploration teams. Miss Loring can use the time to make further astronomical observations. And we can repair and refurbish the ship at our leisure. After all, even if we decide to stay at Alpha Centauri, those of us who are alive now will still have to spend the rest of their existence aboard ship. We will not be able to live on the surface.”
Dan said, “But our children will.”
Val’s children, Larry thought bitterly.
“All right,” he said aloud. “It seems there’s no way around it, and therefore we don’t need to decide about heading elsewhere. Not right now.at least.” He turned to the chief medic. “Will you please start the procedure for reviving an
astronaut team? It looks like we’re going to be sending groups of people down to the planet’s surface.”
The meditech nodded.
The meeting broke up soon afterward. As people got up from their seats and headed for the doors, Larry went straight to Val.
“You didn’t tell me about your father’s notes,” he said.
She was standing by the table, looking very serious and even more beautiful than he had ever known before.
“It happened just as I said.” Her voice was strained, as if she was trying to keep any emotion out of it. “I went to the desk to write a letter to Dan, to tell him what I’d told you, and found father’s handwritten notes in the drawer.”
“You haven’t changed your mind… about last night.”
She looked away from him. “No. I’m not going to be the reason for you and Dan to hurt each other. I simply refuse.”
“But what’s this about you doing astronomical work? I didn’t know…”
“There are lots of things about me that you don’t know,” Val said. “But I know all about you and Dan. Both of you think the other one deliberately tried to kill Father. Well, if someone else started to work in the observatory, what’s to stop the would-be killer—if there is one—from attacking him?”
Realization dawned on Larry, together with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “You mean that if you’re the one working in the observatory…”
“Neither you nor Dan will hurt me. There, it sounds silly and terrible at the same time, doesn’t it? But if you’re both convinced that one of you is a murderer, then the only person who can continue the astronomical work has to be me.”
“But… suppose there is a murderer, and it’s neither one of us? Suppose it’s somebody else?”
Valery didn’t hesitate an instant. “If that happens, then maybe you two idiots can work together to find out who the real madman is!”
She turned and headed for the door. From the set of her slim shoulders, the stubborn toss of her golden hair, Larry could see quite clearly that she didn’t want him to try walking with her.
He sagged back against the table, feeling utterly drained. The whole world is falling apart… everything’s breaking up and there’s nothing I can do___
Then a thought struck him. Dan had said that they’d have to get fresh deuterium for the reactors from the water on the planet. That meant sending a complex load of equipment down to the surface, together with people trained to run it. It means Dan will have to go down to the surface of the planet. The dangerous, maybe deadly surface.
Larry almost smiled.
(11)
Guido Estelella was an astronaut, the only man on ship—asleep or awake—who had experience in piloting rocket craft from orbit down to the surface of a planet and back up again. He hadn’t been one of the political prisoners, back when the ship had been an orbital jail, a place of exile for Earth’s scientists. He had been a free man, an astronaut by training. It was his joy.
But the same Earth government that made prisoners of thousands of scientists and sent them into orbital exile with their families had also cut space flight down to almost nothing. Orbital flights, mostly to repair communications and weather satellites; a few flights to the Moon each year, bringing workers to the factories there. That was all. No more Mars flights. No further exploration of the solar system. Earth could not afford it.
So when the prisoners coaxed Earth’s government into letting them drive their orbiting prison out toward the stars, Estelella volunteered to join them.
“After all,” he said, “it’s my namesake, isn’t it?”
So he went to the stars, frozen in cryosleep for nearly fifty years, to be awakened when he was needed. Now he was awake and working.
And most unhappy.
Guido Estelella stood in an insulated pressure suit on the surface of the new world. Everyone else called it Major, a contraction from “Alpha Centauri’s major Planet.” But in his own mind, Estelella called it Femina: a woman, a certain kind of woman—beautiful, selfish, treacherous, hot-tempered, dangerous.
He always felt tired here. Maybe it was the high gravity, putting an extra load on his muscles. Maybe it was just the constant fear.
For six weeks now, Guido had been flying a small landing craft down to the ground from the main ship, which was now orbiting five hundred kilometers above the planet’s equator. At least twice each week he carried men and equipment down to the small base camp they had made by the shore of one of Femina’s landlocked seas. The rest of the time he trained youngsters to fly the landing craft. There had been one wreck, killing two men and a girl. There had been several very close calls. Guido had aged more in the past six weeks than he did in his fifty years of cryosleep. Far more.
At the moment he was standing halfway between the stubby, winged landing rocket and the sprawl of equipment and plastic bubble tents that made up the base camp. A strong wind was whipping the green water of the sea into whitecaps, but inside his pressure suit, Guido felt the wind only as a faint screeching sound, muffled by his earphones. What was bothering him wasn’t the wind, but the ugly brownish-yellow cloud that it was carrying toward them from the sea horizon.
“Ship to camp,” a girl’s voice crackled in his earphones. “We’ve confirmed that there’s a new volcano active on the far coast of your sea, and the prevailing wind is bringing the fallout in your direction.”
Guido nodded unhappily inside his helmet. He clicked a button on his waistband panel.
“I think we’d better get the shuttle up and out of here before that cloud arrives.”
“Take off early? But we’re not ready.” It was Dan Christopher’s voice, coming from the camp, much stronger than the ship’s transmission.
Guido began to head toward the shuttle craft. “The last time I saw a cloud like that, it brought with it a lightning storm that kept us grounded for two days. And the rain had such a high sulfur content and so many stones in it that we had to resurface the entire top of the shuttle. The heat shield, even the pilot’s bubble were pitted and etched. I don’t want to get caught on the ground like that again.”
“But you can’t take all of us with you. Some of us will have to
stay here during the storm. And the equipment…”
“My first responsibility is for the shuttle. Your equipment is protected, and you can sit out the storm in the underground shelter.” He reached the shuttle’s hatch, popped open the access panel, and pressed the stud inside. The hatch cracked open and the ladder unfolded at his feet.
“Wait,” Dan’s voice responded. “I’ll send out as many people as we can. How many do you have room for?”
“Four. Unless you want to remove some of the cargo we packed aboard this morning.”
“The deuterium? No chance. It’s worth a helluva lot more than any of us.”
Guido looked at the sea. It was frothing heavily now, steep breakers building up and dumping their energy on the sandy shore. The grass and trees were swaying in the mounting wind. The cloud was closer, spreading, blotting out the sunshine arid the golden sky.
“I can wait about ten minutes,” he said.
Inside the main bubble tent of the camp, Dan frowned and glared at the radio set. The main tent was a hodgepodge of radio equipment, viewscreens, cooking units, tables, crated supplies, folding tables and chairs, and five busy people.
Dan could hear the wind’s growing anger outside. One of the girls seated at an analysis workbench glanced up at the roof of their transparent bubble: the plastic was rippling in the wind, making an odd kind of crinkling noise that they’d never heard before. It had taken them days to get accustomed to things like wind, and the noises that an open world makes. Now it was starting to sound frightening.
“Nancy, Tania, Vic…you three get into suits right away and get to the ship. Ross, you and I are going to stay. Vic, bring the latest tank of deuterium with you.”
“But it’s less than half full,” Vic argued.
Dan waved him down. “I know, but we’d better get it shipboard. No telling how bad this storm can get; might damage the equipment. The deuterium’s far too valuable to risk.”
Vic nodded.
“Get into a suit,” Dan said. “Ross and I will hang on here.”
Ross Cranston glanced sharply at Dan, but said nothing. He didn’t like being second-best to a meter-tall tank of stainless
steel, even though he knew that the deuterium gas inside it was more important to the ship than any computer operator.
The two girls and Vic were suited up in a few minutes, moving slowly in the heavy gravity. Vic hefted the tank by its handles, his knees giving slightly under its weight.
“Can you manage it?” Dan asked anxiously. “Yeah.” Vic’s voice was muffled by his helmet. The three of them cycled through the airlock and started trudging heavily through the wind-blown sand and grit toward the sleek little shuttle rocket. Dan watched them through the tent’s transparent plastic. The two girls each grabbed a handle of the tank and helped Vic to carry it.
Turning, Dan saw that Ross was already at the hatch to the underground shelter.
“I’m going to suit up and make a last check of the refining equipment,” Dan told him. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the wind, even though Ross was only a few meters away.
Ross nodded, visibly unhappy.
“Stay by the radio while I’m outside,” Dan said as he reached for one of the two remaining pressure suits hanging stiffly by the airlock.
Ross frowned, but nodded again.
He’s scared, Dan said to himself. Scared of the storm, and scared that I might get hurt and need him to come out and help me.
Neither of them had been on the ground when the first storm had struck, several weeks ago. Two people had been badly hurt when the wind toppled their communications antenna squarely onto the main tent. After that, the underground shelter was dug and the antenna was moved away from the rest of the camp. By the time Dan had his suit zipped up, the shuttle’s rocket engines had roared to life, out-howling even the mounting fury of the storm. Dan reached for his helmet and held it in both hands as he watched the shuttle trundle forward on its landing wheels, then gather speed and scream past the tent toward the beach. Its image shimmered and grew hazy in the heat from its own exhaust, but, squinting, Dan made out the delta-shaped craft as its nose lifted from the ground. It rolled along on its rear wheels for a moment longer, then it seemed to shoot almost straight upward, angling into the sky like a white arrowhead against the gathering darkness of the clouds.
