The shuttle carrying Jason Harmall and Angelina Hesse from Marsbase docked in the early evening, four hours before the Earth Spirit was due. Rumor flew back to us that they were whisked promptly into conference with Schumann, and we waited in the lab for the summons we knew to be due. It wasn’t long in coming.
Harmall was a tall man—almost as tall as Zeno—but he was very slim; his fingers were long and delicate, his jaw deep and narrow. His hair was very fair and his eyes were blue. Angelina Hesse, by contrast, was much squarer of frame and countenance, with serious grey-brown eyes and auburn hair. They were both in the late thirties or early forties—which made me, I suppose, the baby of the party. (Zeno, if you translated his age into our years, was pushing fifty.)
The Space Agency man demonstrated a rare capacity for observing the obvious by asking politely how old I was. I explained that I’d accomplished so much by working hard. He went on to make some equally platitudinous (and faintly insulting) observations about Zeno and the uniqueness of his position on Sule. I didn’t pay them much attention, and was glad when we could get down to business.
Courtesy of Schumann, we had a genuine conference table; we also had a wall-screen uncovered, which indicated that we had a little picture-show to look forward to. The Earth Spirit had obviously been busy transmitting on a tight beam to Marsbase.
“I want you both to understand,” said Harmall to Zeno and me, “that this is strictly a job for volunteers. If at any time you want out, simply say so, and you’re out. What I’m about to tell you is controlled information, and I’ll have to ask you not to repeat any of it for the time being—that’s just a formality. What needs to be said now is that the job is dangerous; maybe very dangerous. I have to know whether you’re prepared to accept that. Dr. Caretta?”
“I’m in,” I said, unhesitatingly. It’s easy to be brave when you’re talking in abstractions.
He only had to glance at Zeno, who nodded calmly.
“Well then, I’ll be brief. Captain D’Orsay, late of the Ariadne, is coming in on the Earth Spirit, and she can provide full details of the whole story. The Ariadne was targeted at a star-cluster a hundred and forty to a hundred and fifty light-years or so toward galactic center. There are something on the order of forty stars in the cluster, over half of them G-type. In getting there she made close enough passage to two other stars to be able to survey them for possible Earthlike planets, but drew a blank.
“Ariadne, as you know, is a colony-ship, carrying three crews in suspended animation. Officers were awakened periodically to carry out systems checks and to evaluate incoming information.
“Once into the cluster, she hit an apparent jackpot. The evidence suggests that at least ten of the G-types have planetary systems, and the odds seem good that at least half of those have life-supporting planets. Ariadne headed straight for the likeliest prospect, and found this.”
Schumann dimmed the lights, and Harmall dabbed at a button on the screen with one of his long fingers. It was a still picture, not a video-tape, but it looked as sharp now as when it was taken.
Earth, from space, looks blue with lots of white streaks. The continents never really show up very well, and they always look rather undistinguished—mottled and muddy—by comparison with the smooth, bright ocean. This world, by contrast, was mostly green-and-white. The clouds might have been Earthly clouds, white and voluminous. The other “Earthlike” worlds don’t have clouds like that. They either have a greenhouse atmosphere that is mottled in shades of grey without a break, or they have hardly anything at all. The surface below the clouds, if it really was land, appeared to be highly verdant. If there was water there, it must have been a virtual soup of photosynthetic algae.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Angelina Hesse. She was watching me. Clearly, she’d already seen the peep-show.
“It’s a very similar kind of world to our own,” said Harmall. “Apparently, though, it’s more stable. Less axial tilt, a trifle smaller, with a shorter day. A single moon, but much smaller than our own—less influential in terms of tides. Little evidence of tectonic activity and no noticeable vulcanism. Not much in the way of mountains; the seas are shallow and there are vast shallow swamps covering fully half the planetary surface. What you or I would call solid ground accounts for only a seventh of the surface, not counting islands in the swamplands, which are legion. No deserts, but there are polar ice-fields which—of course—are hidden here by cloud cover. The name given to it by the duty-crew is Naxos.”
“Why?” I inquired.
“Naxos,” explained Harmall, “was the island where Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus, and from which she was subsequently rescued by Dionysus, who gave her a place among the stars.”
I wasn’t altogether convinced of the propriety of that, but it was hardly for me to question it.
“One full crew was revived,” the blond man went on. “Captain d’Orsay, following the procedure laid down, floated a technical crew down to the surface. There they established a bubble-dome, following the rules with regard to sterile environments. The dome was completely sealed, with a space between the two membranes of the shell that could be evacuated, with a double airlock and the usual facilities for showering down. No one went outside, of course, without a sterile suit. This ground-crew consisted of twenty people. A reserve of thirty waited aboard ship. Six of the twenty were ecosystemic analysts, but as you can imagine, they’d had no opportunity to develop the experience that is routinely available nowadays. Similarly, their equipment was crude compared to what we can put into the field.
“All the early results implied that the planet was both habitable and safe. The one obvious danger was oxygen intoxication: the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere at ground level is a little higher on Naxos than on Earth. They found no obvious evidence of biological threat. They found that the basis of the life-system was a nucleic acid similar to DNA, and that the supplementary cell biochemistry was a reasonable analogue of our own. They worked, of course, mostly with plant specimens, and they carried out their work with all due precautions—at least, we suppose that they did. In view of what happened, there must be some doubt. Perhaps they got careless when nothing showed up to worry them.”
He paused, and began to prod the button under the screen again. The green world disappeared, to be replaced by a series of shots taken on the planet’s surface. All stills. Long-shots and close-ups, mixed in together. Stands of trees, individual flowering plants, flat expanses of tall grass. Ponds and streams decked out with rafts of vegetation or trailing pennants of weed. Insects ranging from small, rounded bugs to big dragonflies, with chimerical water-beasties thrown in for good measure. A few creatures that wore their skeletons inside instead of out, but none bigger than my hand, mostly soft and moist of skin—nothing that could properly be insulted if you decided to call it a frog.
There were half a dozen points in the sequence where I wanted to call “stop,” but I let the chances go. There’d be other times. FTL journeys are notoriously boring—what’s there to do in zero-g but study hard?
Then the pictures changed to interior shots. The dome and its staff. People at work and people at rest. The lab, where everyone wore plastic bags and polythene festoons made the whole working area into a parody of a membrane-filled cell. Chromatograms by the dozen, plotting out in pastel-colored clouds the chemical make-up of the not-so-very-alien life-system. White mice, unprotected by plastic bags, running free and waiting (though they surely didn’t know it!) to give warning of any pathogens by falling ill and maybe dying. Canaries, too, testing the local seeds for digestibility. The mice and the canaries looked suspiciously healthy, bearing in mind the baleful comments Harmall had appended to his last instalment of the Naxos saga.
