Ben Bova - New Earth

“Run the diagnostics program,” Hazzard suggested.

“I’m trying,” said Thornberry. “No response. They’re dead as doornails. Both of ’em.”

“Can’t you do something about it?”

Shaking his head, Thornberry said, “The down side of making machines smart enough to operate on their own is that they operate on their own. They’re clever enough so that when they sense something down there that’s out of their database, they protect themselves by going into hibernation mode until we can restart ’em.”

“So restart them.”

“I’m trying, dammitall!” Thornberry roared. “But the little toothaches don’t respond.”

“Some anomaly down there.”

“A black hole, maybe.”

“Be serious!”

Jordan said to himself, Very well, you’re supposed to be the leader of this group. Show some leadership.

“Mitch, would you keep on trying to reestablish contact? Geoff, lend him whatever help you can.” Turning to the others, Jordan said, “The rest of us should clear out and let Mitchell and Geoff try to sort this out.”

They reluctantly began to shuffle out of the command center. Brandon took Elyse’s arm and led her toward the hatch.

Jordan looked back at Thornberry. The roboticist was poking away at his console’s touchscreen, muttering darkly. But his console’s displays remained stubbornly blank.

There’s nothing you can do for him, Jordan told himself, except let him do his work without the rest of us breathing down his neck. He followed his brother and Elyse down the passageway to the area where the living quarters were.

Brandon stopped in front of the door to his quarters. “What now?” he asked Jordan.

“I don’t know about you, but I intend to sort out my clothing and personal supplies. I have a hunch that we’ll be going down to the surface much sooner than we had planned to.”

Elyse looked worried. “What could have made the rovers go blank like that?”

With a shrug, Jordan said, “Malfunctions happen. Mitchell will figure it out. He’s a good man.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Brandon challenged.

Jordan said, “Then we’ll have to go down to the surface and see what’s wrong with them.”

“See what’s happened to them, you mean.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“I’m going down to the hangar deck to check out our landing craft,” Brandon said.

“Good idea,” Jordan said. “But let’s give Mitchell a chance to reestablish contact with the rovers. No need to jump into the unknown just yet.”

“The hell there isn’t! Something’s going on down there and we’ve got to find out what it is.”

“Bran, whatever’s going on down there, have you considered the possibility that it might be dangerous?”

Elyse looked suddenly alarmed. “Dangerous?”

“Apparently the rovers think so,” Jordan said.

Impatiently, Brandon said, “There’s always a certain amount of danger when you’re dealing with the unknown.”

“That’s true,” said Jordan. “And it’s my responsibility to see to it that we minimize the danger as much as we can.”

“So we just sit up here in orbit with two dead rovers on the surface and a laser beacon shining at us?”

“You think it’s a beacon?” Elyse asked.

“What else?”

Jordan made himself smile as he said, “Bran, there’s a difference between what you want it to be and what it actually is.”

“Do you want to bet?”

Now Jordan’s smile turned genuine. “No thank you. For what it’s worth, Bran, I agree with you. I think it’s probably a beacon, too. But that doesn’t mean we should go barging down there before we’ve considered all the possibilities.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I intend to do what all bureaucrats do when they face a new problem: call a meeting.”

By midafternoon Thornberry had given up in exasperation his attempts to reestablish contact with the two rovers.

When Jordan returned to the command center, Thornberry was alone at his console, sagging wearily in its spindly, wheeled chair, his rumpled shirt stained with sweat. He looked thoroughly defeated.

Jordan sat at the next console, beside him, and said softly, “You’ve done all you can, Mitch. Go get something to eat.”

Thornberry didn’t move. Instead he muttered, “I am maintaining a kindly, courteous, secret, and wounded silence as a gentle reproof against those two knock-kneed, goggle-eyed, outrageously obstinate machines.”

Chuckling at the Irishman’s wry humor, Jordan repeated, “Get something to eat. And then come over to my quarters at fifteen hundred hours. We’ve got to plan out what we should do next.”

Once Thornberry shambled out of the control center, Jordan called Brandon, Elyse, Meek, and Hazzard to join him in his quarters at 1500.

They all arrived promptly and sat around the coffee table, the expressions on their faces ranging from apprehensive to frustrated to downright worried.

Pulling the wheeled chair from his desk up to the little glass coffee table, Jordan said, “The five of you represent the chief technical groups of our team. We need to plan out what our next step in exploring New Earth should be.”

“Send a team down to see what happened to the rovers,” Brandon said immediately. He was sitting tensely on the sofa, next to Elyse. Hazzard sat at her other side, Meek and Thornberry in the armchairs, facing each other across the coffee table.

“And find out what that laser is all about,” added Elyse.

Turning to Meek, Jordan asked, “How much biological data did we get before the rovers blanked out?”

“Air samples,” said Meek. “Nothing startling. There are single-celled creatures in the air, the equivalent of bacteria and protists. A few insect analogs. Dust, of course. Some pollen.”

“Anything harmful?”

“I don’t have enough data to determine that. Yamaguchi’s looking over what we’ve got so far. If you send a team to the surface they should wear biohazard suits, to be on the safe side.”

Turning to Thornberry, Jordan asked, “Mitch, do you have any idea at all of why the rovers died?”

The roboticist shrugged his heavy shoulders. “As far as I can tell, they just shut themselves down. They must have encountered something beyond the limits of their programming.”

“Maybe somebody shut them down,” said Brandon.

“Somebody? Who?”

“Whoever’s shining that laser at us.”

“But there’s no sign of intelligence down there,” Thornberry argued. “No radio signals, no buildings, no roads…”

“There’s the laser,” Jordan pointed out.

Hunching forward in his chair, Brandon ticked off points on his fingers. “Whoever built that laser is using it to attract our attention. They disable the rovers before the machines can get close enough to the laser for us to see what’s there. Isn’t it obvious? They don’t want machines, they want us . They want us to come down and meet them.”

“So they can cook us and eat us,” Hazzard muttered, half-joking.

“I doubt that cannibals use lasers,” Jordan said.

Meek pointed out, “But they wouldn’t be cannibals, not at all. We’re a different species from them.”

“Like beef cattle are different from us,” Hazzard maintained.

No one laughed.

They debated the situation for another hour, but Jordan realized that there was only one decision they could reasonably make.

“All right, then,” he said at last. “We can send another rover or two down, or we can send a team of people. Which should it be?”

“People!” Brandon snapped.

Thornberry countered, “I’d like to send a couple of rovers to different places around the planet and see what happens to them. See if they operate normally.”