Starborne (22 page)

What in God
’
s name is happening here?

This is all crazines
s. His head is full, suddenly, of absurd puerile speculations and suspicions and theories. He is behaving exactly like the lovesick adolescent that he never was. Why? Why? He wonders just how much Noelle means to him. Certainly she fascinates him. Is he i
n
love with her, then? At the very least, her strangely impersonal beauty exerts a powerful effect on him. Does he want to go to bed with her? Then go to bed with her, he tells himself. If she
’
s interested, of course. If she is not in literal truth the nun
he was just imagining her to be.

The year-captain is grateful now for Noelle
’
s blindness, which keeps her from seeing the way his face must look as all this stuff goes coursing through his mind.

As he struggles to regain his equilibrium, she says, “
Is ther
e anything wrong?”

She can tell. Of course. She doesn
’
t need to see his face. She is equipped with a horde of secret built-in receptors that bring her a steady stream of messages about the way he is breathing, the chemical su
b
stances that are flowing from
his pores, and all the other little physi
o
logical betrayals of internal psychological states that a sufficiently keen observer is able to detect even without eyesight. The naturally au
g
mented auxiliary senses of the blind.

“
I was just thinking,”
he says, not entirely dishonestly, “
that I would miss these sessions with you, too. Very much, as a matter of fact.”

“
But we don
’
t have to miss them now.”

“
No. We don
’
t.”

He takes her hand between his and presses it there, lightly, for a m
o
ment. A small g
esture of mild affection, nothing more. Then he suggests they get down to work.

“
I
’
ve been getting mental static again,”
she says.

“
You have? Since when?”
He is glad that the subject is changing, but this is a jarring, unwelcome shift.

“
It began during the
night. A feeling like a veil coming over my mind. Coming between me and Yvonne.”

“
But you can still reach her?”

“
I haven
’
t tried. I suppose so. But I thought everything was better, and now
—”

“
We
’
ve been traveling between stars the past few months,”
he poi
nts out. “
Now we
’
re getting close to one again.”

“
When I was on Earth,”
Noelle says, “
I was only 93 million miles from a star, and Yvonne and I had no transmission problems whatever, even when we were far apart.”

“
Even when you were as far apart as you cou
ld get on Earth,”
he says, “
you and your sister were standing side by side, compared to the distances between you out here.”

“
I still don
’
t think distance has anything much to do with it. I think it
’
s something connected with stars, but I don
’
t know what i
t can be. Stars that are not the sun, maybe. But I don
’
t really understand.”
Now she is the one who takes his hand, and holds it rather more firmly than he had been holding hers a moment ago. “
I hate it when anything gets between me and Yvonne. It scares
m
e. It
’
s the most terrifying thing I can imagine.”

***

The time has arrived now to emerge from nospace and set about reaching a decision about whether to attempt a landing on the world that Zed Hesper has labeled Planet A. Now is the moment when they will d
iscover whether the
Wotan
can indeed jump in and out of nospace in any controllable way; and once that test is behind them, they will be able to learn whether the information that Zed Hesper
’
s instruments have brought them
—
all that impossibly detailed data
about stars and planets and atmospheric composition and polar icecaps
—
constitutes a genuine report on real components of the real universe, or is merely a set of i
m
aginary constructs having no more connection with reality than the chants and potions of a
prehistoric sorcerer.

Julia has the responsibility for the first part of the business, bringing the starship out of nospace. Accomplishing that is mostly a matter of giving the drive intelligence the appropriate orders in the appropriate command sequence,
and then giving the command
—
in the presence of the year-captain, and with him supplying the proper official counte
r
sign
—
that activates the whole series of orders. And then waiting to see whether what happens next is anything like what is supposed to happen.

So is it done, step by step. And it comes to pass that the maneuver is successful.

It seems at first as if nothing has happened. There had been no pe
r
ceptible sensation when they originally shunted into nospace, and there is none coming out, either. No s
ense of being turned inside-out (or ou
t
side-in), no banshee wails in the corridors, no flashing of gaudy colors up and down the visual spectrum and perhaps a little way beyond.

Indeed, there is no indication whatever that anything has changed aboard the
Wo
tan
. Except that
—
suddenly, astoundingly, miraculou
s
ly
—
the throbbing gray nothingness of interlacing energy fields which was all that any of them had had to look at for the past year is gone from the viewplate, and the voyagers find themselves staring at je
t-black sky, a dazzling golden sun not very much different from the one under which they had been born, and a bright scattering of planets. One, two, three, four, five, six planets, so it seems.

That is a stunning sight, after a full year of staring at the
majestic but featureless woolly wrapper of nospace that has surrounded the ship like a second skin. The voyagers who stand by the viewplate break into cheers, applause, giddy laughter, even a few sobs.

The year-captain is on the phone to Zed Hesper, who r
emains holed up in his scanning room down below. “
What do you say, Hesper?”
the year-captain asks. “
Is this the place, or is this the place?”

This is the place, Hesper opines. They have accurately navigated the murky seas of nospace
—
Paco must be congratula
ted
—
and are sitting right in the middle of the solar system that contains his Planet A. Planet A itself is the fourth of the six worlds of this G2 sun, Hesper reminds him.

But it is not so easy to tell, at least not merely by glancing into the viewplate, w
hich of the six planets is the fourth from its primary. If the
Wotan
’
s position in relation to this solar system were optimally inclined to the plane of its ecliptic at a nice 90-degree angle, one could perhaps casually line the planets up in their actual
order of distance from the sun just by peering at the screen. But the
Wotan
is not so conveniently pos
i
tioned. At the place where they have emerged from nospace the voya
g
ers have a skimming, edge-on, rim-shot kind of view of this solar sy
s
tem. And each of
the six worlds is chugging along in its own orbit, na
t
urally, some of them at perihelion at the moment and others at aphelion, and from the point of view of the
Wotan
, confronting the whole system on the skew as it is, they are strewn randomly around the s
ky.

Hesper knows which of the six is Planet A, though. Hesper knows all manner of things of this sort. He tells the year-captain, and the year-captain brings the eye of the viewplate to focus on the world they hope to explore.

It looks like a world.

It loo
ks like
the
world. The world of their dreams; their home away from home; the New Earth that they have crossed this immense gulf to find.

All of Hesper
’
s data-analogies and equivalencies have turned out to be smack-on-the-nose accurate. It is a miracle, the
information that the sharp-nosed little man has managed to conjure out of the scrambled n
o
space numbers with which he works. Planet A seems to be exactly what he said it would be, an Earth-sized
world, more or less, with what appear to be blue oceans and patches of green vegetation and brown soil. There is a sprawling tentacular icecap at the northern pole and a smaller, more compact cap at the southern one. There seem to be thin clouds scudding
through what seems to be an atmosphere.

“
Break out the champagne!”
Paco yells. “
We
’
re home!”

But there is no champagne, the supply that they brought from Earth having been exhausted the night of the six-month anniversary party and the newly synthesized bat
ch still undergoing its second fermentation; nor are they “
home,”
however much this place may superficially rese
m
ble Earth; nor is there any guarantee that they will be able to settle here. Far from it. The year-captain can
’
t help thinking that the odds ag
ainst their finding the right planet on the first attempt are about the same as those of four poker players being handed royal flushes on the same deal.

Still, all the early signs are promising. And the year-captain is neither surprised nor greatly displea
sed by Paco
’
s boisterousness. Boisterou
s
ness is one of Paco
’
s specialties. Besides, they have at least managed successfully to find their way to this place. That calls for a little jubil
a
tion, whether or not the planet turns out to be one they can use.

Jul
ia has some more work to do, now: braking the starship in such a way that it will glide down into orbit around Planet A. Because nospace travel takes place outside the classical Newtonian conceptual framework of the laws of motion, the “
acceleration”
that
the stardrive imparted to the
Wotan
during its journey and the “
velocity”
that the ship thereby a
t
tained bear no relation to the starship
’
s movements now that it has d
e
parted from nospace. It is traveling, in fact, at the same speed it had been making at t
he instant it shunted from realspace to nospace in its departure from Earth. Since it had been positioned at that time in orbit not far above the surface of Earth, it is still moving now at its former orbital velocity. The starship is essentially still in
orbit around Earth. But Earth is no longer nearby.

So Julia must make the necessary adjustments. The
Wotan
is not equipped for extended travel through realspace, but the braking motor with which the starship is equipped will be sufficient for a maneuver of
this sort. It is a simple operation; Julia copes with it with ease.

Meanwhile Marcus and Innelda, whose main areas of expertise are in planetary survey work, are doing an instrument analysis of the world that they hope to explore. There is no sense expend
ing the reaction mass needed to launch a drone probe, let alone sending a manned expedition down there, if Hesper
’
s readings of Planet A
’
s atmospheric makeup and gravitational force and other significant characteristics are incorrect.

But Hesper
’
s figures
continue to be right on the mark. The gravity is reasonable, even alluring: .093 Earth-norm. A handy nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, a little shorter on oxygen and heavier on nitrogen than might be ideal, but probably breathable. Traces of carbon dioxide, a
r
go
n, neon, helium, none of these deployed in perfect Earthlike propo
r
tions but basically close enough to be okay. No sign of free atmospheric hydrogen, which would be a bad thing, indicating disagreeably low temperatures. Definite and heartening presence of
water vapor in the air, not a lot, but enough. A dry place, mostly, this planet, but dry like Ar
i
zona, not dry like Mars. And there is just a touch of methane, too, pr
e
cisely as Hesper had predicted
—
indicating a strong likelihood that the processes of life
are going on down there. Not a certainty
—
the methane could be bubbling up out of subterranean vents, perhaps
—
but neverth
e
less there
’
s a decent probability that living things are growing and eating and digesting and farting, maybe, and dying and decaying,
all of which are methane-producing processes, on the cheerful turf of Planet A.