by Jerry Oltion
Judy giggled. "Ah, the romance of space exploration." She looked at her watch. They had been sealed inside the tank for eleven minutes. She wouldn't waste air just to flush out the smell, but it was probably time to refresh the oxygen supply anyway. They didn't have any lithium hydroxide scrubbers to remove the carbon dioxide that built up as they breathed, so they would start hyperventilating from CO2
poisoning if they let it build up too much. And despite her chagrin at spoiling the mood, she felt so giddy from their accomplishment that she would never know when they ran out of oxygen. She opened the valve and let the pressure drop to 18,000 feet, then she shut it off and cracked the valve on the oxygen tank. She only pressurized it back to 14,000 feet; that was still enough to prevent the bends, and with the infusion of pure oxygen it was a richer mix than before. It smelled better, too. The computer beeped again, and she looked over at the screen, where the star comparator program had identified four sources it couldn't account for.
"They almost certainly have to be planets," Allen said. "Let's make a short hop across the system and get some distance figures."
"Okay."
He keyed in the coordinates, hit "Enter," and the angle of the light changed. They waited another minute or so for the computer to find the planets' new locations, then Allen fed the data from the comparator into the navigation program and let it calculate their actual positions in space. Judy pulled herself around so she could see the screen more clearly, but the figures were displayed in table form, and it took her a few seconds to make sense of them.
"You should program that to show us a diagram of the solar system." Allen pursed his lips and nodded. "That'll be a feature for version 2.0. But it's not too hard to puzzle out. This is the distance from us, and this is the distance from the primary. It's in kilometers, so we want something on the order of a hundred and fifty million."
There was one planet at 70 million, another at 100, and another at 180. Judy's heart fell. The inner two would be too hot, and the next one would be considerably colder than Earth, unless it had a thick enough atmosphere to hold in more heat than Earth did. The outer one was all the way out to 450; the equivalent of Sol's asteroid belt.
She pointed at the third planet. "That's the only candidate, isn't it?"
"Looks like. Shall we take a closer look?"
"Of course we should! I didn't come this far just to turn back because it doesn't look promising." Allen didn't have to type in the coordinates this time. He cut and pasted them from the navigation program, but then he zeroed out the last two digits of the third coordinate.
"What was that for?" Judy asked.
"I shortened the distance, just in case the software got a really accurate fix. We don't want to jump into the middle of the planet; we want to be ten or twenty thousand kilometers away."
"Oh. Right." She shivered. Allen had said the hyperdrive wouldn't let them jump into a space that was already occupied, but she didn't want to test it.
He hit the "Enter" key, and the light from outside grew brighter. They watched the monitor as the Getaway's rotation made stars sweep by, waiting for their first glimpse of the planet. When it came, it nearly took Judy's breath away. She had been afraid they would find another cold, lifeless Mars or a Saturnian giant, but the curved horizon that slid into view held the familiar white swirls of storm systems marching across brown continents and blue ocean.
"It's there!" Judy whispered. "My god, it's real!"
They were only a few thousand kilometers above the surface: close enough to see a chain of mountains along the edge of a major continent directly beneath them. The peaks were covered in snow, but the lower slopes looked lush with greenery.
"There's chlorophyll here," she said. "Plant life!" The atmosphere looked thicker than Earth's. It might have been just an optical illusion, but the cloud layers looked more complex, and the horizon looked fuzzier than Earth's. And by the looks of the vegetation, something was holding in heat. The planet's extra distance from its sun didn't seem to matter at all.
The camera panned across the entire continent as their spaceship continued its slow rotation. They could see more mountain ranges, river valleys, plains, and even a desert, which only accentuated how alive the rest of the continent was.
Allen switched on the radio. "I wonder if there's anybody home?" They had brought a shortwave set on the off chance that they might be able to detect alien radio transmissions with it. It had only a fraction of the bandwidth that they needed to search the whole electromagnetic spectrum, but it was the best they could do on short notice, and it would also come in handy if they needed to talk to anyone once they got back to Earth orbit. Allen had used the cable wrapped around the outside of the tank for an antenna, so it was extremely sensitive, but the speaker was quiet as the radio automatically scanned up and down the bands for a signal. There was an occasional crackle, probably from lightning in the clouds below, but that was it.
"Could there be an entire planet just waiting for us?" Judy asked. "That's almost too much to ask." His eyes twinkled. "Almost?"
"Well, a person can dream, can't they?"
He took the microphone off its clip and spoke into it. "Hello, is there anybody out there? Hello?
Testing, testing, testing. This is Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher broadcasting live from the Getaway Special. Is anyone listening?"
He let up the button and listened to the silence for a few seconds, then keyed the microphone again.
"Hello! We're your neighbors from next door. We come in peace. Well, actually, we came in a septic tank, but that's another story."
He listened again, but there was still no response. Judy reached for the microphone, and he handed it over to her. "Hello," she said. "This is Judy Gallagher, and I've just got to say one thing to all you people back on Earth who may be listening when this message arrives there in four years: Nya, nya, we got here first!"
She giggled and reached out to hand the microphone back to Allen, but she gasped in shock and let go when the radio crackled to life.
21
The microphone sprang back on its coiled cord and clipped the getaway special canister, then bounced off and whacked Allen in the head before he could catch it.
He grabbed the cord before it could do any more damage and reeled it in. "Who's there?" he asked.
The voice was male, and gravelly with time or smoke or garrulousness. "Name's Nicholas Onnescu. I've been here two days already. What kept you?"
Judy heard a ringing in her ears and realized she was clenching her teeth hard enough to hurt. It was a ridiculous reaction, but she couldn't help it. There was somebody else on her planet!
Allen had lost some of his giddiness, too. "We, uh, had a hard time tracking down all the equipment we needed," he said. "Your name sounds familiar. Are you the guy from Lancaster?"
"Yep. 'From' is the operative term. Man, I am so out of there, you can't believe. I may go back for the rest of my stuff, but not anytime soon. I'm too busy fishin' and buildin' a cabin." He laughed. "So my departure made it on the news, eh? I wasn't sure if anybody would report it, considering the lies they were spreadin' around."
Allen waited a second to see if he was done, then said, "They showed the crater you left behind. Boy, you had a lot of junk in that yard!"
"Collectibles," Nicholas said. "Collectibles." Then he laughed again and said, "No, you're right. It was junk. Jeez, that was a lifetime ago. What an artificial bunch of crap we humans drag around with us, eh?"
Allen looked at the interior of the septic tank, festooned with equipment. His eyes met Judy's, and he gave a little shrug. "You don't know the half of it," he said. "Well, hey, I'm glad you made it here okay. You have any trouble with the hyperdrive?"
"Nope. Worked like a charm. Bit my tongue landing, but that was the worst of it."
"How'd you get here so fast? I mean, what did you do for a spaceship?"
"Hah! I had one already built. I made it a couple of years ago when I found the plans for a D
ean drive in an old Astounding magazine, but the drive turned out to be a piece of junk. Barely lifted itself, much less a spaceship. Your little gadget, though—that's a honey. Did you come up with that all by yourself?"
Allen grinned with pride. "Well, Einstein and Hawking had a little to do with the research, but the design is all mine, yeah."
"Good for you. And thanks for sharing. A lot of guys would have took out ads in the back of Popular Science and sold mimeographed schematics for a hundred bucks a pop." Judy found her voice. "Ask him how many other people are here." Allen nodded. "Did you come by yourself?"
"Yep."
"Did anyone else come afterward?"
"Two others that I know of. I may have missed some; this scanner doesn't have the best range in the world. Well, maybe it does, come to think of it, but you know what I mean." Judy knew all too well. That there were any other scanners in the world was almost too much to bear. Who was this Onnescu guy, anyway? And who were the others?
She looked to the monitors. The planet was sweeping past again, a little closer than before. They were falling toward it. Some of that was probably their leftover vector from Earth s orbital motion, but gravity was definitely drawing them down as well.
"Let's go," she said.
"What?" asked Allen.
"Let's go. Everybody and their grandma is going to come to Alpha Centauri first. Inside a week, this place will look like Tokyo."
"Oh, come now. It'll take years before . . . ah, right."
She looked away from the monitor. It was too blurry for her to see much at the moment anyway. Allen keyed the microphone again. "Uh, well, hey, it's been nice talking to you, but we're going to head on out a few more light-years and see what we can find. Give our regards to whoever else passes through."
Nicholas didn't sound very disappointed to see them go. "Will do. Good hunting."
"Thanks. Um, Allen Meisner, signing off." He stuck the microphone back in its clip. "Well. Where to next?"
"Anywhere but here."
He gave her a look, the look, the one she would be seeing off and on for the rest of their lives if they stayed together. The one that asked, "Are you okay?" and answered that question at the same time.
"Well," he said, "there's Tau Ceti not far away, but that's probably going to be overrun with science fiction fans. Same with Sirius and Arcturus and all the other sunlike stars that people have been writing about for years."
"Then let's go farther. You said distance isn't a factor, right? Let's go for the other side of the galaxy and see what's there."
Allen captured a loose screw that was drifting in the air between them and tucked it into a thigh pocket on his spacesuit. "That might be a bit extr—ah, risky. Our star map is just a commercial sky atlas compiled from an astronomical database of nearby stars; it isn't going to be much help beyond a couple hundred light-years. That's a tiny little bubble of space compared to the size of the whole galaxy. If we get lost out there we could have a hell of a time finding our way home again." He was right, damn him. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Okay, then, how about something still on the map, but a little less likely to have settlers already?" He bit his lower lip and his eyes got a faraway look. "Well, there's a whole slew of other G-type stars in Cetus. Some of them are pretty close together. There's a cluster of them about fifty light-years out that I've always wondered about."
She tried out the look on him. "You've always wondered about it? Like it's kept you awake at nights?"
He shrugged; hard to do in a spacesuit, but at least possible under zero-gee. "Maybe a night," he said. "The point is, they're close enough together to support a nice little interstellar empire even with slower-than-lightspeed travel. If we're looking for something interesting, that's a good prospect, and it's not all that well known."
"Oh." An interstellar empire? Wouldn't the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project have found evidence of it if there was one? Fifty light-years was practically in Earth's back yard from their point of view.
Which meant there probably wasn't an empire out there. Or anybody else. At the moment, that was just what Judy wanted.
"Sure," she said. "Let's give it a shot."
They got to the first star on Allen's list in three more jumps: the first to get away from the Alpha Centauran planet's gravity well, the second to cross fifty light-years of space, and the third to close in on their target. They popped into being about five AU out from the star; a little farther than they'd intended, but still close enough to search for planets.
Judy refreshed their air and lowered the pressure a little more while they gave the stellar comparator a chance to assemble a database from that vantage, then they jumped across to the other side of the star and let the program do its work. It took a while, but when it finally made its report, they understood why. It had catalogued 389 planets within ten AU of the primary.
Judy blew a soft whistle. "Holy cow. They must be thick as flies out there." She studied the image in the monitor, but she couldn't tell planets from stars. They were all just bright specks, and this far from the Sun, none of the constellations were familiar. "Can we get a size on any of them?" Allen looked at the list. "There's a couple that're only half a million kilometers away. Not much farther than the Moon from Earth. We should be able to zoom in on one." He didn't bother to state the obvious: if either of the nearby planets had been of any size, they would have seen it already as their spaceship rotated and gave them a 360-degree panorama. He reached out to the camera controls mounted beneath his monitor and upped the magnification, but that merely narrowed his field of view and made the star field slide by faster, so he took the joystick and tried to direct the camera to follow one of the stars. That was tougher than it looked. Judy tried it with her camera, but she had no better luck than he.
"I don't suppose you've got a program that'll do this, do you?" she asked hopefully.
"Nope," he asked. "I could probably cobble something together, but it would be simpler if we just stopped our rotation and let the program we've got point out where we need to look."
"Um, that's going to take a lot of air." Each time Judy had vented air into space, the tank's spin had increased. They weren't rotating all that fast, but there was quite a bit of mass involved, and it would take an equal amount of Force applied in the other direction to cancel out all that angular momentum. They could do it with the valve tapped into the opposite side of the tank, but Judy had just refreshed their air; venting more now would be a waste.
On the other hand, waiting for their air to grow stale so they had a good excuse to vent it was kind of dumb, too. "Oh, to hell with it," she said. "We've got six hours' worth; let 'er rip." She got ready on the oxygen tank while Allen opened the faucet next to his elbow, but she didn't crack the valve right away.
"Uh, it's getting a little thin, isn't it?" he asked as the altimeter needle swung past 20,000 feet and began its second lap of the dial. He closed the faucet and swallowed to make his ears pop. She kept her valve closed. "We can survive for a few seconds at low pressure. Keep going."
"Ooo . . . kay." He let more air out. She let it go up to 24,000, then nodded to him and turned on the oxygen flow while he closed the vent. She stopped at 16,000 this time; they'd been breathing oxygen-enriched air long enough that they were probably safe from the bends at that altitude by now. Their spin had slowed considerably. Now they could let the program flag the points of light they were interested in and zoom in on them manually. It was still hard to hold the cameras on them at high magnification, but they could do it long enough to learn what they needed to: even at the highest power, they could detect no sign of a disk on either of the two closest planets. Nor did any of the others show as more than bright specks of light.
"Looks like a bunch of asteroids," Judy said.
"It does, doesn't it?" Allen stared at the screen for another thirty seconds or so, then typed in the coordinates for the closest target. "What the heck; we might as well go have a look. I've
never seen an asteroid up close."
"Up close" was the operative term. The moment he pushed the "Enter" button, the external monitors filled with a rugged, grayish-green surface that looked like it was only a couple feet away.
"Yeow!" Judy started backward in surprise and banged her head on the side of the septic tank, but she didn't give herself even a moment to register pain; she just immediately pushed herself back down and checked the monitor again to see if they were moving toward it or away. She couldn't tell at first. The image was sliding past too quickly. She grabbed the joystick to try following a landmark for a second, but the moment she moved it and saw how touchy the camera was, she realized she had left the magnification all the way up. When she zoomed out again, the surface didn't look nearly as close. Nor did it look like an asteroid.
It looked more like a thicket of vines entangling a pile of rocks, boards, and rusty scrap metal. It looked, in fact, like Nicholas Onnescu's back yard. If she hadn't seen the tiny size of the crater in his yard, she would have thought maybe he had come here first on his way to Alpha Centauri, but as her eyes picked out more details she realized that the scale was all wrong. This went on for miles. It wasn't even remotely spherical, either. It was more of an oblong, like a stretched-out football, or maybe a disk seen mostly edge-on. The more Judy looked at it, the more she thought it resembled a cityscape. A cityscape reflected in a lake, with waves distorting the image at all angles, but there was definitely order to it.
Allen was staring at it like a deer staring at a pair of oncoming headlights. "Holy shit," he whispered.
"There is an interstellar empire."
22
They were moving toward it, but not so fast that they had to dodge immediately. "Try the radio," Judy said.
Allen slowly undipped the microphone and held it up to his mouth. When he spoke, there was none of the cockiness he'd shown around Alpha Centauri. His voice was a high-pitched squeak as he said,
"Hello? This is—" He cleared his throat and tried again. "This is Allen Meisner and Judy Gallagher of Earth. Can you hear us? We, uh, we'd like to come in and say 'Hi.' " He let off the microphone and said, "Shit, that sounded stupid. They'll think we're morons."
