Huw is hard pressed to remember the last time he saw a dead person. Twenty years ago, perhaps; thirty, even. Death is not a common event in Huw’s world, certainly not death at Marcus’s age. There are occasional unfortunate accidents, yes, few and far between, but in general death is not considered a normal option for people less than a century old. The idiotic, meaningless death of this young man on this alien world strikes Huw with massive impact. Above and beyond the special things that Planet A has been doing to his mind since the moment of landing, completely separate from all of that, Huw feels a pure hot shaft of grief and shock and utter despondency run through the core of his soul. He sags for a moment, and has to steady himself against this unexpected weakness. This planet is teaching him things about the limits of his resilience, which he once had thought was boundless.
“What can we do?” Giovanna asks. “Is there something in the medical kit that will—”
Huw laughs. It is such a harsh laugh that she flinches from him, and he feels almost like apologizing, but doesn’t. “What we have to do,” he says, as gently as he can, “is pick him up and carry him back to the ship, I suppose. That’s all. The other option, the practical thing to do, would be to leave him right here, with a cairn to mark the place, but we really can’t do that, you know. Not without permission. The one thing we can’t do is bring him back to life, Giovanna.”
The year-captain cuts in once more, wanting to know what’s going on.
“We have a casualty here,” Huw says somberly. He is furious with himself, though he knows that none of this is his fault. “There’s something about this goddamned place that drives you crazy. Marcus panicked and bolted and ran. Up the hill, down the other side. And tripped and fell headlong against a rock and broke his stupid neck.”
Silence, for a moment, at the other end.
“Are you saying that he’s dead, Huw?” the year-captain finally asks.
“I’m saying that, yes.”
“Do you want to talk to Leon?”
“About what?” Huw asks savagely. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Marcus is really dead and he’s going to stay that way. He can’t be fixed, not by me, not by Leon if I bring him back up there, not by Jesus Christ himself. Believe me.” There’s Jesus Christ again, Huw thinks. The old myths keep surfacing. Something about this planet makes you want to invoke divine aid, it would seem. “Or Zeus, for that matter,” Huw says, still angry, angry at the year-captain, at Marcus, at himself, at the universe.
Once again the year-captain is slow to respond.
“I think what we have here is an uninhabitable planet,” Huw says, as the silence from above stretches intolerably. “That’s not a final conclusion but it looks pretty overwhelming. There’s something very peculiar here, some kind of a psychic field, that starts operating on you the moment you make surface contact with the planet, and it, doesn’t let up. You just go on and on, feeling horrible, every minute you’re here. Some minutes are worse than others, but none of them is ever any good. Do you understand what I’m saying, year-captain?”
“We’ve been following your ground conversations. We have some idea of what it’s been like.”
“You haveno idea, none. You only think you do. What shall I do with Marcus? Bury him here?”
“No. Bring him back with you.”
“You think he isn’t really dead?”
“I think salvaging what we can of him for the ship’s organ bank makes more sense than putting him in a hole in the ground,” the year-captain says, sounding brusque. “You’re going to start back up here right away, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“No?”
“That would be aborting the mission, captain. Do you want me to do that?”
“You said the place is uninhabitable.”
“I saidI think it’s uninhabitable. We’ve only experienced one small patch of it. Suppose this psychic field, if that’s what it is, is a factor only in this one region? The least I can do is check out some other area before we write the mission off as a complete failure.”
“It’s cost us one life already, Huw.”
“Exactly. That’s why I want to make absolutely sure that we can’t use this planet before we give up on it. Marcus will really have died in vain if we let one bad experience spook us away from a planet that might have worked out for us had we only bothered to take a little more time for a good look at the rest of it.”
Still another spell of nonresponse now from on high. Huw wonders what effect Marcus’s death is having on the year-captain and the rest of them up there. He himself is growing almost numb to it, he realizes. Marcus’s twisted form, lying right at his feet, seems to him to be nothing more than a badly constructed doll now.
Once more Huw is compelled to break the silence himself. “Are you ordering me to abort the mission, captain?”
“No. I’m not doing that. What’s your actual plan, Huw?”
“I was originally going to make a trek to the seashore near here, but there’s no sense in that now. What we’re going to do is make a landing on a second continent, a brief reconnaissance. If we get the same kind of negative results there too, we’ll head for home right away. Bringing Marcus with us, as you request. What do you say?”
“Go ahead,” says die year-captain. “Check out a second continent, if that’s what you want to do.”
Huw closes Marcus’s faceplate and signals to Giovanna, and together they carry the dead man up the slope, down the far side, and across the basin to the ship. It is not an easy task, despite Marcus’s slenderness and the slightly lessened gravitational pull. The dispiriting emanations of this planet claw at their souls, robbing them of will and strength. But somehow they manage. They load Marcus into his acceleration chair and slide into their own.
Giovanna says, “You’re really going to investigate some other site before we go back?”
“I really am, yes. Don’t you think you can handle it?”
“I think it’s a waste of time.”
“So do I,” Huw says. “But we’ve worked very hard to get ourselves here. If I don’t make one more attempt at seeing if we can cope with this world, I’m going to wonder for the rest of my life whether I was too hasty in leaving. Humor me, Giovanna. I can’t turn back this fast.”
“Even with Marcus sitting here next to us and—”
“Even with,” he says. As he speaks, he is busy requesting lift-off assistance from the drive intelligence. The drone probe works its way through its sealing maneuvers, the hatch swings closed, and the usual array of readouts begins to announce the little ship’s readiness for going airborne. Huw does not attempt to take direct command of the vessel himself; he is too drained by what has occurred here, and he wants simply to sink back in his acceleration chair and let things happen around him, at least for a little while.
They are in the air now. Heading eastward, flying at an altitude of a thousand kilometers, crossing a calm gray-green ocean with an almost waveless surface that has a curiously greasy look. Night begins to descend around them, and very quickly they are in darkness. This planet has no moon. The stars, against that pure black backdrop, are nearly as intense in their gleaming as they would be in space. Huw, studying the sky, tries to arrange the unfamiliar patterns into constellations. That one, he thinks, is something like a tree with huge feathery branches, and he traces another outline that strikes him as reminiscent of a dog’s head, and another that seems to be a warrior about to throw a spear. He tries to point these figures out to Giovanna, but she is unable to see them no matter how carefully he directs her to the key stars, and gradually Huw loses them himself in the general confusion of the bright cosmic clutter.
The probe is over land again. A greenish dawn is breaking. Huw assumes manual control and searches for a good place to bring them down.
This continent is one big desert, a sea of orange dunes. Perhaps it doesn’t radiate nightmare waves like the continent in the western hemisphere, but it doesn’t look like a very good bet for settlement all the same. From the air Huw sees nothing that might be a river, a lake, even a stream — just sand and more sand, and squat flat-topped hills separating one cluster of dunes from another, and some isolated patches of dismal scrubby vegetation. Still, he has come here for the purpose of finding out something particular about this side of the planet, and he intends to follow through on that intention.
Huw sets the probe down carefully in a windswept area where the dunes have been pushed aside, and begins the hatch-opening procedure. But already the wrongness of this world is manifesting itself once more upon them, here in the first instants of their second landfall. He can feel the icy, invisible skeletal fingers scrabbling at his brainstem again, the queasiness expanding in his gut, the conviction that a web of some constricting fabric is being woven around his heart.
There is a curse on this filthy place, he tells himself.
He glances over at Giovanna. She nods. She’s feeling it too.
“Let’s go outside anyway,” Huw says.
“What for?”
“To say that we did. Come on.”
Giovanna shrugs and releases herself from her acceleration chair and follows him out. As before, the waves of fear intensify as they make actual contact with the surface of the ground. Huw looks upward at the brightening morning sky. An unreasoning conviction begins to grow in him that there are winged creatures circling around up there, though he has not seen any form of animal life at all, airborne or otherwise, since their arrival on this world: huge gliding monsters overhead with sharp teeth and great curving black wings, he is sure of it, batlike beasts that even now are making ready to swoop down on them and wrap those dreadful wings around their faces.
There is nothing in the sky. No monsters. Not even a cloud.
He fears them, even so. He imagines that he can hear the slashing sound of their swift descent, the heavy rustling of those immense wings as they enfold him. He feels the dry, rough, rasping texture of them. Smells the parched, burned odor of them. His breath shortens and his heart pounds. He puts his hand to his throat. He is choking. He is definitely choking.
He takes it for a moment more. Then, suddenly, Huw pulls his faceplate open and fills his lungs with the air of this terrible planet.