The conference room filled slowly with Council members. At the head of the table, standing there and watching them drift in, Larry thought they looked almost reluctant to get the meeting started.
They know that a battle’s coming; they’ve got a hard choice to make, and they don’t want to face it.
His own thoughts kept slipping back to Valery, to the angry, sad, scared look in her eyes the night before. She can’t stay away from us both, he knew. The ship’s laws were lenient in some ways, but inexorable in others. Valery was at the age for marriage. She must marry. The computer’s genetics program had listed the men who were genetically suited for marriage with her. There was no way for her to avoid it; she had to marry someone on that list.
Either Dan or me, Larry thought. Then, Or somebody else? No, she couldn’t marry somebody else. She wouldn’t.
But now there was another part to the problem. If the Council decides to stay at Alpha Centauri, then we’ll have to genetically alter this next generation of children. Val’s children — whoever she marries — will be sulfur-breathing, high-gravity monsters. She won’t be able to live with them; they couldn’t stay in the same sections of the ship, except for brief visits. They couldn’t breathe the same air.
Someone coughed, and Larry snapped his attention back to the conference room, the Council meeting, the men and women who were now in their seats and looking up at him.
Only three seats were still vacant: Dr. Loring’s, Joe Mailer’s, and Dan’s. Before Larry could say anything, the door at the far end of the room slid open and Haller and Dan stepped in. Dan was smiling.
They took their seats at that end of the table, and Larry sat in his chair.
“I assume you’ve all reviewed the minutes of our last meeting, and know the agenda for today.”
A general mumble and nodding of heads.
“We’ve all seen Dr. Polanyi’s data tapes from the probes.”
Assent again.
The nervousness that Larry had expected to feel just wasn’t there. He hunched forward in his chair, feeling... detached, remote from all this, as if he himself, the real Larry Belsen was somewhere lightyears away, looking back and watching the meeting, watching the person in his skin the way a scientist watches an experimental animal.
Leaning his forearms on the table, Larry said, “All right, we can get right down to it. The basic question is simply this: do we end our voyage at Alpha Centauri, or do we go on to try to find a better, more Earthlike planet at another star?”
For a moment none of the Council members said anything; they looked at each other, none of them apparently willing to start the debate.
Then Mort Campbell cleared his throat. His voice was deep, his usual speech pattern was slow and methodical. Put together with his solid frame and beefy face, he gave the impression of being a stolid, slow muscleman. But Campbell was the ship’s champion chess player, as well-as its top wrestler. His scientific skills, as chief of the Life Support group, spanned medicine, cryogenics, electronics, and most of the engineering disciplines. When he talked, no matter how slowly, people listened.
“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 Jupiter, 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.
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.
In less than a minute the rolling thunder of the rocket’s takeoff had rumbled away, leaving only the keening of the wind and the flapping of the tent’s supposedly tearproof plastic.
As he put the helmet on, Dan thought, There’s a big difference between seeing storms on videotapes and really being in one.
He checked the suit radio. “I’m going out now, Ross.”
“Okay.”
Dan turned to see Ross through the helmet’s faceplate. The computerman looked scared and sullen.
“If you go down into the shelter, tell me before you leave the radio. I don’t want to be stuck alone out there.”
“I will.”
Dan nodded and opened the inner airlock hatch. While the airlock was busy sealing itself and pumping out the good breathable air, Dan was trying to calm himself.
He wasn’t frightened, he was excited; happy, really. He knew that was dangerous. If you’re scared, like Ross, you don’t take chances. But Dan was soaring high, spaced out on the excitement of being on the surface of a planet, the planet, the new world, facing its dangers unafraid. The storm, the wind, the crashing of the sea, the tossing golden trees, the dust and sand that was blowing through the air in ever-thickening clouds—it was wild and free. Not like the ship. Not like the quiet, orderly world where everything went according to schedule and there was absolutely no difference between one day and the next. This was life!
The airlock lights turned green. Dan clumped heavily to the outer hatch and turned its control wheel. It moved slowly, slowly, then the hatch popped open and a gust of grit-filled air puffed into the airlock.
Dan had to lean hard against the hatch to get it to swing open wide enough for him to go outside. Already his muscles felt strained. The high gravity made everything feel heavier than it should: the suit weighed down on him, the hatch opened grudgingly. It was an effort to lift one booted foot off the floor of the airlock and place it on the sandy soil outside.
The wind caught Dan by surprise. He had heard it long enough, but now he felt it as physical force. Even inside the suit he could feel the wind buffeting him, trying to push him down.
He grinned.
Turning his back to the wind, he began trudging along the edge of the circular tent, heading for the once-gleaming jumble of metal shapes that was the refinery.
It gleamed no longer. Many weeks of being exposed to this corrosive atmosphere had dulled its exterior finish, and the storms and rains had etched and pitted the metal. But the insides still work. Dan told himself as he looked along the length of pipes that led down to the sea. Take in sea water, extract the deuterium, then return what’s left—about 99.97 percent of it. We don’t want much from you, Dan said silently to the sea. Just three hundredths of a percent. Enough to live on.
A shriek of metal against metal made him jump in sudden fear. From inside the helmet, he couldn’t see what was happening. He had to turn around and lean his whole body backward to look up.
One of the solar battery panels—the collection of silicon-based cells that converted sunlight into electricity—had ripped loose from the roof of the refinery’s storage tower. Now it was sliding along the bulbous metal domes of the separation equipment, banging, screeching... It blew free and sailed like a jagged enormous leaf into the wind, pinwheeling as it disappeared into the dust clouds that were blowing everywhere.
“Never worked right anyway!” Dan yelled. The solar batteries had been badly eroded by the sulfur-rich air. Dan had been forced to fly a small generator down from the ship to provide electricity for the base camp.
Everything else on this side of the equipment complex looked tight and safe. Even if the other solar panels rip off, that’s no problem. Unless they tear into the tent.
Dan’s legs were starting to tremble with exertion. He forced himself to plod around the side of the big refinery. As he turned the corner, the wind caught him head-on and nearly toppled him backward. Leaning heavily into the wind, he trudged on.
It was getting very dark now. And the wind was screaming insanely. Dust clouds made it hard to see any distance at all.
Lightning flashed. Dan heard it crackle in his earphones as it flickered out over the sea, brightening the whole scene for an eyeblink’s time. It sent a jolt of irrational fear through him.
Then came the boom of the thunder, distant but menacing. Dan moved on.
He couldn’t see the radio antenna in the darkness and dust. Then another flash of lightning and there it was, swaying like a gigantic, leafless, branchless tree. But it held firm. The new anchor pins were doing their job.
A sudden gust of wind actually lifted one of Dan’s boots off the ground. He swayed for a moment, fought hard for balance, then planted the foot back on the ground.
“Ross?” he called into his helmet microphone.
No answer.
“Ross! Are you there? I’m coming in... be back in a minute.”
Silence. Only the crackling of lightning static in his earphones. He’s gone back into the shelter, Dan realized.
Bending into the wind, Dan clumped forward slowly. It was painful, each step. Another horrible tearing sound, and he saw out of the corner of his eye another of the solar panels flipping off madly, hitting the ground with one corner and bouncing along like a child’s runaway toy.
Then a more ominous sound. A groaning, gut-wrenching sound, like the earth itself being pulled apart. Dan looked up at the metal domes and towers alongside him, but couldn’t see any cause for the...
It moaned again. And fainter, the sound of—flapping. Something soft, something plastic... the tent!
Dan pushed himself madly along the side of the refinery, trying to get to the side where the tent stood. If it still stood. He stumbled and fell face forward, but hardly stopped at all. He crawled on all fours for a few paces, then painfully pushed himself to his feet again. The wind was getting intolerable.
Grabbing hold of a projecting ladder-rung from the metal tower he stood next to, swaying in the howling insanity of the wind, Dan rested for a moment, then pushed on. He rounded the corner and saw what the groaning noise was.
The tent was collapsed and flapping on the ground like some monstrous dying pterodactyl. Dan couldn’t see the airlock, couldn’t tell if Ross had made it to the underground shelter before the collapse. If he hadn’t, he was dead inside there.
Only one thing was certain. There was no way for Dan to get inside to safety.
The storm howled triumphantly.
In the ship’s observation center, at the zero-gravity hub, the only sound was the faintest whispering of the air-circulating fans.
Larry hovered weightlessly at the transparent wall of the big plastiglass blister, staring out at the massive curving bulk of the golden planet below. A huge yellow-brown smear was staining one section of the planet’s surface: the storm.
He touched the plastiglass wall with his fingertips, anchoring himself lightly in place. There was a wall phone within arm’s reach, but he didn’t want to use it, didn’t want to hear what was happening.
“Dan’s still down there.”
Before he turned, he knew it was Valery’s voice. In the golden light coming up from the planet, she looked like an ancient goddess, shining against the darkness of the observation center’s dim lighting. Her face, though, was very human: worried, almost frightened.
Larry said, “The shuttle came back about fifteen minutes ago. Estelella brought the two girls and Vic O’Malley with him. Dan and Cranston stayed. Dan made certain that he sent every gram of deuterium they had processed.”
“And now he’s in the middle of the storm.” Her voice was calm, but just barely. Larry could hear the beginnings of a tremble in it.
“They’ve got the underground shelter. He’ll be all right.”
“Has he sent word? Do you know for sure...?”
Larry jerked a thumb toward the storm cloud. “Can’t get radio transmission through that stuff. We’ve tried every frequency. Too much electrical interference.”
“He could be dead.”
“No. He’s tough and smart. He’ll get through it all right.”
She stared out at the swirling muddy-colored storm cloud.
“It looks alive... like some monster eating—” Val reached out for Larry. “Can’t you do anything! Send the shuttle down for him? Something!”
He took her in his arms and rocked her gently. “There’s not a thing we can do but wait. The shuttle would be wrecked trying to fly through that. All we can do is wait.” And his mind was asking him, If it were you down there and Dan safely up here, would she be this upset?
“It makes you feel so helpless,” Val whimpered.
“I know. I know.”
“How long will the storm last?”
Larry shrugged. “Nobody knows. Not enough data on the weather patterns of this planet. The last one took two days to blow past the camp. But we don’t know if it was an unusually big one, or...” He let his voice trail off.
“Or an unusually small one,” Valery finished for him. “This one looks bigger, doesn’t it?”
Larry didn’t answer.
She kept staring out at the planet, at the storm. “Oh, Larry, if he dies there...”
“It’ll be my fault.”
Val turned sharply enough to bounce slightly away from the plastiglass. “Your fault? Why should it be your fault?”
“I sent him down there, didn’t I?”
“It’s part of his job. He wanted to go.”
Larry said, “I could have stopped him. I could have ordered somebody else to go down instead. I knew it was dangerous down there.”
Val was drifting freely in a small semicircle around Larry. He had to turn his back to the plastiglass to keep his eyes on her. She floated in midair, a golden goddess shining against the night.
“Did you want him to be exposed to danger?” she asked.
“You mean, did I want him to risk getting killed?” Larry closed his eyes and found the answer in his mind. “No, I didn’t.”
“Not consciously,” Val murmured.
“What?”
“You knew he’d be running into danger.”
Nodding, Larry admitted, “Sure. I even thought about going down there with him... but I’m not qualified for any of the jobs that need doing down there. I couldn’t justify taking up space on the shuttle and in the camp, just to show everybody I’m as brave as Dan is.”
“But in the back of your mind you knew he might be killed.”
“Of course. But that doesn’t mean...” He began to see what she was driving at. “Val, you don’t think that I.. .you can’t believe that!”
“I don’t,” she said. But it sounded weak, unconvincing.
Larry thought, it would certainly settle all the problems if he got killed down there. Then another part of his mind screamed, And that would make you a murderer, whether you planned it beforehand or not!
Valery seemed to sense the turmoil in his mind. She took him by the hand and pushed against the plastiglass wall, driving the two of them into a slow drift across the big, darkened, empty-looking chamber.
“I guess you’re right,” she said over her shoulder to him. “There’s not much we can to except watch and wait.”
“Val... I didn’t want it this way, honestly. I didn’t...”
“I know,” she said soothingly. “I know.”
They touched down on the floor easily, their velcroed slippers catching and holding gently against the carpeting there.
“As long as we’re here,” Valery said, letting his hand go and walking carefully, in a slow zero-g glide, toward the desk and instruments in the middle of the room, “I might as well show you what I’ve found out about the other stars.”
She’s changing the subject, Larry realized, trying to get both our minds off Dan.
Val sat at the desk while Larry stood beside her. She touched buttons on the desktop keyboard and pictures appeared on the viewscreen.
To Larry, they all looked like tiny white dots. The stars were bigger and brighter; in some pictures they were glaringly bright. But the planets around the stars were all featureless blobs of light.
Valery shook her head after showing about twenty of the pictures. “Those are the best we have so far. And it’s all pretty depressing. Nothing even close to being Earthlike.”
Larry blinked at her. “None of those planets...”
“They’re mostly gas giants, like Jupiter. Or little balls of rock, like Earth’s Moon.”
“Can you be sure?”
She ran a hand through her hair. “Oh, I’m still working on it, trying to get better data, more precision in the spectrograms and visuals... but it looks very bad.”
Larry sagged into a half-sitting, half-leaning position against the desk’s edge. “And this goes for both Epsilon Indi and Epsilon Eridani.”
“Yes, both stars. I’m afraid the planet here is the only choice we’re going to have, Larry.”
He sat there a moment longer, his mind turning slowly, wearily. “When ... when will you report this to the Council?”
“I want to make the data much more precise,” she answered. “I haven’t shown this to anyone yet. . you’re the only one. In a week or two, I’ll report it to the Council.”
He nodded dumbly.
Valery went to turn off the last picture from the viewscreen. “Oops!” She pulled her hand away from the keyboard as if it were burning hot. “I almost hit the ERASE button. That would’ve been stupid.”
“Huh?”
“All this data—weeks and weeks of work—would be erased from the computer’s memory bank if I had touched that button just now.” She pressed the proper button and the viewscreen went blank. Looking up at Larry, she added, “The only two places where the data’s stored are in the computer’s memory bank ... and my own head.”
Larry nodded at her, but said nothing.
The wind was getting even worse.
Dan tried to flatten himself into a niche between two of the big water-treatment tanks, but he felt the wind tearing at him, trying to pry him loose and bowl him along like the solar panels had been blown away. It was getting hard to stay on his feet. The noise was overpowering, and he could barely see a dozen meters ahead because of the dust and flying sand. He could hear the gritty stuff grinding against his suit; a yellowish film was building up on his helmet faceplate. He wiped at it awkwardly with a gloved hand, smearing it even worse than before.
Can’t slay here, he knew. Got to get into the shelter.
He edged away from the metal tanks far enough to poke his head around their curving flanks and look at the tent. A sudden gust of wind nearly knocked him over. The tent was flapping wildly in the roaring wind, snapping and tearing like a huge blanket. It cracked against one of the slim metal pipes leading from the squat round dome of the centrifuge and the pipe went clang! and snapped in half. Dan suddenly got a picture of what would happen if that tent-whip hit him.
It was getting difficult to move the arms of his suit. Muscles tired... or are the joints getting jammed with grit? Probably both.
Then he started wondering what would happen if his suit sprung a leak, if the sulfurous air ate through his plastic oxygen tubing, if the grit made the suit completely immovable, if...
Stop it! he commanded himself. Try to think. Think calmly. Are you safer here or should you try to get into the shelter?
The question was answered for him. A half-dozen spears of lightning flickered off in the distance, far enough to be still out over the sea, close enough so that the thunder exploded almost immediately with shattering noise.
Lightning! Dan remembered what he’d been told about the last storm. The lightning bolts loved the big high-standing metal equipment that stood there. Dozens of bolts had hit the refinery
If I'm out here when the lightning starts striking...
He knew he had to get to the shelter.
Slowly, carefully, Dan hunkered down onto his knees and then flattened out on his belly. The wind-blown dust was even worse down at ground level, he could barely see an arm’s length before him. The wind tried to lift him up off the ground, sail him like a glider. He pressed himself into the ground as hard as he could.
He crawled. Centimeter by agonized centimeter, he crawled on all fours toward the tent. He was guided more by the flapping, whip-cracking sounds of the tent’s loose fabric than by vision. All he could see was flying sand and wind-flattened yellow grass.
It seemed to take hours. Dan knew it was only a few meters from where he had been standing to the edge of the tent, but it seemed more like lightyears now. A new blast of lightning, turned everything glare-white for an instant, and the thunder seemed to be trying to crack him open like an eggshell. Every muscle in his body ached and burned, and he was drenched with sweat.
Got to stop…rest. But something inside him said fiercely, Stop now and you’re dead. Keep going, dammit! Keep going!
He inched along. A lightning bolt struck metal somewhere close beside him with an unbelievable burst of light and a deafening explosion. Something hit Dan’s right leg and the suit seemed to go completely stiff there. He couldn’t move the leg at all.
Or is my own leg hurt? He didn’t feel any extra pain there, but he knew that shock sometimes cut off pain. And besides, every part of him already hurt so much.
His outstretched hand bumped into something. The flat, circular plastisteel foundation of the tent.
Dan raised his head and saw the tent’s fabric looming up, flapping wildly, right in front of him. Like a nightmare monster.
Rising up, up, filling all his visions with its rippling, snapping immensity. Then with a whip-crack it flattened out again, only to begin rising once more immediately.
Can’t go through that, Dan realized.
He fumbled at his belt for the suit’s tool kit. It was almost impossible to feel shapes with the gloves on, but at last he pulled out the little pistol-shaped laser that they used for cutting and welding.
Hope it’s charged up. Dan pressed the snub nose of the laser against the edge of the tent’s foundation and pulled on the trigger. The pistol didn’t make a sound or vibration, but after a moment or two Dan could see the plastic fabric of the tent glowing, tearing, separating from the foundation.
With an agonized screeching sound, the plastic ripped free of the foundation and went billowing into the wind, disappearing into the howling storm like a giant bird suddenly let loose.
Dan clung to the foundation’s edge for a long, weary moment, then pulled himself slowly over the lip. He dragged himself, using his arms and his one movable leg, groping for the hatch to the underground shelter Desks, chairs, viewscreens, even the heavy computer consoles had been blown over by the wind, bowled away like so much dust. Another bolt of lightning struck with shattering force, blinding and deafening Dan for several moments.
Then his hands found the hatch. He pulled himself up onto his elbows, nearly unconscious with pain and exhaustion. Eyes stinging and nearly blinded with sweat, he groped for the control switch. He found it and leaned on it heavily. It wouldn’t move. He forced his weight on the tiny switch as hard as he could. Nothing.
Jammed by the grit.
He raised a fist, taking all the strength he had, and pounded on the hatch itself. If Cranston’s down there...if he's not dead... Even his thoughts were getting fuzzy now. Pound. Raise the fist and let it drop. Raise the fist and let it drop...
The hatch moved. It pushed against his inert arm. A straining, rasping sound and Dan could see the hatch lifting slowly. A gloved hand was pushing it open from the inside.
Everything seemed to go hazy, foggy, blood-red and then dead-black. Dan could feel his body moving—being moved?—and the noise of the wind’s evil howling dimmed, muffled. Somebody was talking to him, urgent words crackling in his earphones. Then the blackness swam up and surrounded him and pulled him downward into oblivion.
When he awoke, his helmet was off. Cranston was completely out of his suit, dressed only in blue coveralls. The little underground shelter seemed cool and snug and safe. The wind was a distant mumble somewhere outside. The shelter was bright and quiet. Its curving walls and ceiling seemed to gather around him protectively. Its bunk felt soft and comfortable.
Cranston was standing by the cooking unit.
“Do you think you could eat something?” he asked, looking worriedly at Dan.
Dan realized he was sitting on one of the bunks, slouched against the curving wall of the shelter.
“Yeh. ..sure.” Every muscle ached. His head throbbed horribly. His mouth felt dry and caked with dust.
Glancing down at his legs, he saw that Cranston had taken off the bottom half of his suit, as well as his helmet.
“There was a bad dent on the left leg of the suit,” the computerman said. “I was worried that your own leg might’ve been hurt. It’s bruised pretty bad, but I don’t think it’s anything worse than that.”
“When ...” Dan tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was dry. He croaked, “When did you.. .come into the shelter?”
Cranston flashed him a guilty glance, then turned his attention to the cooker. “Uh...I tried calling you on the radio... no answer. I didn’t know what was happening. Then... uh, the tent... it looked like it was going to collapse—”
“It did,” Dan said wearily. “You did the best thing.”
“Oh... okay...” He smiled, still looking slightly guilty.
Dr. Hsai’s quarters looked like pictures of Japanese homes that Valery had seen on the education tapes.
The compartment was no bigger than any other single man’s quarters. But it looked different. There were living green vines climbing along one wall, reaching upward to the ceiling light panels. A painting filled part of the same wall, showing soft green hills and a river with a delicate bridge arching over it. The vines seemed to blend into the picture, the two merged and became a single experience. The bunk was austere, hard-looking, but a beautiful red drape hung beside it. There was no other furniture visible, except two little pillows on the floor and a low-slung black lacquered table.
Dr. Hsai himself was dressed in a loose-fitting robe of black and white, with just a hint of gold thread at the collar.
“What a beautiful robe!” Valery said, despite herself, as Dr. Hsai ushered her into his quarters.
“Thank you very much.” The psychotech smiled pleasantly. “It belonged to my great-grandfather and has been handed down through four generations.”
“It’s very lovely.”
He smiled again and bowed ever so slightly. “I am afraid,” he said, “that I have no western furniture for you to sit upon. I usually receive visitors in the office of the infirmary. But you seemed so insistent—”
“I can sit on the floor,” Val said. She curled up next to the bunk.
Dr. Hsai offered her one of the pillows, and Val put it behind the small of her back, then leaned against the edge of the bunk.
“You wish to ask me a medical question?” Dr. Hsai inquired, sitting in the middle of the tiny room.
“A psychological question,” Val replied.
He nodded. “I might have guessed. Unfortunately, my knowledge of psychiatry is far from expert, although I have been studying the available tapes on the subject very carefully these past few weeks.”
“Why?” Val asked. “Do you think there’s a killer aboard the ship, too?”
Hsai smiled patiently. “Not at all. At least, I hope not. But certain individuals believe that there might be a killer among us, and I am trying to pin down the origins of these fears.”
“There have been these... accidents.”
“Yes.”
“Including my father.”
“Yes.”
Valery was starting to feel uncomfortable. What she wanted to ask suddenly began to sound silly in her own mind. Worse still, she felt that Dr. Hsai knew what she wanted, but was being too polite to bring up the subject himself.
“Dan Christopher has been under great emotional stress,” the psychotech said, mainly to keep the conversation from faltering. “He is a very troubled young man. Perhaps it would have been wise to revive one or more of our sleeping psychiatrists, to examine him thoroughly.”
“Yes, I was wondering why you didn’t do that,” Val said.
“Larry Belsen said it wouldn’t be necessary. As Chairman, he has the responsibility to pass on all requests for revival.”
“Larry disapproved?”
“Yes. I asked him specifically if he wanted us to revive a psychiatrist . . It was when Dan Christopher was in the infirmary for observation, and I could find nothing psychologically wrong with him “
“And Larry said he didn’t want a psychiatrist revived?”
Dr. Hsai almost frowned “Not in those words, but he told me he thought it would be unnecessary. You know, of course, the difficulties involved in reviving a person, and the limited resources we have. It cannot be done lightly. And we cannot ask the person, once revived, to return to sleep a few days or weeks later It is not medically wise, for one thing.”
“I know.” Valery suddenly realized that she was gnawing on her lip. A nervous habit. She looked back at Dr. Hsai. “About the question I wanted to ask you...”
“So?”
Somehow it didn’t feel so silly now “Could, could a person do things—violent things—and not know it?”
Hsai looked puzzled
“I mean, could somebody commit a murder and then not remember he did it? You know, his conscious mind doesn’t even know what he’s really doing “
Hsai gave the faintest of shrugs. “I have heard of such cases in my education, of course, but... of course, I have never dealt with such a situation myself”
Before she could think about it, Valery spilled out, “Do you think that the reason Larry didn’t want a psychiatrist revived is that he was afraid the psychiatrist might find out something about him—about Larry himself”
For an instant, Hsai looked shocked. Then he dropped a mask of oriental and professional calm over his face “You believe that Larry Belsen might be unbalanced?”
“My father’s injury was no accident,” Val said, feeling miserable “Somebody did it. Either Dan or Larry . or somebody else “
For several moments Dr. Hsai sat there silently, his eyes closed. Then he looked up and said, “I will immediately take steps to revive the ship’s best psychiatrists. If your suspicions are even remotely close to the truth, this is an emergency situation There is no need to wait for the Chairman’s approval under these circumstances “
“The only trouble is,” Val said, “that Dan might already be dead “
Dan knew it was a nightmare, yet it still had him terrified.
He was running, or trying to. He seemed to be caught in some thick syrupy liquid that made all his motions languidly slow. Something was roaring behind him, getting louder, catching up to him. When he tried to look over his shoulder, all he could see was a giant pair of hands reaching for him.
He tried to run faster, but couldn’t. The roaring became ear-shattering. Lightning crashed and the hands grabbed at him, caught him, bore him down, pushed him under, beat at him, pummeled him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even scream—
He woke up, wide-eyed and drenched with sweat, trembling. Half a meter above his face was the curving ceiling of the underground shelter. In the bunk below him he could hear Cranston snoring lightly. The hum of electrical machinery was the only other sound, beside his own throbbing pulsebeat.
The wind had died!
Dan pushed himself up to a sitting position, and his back muscles screamed agony. For a moment he was dizzy. Forcing both the pain and faintness down, he swung his legs slowly over the edge of the bunk and slid down to the plastic flooring. The jolt when his feet hit the floor sent a fresh spark of pain shooting through him.
He shook Cranston awake.
“Huh ... whuzzit...”
“I think the storm’s over,” Dan said. “You try the radio while I get suited up.”
Cranston swung out of the bunk slowly. For a long moment he sat on its edge, head drooping tiredly.
“What... how... what time’s it?”
Dan glanced at his wristwatch. It was set on ship time. “We must’ve slept more than twelve hours. Come on, try the radio.”
“How d’you feel?” Cranston asked as he pulled himself to his feet.
“Black and blue all over. Otherwise okay.”
“It’s this damned gravity.”
Cranston shuffled over to the little desk that bore the communications transceiver, minus viewscreen. As he flicked it on and started talking into the speaker, Dan pulled on the one usable pressure suit they had left.
By the time Dan was checking the seal of his helmet, he could hear Cranston saying, “No use. Can’t get through to them. No answer.”
“Interference from the storm?”
The computerman shook his head. “Not much static. Just silence. I don’t think this set has enough muscle to reach the ship without the main antenna and the amplifier up in the tent.”
Dan said nothing. He clumped to the airlock, stepped through it, and shut the inner hatch. The airlock cycled through, pumping all its air into storage tanks, then flashed the green “all clear” light.
Dan reached up and unsealed the outer hatch. He pushed it upward, and a fine powder of yellowish sand and ash trickled down onto his faceplate.
Stepping up the rungs of the metal ladder set into the airlock’s wall, Dan pushed the outside hatch all the way open and stuck his head up above the opening.
The camp looked as if it had been bombed. The tent was completely gone, not a shred of it left. The desks and consoles and other gear from inside the tent were nowhere in sight, either. Nothing there but the plastisteel foundation, and even that was buried under several centimeters of powdery sand and ash.
The sky overhead was gray now, sullen-looking. The clouds were high, but moving with great speed. Dan turned stiffly with the suit and tried to look in all directions. No break in the clouds anywhere: gray from horizon to horizon.
The refinery was a complete shambles. The big cylinders and spheres were cracked open, blackened and burned. Not much to salvage from it, Dan realized. He knew he should have been glad just to be alive, but somehow he felt terribly dejected, defeated, let down.
The communications mast was gone, of course. So were most of the trees. The grass was still there, though, poking through the sand and ash, its cheerful yellow strangely incongruous in the somber scene of destruction.
Dan stepped down the ladder again, lowering the hatch after him. He sealed it, set the airlock to recycling again; the native sulfurous air was pumped outside, the breathable air that had been stored away hissed out of the tanks and filled the tiny airlock once again. When the light flashed green, Dan opened the inner hatch and stepped back into the main area of the shelter.
He took off his helmet. It felt as if it weighed a ton.
Cranston was still seated in front of the radio. “No response. We can’t reach them.”
“They can’t see us, either,” Dan said grimly. “Cloud deck’s still covering us.”
“Isn’t there any way we can tell them we’re here? Can’t they spot us with radar or infrared or something?”
Dan plopped on the lower bunk and reached for the zips on his suit legs. “Radar won’t tell them if we’re alive or not. But if we could make a big enough hot spot, IR might pick it up—”
“A hot spot. With what?”
Dan shrugged. “I don’t think we’ve got anything bigger than the suit lasers. That won’t do.”
“Uhmm...” Cranston started to look concerned. “How much air and water do we have?”
“We pull our oxygen out of the planet’s air,” Dan answered. “Clean out the sulfur and other gunk so we can breathe it. That’s not problem. Water, though ... our water purification gear was all topside. It’s gone—There’s probably not more than a couple days’ worth in here.”
“And how long will the clouds cover us?”
Dan shrugged. “Maybe we ought to try to figure out how to make a big hot spot.”
Larry was pacing back and forth along the bridge, followed by Joe Haller and Guido Estelella. The technicians working the various consoles kept their faces turned very carefully to their work.
“But you can’t let them sit down there without even trying to pick them up!” Haller was shouting.
Larry whirled and pointed to one of the viewscreens. It showed nothing but gray cloud scudding across the planet’s face.
“There’s absolutely no evidence that they’re still alive,” he snapped back, lower-keyed but still with an edge of anger to his voice. “You want me to risk our only qualified pilot and our only landing shuttle on the chance that they might have survived the storm?”
“Hell yes!”
“I’m willing to try it,” Estelella said.
Larry shook his head. “We have no idea of what conditions are like under those clouds. The whole surface could be buried under tons of volcanic ash.”
“We have other landing shuttles,” Haller insisted. “You can order them taken out of the storage depot and reassembled.”
“Can I replace our one qualified astronaut?” Larry demanded.
“But he’s volunteered to go!”
“No.” Larry pushed past Haller and started pacing the bridge again.
Haller followed doggedly. “You’re killing two men!”
“They’re already dead,” Larry said. “We’d have heard from them by now if they were still alive. The storm’s been over nearly two days.”
“Their communications gear might’ve been damaged. They could be hurt, trapped in wreckage.. .anything.”
Larry countered, “Nothing survived that storm. You saw the electrical signals we were getting from the lightning. Like a continuous sheet of flame. The wind speeds were right off the scale of our meteorological instruments. Those clouds are still moving at fifty kilometers an hour. How do we know what the wind and weather conditions are like under the clouds?”
Haller’s shoulders slumped. “How much longer are the clouds suppose^) to last?”
“Nobody knows,” Larry said. “They’re coming from the chain of volcanoes on the other side of the sea. It might end in a few hours or a few weeks. Nobody knows.”
“So we’re just going to sit here and wait.”
“That’s all we can do.”
Haller looked as if he wanted to say something more, but instead he turned abruptly away from Larry and marched off the bridge. Estelella stood there for a puzzled moment, then, with a shrug, he walked off too.
Larry turned to the viewscreens showing the planet’s surface. Gray clouds covered almost everything. He shook his head. They’re dead, he told himself. They must be dead.
But if they’re not, he knew, you’re killing them.
Abruptly, he went over to one of the technicians and said; “I’m leaving the bridge. Take over for me.”
The girl looked up at him, surprised, “Where will you be?”
“You can reach me on the intercom. Page me, if you need me.”
Larry ducked through the doorway into the corridor that connected to his office. He hesitated for just a moment, then entered the compartment. Without bothering to slide the door shut, he went to the phone and punched it on savagely.
“Get Valery Loring here, right away.”
The computer’s voice said calmly, “Working.”
Valery appeared at his door ten agonized minutes later.
Larry was still fidgeting beside his desk when she arrived.
“You sent for me?”
He wanted to reach out and hold her. Instead, he said flatly, “They think I want to kill Dan.”
“Who does?”
Larry saw his hands flutter angrily. “Haller, Estelella, the whole damned crew on the bridge, for all I know.”
Standing uncertainly by the door, Valery said, “Do you want to kill him?”
“No! Of course not! What kind of a question is that?”
“Then why are you afraid of what they think?”
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly. “None of you understands at all.”
“Understands what, Larry?”
“I’m the Chairman. Can’t you see what that means? I have to decide. Me. My decision. Life or death. I have to decide on sending Estelella down there... maybe getting him killed. Or forcing him to stay aboard the ship while we can’t tell for certain what the surface conditions are. And that’ll probably kill Dan, if he isn’t dead already.”
“There’s still no word from him?”
“Nothing. We’ve been scanning the area with every instrument we’ve got. No indication that they survived. Nothing at all.”
“They could be in the shelter.”
“I know.” He pulled out the desk chair and sank into it.
Valery remained standing by the door.
“I have to decide,” Larry repeated.
“Does Estelella want to try a landing?” she asked.
“Yes. But it’s my decision to make, not his.”
“I know. I wish there was some way I could help you.”
“Nobody can help.”
She took an uncertain step into the tiny office. “Larry ... what do you want to do?”
He stared at her. The answer was obvious to him. “I want to send Estelella down there and see if they’re still alive. Do you think I want to kill Dan?”
She said, “I think you want to do what’s right, but you’re letting your responsibilities as Chairman get in the way of your best judgment.”
“But suppose he wrecks the shuttle? Suppose he’s killed trying to land? We don’t know very much about the conditions down there—”
“He volunteered to try,” Val answered. “You want to try it. Even if he’s killed, at least you’ll both have tried. It’s better than sitting around and doing nothing, isn’t it? If you don’t try, we know Dan will die. But if you do try...”
He nodded unhappily. “You’re right... they all know...”
“There’s something that I know,” Valery said.
“What is it?”
“I know that no matter what’s happened ... or what’s going to happen ... you’d never willingly hurt anyone. Not even Dan.”
“He... he was my best friend. We were all friends, once.”
“A million years ago.” Val’s voice was faint and distant.
Larry took a deep breath. Standing, he said, “All right, we’ll try it. But I’m riding down with Estelella myself.”
Valery didn’t seem surprised. “There’s no need for that. You don’t have to prove anything. Not to me or anyone else.”
“No, I want to do it.”
“But you can’t. You’re the Chairman. And besides, you’d only be wasting valuable mass and space aboard the shuttle.
There’s nothing you can do to help... except to make the right decision.”
Dan was standing out on the surface in the protective suit. His face was haggard, with several days’ worth of dark scrubby beard mottling his chin. His mouth was caked and dry.
He was staring at the sea, only a few hundred meters from the wrecked base, where he stood. The waves were lapping up softly, sliding up onto the sandy beach. He could walk out there and be waist-deep in the water...
Can’t drink it, he was telling himself. It’s gat to be purified. The contaminants in it will kill you.
“Another few hours,” he mumbled, his voice thick and raspy, “and it won’t make any difference what’s in the water. We’ll have to try it.”
Cranston was back in the shelter, in his bunk, paralyzed by the fear of dying. Dan found that he couldn’t stand being in the cramped little shelter with him. It was better up here on the surface, even though he had to stay inside the suit. H is own body smell was getting overpowering, though.
He almost smiled. Larry’s going to get his way, after all. lean just see him. Death-planet, he’ll call it. Too dangerous. Got to move on. The smile faded. He’s going to make sure we die.
A distant crack of thunder and its following rumble made him look up. Another storm? No, the sky looked the same as it had for the past three days: gray, completely overcast, but not stormy. The wind was so light that he couldn’t notice it except as a gentle swaying of the grass.
Dan looked up again. And blinked. There was a white streak etching across the clouded sky. A thin white line. A contrail!
If he could have jumped inside the heavy suit, he would have. He wanted to leap up and down, to dance, to shout.
Instead he stood rooted to the spot, watching as the streak swung around overhead. He could make out the tiny arrowhead form of the shuttle rocket now. It grew, took on solidity. The sweetly beautiful roar of the craft’s auxiliary turbo engines came to him, even through the helmet and earphones. The ship banked smoothly, raced low across the water and came up toward him, landing wheels out. It touched down with a puff of dust, rolled past the ruined base.
Dan stood there motionless as the shuttle craft taxied around, nosed back toward the base and edged slowly “toward him, engines screeching and blowing up a miniature sandstorm of dust and ash behind it.
Then the roar died away. The bubble canopy popped open and a pressure-suited figure stood up.
In sudden realization, Dan reached for the radio switch on his belt.
“...just stand there, will you? Say something, wave, do something! What’s the matter, are you frozen?”
“I’m okay,” Dan croaked, his voice sounding strange and harsh, even to himself. “Just... thirsty.”
“You’re alive!” It was Estelella’s voice, and there was no missing the elation in it. “Don’t move... I’ve got plenty of water with me. Be right there.”
If Dan had still had enough moisture in his body, he would have cried for joy.
They celebrated that night.
Nearly everyone on the ship, all those who weren’t absolutely needed on duty, gathered in the cafeteria and ate and drank and sang together. Dan had to fight off the determined medical insistence of the whole infirmary staff, but he made the scene too. In a wheelchair.
“It’s my party, dammit!” he shouted at them.
For the first time in months, Dan, Valery, and Larry found themselves at the same place, even at the same table. And for a few hours, it was almost like old times. No one mentioned Larry’s reluctance to send a ship down to the surface. Old tensions, old fears were forgotten. For a while.
They laughed together, remembered happier times. They sang far into the early hours of the morning.
But then, as the party was finally winding down and people were tiptoeing or staggering or lurching homeward, somebody said loudly enough for everyone to hear:
“I guess this proves that we can’t stay on the surface. Too dangerous. We were lucky to get you guys back alive.”
Dan’s face went deathly grim. “It proves that we need much better equipment and precautions to work on the surface. But if we lived through that storm, we can live through whatever else the planet throws at us.”
“I don’t know...” Larry began.
Valery said, “We still need more deuterium, don’t we? Someone will have to go back to the surface, with more equipment.”
“That’ll be a long, tough job.”
“But it’s got to be done.”
Dan pushed himself out of the wheelchair and got to his feet. He still looked gaunt, eyes dark and haggard. “We can do what needs to be done. And our children, when they’ve been specially adapted for life on the surface, will make that planet their playground.”
Larry glanced at Val. She was looking up at Dan. And the only thing he felt in his heart was hatred.
It was the next morning when Dan tracked down Valery in the ship’s library.
She was sitting in one of the small tape-reading booths. There were two viewscreens mounted side by side on the booth wall, and Val was comparing some of the spectrograms she had made with the big telescope against the special analysis charts in the library’s files.
Dan tapped on the glass door of the booth. She turned, smiled, and waved him in.
He slid the door open and squeezed into the booth. There was only one chair, and hardly enough room for him to stand beside her. The door slid shut automatically as soon as he let go of it.
“Cozy in here,” he said, grinning.
“It’s not built for comfort,” Valery agreed, shifting her weight slightly on the stiff metal chair.
“I wanted to know if you’re free for dinner tonight?” His voice rose enough to make it a question.
Val shook her head.
“Lunch?”
“Dan,” she said sadly. “I told you and Larry the same thing. Until the two of you stop fighting each other, I’m not going to have much to do with either of you. I won’t be the bait in a battle between you.
“But you said ...”
“I’ve said a lot of things. Now I’m saying that the answer to both of you is no... as long as you’re fighting each other.”
“But Larry is...”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
Dan could feel hot anger rising inside him.
She almost smiled at him. “You don’t have to look so grim.”
“Don’t I?”
“No—Look, here are some of the results of the spectra I’ve taken with the main telescope. I haven’t shown them to anybody else, but I’ll show them to you.”
He shrugged. “Big thrill.”
“Don’t be fresh. And you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone until I make my report to the Council next week. I don’t want these data leaking out before I’ve had a chance to check everything through thoroughly.”
“I can keep a secret,” Dan said tightly.
“Well...” Val lowered her voice to almost a whisper. “Both stars seem to have Earthlike planets.”
“What?”
Nodding, Val went on, her voice rising with excitement. “Epsilon Indi is the closer of the two stars, so I can resolve its planets more easily. Not that I’ve been able to see anything except a pinpoint of light, even with the best image intensification. But the gravimetric measurements look good, and the spectral data...”
She turned to the twin viewscreens. “Look... here’s a spectrum I made twenty-four hours ago of the innermost planet of Epsilon Indi—the one that’s about Earth’s size and mass. And here, on the other screen, is a spectrum I made of Earth with the same telescope, a few days earlier. We’re just about the same distance from both planets—about four lightyears.”
Dan squinted at the two viewscreens. Each showed a smear of colors, crisscrossed by hundreds of dark lines. The Earth spectrum seemed to be dominated by shades of yellow, while the Epsilon Indi spectrum seemed more orange.
“The background continuum isn’t what’s important,” Valery explained. “Look at the absorption lines—” She pointed from one viewscreen to the other. “Oxygen here. And here. Nitrogen, on both. Water vapor... carbon dioxide,” her slim hand kept shifting back and forth, “and all at just about the same concentration. It’s fantastic!”
“You mean this planet’s just like Earth?”
“So close to each other that it’s hard to tell where they’re different, from this distance, at least.”
“But...” Dan’s insides were churning now. “But, the Epsilon Indi planet is just as far from us now as Earth and the solar system.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Val admitted.
“We could never make it there.”
Instead of answering, Valery turned back to the keyboard in front of the viewscreens. One of the pictures disappeared, to be replaced by another spectrogram.
“This is the spectrum of Femina... it’s much more intense than the Epsilon Indi planet’s, because we’re right next to it.”
“And the other spectrogram is still Earth’s?”
“Yes,” Val said. “And look at the differences in the atmospheric constituents. Sulfur oxides, big gobs of carbon dioxide and monoxide, other things I haven’t even identified yet.”
Even Dan’s unpracticed eye could see that the two spectrograms were very different from each other.
“Considering what you went through down there on the surface,” Valery said, “I should think you’d want to repair the ship and then push on for Epsilon Indi.”
Dan said nothing. He leaned against the acoustically insulated wall of the tiny booth; his face was pale, his eyes troubled.
“Thanks for showing me,” he said quietly. “I... won’t tell anybody until you give your report at the Council meeting.”
And then he pulled the -door open and stepped out of the booth, leaving Valery there alone to watch him walking quickly, through the tape shelves of the library.
Now I’ve told each of them, the exact opposite of what he wants to hear, she thought. Which one will come after me and try to silence me before the Council meeting?
Four days passed.
Larry sat in the main conference room, at his usual chair at the head of the table. But the table was mostly empty. Only Dan, Dr. Polanyi, Mort Campbell, and Guido Estelella were there, all clustered up close to Larry’s seat.
“From everything you’ve been telling me,” Larry was saying, looking at the chart on the viewscreen at the far end of the long, narrow room, “we have no choice but to go down to the surface again and try to repair the refining equipment.”
Polanyi folded his hands over his paunchy middle and agreed. “Whether we eventually decide to stay here or to move on, we still must have enough deuterium for many more years of living aboard the ship.”
“And we’ve got to overhaul just about everything on board,” Campbell added. “Doesn’t make a bit of difference if we’re going to live here or find another planet. The ship’s starting to fall apart. We’ve got to patch her up.”
Larry turned to Estelella. “What about rebuilding the refining equipment? That’ll take a lot of shuttling back and forth to the surface.”
The astronaut tilted his head slightly to one side. “That’s what I’m here for—I’m no use to anyone just sitting around.”
“No, I suppose not,” Larry said seriously. “How many flights will be necessary? Will you have to do all the flying yourself or will some of the other kids you’ve been training be able to help?”
“There are at least three or four who can fly the shuttle almost as well as I can,” Estelella said. It could have sounded like a boast, but he said it as a simple statement of fact. “And we can take the back-up shuttles out of storage and use them, too.”
Larry nodded thoughtfully.
“I think,” Dan said, “it’d be a good idea to have a spare shuttle on the ground next to the camp at all times. That way we’ll always have an escape route, in an emergency.”
“Good idea,” Larry said.
“The only real danger on the surface that we’ve run into are the storms,” Estelella muttered.
Polanyi said, “They appear to be tied in with the volcanic disturbances. If we could revive our full meteorological and geological teams, perhaps we could get accurate predictions of when to expect storms...”
Larry cut him off. “We can’t revive large numbers of people until we’ve made a firm decision to stay here. And that decision won’t be made until we get a full report on the other available planets.”
“We’re still going to be orbiting this planet,” Dan argued, “for a long time. Years, maybe.”
The others nodded agreement.
Dan went on, “I’m going down there with the first crew... got to see how bad the damage to the refinery really is.”
“You just got back,” Larry said. “And the medics are still...”
“I’m responsible for the equipment,” Dan snapped, his voice rising a notch louder than Larry’s. “It’s my job. I’m going down.”
Larry forced down an urge to shout back at him. “All right,” he said coldly, “then the only question is, when do we start?”
“Sooner the better,” Dan said.
“The campsite is in darkness now,” Estelella said, with a glance at his wristwatch. “It’ll be daylight there again in about... eight hours.”
“That puts it close to midnight, ship time.”
“Right.”
Dan said, “Let’s get a landing group together and get down there as soon as there’s enough light to see.”
“We can take off at midnight,” Estelella said.
“Good. You, me, and enough equipment to get the camp started again. Who else will we need?”
Larry was getting that helpless feeling again. Dan was running things his own way.
“You’d both better get some sleep,” he said. “And I’ll get the maintenance crew to crack the back-up shuttles out of storage, so you can get them into action as soon as possible.”
“Right.”
They got up from their chairs and headed for the door. Larry was the last to reach the doorway. Dan was still there, lingering, waiting for him.
“You’re not fooling me,” Dan said.
Larry frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t have any intention of staying here. I know that. You’re going to get the ship overhauled and patched up, and then try to convince everybody we ought to push on.”
To where? Larry almost said. But he wouldn’t give Dan the satisfaction. Instead, he asked, “You enjoyed your trip to the surface so much? You think it’s a fun place to be?”
“It’s better than this ship.”
Larry snorted. “That’s like saying that death is better than life.”
“Wrong!” Dan snapped. “Can’t you see it’s wrong? This is where we have to stay. Trying to push farther is just going to kill everybody. Is that what you want?”
“We’ve had this argument before, Dan.”
“You’re still not convinced?”
“This planet is a killer,” Larry said. “We can alter the next generation or two or even three... but I still don’t think they’ll be able to survive on Femina. The Planet’s deadly: Guido picked a good name for it.”
Dan started to answer, but Larry went on, “It’s a huge universe out there. It would be criminal of us to settle for this planet when there’ve got to be better worlds for us. Somewhere. There’s got to be.”
“We’ll see,” Dan said, his voice shaking. “We’ll see. And soon.”
Midnight.
There was no way to distinguish time on the bridge. Along the ship’s corridors and tubes, in the rec areas and cafeteria, the overhead lighting was dimmed during the night shifts. But in the working spaces, such as the bridge, everything looked the same whether it was midnight or noon. Only the people working changed. And the twenty-four hour clocks.
Larry stood behind the launch monitor, watching over his shoulders the viewscreens that showed the planet below them and the shuttle rocket sitting on the ship’s launching platform, up near the hub.
The campsite was in daylight now; under the highest magnification of the observation scopes, Larry could see a blackened smudge where the camp had been.
He turned to the screen that showed the shuttle craft. He could make out the two pressure-suited men sitting side by side in the pilot’s bubble. Estelella’s voice was checking off the countdown routine:
“Internal power on.”
“... nine, eight, seven...”
“Rockets armed and ready for ignition.”
“... five, four...”
“Tracking and telemetry on,” said a technician.
“.. .two, one, zero”
The electric catapult slid the shuttle craft out past the open airlock hatch. Larry watched the viewscreen. It showed the shuttle dwindling, dwindling, becoming one more speck among the endless stars.
“Rocket ignition,” came Estelella’s voice.
The speck blossomed briefly into a glow of light. Then even that disappeared.
“Tracking on the observation telescope,” said a tech.
Larry turned toward the sound of her voice. The main screen on her console showed the shuttle craft, a tiny red-glowing meteor streaking across the broad golden landscape of the planet.
“Telemetry and voice communications strong and clear.”
Larry pressed the shoulder of the tech he was standing behind. “I’m going to my quarters to grab some sleep. Call me when they’ve landed.”
He stepped out of the glare and bustle of the bridge, into the soft shadowy nighttime lighting of the corridors. His own room was dark. He didn’t bother turning on a light, just slouched onto the bunk and waited.
The phone chimed. He touched the VOICE ONLY button.
“Yes?”
“They’ve landed. Estelella reports all okay, they’re getting out of the shuttle and starting to look around.”
“Thank you.”
Larry sat on the bunk, motionless for a long while. Then he turned to the phone again. “Valery Loring, please.”
A pause. Of course. She’s asleep by now.
Mrs. Loring’s face appeared on the viewscreen. “Larry, is that you? I can hardly see you. Don’t you have any lights on?”
“I’m sorry to wake you,” he said. “Is Val there?”
“I wasn’t asleep,” she said. “Haven’t been sleeping well lately...” Her voice trailed off. Then, “Valery’s up in the observatory. She’s been keeping very odd hours lately.”
“Oh, All right. Thank you. I’ll call her there.”
But he knew he wasn’t going to call her on the phone. He had to go up there and see her, face to face.
Two more nights, Valery was thinking. Two more nights, and then on the third morning the Council meets. Then I’ll have to tell them all the truth.
Each night for the past week she had been staying up in the observatory, sitting at the desk her father had used. The myriads of stars sprinkled across the blackness outside seemed to make the place feel colder, lonelier. Their light brought no warmth. The huge bulk of the planet was out of sight, down below the floor of the observatory, on the other side of the ship.
The big spidery telescope bulked blackly against the stars, and the smaller pieces of equipment made a hodgepodge of shadows. Black on black. Dark and darker. Only the little glowlights from the computer terminal and the viewscreens lit Val’s post.
She tried to stay awake through each night, of course. She actually got quite a bit of work done. But for long stretches of the night the telescopes and cameras and other instruments were doing their tasks and there was almost nothing for her to do. Except think. And—too often—drift into sleep, lulled by the weightlessness of the observatory and the silence.
Click!
She tensed instantly.
The sound of a hatch opening. Val strained her eyes, but could see nothing in the darkness. There were several hatches leading into the observatory, and with the tubes on nighttime lights, there wouldn’t be much of a glow to see when one of them was opened.
Padding footsteps. Slippered feet walking softly across the observatory floor.
“Who’s there?” she called.
No answer.
Dan went out on the shuttle, she knew.
“Larry, it’s you, isn’t it?”
His lean dark form seemed to coalesce out of the shadows. “Yes,” he said quietly, not five meters away from her. “It’s me.”
Her pulse was racing. “Oh... you scared me... a little.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
He was close enough now for her to see his face in the glow of the desk lights. He looked infinitely weary. He pulled up a chair and floated softly onto it. Valery noticed that he didn’t snap on the zero-g restraining belt. As calmly and unhurriedly as she could, she unclipped her own lap belt. It clicked loudly and snapped back into its resting sockets.
“Why... what brings you up here?” she asked.
For a moment he didn’t answer, merely stared at her. “I just had to talk to somebody,” he said at last. “I... lately, I’ve had the feeling that I’m completely alone. Totally cut off from everybody. No friends, nobody.”
“I’m still your friend, Larry,” she said softly.
“It’s hard for us to be friends, Val. After everything that’s happened... we can’t be friends. Not really.”
“I don’t understand.”
He seemed miserable. “Can’t you see? When you tell the Council that you haven’t been able to find an Earthlike planet, they’re going to vote to stay here. They’ll elect Dan Chairman and the geneticists will be put to work preparing the next generation of children for that deathworld down there. Your children, Val! Yours and Dan’s. They’ll be monsters. Sulfur-breathing, gorilla-sized monsters.”
She had to struggle to keep her voice from shaking. “But what else can we do?”
“We’ve got to keep on going. Got to find an Earthlike planet somewhere. In this whole universe...”
“There might not be any,” Valery said. “Maybe Earth is a unique place. Why should we expect anything closer to Earth conditions than the planet down below us?”
Larry didn’t answer. He just sat there and lifted his head back, gazing up at the stars that crowded all around.
“I can see why you like it up here,” he said. “It’s peaceful here. Like being alone in the universe... floating free among the stars. It wouldn’t be a bad way to die, just floating out there. No cares, no weight, just out there in the universe, without the ship to hem you in.”
“Wh... what do you mean?”
He snapped his attention back to her. Valery felt a chill as his ice-blue eyes focused on her.
“You got Dr. Hsai to start revival procedures on a team of psychiatrists,” Larry said flatly.
“I... we talked about it, yes...”
“Why?” Larry asked, rising up from his chair like a ghost. “I told Hsai it wasn’t necessary. Why did you get him to countermand my decision?”
“He thought it would be best,” Valery said, her voice going high, the words coming out fast. “I didn’t tell him to do it; he decided for himself.”
“He didn’t decide until after you talked to him.” He was standing over her now, feet barely touching the floor, looming over her.
Valery got up from her chair, bumping Larry slightly so that he bobbed away gently.
“Larry... you and Dan are both certain that there’s a madman aboard this ship. A killer. You think it’s Dan and he thinks it’s you.”
“So?”
Carefully, Val edged over in front of the desk and sat on it. Her feet no longer touched the floor. She gripped the edge of the desk with both hands.
“So shouldn’t we have a psychiatrist on hand to examine him? And—and you?”
“Me? Why me? I’m not the killer.”
Suddenly Val didn’t know how to say what she knew had to be said.. She plunged ahead anyway.
“Larry—have you ever thought that maybe, if Dan is the killer, he doesn’t know it?”
“Huh?”
“He might be doing things that his conscious mind isn’t aware of. And, besides, he hasn’t killed anybody. Not really.”
“He tried to kill your father. And the fire in the cryonics unit might have been deliberately set. That’s still a possibility.”
“All right,” Valery said, inching the top desk drawer open with her right hand. “Even if he did... maybe he doesn’t know about it. He might be sick, insane.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.”
“I know,” Val agreed. “But—you can understand that he might be doing all these things without being consciously aware of it.”
Looking puzzled now, Larry said, “Yes... I guess that’s possible.”
Val held her breath for an instant, then blurted, “Then you can see that it might be you who’s doing it! You could be the sick one and not even know it!”
“Whhaaat?”
Larry’s eyes went wide with shock. He seemed to stagger back.
“No!” he roared. “That can’t be.”
Tears were springing up in Val’s eyes, and her vision was getting blurry. “Larry, it could be. It could be!”
“You’re wrong. That’s crazy... it’s not me—”
Her hand closed on the cold hard metal she was seeking.
“Why did you come up here tonight?” Val asked. “Why did you come up here the night my father was nearly killed?”
“No!” he shouted again, and started for her.
Valery pulled the sonic stunner out of the desk drawer and fired point-blank. The gun made a barely-audible popping sound. But Larry’s body stiffened, his eyes glazed, his arms froze outstretched barely a few centimeters from her. He didn’t fall, he couldn’t in zero-gravity. He merely hung there, unconscious.
Val found that her hands were shaking wildly now, and she was sobbing.
Then:
“Very neat work. The two of you are being very cooperative.”
Dan Christopher stepped out of the shadows from beyond the desk, grinning.
Valery blinked back her tears.
“Dan! But I thought you...”
He was still some distance away from the desk, just close enough to be seen as a tall, lithe shadow. “That was Joe Haller on the shuttle. I asked him to take my place at the last minute.”
“What... what are you doing here?”
“The same thing I tried to do when your father first started this nonsense of looking for another planet.”
Val felt completely confused. “But... I thought...”
Dan laughed. “You made just about every mistake you could make, Val. You thought it was Larry, when all along it’s been me.”
“You’re the madman?” The question popped out of her involuntarily.
Still hovering off near the shadows, Dan said grimly, “Wrong again. I’m not insane. It’s not insanity when you fight to protect yourself from your so-called friends. Not when they’re laughing at you behind your back. Plotting against you. Taking everything away from you.”
“I... never laughed at you, Dan.”
“Not much.” His voice was getting hard, steel-edged. “You talked Larry into the Chairmanship. You probably got him to kill my father. Don’t tell me the two of you weren’t laughing at me.”
“Dan, you’re wrong.. .can’t you see?”
“I see perfectly. I’ve seen it all along. You kill my father. While I’m mourning him, Larry take over the Chairmanship and you takes over Larry. Then the two of you scheme to move the ship on to another planet, another star. Not where we’re supposed to go, where we’re destined to go. Oh no! You’ve got to have your way in everything, don’t you?”
Valery realized she still held the stunner in her hand. “Dan, it isn’t like that at all.”
“You even got your father to help you, didn’t you?” he went on. “Searching for other planets. I fixed him. But you wouldn’t let it rest there. Now I’ve got to take care of you, too—” His voice seemed to break.
“Dan? Dan, please.”
“No,” he said, almost sobbing. “Val, I loved you. I would have given my life for you. But you’ve always been against me. You’ve always loved Larry better than me. You’ve all been against me, all along.”
“Dan, you’re wrong. Come here,” she gripped the stunner firmly, “and let me prove how wrong you are.”
“Sure, I’ll come to you.” His voice grew stronger. “As soon as you toss that popgun away.”
Valery brought it up to fire, but Dan melted into the shadows before she could pull the trigger.
“It’s a very short-range weapon,” she heard his voice call to her, echoing mockingly. “And very directional. Now this laser I borrowed from the pressure suit is only a working tool... but at this distance it can burn your arm off the shoulder.”
A blood-red pencil-beam of energy shot past Valery’s ear.
She screamed and jumped, hitting the edge of the desk with her legs.
“The next one won’t miss, Val. Throw your gun away.”
She tossed it from her. The gun went spinning weightlessly into the darkness.
Dan stepped closer, close enough for her to see his face in the faint glow of the desk lights. He didn’t look wild-eyed or twisted at all. He seemed perfectly at ease, calmer than usual. Serene.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“What can I do?” he shot back. “You’ve left me no alternative. For a while, I tried to figure out some way of getting you to agree to cryosleep, so I wouldn’t have to kill you. But that’s not possible. Not now.”
“Dan, you’ve got to stop. You can’t kill everyone that...”
“Everyone that gets in my way? Everyone who takes what’s rightfully mine? Yes, I can kill them all. You just watch me do it.”
“You’re sick!”
“Sick of being cheated by those who claim they love me.” He gestured with the laser pistol. “Erase all your data tapes.”
“I...” Val’s mind was racing. “If I do, will you let me live?”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’ll go into cryosleep. You can take me down there yourself. Right away.”
He hesitated a moment. “Erase the tapes.”
She turned and flicked her fingers over the keyboard. Lights on the computer terminal’s face flickered on and off.
Turning back to Dan she said, “Well? You don’t have to kill anyone.”
Dan glanced at Larry’s inert form. “You want me to let him be frozen, too?”
“Yes.”
“So the two of you can awake together? Never,” Dan said firmly. “He killed my father.”
“No one killed your father,” Valery said, her voice rising. “It was an accident.”
“Don’t argue with me!” he shouted. “He killed my father and I’m going to kill him. He’s always been after everything that’s mine. Now he’s going to pay for it.”
“Then you’ll have to kill me too!” Val shouted back.
He pointed the gun at her. Val slid sideways, away from the computer terminal. “Look!” she yelled. “It’s not on erase, it’s on record! And I put the intercom on, too. Everything you’ve said for the past minute or two is being broadcast all over the ship. There must be an emergency crew heading up here right now!”
“You...” Now Dan’s eyes glittered dangerously, and his breath became ragged, gulping.
“It won’t do you any good to kill us, Dan,” Val said as calmly as she could manage. “Everyone knows now. Just give up and let the medics take care of you.”
With a bellowing roar, Dan fired the laser into the computer terminal. It exploded in a shower of sparks. Valery leaped upward as the desk lights blanked out, then angled to one side and desperately tried to put as much distance between herself and Dan as she could.
“I’ll get you!” He was screaming. “Both of you! All of you!”
Larry! Somewhere in the vast, completely darkened chamber, Larry’s unconscious body floated. If Dan found him first... Valery saw a gaunt framework of shadows moving up toward her. The main telescope. She put out both hands and grabbed at one of the girders, slowing her impact.
Hanging there weightlessly, she peered into the darkness, letting her eyes adjust to the dim starlight. There. A body floating silently off in the darkness. Is it Larry, or a trick of Dan’s?
The click and creak of a hatch opening made her turn her attention toward the sound. A shaft of light flickered through the observatory, and Valery caught the shadow of Dan’s form squeezing down through the hatch, then slamming it shut behind him.
She launched herself across the room toward Larry. Another hatch opened, off to the other side of the observatory, and a man’s voice called out:
“Miss Loring, are you all right?”
“I’m here! Get some lights and help me. Larry Belsen’s unconscious.”
Talk about irony, Larry thought.
He was sitting in Dan’s desk chair in the Propulsion and Power control center, one level below the observatory. The gravity was still low enough for his arms to tend to float up off the chair arms. Someone was holding a vibrator to the back of his neck, soothing away the roaring headache that the stunner had given him.
Valery was standing in front of him, looking very pale and frightened.
Half a dozen engineers and technicians were at their stations. All of them wore stunners on their belts.
“How does your head feel now?” a girl’s voice came from behind him.
Too stiff and aching to turn toward her, he replied. “Like somebody’s running a rocket engine inside it.”
The girl moved in front of him, where he could see that she was wearing a white nurse’s coverall. “I’ll get you a pain-killer.” She opened a kit on the desk.
Larry looked up at Valery. “So you thought it was me.”
Her eyes were red from crying, he noticed.
UI was afraid it was you,” she answered quietly.
“Do you feel any better,” he asked bitterly, “knowing that it’s Dan?”
“Not much,” she confessed. Then she added, “But... I’m glad it wasn’t you. Even if you’d been doing it unconsciously.”
The nurse turned back to him and handed him an immense blue pill.
“I’ll get some water,” Valery said.
“Make it a bucketful,” Larry called to her. To the nurse, he asked, “Will this make me sleep?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s a selective depressant. If you want to sleep...”
“No, I’ve got to stay awake.”
Val came back with a plastic cup of water. Larry swallowed hard on the pill, nearly choked, but finally forced it down.
“Any idea of where Dan is?” he asked.
Val said, “No. Mort Campbell is heading up the emergency squad. They’re searching the ship for him.”
“Could you get Mort on the phone for me, please?”
She handled the desk phone, while Larry rubbed the back of his still stiff neck.
Campbell’s heavy-featured face showed up on the screen.
“Where are you?” Larry asked.
“Storage area seventeen. One of the maintenance men working on the extra shuttles said he heard some strange noises down here.”
“Anything?”
Campbell’s beefy face settled into a scowl. “Who knows? This area’s big enough to hide the whole ship’s crew. We’ve got kilometers of corridors and tubes to search, thousands of sections and compartments... a few dozen men can’t hack it. Not even a few hundred.”
“He’s got to be someplace. I’ll make sure that all the working and living areas are guarded. He’ll have to show up sooner or later... even if it’s just to get some food.”
“I know. But I wouldn’t count on that. Anyway, there are video monitors on all the important areas of the ship. I’ve got a special squad of people monitoring the viewscreens on the bridge.”
“Good.”
Campbell said, “I understand he’s armed.”
“He was. But I want him brought in alive. No rough stuff. If you have to fight, use the stunners.”
“He must really be sick.”
“And scared. Be careful with him. But don’t take unnecessary chances; he’s perfectly willing to kill.”
Campbell’s eyes flickered with just the barest hint of surprise. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said.
The picture on the viewscreen faded.
Larry got to his feet. For a moment he felt a surge of dizziness. Val was beside him and he rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Come on,” he said. “We can be in better touch with the whole ship down on the bridge.”
“Wait a minute?” she asked. “I had an idea, while you were talking with Mr. Campbell.”
“What?”
“Dr. Hsai. He’s spent a lot of time examining Dan, talking with him ...”
“And finding zero,” Larry grumbled.
“Yes, but he might be able to find something in his records... or maybe something he’ll remember... some clue to where Dan might be hiding, what he’s doing.”
Larry thought it over for half a moment. “It’s worth a try.” He turned to the nearest technician, who was seated at a monitoring console, watching the computer-produced graphs that gave second-by-second reports on the performance of the reactors and generators. “Your name’s Peterson, isn’t it?”
The blond youth smiled, obviously flattered that the Chairman knew his name. “Yessir, that’s right.”
“Would you please call Dr. Hsai and ask him to meet me on the bridge as soon as he can possibly get there?”
“Yessir. Right away.”
The oriental psychotech was already on the bridge, waiting patiently, when Larry and Val got there. All the way down the now fully lit connector tubes, padding down those spiraling metal steps, Larry had half-expected Dan to leap out at them. No sign of him. Nor of Campbell’s search parties and emergency squad.
It’s a big ship. Larry reminded himself. You could roam around for weeks without seeing another person, if you really wanted to.
All the technicians on the bridge were wearing sidearms as they sat at their consoles. And there were two grim-faced guards scowling at the door Larry and Val stepped through.
Dr. Hsai was unarmed, of course. Larry quickly explained what he was after.
The psychotech pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I must admit that nothing comes to mind right now. But I will review all my records. Perhaps there is something he inadvertently revealed that will help you.”
There’d better be, Larry thought. To Val, he muttered, ”Dan could do a lot of damage to the ship, if he wants to.”
“But all the vital areas are protected now, aren’t they?”
He scanned the viewscreens and nodded. “They seem to be... but the ship’s too big. Too many soft spots. He could cut electrical connections, air lines, water pipes... anything.”
“Why would he do something like that?” she asked.
“How should I know?” Larry snapped. “Why would he do any of the things he’s doing? He’s crazy!”
She didn’t respond, but her chin dropped slightly.
“I’m sorry,” Larry said immediately. “I didn’t mean it that way. Guess I’m getting edgy.”
“I know,” Valery said.
The hours wore on. Larry finally had to sleep; he couldn’t stay on his feet any longer. He woke up two hours later and groggily made his way back to the bridge.
Mort Campbell was there, unshaven, bleary-eyed, sipping coffee from a steaming mug.
“Anything?” Larry asked.
“Nine dozen false alarms, that’s all.” Campbell sipped, then winced. “Cheez, that’s hot! No...everybody and his brother thinks they’ve seen him. But none of it checks out. Wherever he’s hiding, it’s a good place.”
Larry stood through two full shifts. Most of the time he remained on the bridge, although he put in a swing with one of Campbell’s search squads, spending several hours going through corridors and unused work and storage areas. All of them were sealed tight and lay under half a century’s worth of dust.
He had dinner with Val in the cafeteria.
“I’m going to assign a couple of men to guard you.”
“Me?”
“He was after you, wasn’t he?”
“That’s only because I showed him that Epsilon Indi’s closest planet is almost exactly like Earth. He wanted to destroy that evidence, to make sure we stayed here.”
“Oh... Now he knows you were lying to him.”
She grinned, a bit sheepishly. “No, I was telling him the truth. It was you that I lied to.”
“What? But you said ...”
“It was a lie,” she replied. “To see if... well, if you were the one who’d try to... stop me from reporting to the Council.”
Larry stared at her. “You mean there really is a planet like Earth at Epsilon Indi?”
She nodded, grinning again.
“That’s fantastic! Fabulous!” Larry felt like jumping up on the cafeteria table. Then he remembered about Dan. “But I still want you guarded. He’s dangerous, and he might come after you. I don’t want you to be bait anymore.”
“I’ll be all right in my own quarters. Mother’s there, and we have a phone—”
“And there will be two guards with you at all times,” Larry said firmly.
“At all times?” Her eyebrows arched coyly.
Larry put on a sour face. “They’ll stay outside your door when you go home.”
“But...”
“No arguments, or I’ll make it four guards.”
She put her hands up in mock surrender. “Yessir, Mr. Chairman. To hear is to obey.”
“Stuff it.” Now he was grinning. “Uh... this might not be the right time, but—well, I still love you.”
“I know,” she said, much more softly. “I never stopped loving you.”
He leaned across the table and kissed her. Seven dozen people in the cafeteria stopped their meals to watch, but Larry couldn’t have cared less. Even if he had noticed them.
* * *
“He’s got to be someplace” Larry fumed.
He was on the bridge again, talking to Mort Campbell, who was slumped tiredly on the chair of an unoccupied console.
“A man just can’t disappear for three days,” Larry insisted. “It’s a big ship, but you should have been able to flush him out by now.”
“I know, I feel the same way,” Campbell said, nodding his heavy head. “Either he’s damned clever or...”
“Or what?”
“Or he’s got friends helping him.”
Larry made a chopping motion with his hand. “No. That I can’t believe. A madman aboard the ship is one thing, but other madmen to help him? No.”
“He got Joe Haller to take his place on the shuttle, didn’t he?”
“We’ve gone through all that with Joe. He had no idea of what Dan was up to. Dan asked him to fill in for him, and he did. That’s all.”
Campbell threw his hands up in disgust. “Then where the hell is he? Why can’t we find him?”
“If I knew, Mort, I’d...”
“Emergency signal!” sang out one of the techs.
Larry went over to her like a shot. “What is it?”
The girl pointed to a flashing red light on the console in front of her, between two viewscreens. Her hands flew over the keyboard. One of the viewscreens brightened and showed a guard, bleeding from a gushing cut on his scalp. The blood was pouring down into his eyes.
“He...he’s here...”
“What’s the location?” Larry yelled at the girl.
“Airlock fourteen, level three.”
Campbell bolted from his chair and dashed for the nearest door.
Larry snapped, “Hook me into the intercom.”
The girl nodded and did things to her keyboard. “Okay now, sir.”
Leaning over her shoulder to speak into the microphone built into the console’s face, Larry said. “This is the Chairman speaking. Dan Christopher has attacked a guard at airlock fourteen, level three. All search squads converge on that location. All guard units, remain on duty at your assigned posts.” He started to straighten up, then had another thought. “Dan... Dan Christopher. Give up, Dan. You can’t win. We want to help you. Give up and you won’t be hurt.”
But it sounded empty, even as he said it.
Larry fidgeted on the bridge for about a minute longer, then said, “I’m going up to that airlock. Relay any calls for me to that location.”
He got there as the guard was being carried off to the infirmary on a stretcher. Campbell was standing inside the airlock, filling its cramped metal space with his formidable bulk. He had his hands on his hips.
Larry pushed past a dozen men and stepped through the airlock’s inner hatch to squeeze in next to Campbell.
“Well, now we know where he is,” Campbell said.
“What happened?”
Campbell jerked a thumb at the rack of pressure suits hanging outside the airlock, in the corridor. “He slugged the guard, took one of the suits, and went outside.”
“What? You’re sure?”
Nodding, Campbell answered, “Yep. Just checking the hatch here. It was open when we arrived a few minutes ago.”
“He’s outside?”
“He’s committing suicide.”
Larry thought it over for a few moments. “No. He’s moving to a part of the ship where he wants to be... My god! He can cut open bulkheads anywhere he wants to and blow whole sections of the ship into vacuum. If he does that in the living quarters...”
Even Campbell’s normal calm seemed shaken. “We’d better get all the living quarters on disaster alert. All hatches sealed...”
Larry nodded. “And guards on every airlock.”
“Right. Anything else?”
“Yes. Get a squad of volunteers together. We’ve got to go outside after him. And I’m going with you.”
It was a strange, eerie feeling.
Larry had been outside the ship before, but never since they had taken up orbit around the planet. Its massive curving bulk hung over him, it seemed, close and beckoning yet somehow menacing. He felt almost as if it was going to fall on him and crush him.
He shook his head inside the suit’s helmet. You’ve got a job to do. No time for sightseeing.
A dozen men had floated out of the airlock in search of Dan. A dozen men to cover the thousands of possible places where he might be lurking.
They worked with a plan in mind. They came out of one airlock at the first level, the largest of the ship’s seven wheels. They spread out around the periphery of that wheel. The plan was for each man to search the area between connecting tubes. Then, if none of them found Dan, they would work their way simultaneously up each of the connector tubes to the next ring, search there, then on to the third ring. And so on, right up to the hub.
We could use a hundred men, Larry thought. Only twelve men qualified for outside work had volunteered. Most of the people aboard the ship had never been outside it.
Larry watched the man nearest him disappear over the curve of the ship’s ring-like structure. He was alone now, standing on the ring’s metal skin with magnetically gripping boots, looking down a connector tube, past the seven rings to the bulging plastiglass blisters of the. hub.
The stars formed a solemn, unblinking backdrop, like millions of eyes watching him. And behind him, Larry could feel rather than see the immense ponderous presence of the planet.
Campbell’s voice crackled in his earphones. “Everybody ready?”
One by one, the eleven others answered by the numbers that had been hastily sprayed onto their suits.
“All right, everybody work to his left. Keep your guns loose.”
Larry fingered the laser tool-turned-weapon at his waist. Sonic stunners wouldn’t work in vacuum. If there was any shooting, somebody was going to die.
He began walking in a spiral around the big main wheel, his footsteps tacky in the magnetic boots. Around and around, spiraling like an electron in a strong magnetic field, curving from one connector tube to the next. There was practically no place for a man to hide here; the main level’s outer wall was almost perfectly smooth, broken only by an occasional viewport.
Larry carefully avoided stepping on the viewports. Being plastiglass, they’d provide no grip for his magnetic boots. Larry didn’t feel like slipping off the ship’s surface. There were steering jets on his belt, but he preferred to stay in contact with the ship rather than try zooming through empty space.
At last he came to the next connector tube. He found that he was breathing hard, sweating, but feeling relieved. No sign of Dan. And that somehow made him almost happy.
At least I didn’t have to shoot it out with him.
“Not yet,” he heard himself mutter.
The others began reporting in. None of them had seen Dan.
“All right,” Campbell said. “Every man goes along the tube he’s at now. Stop at level two-and report in.”
It was taking too long, Larry realized. More than an hour had passed since they had first come outside. It would easily take another hour or more by the time they had checked out level two. It wasn’t going to work. They’d have to go inside long before they could inspect level three. If Dan didn’t show up soon, they’d have to call off the whole idea of searching outside for him. Unless they could get more people outside to help.
Larry always felt hot inside the suits. There was a radiator on the back of his lifepack, but it never seemed to get rid of his body heat fast enough. The air blowers whirred noisily, but he still found himself drenched with sweat before he was halfway up the tube to level two.
Around and around. Down was up, and then it was down again. He saw the planet swing by as he stolidly plodded along the metal skin of the tube. Stars and planets, turning, turning, turning Keep your eyes searching for Dan! he warned himself. But where? He could be crouched behind that antenna; Larry checked it out carefully. No. He could be hovering no more than a hundred meters from the ship, and he’d be virtually invisible against the backdrop of stars. We’d never see him.. .you’d have to be lucky enough to look in exactly the right place at the right time...
And then Larry began to get the uncanny feeling that Dan was walking along behind him, following his footsteps, tiptoeing the way children sometimes do behind someone they’re trying to surprise.
He knew it was silly, irrational. But the feeling grew. He felt a cold shudder go through him. If he is behind me...
Larry whirled around. It was a clumsy move in the pressure suit, and his boots left contact with the ship. No one! Then he realized he was drifting away. He slapped at the control unit on his belt, and the microjets puffed briefly and slammed him hard back onto the tube. His knees buckled momentarily, but he stayed erect.
You’re getting spooked, he raged at himself.
He glanced at the oxygen gauge on his wrist. Still in the green, but a sliver of yellow was showing. When the yellow went to red, he’d have to either go inside or get a fresh tank.
His earphones buzzed. “Mr. Chairman?”
“Here.”
“Just a moment, sir...”
Then Valery’s voice said, “Larry? I think Dr. Hsai might have come up with something.”
“What?”
“Wait... I’ll put him on.”
Larry kept plodding on, kept his eyes searching.
“Mr. Chairman,” the psychotech said formally.
“Doctor,” Larry responded automatically.
“I’ve been reviewing my records of Dan Christopher’s case.”
“And?”
“I believe I may have found something significant.”
Larry fumed inside his helmet. “Well, what is it?”
But there was no hurrying Hsai. “Do you recall when Mr. Christopher was first placed under my care...just after his father died?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“He was treated for a few days and then released. I tried to maintain contact with him, to follow up his case.”
“I know. We put him under observation for a month.” And you found nothing, Larry added mentally.
“Yes. Exactly so. But before then—just after he was released from the infirmary for the first time, I asked him several times to check in with me for follow-up tests. He refused.”
“So?”
Dr. Hsai’s voice continued smoothly, with just the barest hint of excitement. “At one point, he warned me that his job was too important to be interfered with.”
“Warned you?”
“I have his exact words here... listen...”
Larry stopped moving and hung frozen on the skin of the tube. The ship’s vast turning motion swung him majestically around, like a lone rider on an ancient merry-go-round. Then he heard Dan’s voice, which startled him for a moment, until he realized it was one of Dr. Hsai’s tapes:
“Our reactors are feeding the ship’s main rocket engines,” Dan was saying hotly, “on a very, very carefully programmed schedule. This ship can’t take more than a tiny thrust loading—we’re simply not built to stand high thrust, it’d tear us apart...”
“Everyone knows this.” Hsai’s voice.
Dan answered, “Uh-huh. This is a very delicate part of the mission. A slight miscalculation or a tiny flaw in the reactors could destroy this ship and kill everyone.”
Click.
“Do you understand what he was trying to tell me?” Dr. Hsai asked.
Larry blinked puzzledly. “Frankly, no. What.he was saying was perfectly true.”
“Of course. But underneath the obvious truth, he was threatening to destroy the ship and everyone in it if he didn’t get his way.”
“What?”
“I believe that is what is in his mind,” Hsai went on “Of course, I am no psychiatrist, but I think such an action of self-destruction would be consistent with Christopher’s behavior pattern."
Larry instantly blurted, “The reactors!”
Val’s voice came on. “Larry, do you think he’d do if…”
“We can’t run the risk of not thinking it. Val, get the power crew on the phone and have them abandon level seven. Everybody out except a skeleton crew, and I want them in pressure suits. Quick!”
“Right.”
Larry fumbled with the radio switches on his belt.
“Mort, this is Larry.” Do I have the right frequency?
“You find something?”
“No. I just got a call from inside. Hsai thinks Dan might try to blow the reactors.”
“Holy…”
“I’m jetting up there. You keep the search going, just to make sure I’m not on a wild-goose chase.”
“Okay.”
Larry pushed off the tube wall and touched the microjet controls. He felt tiny hands grab him around the waist and push him up toward the ship’s hub. The rings of the ship passed beneath him three, four, five, six…
There was a flash and a puff of what looked like steam, up ahead at level seven. Something cartwheeled up, a jagged shard of metal. Larry steered in that direction.
Level seven’s only viewport had been blown apart. The lights inside were gone. Larry grabbed the jagged rim of the exploded port and hauled himself in through the hole.
If I turn on my helmet lamp I’ll be a certain target.
Something heavy and metallic slammed thunderously in the distance and a gust of wind tore past Larry, cracking like a miniature thunderclap.
Safety hatch! He’s opened the safety hatch between the offices and the reactor area.
Larry reached to his belt with both hands, turned on his helmet lamp, and pulled the laser pistol from its holster.
The office was a shambles. When the viewport blew open, air pressure inside the office gusted violently out into space, bowling over everything in its path. Chairs were overturned, desk fittings broken and scattered over the floor. Any papers that had been around were blown outside.
But no bodies. Valery’s warning must have reached the technicians just in time.
Larry hefted the pistol in his right hand and took a deep breath. The suit air suddenly tasted good. He moved toward the safety hatch that connected the office with the reactor area. In the low gravity of level seven, it was easy to move around, even inside the cumbersome suit. But still Larry moved slowly, cautiously. He was only moments behind Dan. Maybe he could surprise him.
The safety hatch was open, and the reactor area was deep in darkness. For a moment, Larry thought about switching off his helmet lamp. But he couldn’.t Be blind without it.
He edged toward the hatch. It opened, he knew, onto a metal catwalk that hung above the two main working reactors and the main electrical power generator.
He stepped out onto the catwalk, then immediately flicked off his lamp.
Down below, kneeling by the power generator in a pool of light from his own helmet lamp, was Dan. He had a laser pistol in his hand, and he was burning it at full intensity on some of the exposed wiring of the generator. Smoke and sparks were sputtering from the generator’s innards.
With barely a thought about what he was doing, Larry clambered over the catwalk’s flimsy railing and launched himself at Dan. It was like a dream, a nightmare. He floated through the twenty meters separating them like a cloud drifting across the sky. Larry raised his right hand and threw his pistol as hard as he could at Dan. It banged into Dan’s hand, knocking his own laser skittering across the floor.There was no sound.
Dan turned toward him, his lamp suddenly glaring straight into Larry’s eyes. Then they collided, hitting with a bone-jarring impact that carried the two of them up and over the generator and into a confused tangle of arms and legs onto the narrow floor space between the generator and one of the reactors.
It was like two robots grappling. In the low gravity, every strenuous move was overly done, and they fought clumsily, swinging, bouncing, rolling across the floor and flailing at each other. Noiselessly, except for the bone-carried shock of impact and the grunts that each man made inside his suit.
Larry’s head was banged around inside his helmet a dozen times. His ears rang and he tasted blood in his mouth. Sweat was trickling stingingly into his eyes.
Dan was reaching up over Larry’s shoulder, trying to grab his airline. Larry knocked his arm away and pushed Dan back against the smooth metal wall of the reactor. Dan bounced off, doubled over, and sliced Larry’s legs, knocking him sprawling.
Feeling like a turtle on its back, Larry tried to scramble up again, but Dan was on top of him. Through the metal-to-metal contact of the suits, he could hear Dan faintly yelling something; it was unintelligible.
Dan had him by the shoulders now and was banging his head and torso against the metal floor plates. Each slam jarred Larry, blurred his vision. Either his suit was going to crack open or his head would; it didn’t matter which one happened first.
He grappled his arms around Dan’s torso, trying to hold on and prevent Dan from slamming him. But Dan just rode up and down on top of him, adding his own body’s mass to the process of bludgeoning Larry to death.
Larry’s hands grasped frantically and closed on a slim piece of tubing. Airline! His first instinct was to rip it loose, but instead Larry simply squeezed on it, grabbed it hard and hung on.
In a few moments Dan stopped the pounding. He tried to reach Larry’s arm, but Larry was wrapped too closely to him for that. Dan rolled over onto his back, but Larry hung on. Squeezing, squeezing the airline, keeping fresh oxygen from Dan’s lungs, letting him suffocate on his own carbon dioxide.
Dan went limp.
Larry hung on for a few seconds longer, then let go. He himself sagged, barely conscious, on top of Dan’s inert form. No. Can’t.. .pass out. He’ll be coming around... as soon as fresh air... gets into his suit.
Dazed, bloody, Larry got to his knees. He knew he couldn’t stand up. He flicked on the helmet lamp and turned to look for the lasers. Dan’s legs started to move feebly. Larry crawled on all fours, found one of the little pistols on the floor, and took it in his hands. He flopped into a sitting position, leaning his back against the generator, and pointed the pistol at Dan. With his free hand he worked the suit’s radio switch.
“I’ve got him,” he said weakly. “Reactor area.”
The Council members all looked happy enough, but Larry felt nothing but numbness inside himself.
Even Valery looked pleased. She had just shown all her data tapes about the Epsilon Indi planet. It looked as much like Earth, from this distance, as Earth itself did.
“I would like to suggest,” Dr. Polanyi said, beaming across the table at her, “that Miss Loring be accepted as a member of the Council pro tem—for as long as her father is unable to attend our meetings.”
There was a general nodding of heads and approving murmurs.
“Any dissenting voices?” Larry asked.
None.
“Then it’s done.”
There was only one empty seat at the table: Dan’s. Larry glanced at it, his mouth tightening with bitterness.
Adrienne Kaufman cleared her throat. “What about the data we’ve just seen? Should we consider heading for this new planet? If not, we have a huge task of genetic work ahead of us.”
Larry glanced around the table. None of the Council members seemed willing to speak before he did.
“Actually,” he smiled at last, “I don’t see any reason to rush into such a decision. We’re going to be here in orbit for many months, refurbishing the ship. Let’s spend that time gathering more data about this new planet.”
Valery said, “If we could build a bigger telescope, or improve the sensitivity of the instruments we have...”
“That could be done,” Polanyi said quickly.
“Epsilon Indi is about the same distance from us as Alpha Centauri is from Earth,” Larry said. “If we decide to go there, it will take another half-century.”
“None of us will be awake for much of that trip,” Polanyi said.
“If we decide to go,” Adrienne Kaufman put in.
“Oh, I think we will,” said the old engineer. “It looks too good to ignore.”
The meeting broke up shortly after that. Valery got up from her chair and went toward Larry.
“They’re putting Dan into cryosleep today. Dr. Tomaso says he can work on Dan’s neural patterns much more easily when the nerve impulses are slowed down by the low temperature.”
“I know,” Larry said.
“He might be under cryosleep for years and years,” she said.
He thought he knew what was bothering him, but he was afraid to mention it. Afraid she might tell him that his fears were correct.
She looked at him curiously. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Valery almost smiled. “You’re wondering if I want to go into cryosleep too, and be awakened when Dan’s cured.”
He reached out and took her hand. “Do you?”
“No,” she said. “Silly. When are you going to believe that you’re the one I want?”
He grinned foolishly. “Any day now.”
They walked together out of the conference room and down a long, curving corridor. They stopped at a viewport and stared silently at the golden planet outside.
“It would’ve been a lovely world—” Larry muttered. “So close... so close...”
“There’s a better one waiting for us,” Val said.
“But if we don’t go into cryosleep,” Larry realized, “we’ll probably never see that new world.”
She smiled up at him. “I know. But someone’s got to keep the ship going, and raise a new generation of children who will see the new world. See it and live on it.”
“Our children,” he said.
“Human children,” Val added. “Beautiful strong human men and worn for the new world.”
“For the new world,” he echoed.
They smiled together and walked off down the corridor, arm in arm.