New Earth (7 page)

“There’s the clearing,” Hazzard called out, pointing.

“Ah, she’s gliding in like a blessed angel,” said Thornberry.

Jordan watched as the open, grassy glade expanded to fill the display screen, tilted slightly, then straightened out and rushed up. The ground looked smooth, covered with green grass. The view bumped once, twice, then all motion stopped.

“She’s down,” Thornberry sighed, as if a
gigantic weight had just been taken off his shoulders.

Hazzard flexed his fingers, then recited, “Log entry: oh-eight-forty-two hours, this date, spacecraft one landed on Sirius C. Fill in geographical coordinates.”

Jordan let out a gust of breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. She’s down, he told himself. The craft has landed safely.

The camera atop the landing craft slowly revolved,
showing a broad grassy glade surrounded by tall, straight-boled trees, darkly green. Mountains in the distance, their peaks bare rock. The glade was flat and smooth, not a rock or boulder in sight, as if the area had been specifically cleared for the rover’s touchdown. The sky above was turquoise blue, dotted with puffy white clouds.

The first view from the surface of New Earth, Jordan thought.

“Send this view to Earth right away,” he said to Hazzard.

“Won’t get there for more’n eight years,” Hazzard replied.

“Yes, but send it. Send it now.”

“Right.”

For the next three-quarters of an hour they watched as the rocketplane automatically checked all its internal systems and activated its sensors. Meek and the others filtered into the command center and watched with Jordan as the numbers
scrolled along the bottom of the main display screen: atmospheric pressure, temperature, composition—all were well within the limits that had already been recorded for New Earth by the earlier robotic probes.

We can breathe that air, Jordan told himself. Then he added, If it’s not full of dangerous microbes.

“Activating rovers,” Thornberry said, in the flat, almost mechanical tone of a mission
controller. The command center fell completely silent, but Jordan could sense the excitement vibrating among the onlookers. He felt it himself.

The view switched to show the shadowy interior of the rocketplane. One side swung open and down, turning into a ramp. Brilliant, glaring sunlight streamed in.

“Rovers check out,” Thornberry reported tersely. “Out you go, lads.”

His console’s main screen
split to show two views, from the cameras mounted atop the two rovers. Hazzard flicked his fingers across the keyboard built into his chair’s armrests and two of the wall screens above the consoles lit up to show the view from each of the two rovers. The machines trundled down the ramps and out onto the smooth grassy ground.

“Over the river and through the woods…” somebody singsonged. Brandon,
Jordan thought.

“There’s no river.” Elyse’s voice, clearly.

The rovers plunged into the forest, at ten kilometers per hour. Jordan watched, fascinated, as the thick-boled trees glided past. There was precious little foliage between the trees, hardly any bushes at all. The woods looked almost like a well-tended park.

“Look,” said Brandon. “There’s a little stream.”

“A babbling brook.”

“Look
out for animal life,” said Meek. “The equivalent of squirrels or other arboreal forms.”

His biologist, Paul Longyear, hurried to one of the unused consoles, muttering, “The sensors should be taking bio samples of the air.”

Longyear was a young Native American with a complexion the color of dried tobacco leaf, dark hair braided halfway down his back, and deep onyx eyes.

“Can’t those pushcarts
go any faster?” Brandon demanded.

Thornberry shot him a grim look over his shoulder as he replied, “Sure they can. But not over territory we haven’t mapped yet. I don’t want these darlings bumping into trouble.”

“Maybe there’s tiger traps down there,” somebody snickered.

“We don’t have any idea of what’s down there,” Jordan said, loudly enough to stop the chatter. The terrain had been mapped
from orbit, of course, but the forest covered the ground too thickly to see details smaller than a few meters.

Onward the rovers trundled, among the sturdy trees, maneuvering around rocks and boulders, some of them big as houses.

“Should be getting to the spot where the laser is,” Thornberry muttered. “Any minute now.”

And at that precise moment, all the screens went blank.

FRUSTRATION

“What the hell?” Thornberry exclaimed.

Jordan stared at the suddenly dark screens. What’s gone wrong? he asked himself.

While Thornberry growled into his microphone, Longyear announced from his console, “Bio sensors have crapped out, too.”

“Everything’s down,” Thornberry said, bewildered. Then he added a heartfelt, “Damn!”

“What’s the problem?” Brandon wondered.

“Run the diagnostics
program,” Hazzard suggested.

“I’m trying,” said Thornberry. “No response. They’re dead as doornails. Both of ’em.”

“Can’t you do something about it?”

Shaking his head, Thornberry said, “The down side of making machines smart enough to operate on their own is that they operate on their own. They’re clever enough so that when they sense something down there that’s out of their database, they
protect themselves by going into hibernation mode until we can restart ’em.”

“So restart them.”

“I’m trying, dammitall!” Thornberry roared. “But the little toothaches don’t respond.”

“Some anomaly down there.”

“A black hole, maybe.”

“Be serious!”

Jordan said to himself, Very well, you’re supposed to be the leader of this group. Show some leadership.

“Mitch, would you keep on trying to reestablish
contact? Geoff, lend him whatever help you can.” Turning to the others, Jordan said, “The rest of us should clear out and let Mitchell and Geoff try to sort this out.”

They reluctantly began to shuffle out of the command center. Brandon took Elyse’s arm and led her toward the hatch.

Jordan looked back at Thornberry. The roboticist was poking away at his console’s touchscreen, muttering darkly.
But his console’s displays remained stubbornly blank.

There’s nothing you can do for him, Jordan told himself, except let him do his work without the rest of us breathing down his neck. He followed his brother and Elyse down the passageway to the area where the living quarters were.

Brandon stopped in front of the door to his quarters. “What now?” he asked Jordan.

“I don’t know about you, but
I intend to sort out my clothing and personal supplies. I have a hunch that we’ll be going down to the surface much sooner than we had planned to.”

Elyse looked worried. “What could have made the rovers go blank like that?”

With a shrug, Jordan said, “Malfunctions happen. Mitchell will figure it out. He’s a good man.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Brandon challenged.

Jordan said, “Then we’ll have to
go down to the surface and see what’s wrong with them.”

“See what’s happened to them, you mean.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“I’m going down to the hangar deck to check out our landing craft,” Brandon said.

“Good idea,” Jordan said. “But let’s give Mitchell a chance to reestablish contact with the rovers. No need to jump into the unknown just yet.”

“The hell there isn’t! Something’s going on down there
and we’ve got to find out what it is.”

“Bran, whatever’s
going on
down there, have you considered the possibility that it might be dangerous?”

Elyse looked suddenly alarmed. “Dangerous?”

“Apparently the rovers think so,” Jordan said.

Impatiently, Brandon said, “There’s always a certain amount of danger when you’re dealing with the unknown.”

“That’s true,” said Jordan. “And it’s my responsibility
to see to it that we minimize the danger as much as we can.”

“So we just sit up here in orbit with two dead rovers on the surface and a laser beacon shining at us?”

“You think it’s a beacon?” Elyse asked.

“What else?”

Jordan made himself smile as he said, “Bran, there’s a difference between what you want it to be and what it actually is.”

“Do you want to bet?”

Now Jordan’s smile turned genuine.
“No thank you. For what it’s worth, Bran, I agree with you. I think it’s probably a beacon, too. But that doesn’t mean we should go barging down there before we’ve considered all the possibilities.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I intend to do what all bureaucrats do when they face a new problem: call a meeting.”

*   *   *

By midafternoon Thornberry had given up in exasperation his attempts to
reestablish contact with the two rovers.

When Jordan returned to the command center, Thornberry was alone at his console, sagging wearily in its spindly, wheeled chair, his rumpled shirt stained with sweat. He looked thoroughly defeated.

Jordan sat at the next console, beside him, and said softly, “You’ve done all you can, Mitch. Go get something to eat.”

Thornberry didn’t move. Instead he
muttered, “I am maintaining a kindly, courteous, secret, and wounded silence as a gentle reproof against those two knock-kneed, goggle-eyed, outrageously obstinate machines.”

Chuckling at the Irishman’s wry humor, Jordan repeated, “Get something to eat. And then come over to my quarters at fifteen hundred hours. We’ve got to plan out what we should do next.”

Once Thornberry shambled out of the
control center, Jordan called Brandon, Elyse, Meek, and Hazzard to join him in his quarters at 1500.

They all arrived promptly and sat around the coffee table, the expressions on their faces ranging from apprehensive to frustrated to downright worried.

Pulling the wheeled chair from his desk up to the little glass coffee table, Jordan said, “The five of you represent the chief technical groups
of our team. We need to plan out what our next step in exploring New Earth should be.”

“Send a team down to see what happened to the rovers,” Brandon said immediately. He was sitting tensely on the sofa, next to Elyse. Hazzard sat at her other side, Meek and Thornberry in the armchairs, facing each other across the coffee table.

“And find out what that laser is all about,” added Elyse.

Turning
to Meek, Jordan asked, “How much biological data did we get before the rovers blanked out?”

“Air samples,” said Meek. “Nothing startling. There are single-celled creatures in the air, the equivalent of bacteria and protists. A few insect analogs. Dust, of course. Some pollen.”

“Anything harmful?”

“I don’t have enough data to determine that. Yamaguchi’s looking over what we’ve got so far. If
you send a team to the surface they should wear biohazard suits, to be on the safe side.”

Turning to Thornberry, Jordan asked, “Mitch, do you have any idea at all of why the rovers died?”

The roboticist shrugged his heavy shoulders. “As far as I can tell, they just shut themselves down. They must have encountered something beyond the limits of their programming.”

“Maybe somebody shut them down,”
said Brandon.

“Somebody? Who?”

“Whoever’s shining that laser at us.”

“But there’s no sign of intelligence down there,” Thornberry argued. “No radio signals, no buildings, no roads…”

“There’s the laser,” Jordan pointed out.

Hunching forward in his chair, Brandon ticked off points on his fingers. “Whoever built that laser is using it to attract our attention. They disable the rovers before
the machines can get close enough to the laser for us to see what’s there. Isn’t it obvious? They don’t want machines, they want
us
. They want us to come down and meet them.”

“So they can cook us and eat us,” Hazzard muttered, half-joking.

“I doubt that cannibals use lasers,” Jordan said.

Meek pointed out, “But they wouldn’t be cannibals, not at all. We’re a different species from them.”

“Like beef cattle are different from us,” Hazzard maintained.

No one laughed.

*   *   *

They debated the situation for another hour, but Jordan realized that there was only one decision they could reasonably make.

“All right, then,” he said at last. “We can send another rover or two down, or we can send a team of people. Which should it be?”

“People!” Brandon snapped.

Thornberry countered,
“I’d like to send a couple of rovers to different places around the planet and see what happens to them. See if they operate normally.”

“That would mean the area around the laser beacon is a special place,” said Meek.

“A dangerous place,” Jordan said.

Brandon shook his head. “I think they’re making it abundantly clear that they want us to come down and meet them. In person.”

“Meet who?” Jordan
asked. “If there are intelligent aliens down there, capable of building a laser and disabling our rovers, why are they being so coy? Why not try to contact us? Send us a radio message. Blink the laser, use it as a communications beam.”

“Yeah,” Thornberry agreed. “If they’re intelligent they could send up a spacecraft of their own to greet us properly.”

Meek shook his head. “It’s obvious that
they don’t think the same way we do.”

“Is it?” Brandon countered. “Seems to me they’re very deliberately trying to get us to go down there and meet them.”

“Luring us in,” Jordan muttered.

“But why?” Elyse asked. “Why are they behaving this way?”

Jordan looked around the table at their faces, then said, “There’s only one way to find the answer to that question. We’ll have to send a team down
to the surface.”

“Right!” said Brandon.

DECISIONS

It took another whole day to get a landing party assembled and checked out. Jordan gathered the entire group in the wardroom and had them push all six tables together. Once all twelve of them were seated, he began to announce his decisions.

“As you know,” he began, “I try to manage our group on a consensus basis. We’re not a hierarchical organization, not like a university department.
While we have leaders in the various fields of interest, such as astrobiology—”