Ben Bova - Flight of Exiles

The table was almost filled when Dan Christopher and Joe Haller came in together.

Larry felt a flash of surprise go through him. Then he rose from his chair and went down along the table to Dan.

“Hey, it’s good to see you back on your feet again,” he said, putting out his hand. “How do you feel?”

Dan shook Larry’s hand without enthusiasm. “I’m all right,” he answered.

“I didn’t know you’d be out of the infirmary today,” Larry apologized. “I was going to visit you. I did drop in once, but they told me you were sleeping.”

“I’m fine now,” Dan said.

And sore as hell, Larry realized. “Look… uh, why don’t we get together after this meeting and talk. There’s a lot we ought to hash over.”

Dan nodded. “Okay.”

Feeling even shakier than before, Larry went back to the Chairman’s seat and opened the meeting. He let the automatic procedures of every meeting smooth over his nervousness, and sat there listening to his pulse beating in his eardrums as the minutes of the previous meeting flashed on the wall screen at the far end of the long, narrow room.

They rumbled through old business, and listened to Joe Haller’s report on progress with the generator. Adrienne Kaufman, head of the Genetics Section, recommended that the Council offer its official expression of sympathy for those who lost family members in the recent fire. Larry glanced at Dan while the unanimous vote was made; Dan was staring at him, his eyes ablaze.

Then came new business, and Larry heard himself saying:

“As you know, we’ll be in the Alpha Centauri system in about two months. Our trajectory will bring us to a point where we fly-by the major planet. At some point before our closest approach, we must decide if we want to decelerate and take up orbit around the planet, or continue onward and out of the Centauri system. So it’s time for us to begin a serious review of what’s known about the planets and to consider launching our remote probes, to gather more data on them.”

Pressing a stud set into the tabletop before him, Larry said, “Here’s the best holo of the major planet that we have, taken by the original probe from Earth, nearly a century ago.”

The wall screen seemed to dissolve. In its place, deep space itself took form, with stars hanging everywhere, and a fat, yellowish ball of a planet sitting in the middle of the emptiness.

“Dr. Loring, could you review what’s known about the major planet?” Larry asked.

“Not terribly much, I’m afraid,” Loring began in his most pedantic style. “That primitive probe was woefully small, and a horrendous communications problem—transmitting holographic data over more than four light-years is no simple problem, believe me! And, of course, the men who launched the probe weren’t considering settling down on the Centaurian planets to live. In fact, they didn’t even know there were any planets in the Alpha Centauri system when the probe was launched.”

“All right,” said one of the other elder Councilmen. “Now how about telling us what we do know?”

“Certainly, certainly,” Dr. Loring replied. “I won’t even discuss the minor planet… it’s airless, bare rock, baked by the big star, Alpha Centauri A… which, as you know is almost exactly like the sun. I don’t foresee any radiation problems for us from A… and star B is small and cool, no problems there either. No worries about high fluxes of ultraviolet or x-rays and such. Now Proxima—the third star of the system—is so dim and so far away that it will look like an ordinary star up in the sky. No influence on the planet at all.”

“What about the planet itself?” Adrienne Kaufman asked sharply.

“Oh, yes… Frankly, it’s not going to be paradise. The white clouds you see flecking the surface are water vapor, all right, and the temperature range of the planet should permit liquid water on its surface. But, as you can see, that surface is mostly yellow-green. Watery planets, such as Earth, tend to look blue.”

“What is the yellow-green stuff?”

Loring shrugged elaborately. “I wish I could tell you. The spectroscopic data returned by the original probe was very scant. I’ve been doing additional work with our equipment in the hub, but it’s still very skimpy data. There’s no evidence yet of liquid water on the surface. The planet’s density appears to be rather high, judging from the orbits of its little moonlets. Its surface gravity might be as high as 1 1/2 g… certainly no lower than 1.2. Anyone standing on that planet is going to feel heavier than he does now by 20 to 50 percent.”

“That could make life unpleasant.”

The chief medic said, “It could make life impossible for us on the surface. Human beings can’t live normal, active lives under a continuous 1.5-gload. It would ruin your back, your abdominal wall, your feet and legs.”

“But the data’s so sketchy—”

Larry took over. “It’s very sketchy, and it could be wrong, too. I think we ought to launch our own probes as soon as possible, and start to get more detailed and reliable information.”

There was a general murmur of agreement.

Dan Christopher spoke up. “What happens if we find that the planet is as bad as we fear?”

Silence. Everyone turned to look at Dan, sitting down at the far end of the table, then one by one they turned back to look at Larry for an answer.

Larry hiked his eyebrows. “We’d have two possible alternatives. Either stay in orbit and live in the ship until we can raise a generation of children who are genetically altered so that they’re suited for life on the planet’s surface… or keep going and look for another star with a more Earthlike planet.”

“Which would you recommend, in such a case?” Dan asked.

Larry sensed danger, a trap. “It’s much too early to try to answer that question,” he said slowly. “There are too many variables, too many unknowns.”

Joe Haller said, “Truthfully, I wouldn’t want to bet on this bucket of transistors making it much farther than Alpha Centauri.”

“And we know nothing at all about possible Earthlike planets around other stars,” Dr. Loring pointed out.

“Then we’ve got to stay at Alpha Centauri and modify our children to live on the major planet,” Dan said.

Larry found himself shaking his head. “We don’t know yet. There’s a chance that we won’t be able to do that, even if we want to. And to expect the rest of us to live out our lives here in the ship while we’re raising children who’ll leave us and go live on the surface… well, I think we might run into some psychological problems there.”

“Wouldn’t there be psychological problems connected with sailing off for some unknown destination?” Dan asked.

“Yes, sure, but…” Larry stopped himself. Why does he want to start an argument? “Look., there’s no sense talking about this until we have some data back from the close-up probes.”

Emile Polany, chief of the engineering department, said in a deep voice that still carried traces of old Europe, “We can launch the probes after a few days’ checkout. They are capable of high acceleration, and could be in orbit around the major planet in a few weeks.”

“What about landing on the planet itself?” Dan asked.

“The probes are equipped with instrument packages that can be soft-landed on the surface.”

“Good. We ought to begin the checkout at once,” said Dan.

Only then did Larry realize what was happening. He’s trying to take the meeting away from me. He’s trying to show everyone that he’s in charge, no matter who they elected Chairman.

The meeting ended.

Much more swiftly than they had drifted into the meeting room, the Council members cleared out. Larry watched them leave, all of them except Dan. Finally he was alone in the room except for Dan. They sat at opposite ends of the table staring at each other.