by Eric Flint
So it is, Roymer agreed. He asked quickly: "Are they aware of us?"
"No. They are directing their attention on the star. Shall I contact?"
"No. Not yet. We will observe them first."
The alien ship floated upon the screen before them, moving in slow orbit about the star Mina.
* * *
Seven. There were seven of them. Seven planets, and three at least had atmospheres, and two might even be inhabitable. Jansen was so excited he was hopping around the control room. Cohn did nothing, but grin widely with a wondrous joy, and the two of them repeatedly shook hands and gloated.
"Seven!" roared Jansen. "Old lucky seven!"
Quickly then, and with extreme nervousness, they ran spectrograph analyses of each of those seven fascinating worlds. They began with the central planets, in the favorable temperature belt where life conditions would be most likely to exist, and they worked outwards.
For reasons which were as much sentimental as they were practical, they started with the third planet of this fruitful sun. There was a thin atmosphere, fainter even than that of Mars, and no oxygen. Silently they went on to the fourth. It was cold and heavy, perhaps twice as large as Earth, had a thick envelope of noxious gases. They saw with growing fear that there was no hope there, and they turned quickly inwards toward the warmer area nearer the sun.
On the second planet—as Jansen put it—they hit the jackpot.
A warm, green world it was, of an Earthlike size and atmosphere; oxygen and water vapor lines showed strong and clear in the analysis.
"This looks like it," said Jansen, grinning again.
Cohn nodded, left the screen and went over to man the navigating instruments.
"Let's go down and take a look."
"Radio check first." It was the proper procedure. Jansen had gone over it in his mind a thousand times. He clicked on the receiver, waited for the tubes to function, and then scanned for contact. As they moved in toward the new planet he listened intently, trying all lengths, waiting for any sound at all. There was nothing but the rasping static of open space.
"Well," he said finally, as the green planet grew large upon the screen, "if there's any race there, it doesn't have radio."
Cohn showed his relief.
"Could be a young civilization."
"Or one so ancient and advanced that it doesn't need radio."
Jansen refused to let his deep joy be dampened. It was impossible to know what would be there. Now it was just as it had been three hundred years ago, when the first Earth ship was approaching Mars. And it will be like this—Jansen thought—in every other system to which we go. How can you picture what there will be? There is nothing at all in your past to give you a clue. You can only hope.
The planet was a beautiful green ball on the screen.
* * *
The thought which came out of Trian's mind was tinged with relief.
"I see how it was done. They have achieved a complete stasis, a perfect state of suspended animation which they produce by an ingenious usage of the absolute zero of outer space. Thus, when they are—frozen, is the way they regard it—their minds do not function, and their lives are not detectable. They have just recently revived and are directing their ship."
Roymer digested the new information slowly. What kind of a race was this? A race which flew in primitive star ships, yet it had already conquered one of the greatest problems in Galactic history, a problem which had baffled the Galactics for millions of years. Roymer was uneasy.
"A very ingenious device," Trian was thinking, "they use it to alter the amount of subjective time consumed in their explorations. Their star ship has a very low maximum speed. Hence, without this—freeze—their voyage would take up a good portion of their lives."
"Can you classify the mind-type?" Roymer asked with growing concern.
Trian reflected silently for a moment.
"Yes," he said, "although the type is extremely unusual. I have never observed it before. General classification would be Human-Four. More specifically, I would place them at the Ninth level."
Roymer started. "The Ninth level?"
"Yes. As I say, they are extremely unusual."
Roymer was now clearly worried. He turned away and paced the deck for several moments. Abruptly, he left the room and went to the files of alien classification. He was gone for a long time, while Goladan fidgeted and Trian continued to gather information plucked across space from the alien minds. Roymer came back at last.
"What are they doing?"
"They are moving in on the second planet. They are about to determine whether the conditions are suitable there for an establishment of a colony of their kind."
Gravely, Roymer gave his orders to navigation. The patrol ship swung into motion, sped off swiftly in the direction of the second planet.
* * *
There was a single, huge blue ocean which covered an entire hemisphere of the new world. And the rest of the surface was a young jungle, wet and green and empty of any kind of people, choked with queer growths of green and orange. They circled the globe at a height of several thousand feet, and to their amazement and joy, they never saw a living thing; not a bird or a rabbit or the alien equivalent, in fact nothing alive at all. And so they stared in happy fascination.
"This is it," Jansen said again, his voice uneven.
"What do you think we ought to call it?" Cohn was speaking absently. "New Earth? Utopia?"
Together they watched the broken terrain slide by beneath them.
"No people at all. It's ours." And after a while Jansen said: "New Earth. That's a good name."
Cohn was observing the features of the ground intently.
"Do you notice the kind of . . . circular appearance of most of those mountain ranges? Like on the Moon, but grown over and eroded. They're all almost perfect circles."
Pulling his mind away from the tremendous visions he had of the colony which would be here, Jansen tried to look at the mountains with an objective eye. Yes, he realized with faint surprise, they were round, like Moon craters.
"Peculiar," Cohn muttered. "Not natural, I don't think. Couldn't be. Meteors not likely in this atmosphere. "What in—?"
Jansen jumped. "Look there," he cried suddenly, "a round lake!"
Off toward the northern pole of the planet, a lake which was a perfect circle came slowly into view. There was no break in the rim other than that of a small stream which flowed in from the north.
"That's not natural," Cohn said briefly, "someone built that."
They were moving on to the dark side now, and Cohn turned the ship around. The sense of exhilaration was too new for them to be let down, but the strange sight of a huge number of perfect circles, existing haphazardly like the remains of great splashes on the surface of the planet, was unnerving.
It was the sight of one particular crater, a great barren hole in the midst of a wide red desert, which rang a bell in Jansen's memory, and he blurted:
"A war! There was a war here. That one there looks just like a fusion bomb crater."
Cohn stared, then raised his eyebrows.
"I'll bet you're right."
"A bomb crater, do you see? Pushes up hills on all sides in a circle, and kills—" A sudden, terrible thought hit Jansen. Radioactivity. Would there be radioactivity here?
While Cohn brought the ship in low over the desert, he tried to calm Jansen's fears.
"There couldn't be much. Too much plant life. Jungles all over the place. Take it easy, man."
"But there's not a living thing on the planet. I'll bet that's why there was a war. It got out of hand, the radioactivity got everything. We might have done this to Earth!"
They glided in over the flat emptiness of the desert, and the counters began to click madly.
"That's it," Jansen said conclusively, "still radioactive. It might not have been too long ago."
"Could have been a million years, for all we know."
"Well, most places are s
afe, apparently. We'll check before we go down."
As he pulled the ship up and away, Cohn whistled.
"Do you suppose there's really not a living thing? I mean, not a bug or a germ or even a virus? Why, it's like a clean new world, a nursery!" He could not take his eyes from the screen.
They were going down now. In a very little while they would be out and walking in the sun. The lust of the feeling was indescribable. They were Earthmen freed forever from the choked home of the System, Earthmen gone out to the stars, landing now upon the next world of their empire.
Cohn could not control himself.
"Do we need a flag?" he said grinning. "How do we claim this place?"
"Just set her down, man," Jansen roared.
Cohn began to chuckle.
"Oh, brave new world," he laughed, "that has no people in it."
* * *
"But why do we have to contact them?" Goladan asked impatiently. "Could we not just—"
Roymer interrupted without looking at him.
"The law requires that contact be made and the situation explained before action is taken. Otherwise it would be a barbarous act."
Goladan brooded.
The patrol ship hung in the shadow of the dark side, tracing the alien by its radioactive trail. The alien was going down for a landing on the daylight side.
Trian came forward with the other members of the Alien Contact Crew, reported to Roymer, "The aliens have landed."
"Yes," said Roymer, "we will let them have a little time. Trian, do you think you will have any difficulty in the transmission?"
"No. Conversation will not be difficult. Although the confused and complex nature of their thought-patterns does make their inner reactions somewhat obscure. But I do not think there will be any problem."
"Very well. You will remain here and relay the messages."
"Yes."
The patrol ship flashed quickly up over the north pole, then swung inward toward the equator, circling the spot where the alien had gone down. Roymer brought his ship in low and with the silence characteristic of a Galactic, landed her in a wooded spot a mile east of the alien. The Galactics remained in their ship for a short while as Trian continued his probe for information. When at last the Alien Contact Crew stepped out, Roymer and Goladan were in the lead. The rest of the crew faded quietly into the jungle.
As he walked through the young orange brush, Roymer regarded the world around him. Almost ready for repopulation, he thought, in another hundred years the radiation will be gone, and we will come back. One by one the worlds of that war will be reclaimed.
He felt Trian's directions pop into his mind.
"You are approaching them. Proceed with caution. They are just beyond the next small rise. I think you had better wait, since they are remaining close to their ship."
Roymer sent back a silent yes. Motioning Goladan to be quiet, Roymer led the way up the last rise. In the jungle around him the Galactic crew moved silently.
* * *
The air was perfect; there was no radiation. Except for the wild orange color of the vegetation, the spot was a Garden of Eden. Jansen felt instinctively that there was no danger here, no terrible blight or virus or any harmful thing. He felt a violent urge to get out of his spacesuit and run and breathe, but it was forbidden. Not on the first trip. That would come later, after all the tests and experiments had been made and the world pronounced safe.
One of the first things Jansen did was get out the recorder and solemnly claim this world for the Solar Federation, recording the historic words for the archives of Earth. And he and Cohn remained for a while by the air lock of their ship, gazing around at the strange yet familiar world into which they had come.
"Later on we'll search for ruins," Cohn said. "Keep an eye out for anything that moves. It's possible that there are some of them left and who knows what they'll look like. Mutants, probably, with five heads. So keep an eye open."
"Right."
Jansen began collecting samples of the ground, of the air, of the nearer foliage. The dirt was Earth-dirt, there was no difference. He reached down and crumbled the soft moist sod with his fingers. The flowers may be a little peculiar—probably mutated, he thought—but the dirt is honest to goodness dirt, and I'll bet the air is Earth-air.
He rose and stared into the clear open blue of the sky, feeling again an almost overpowering urge to throw open his helmet and breathe, and as he stared at the sky and at the green and orange hills, suddenly, a short distance from where he stood, a little old man came walking over the hill.
They stood facing each other across the silent space of a foreign glade. Roymer's face was old and smiling; Jansen looked back at him with absolute astonishment.
After a short pause, Roymer began to walk out into the open soil, with Goladan following, and Jansen went for his heat gun.
"Cohn!" he yelled, in a raw brittle voice, "Cohn!"
And as Cohn turned and saw and froze, Jansen heard words being spoken in his brain. They were words coming from the little old man.
"Please do not shoot," the old man said, his lips unmoving.
"No, don't shoot," Cohn said quickly. "Wait. Let him alone." The hand of Cohn, too, was at his heat gun.
Roymer smiled. To the two Earthmen his face was incredibly old and wise and gentle. He was thinking: Had I been a nonhuman they would have killed me.
He sent a thought back to Trian. The Mind-Searcher picked it up and relayed it into the brains of the Earthmen, sending it through their cortical centers and then up into their conscious minds, so that the words were heard in the language of Earth. "Thank you," Roymer said gently. Jansen's hand held the heat gun leveled on Roymer's chest. He stared, not knowing what to say.
"Please remain where you are," Cohn's voice was hard and steady.
Roymer halted obligingly. Goladan stopped at his elbow, peering at the Earthmen with mingled fear and curiosity. The sight of fear helped Jansen very much.
"Who are you?" Cohn said clearly, separating the words.
Roymer folded his hands comfortably across his chest, he was still smiling.
"With your leave, I will explain our presence."
Cohn just stared.
"There will be a great deal to explain. May we sit down and talk?"
Trian helped with the suggestion. They sat down.
The sun of the new world was setting, and the conference went on. Roymer was doing most of the talking. The Earthmen sat transfixed.
It was like growing up suddenly, in the space of a second.
The history of Earth and of all Mankind just faded and dropped away. They heard of great races and worlds beyond number, the illimitable government which was the Galactic Federation. The fiction, the legends, the dreams of a thousand years had come true in a moment, in the figure of a square little old man who was not from Earth. There was a great deal for them to learn and accept in the time of a single afternoon, on an alien planet.
But it was just as new and real to them that they had discovered an uninhabited, fertile planet, the first to be found by Man. And they could not help but revolt from the sudden realization that the planet might well be someone else's property—that the Galactics owned everything worth owning.
It was an intolerable thought.
"How far," asked Cohn, as his heart pushed up in his throat, "does the Galactic League extend?"
Roymer's voice was calm and direct in their minds.
"Only throughout the central regions of the galaxy. There are millions of stars along the rim which have not yet been explored."
Cohn relaxed, bowed down with relief. There was room then, for Earthmen.
"This planet. Is it part of the Federation?"
"Yes," said Roymer, and Cohn tried to mask his thought. Cohn was angry, and he hoped that the alien could not read his mind as well as he could talk to it. To have come this far—
"There was a race here once," Roymer was saying, "a humanoid race which was almost totally destroyed
by war. This planet has been uninhabitable for a very long time. A few of its people who were in space at the time of the last attack were spared. The Federation established them elsewhere. When the planet is ready, the descendants of those survivors will be brought back. It is their home."
Neither of the Earthmen spoke.
"It is surprising," Roymer went on, "that your home world is in the desert. We had thought that there were no habitable worlds—"
"The desert?"
"Yes. The region of the galaxy from which you have come is that which we call the desert. It is an area almost entirely devoid of planets. Would you mind telling me which star is your home?"
Cohn stiffened.
"I'm afraid our government would not permit us to disclose any information concerning our race."
"As you wish. I am sorry you are disturbed. I was curious to know—" He waved a negligent hand to show that the information was unimportant. We will get it later, he thought, when we decipher their charts. He was coming to the end of the conference, he was about to say what he had come to say.
"No doubt you have been exploring the stars about your world?"
The Earthmen both nodded. But for the question concerning Sol, they long ago would have lost all fear of this placid old man and his wide-eyed, silent companion.
"Perhaps you would like to know," said Roymer, "why your area is a desert."
Instantly, both Jansen and Cohn were completely absorbed. This was it, the end of three hundred years of searching. They would go home with the answer.
Roymer never relaxed.
"Not too long ago," he said, "approximately thirty thousand years by your reckoning, a great race ruled the desert, a race which was known as the Antha, and it was not a desert then. The Antha ruled hundreds of worlds. They were perhaps the greatest of all the Galactic peoples; certainly they were as brilliant a race as the galaxy has ever known.
"But they were not a good race. For hundreds of years, while they were still young, we tried to bring them into the Federation. They refused, and of course we did not force them. But as the years went by the scope of their knowledge increased amazingly; shortly they were the technological equals of any other race in the galaxy. And then the Antha embarked upon an era of imperialistic expansion.
