Ben Bova - New Earth

“No sign that we can detect,” Meek countered. “That’s why we’re sending your rovers down there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Thornberry admitted grudgingly. “Right.”

“Somebody’s down there,” Meek said firmly. “That laser didn’t get there by itself.”

Trish looked up from her half-demolished breakfast and asked, “But who could it be? I mean, who put that laser down there in the middle of the forest? And why?”

Jordan murmured, “Sherlock Holmes.”

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“I believe it was Holmes who said that it was useless to speculate in the absence of facts.”

“Hah,” said Meek. “Excellent point. We’re just wasting our time until the rovers start to transmit some useful information to us.”

“Which they should be doing in another hour or so,” Thornberry said, with a glance at his wristwatch. “The rocketplane ought to be hitting the atmosphere in a couple of minutes.” He pushed his chair back and got to his feet.

Jordan rose, too. Trish kept gobbling her breakfast and Meek pointed to the wall screen. “You’ll pipe the imagery here, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Jordan said. Then he and Thornberry headed for the command center.

Brandon and Elyse were still standing close enough to touch, Jordan saw. Is there a romance going on? he wondered. Brandon’s always been a fast worker, but even for him this would be something of a record. Then he recalled, Of course, they knew each other all through the training period and embarkation, before we went into cryosleep.

Hazzard had put the imagery from Thornberry’s console onto the command center’s main screen, but all it showed was hash.

“Blackout,” Hazzard said. “Atmospheric entry plasma sheath blocks transmissions.” Then he added, “Temporarily.”

The screen suddenly cleared and Jordan saw a world of jagged peaks and thickly leafed trees scudding past as the rocketplane skimmed above a heavily forested chain of mountains. Thornberry hurried to his console chair, then turned back with an almost apologetic expression on his fleshy face.

“Entry and landing’s automated,” he said.

From his command chair, Hazzard said, “I’ve set up the override program. If we need to, I can fly the bird.”

Thornberry nodded.

“It’ll be fine,” Jordan assured him.

Still, they were all tense as they watched the ground rushing up toward the camera. The rocketplane’s speed slowed noticeably, but still there was nothing to see but an endless forest stretching to the horizon in every direction.

“The sky is blue,” Elyse said, in a half whisper.

“Those trees are damned tall,” said Brandon.

“Final retroburn,” muttered Thornberry. The rocketplane seemed to hover in midair momentarily.

“There’s the clearing,” Hazzard called out, pointing.

“Ah, she’s gliding in like a blessed angel,” said Thornberry.

Jordan watched as the open, grassy glade expanded to fill the display screen, tilted slightly, then straightened out and rushed up. The ground looked smooth, covered with green grass. The view bumped once, twice, then all motion stopped.

“She’s down,” Thornberry sighed, as if a gigantic weight had just been taken off his shoulders.

Hazzard flexed his fingers, then recited, “Log entry: oh-eight-forty-two hours, this date, spacecraft one landed on Sirius C. Fill in geographical coordinates.”

Jordan let out a gust of breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. She’s down, he told himself. The craft has landed safely.

The camera atop the landing craft slowly revolved, showing a broad grassy glade surrounded by tall, straight-boled trees, darkly green. Mountains in the distance, their peaks bare rock. The glade was flat and smooth, not a rock or boulder in sight, as if the area had been specifically cleared for the rover’s touchdown. The sky above was turquoise blue, dotted with puffy white clouds.

The first view from the surface of New Earth, Jordan thought.

“Send this view to Earth right away,” he said to Hazzard.

“Won’t get there for more’n eight years,” Hazzard replied.

“Yes, but send it. Send it now.”

“Right.”

For the next three-quarters of an hour they watched as the rocketplane automatically checked all its internal systems and activated its sensors. Meek and the others filtered into the command center and watched with Jordan as the numbers scrolled along the bottom of the main display screen: atmospheric pressure, temperature, composition—all were well within the limits that had already been recorded for New Earth by the earlier robotic probes.

We can breathe that air, Jordan told himself. Then he added, If it’s not full of dangerous microbes.

“Activating rovers,” Thornberry said, in the flat, almost mechanical tone of a mission controller. The command center fell completely silent, but Jordan could sense the excitement vibrating among the onlookers. He felt it himself.

The view switched to show the shadowy interior of the rocketplane. One side swung open and down, turning into a ramp. Brilliant, glaring sunlight streamed in.

“Rovers check out,” Thornberry reported tersely. “Out you go, lads.”

His console’s main screen split to show two views, from the cameras mounted atop the two rovers. Hazzard flicked his fingers across the keyboard built into his chair’s armrests and two of the wall screens above the consoles lit up to show the view from each of the two rovers. The machines trundled down the ramps and out onto the smooth grassy ground.

“Over the river and through the woods…” somebody singsonged. Brandon, Jordan thought.

“There’s no river.” Elyse’s voice, clearly.

The rovers plunged into the forest, at ten kilometers per hour. Jordan watched, fascinated, as the thick-boled trees glided past. There was precious little foliage between the trees, hardly any bushes at all. The woods looked almost like a well-tended park.

“Look,” said Brandon. “There’s a little stream.”

“A babbling brook.”

“Look out for animal life,” said Meek. “The equivalent of squirrels or other arboreal forms.”

His biologist, Paul Longyear, hurried to one of the unused consoles, muttering, “The sensors should be taking bio samples of the air.”

Longyear was a young Native American with a complexion the color of dried tobacco leaf, dark hair braided halfway down his back, and deep onyx eyes.

“Can’t those pushcarts go any faster?” Brandon demanded.

Thornberry shot him a grim look over his shoulder as he replied, “Sure they can. But not over territory we haven’t mapped yet. I don’t want these darlings bumping into trouble.”

“Maybe there’s tiger traps down there,” somebody snickered.

“We don’t have any idea of what’s down there,” Jordan said, loudly enough to stop the chatter. The terrain had been mapped from orbit, of course, but the forest covered the ground too thickly to see details smaller than a few meters.

Onward the rovers trundled, among the sturdy trees, maneuvering around rocks and boulders, some of them big as houses.

“Should be getting to the spot where the laser is,” Thornberry muttered. “Any minute now.”

And at that precise moment, all the screens went blank.

“What the hell?” Thornberry exclaimed.

Jordan stared at the suddenly dark screens. What’s gone wrong? he asked himself.

While Thornberry growled into his microphone, Longyear announced from his console, “Bio sensors have crapped out, too.”

“Everything’s down,” Thornberry said, bewildered. Then he added a heartfelt, “Damn!”

“What’s the problem?” Brandon wondered.