“It means asking for the special favor of the universal forces,” he explains. “Never mind. Just tell them that we’re sending three of our people out to see whether we’ve found a place where we can live.”
For Huw this is the big moment of his career, the time when he takes the center of the stage and keeps it for all time. He is about to become the first human being to set foot on a planet of another star.
He has spent the past three days reconfiguring the largest of the Wotan’s three drone probes for manual operation. Unlike the probe that has already gone down to Planet A, and a second one just like it that is also on board, this one is big enough to hold a crew of three or four people, and is intended for follow-up expeditions precisely of this sort. It is default-programmed for proxy operation from the mother ship, but Huw intends to be his own pilot on the trips to and from the planetary surface. And now, after three days of programming and simulations and rechecks, he has pronounced the little vessel ready to go.
There has been one change in the personnel of the mission since the original three were named. During some celebratory horseplay in the baths involving Heinz, Paco, Natasha, and two or three others, Innelda has slipped on a soapy tile — she says she was pushed, somebody’s sly hand on her rump — and has badly sprained her leg. Leon says that she will be able to move about normally within five or six more days; but at the moment the best she can do is hobble, and Huw is unwilling to delay the expedition until she recovers, and the year-captain has backed him on that. So Marcus, whose planetographic expertise duplicates Innelda’s in many ways, has been chosen to replace her. Innelda is irate at missing her chance, but her protests to the year-captain fall on deaf ears. She will discover, before very long, that whoever it was who gave her that rude shove in the baths has done her a considerable favor; but that is the kind of thing that becomes apparent only after the fact.
The space suit — clad figures of Huw, Giovanna, and Marcus constitute a grand and glorious procession as they march through the bowels of the ship toward the drone-probe hangar. Virtually everyone turns out to see them off, everyone except Noelle, who is drained and weary after her morning colloquy with her distant sister and has gone to lie down in her cabin, and the still-angry Innelda, who is sulking inher cabin like brooding Achilles. Huw leads the way, waving majestically to the assembled onlookers like the offshoot of the great Prince Madoc of Wales that he believes himself to be. Certainly his Celtic blood is at high fervor today. What is a little trip to Ganymede, or even Venus, next to this?
He and Giovanna and Marcus settle into their cozy slots aboard the probe. Hatches close. Pressurizing begins. The Wotan’s launch bay opens and the probe slides forward, separates itself from its mother ship, emerges into open space.
A tiny nudge of acceleration, the merest touch of Huw’s finger against the control, and the probe breaks from orbit and begins to curl planetward. Soon enough the brown-blue-green bulk of Planet A is the only thing the three explorers can see from the port in front of their acceleration chairs. It is astonishing how big the planet looks as they near it. It is only an Earth-size planet, but it looms like a Jupiter before them. A year in the seclusion that is nospace has given them the feeling that the Wotan is the only object in the universe. But now there is another one.
Though Huw is definitely in charge, and can override anything at any moment, the real work of calculating the landing orbit is being done by the Wotan’s drive intelligence. That’s only common sense. The intelligence knows how such things are done, and its reaction time is a thousand times quicker than Huw’s. So he watches, now and then nodding approvingly, as the landing operation unfolds. They are coming down near the coast of the least parched of the four desertlike continents. The climate appears to be the most temperate here, milder than in the interior and, so it would seem, blessed with somewhat higher precipitation levels. Huw is planning a trek to the ocean shore to try to get a reading on what sort of marine life, if any, this place may have.
The ground, visible a few hundred kilometers below, seems pretty scruffy here, though: dry buff-brown fields, isolated patches of low contorted shrubs, a few minor blunt-nosed rocky outcroppings, but nothing in the way of really interesting geological formations. To the east, low hills are evident. Planet A does not appear to have much in the way of truly mountainous country. To Huw the landscape looks elderly and a little on the tired side. It is a flattened, eroded landscape, well worn, one that has been sitting out here doing nothing very much for a very long time.
Not really a promising place to found New Earth, he thinks. But we are here, and we will see what there is to see.
“Touchdown,” he tells the year-captain, sitting up there 20,000 kilometers away in the control cabin of the Wotan, as the drone makes a nice unassisted landing right in the heart of a large, broad, shallow bowl-shaped formation, perhaps the crater of some ancient cosmic collision, set in a great dry plateau.
The landscape, Huw observes, does not seem all that wondrously Earthlike when viewed at very close range. The sky has a faint greenish tinge. The position of the sun is not quite what he would expect it to be: out of true by a few degrees of arc, just enough to be bothersome. The only living things in sight are little clumps of yellow-headed shrubs arrayed here and there around the sides of this sloping basin; they have peculiar jet-black corkscrew-twist trunks and oddly jutting branches, and they, too, seem very thoroughly otherworldly. Even the way they are situated is strange, for they grow in long, right elliptical rings, perhaps a hundred bushes to each ring, and each ring spaced in remarkable equidistance from its neighbors. As though this is a formal garden of some weird sort. But this is a desert, on an apparently uninhabited world, not anybody’s garden at all. Something feels wrong to him about these spacing patterns.
The surrounding rock formations, jagged black pyramidal spires fifty or sixty meters high, have the same nonspecific wrongness. They announce, however subtly, that they have undergone processes of formation and erosion that are not quite the same as those the rocks of Earth have experienced.
It is understood that Huw will be the first one to step outside. He is the master explorer; he is the captain of this little ship; this is his show, from first to last. He is eager to get outside, too, to clamber down that ladder and sink his boots into this extrasolar turf and utter whatever the first words of the first human visitor to a world of another star are going to be. But he is too canny an explorer to rush right out there, however eager he may be. There are housekeeping details to look after first. Determination and recording of their exact position, external temperature readings to take, geophysical soundings to make sure that the ship has not been set down in some precarious unstable place and will fall over the moment he starts to climb out of it, and so forth and so forth. All of that takes close to an hour.
While this is going on Huw notices, after a time, that he has started to feel a little odd.
Uneasy. Queasy. Even a little creepy, maybe.
These are unusual feelings for him. Huw is a robust and ebullient man, to whom such sensations as dismay and apprehension and disquietude and agitation are utterly foreign. He is generally prudent and circumspect, useful traits in one who finds his greatest pleasure in entering unfamiliar and dangerous places, but a tendency toward anxiety is not part of his psychological makeup.
He feels a good deal of anxiety now. He knows that what he feels can be called anxiety, because there is a strange knot in the pit of his stomach, and a curious lump has appeared in his throat that makes swallowing difficult, and he has read that these feelings are symptoms of anxiety, which is a species of fear. Up until now he has never experienced these symptoms, not that he can recall, nor has he experienced very much in the way of any other sort of fear, either.
How very peculiar, he thinks. This place is far less threatening than Venus, where the temperature at its mildest was as hot as an oven and one whiff of the atmosphere would have killed him in an instant, and he hadn’t felt a bit of this stuff there. The worst that could have happened to him on Venus was that he would die, after all, and though he was far from ready for dying, Huw quite clearly had understood ahead of time that he might be putting himself in harm’s way by going there. Likewise when he had visited Mercury, and Ganymede, and roaring volcanic Io, and all the rest of the uncongenial but fascinating worlds and worldlets that his ventures had taken him to. So why these sensations of — fear! — as he sits here, fully space-suited, inside the sealed snug-as-a-bug environment of this elegantly designed and sturdily constructed little spaceship?
It is almost time for extravehicular now. Huw steals a glance at Giovanna, cradled in the acceleration chair to his right, and at Marcus, on his other side. He can see only their faces. Neither one looks very cheerful. Marcus is frowning a little, but then, Marcus almost always frowns. Giovanna’s expression, too, might be a bit on the apprehensive side, and yet it might just be a look of deep concentration; no doubt she is contemplating the experiments she intends to carry out here.
Huw remains mystified at his own attack of edginess. Is that a droplet of sweat running down the tip of his nose? Yes, yes, that is what it seems to be. And another one trickling across his forehead. He appears to be doing quite a bit of perspiring. He is actually beginning to feel very poorly indeed.
Something I ate, maybe, he tells himself. My digestion is fundamentally sound but there is always the odd apple in the barrel, isn’t there?
“Well, now,” he says to Giovanna and to Marcus, and to everyone listening aboard the Wotan. “The moment has arrived for me to go out and claim this land in the name of Henry Tudor.”
He makes sure that his tone is a ringing, hearty one. His little private joke stirs no laughter among his companions. He doesn’t like that. And how curious, he thinks, that he needs towork at sounding hearty! He runs through one final suit-check and begins to set up the hatch-opening commands.
“When I go out,” he says, “you stay put right where you are until I call for you, all right? Let’s make sure I’m okay before anybody tries to join me. I’ll give the signal and you come out next, Giovanna. We check how that goes and then I’ll call for you, Marcus. Is that clear?”
They confirm that it is quite clear.
The hatch is open. Huw crawls through the lock, pauses for a moment, begins to descend the ladder in slow stately strides, trying to remember those lines of poetry about stout Cortez silent on that peak in Darien — feeling like some watcher of the skies, was it, when a new planet swims into his ken?
His left boot touches the surface of Planet A.
“Jesus Goddamn Christ!” Huw cries, a piercing anachronistic yawp that rips not only into the earphones of his fellow explorers but also, alas, into the annals of exploration as the first recorded statement of the first human visitor to an extrasolar planet.
“Huw, are you all right?” Giovanna asks from within, and he can hear the year-captain’s voice coming over the line from the Wotan, asking the same thing. It must have been one devil of a yell, Huw thinks.
“I’m fine,” he says, trying not to sound too shaky. “Turned my ankle a little when I put my foot down, that’s all.”
He completes the descent and steps away from the drone probe.
He is lying about his ankle and he is lying about feeling fine. He is, as a matter of fact, not feeling fine at all.
He is experiencing some sort of descent into the jaws of Hell.
The — uneasiness, anxiety, whatever it was — that he was feeling a few minutes ago on board the probe is nothing at all in comparison to this. The intensity of the discomfort has risen by several orders of magnitude — rose, actually, in the very instant that his boot touched the ground. It was the psychic equivalent of stepping on a fiery-hot metal griddle. And now he has passed beyond anxiety into some other kind of fear that is, perhaps, bordering on real terror. Panic, even.
These feelings are all completely new to him. He finds it almost as terrifying to realize that he is capable of being afraid as it is to be experiencing this intense fear.
Nor does Huw have any idea what it is that he might be afraid of. The fear is simplythere, a fact of existence, like his chin, like his left kneecap. It seems to be bubbling up out of the ground into him through his feet, passing up into his calves, his shins, his thighs, his groin, his gut.
What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell—
Huw knows he needs to regain control of himself. The last thing he wants is for any of the others to suspect what is going on inside him. No more than a few seconds have passed since his emergence from the probe, and his initial anguished screech is the only sign he has given thus far that anything is amiss.
Now the strength gained through a lifetime of self-confident high achievement asserts itself. This can’t be happening to him, he tells himself, because he is not the sort of man to whom things like this happen: Q.E.D. The initial feeling of shock at that first touch of boot against ground has given way to a kind of steady low-level discomfort: he seems to be getting used to the effect. Does not like it, does not like it at all, but is already learning how to tolerate it, perhaps.
He walks five or six paces farther away from the probe, stops, takes a deep breath, another, another. Squares his shoulders, stands as erect as is possible to stand. Pushes the welling tide of terror back down his body millimeter by millimeter, down through his legs, his ankles, his toes.
There.
It’s still there, trying to get back up into his chest to seize his heart and then move on beyond that to his lungs, his throat, his brain. But he has it, whatever the hell it is, in check. More or less. Its presence baffles him but he is holding it at bay, at the expense of considerable mental and moral energy. It requires from him a constant struggle against the profound desire to scream and weep and fling his arms around wildly. But it is a struggle that he appears to be winning, and now he can proceed with the business of taking a little look around this place.
Now he hears a moaning sound just to his left, which calls to his attention the fact that someone else is out here with him. One of the others has left the probe without waiting for the go-ahead signal; the moan is probably an initial response to the hot-griddle effect of making direct contact with this planet’s surface.
“Hey!” he yells. “Didn’t I say to stay in there until I called you out?”
It is Marcus, Huw realizes. Which is even worse: Giovanna was the one whom he had chosen to be the second one out of the probe. Marcus has exited the ship on his own authority and out of turn, and now, moving in what seems like an oddly dazed and disoriented way, he is wandering around in irregular circles near the base of the ladder, scuffing his boot against the soil and stirring up little clouds of dust.
“I’m coming out too,” Giovanna says over the phones. “I don’t feel so happy being cooped up in here.”
“No, wait—” Huw says, but it is too late. Already he sees her poking out of the hatch and starting to climb down. The year-captain is saying something over the phones, apparently asking what’s taking place down there, but Huw can’t take the time to reply just now. He is still fighting the bursts of seemingly unmotivated terror that feel as though they are pulsing up through the ground at him, and he needs to get his crew back under control too. He jogs over toward Marcus, who has stopped scuffing at the ground and now is walking, or, to put it more accurately, staggering, in a zigzag path heading away from the probe on the far side.
“Marcus!” Huw calls sharply. “Halt where you are, Marcus! That’s an order!”