Ben Bova - New Earth

“What the hell is that?” Brandon yelped.

“A light,” said Jordan, staring at the screen. “A light in the midst of all that darkness.”

“That shouldn’t be there,” Brandon said.

“Maybe it’s a fire,” said Jordan.

“It’s not flickering.”

“Volcano?”

Brandon shook his head. “Too small. Too steady.”

Without another word they both scrambled toward the ship’s command center, the bridge, where all the system controls were.

“I’d better call the others,” Jordan said as they hurried along the narrow passageway between the wardroom and the command center.

The command system’s screens showed that the ship’s systems were humming along without human intervention or guidance. Four of the screens displayed the planet below them.

The natural-light display showed the pinpoint of light on the planet’s dark side, sliding off toward the horizon now. The other screens showed an infrared view, atmospheric conditions, gravitation measurements.

Jordan slipped quite naturally into the command chair and pressed the communications stud. “Intercom,” he spoke firmly, “connect me to all team members.”

In an instant the communications console showed he was connected.

“This is Jordan. The sensors show a spot of light down on the planet’s night side. We’re trying to determine what’s causing it. I’d like the planetary field team and the sensor engineer to come to the bridge, please.”

They all came, every one of the group , jamming the compartment, making it stuffy with their body heat.

“What on Earth could it be?” Meek asked, his eyes fixed on the light.

“We’re not on Earth,” someone snapped.

Thornberry replied, “On Earth it might be a village. Or maybe a roadside fast-food joint.”

“One light,” murmured Patricia Wanamaker, Thornberry’s aide, the sensor engineer. Of the twelve men and women in the group, she was the only one not from Earth: she had been born in a space habitat orbiting the planet Saturn.

Trish was almost Jordan’s height, heavyset, with a strong jaw set in a squarish, chunky face. Her ash blond hair was chopped mannishly short. Staring at the glow intently, she plumped herself down at one of the consoles.

“We’d better put up a surveillance satellite to cover the area,” Jordan suggested.

Wanamaker nodded without taking her eyes from her console’s screens. “I’ll deploy one of the minisats. Synchronous orbit, so it can hover over the area.”

“Good,” said Jordan.

Geoff Hazzard, standing beside Jordan, said, “I’d better stay here for a while, keep an eye on things.”

Jordan caught his meaning. “Of course,” he said, getting up from the command chair. “I didn’t mean to usurp your seat.”

Hazzard smiled, almost embarrassed. “It’s not my seat, Jordan. Not particularly.”

Still, he settled himself quite naturally into the command chair, his long slim legs stretched out.

Sitting at her console, Wanamaker clipped a communicator over her left ear and began speaking into it in a whisper. The consoles all had voice recognition circuitry, but with six of them jammed in side by side, all the team members had been trained to keep their voices low, so that their commands would not be accidentally picked up by a neighboring console. Even so, while she murmured into the communicator, her stubby fingers twitched involuntarily, as if she were using a keyboard.

At last she looked up and announced, “Satellite launched. It’ll take eighty-six minutes for the bird to attain synchronous orbit.”

Jordan looked around at the team. “Any other suggestions? Anything more we should be doing?”

“Get a spectrum of that light as soon as you can,” said Brandon.

“Put together a team to go down there and look firsthand,” said Silvio de Falla. He was Brandon’s geologist, short, solidly built, usually easygoing. But now he looked intense, eager as a greyhound who had just spotted a rabbit.

“Right away,” Brandon agreed.

“Now wait,” cautioned Meek. “We ought to scout the terrain first, see what we’d be up against.”

“See what kind of topography that area has.”

“Check for gravitational anomalies.”

“I agree,” said Jordan. “I’d like to know what the area is like before we go barging into it.”

“But what if the light disappears before we get there?” Brandon countered.

Jordan spread his hands. “Now listen. We’ve just arrived here. It’s night down where the light is shining. We haven’t even begun to map the surface—”

“The robotic orbiters have mapped the whole planet,” de Falla pointed out.

“But none of the orbiters detected that light,” said Jordan.

“Because it wasn’t there, most likely,” Brandon said.

“Well, it’s there now, and—”

“For how long?” Brandon insisted.

“We have no control over that,” said Jordan, patiently. “But we do have control over our own safety. I don’t want us—any of us—to go blundering into the unknown.”

“For god’s sake, Jordy, that’s why we’re here—to delve into the unknown!”

“And that’s what I intend to do, Bran,” Jordan said. “But it won’t hurt to be a little cautious about it.”

“For what it’s worth,” Hazzard added, “mission protocol calls for a robotic reconnaissance of any area we intend to send humans into.”

Brandon’s expression was somewhere between hurt and sulky, but he said nothing more.

“I think caution is a wise policy,” said Meek. “We’re on our own here. If anything goes wrong, we’ll get no help from anyone else.”

From her console, Trish Wanamaker said, “We could at least send a robot down there.”

“Good thinking,” said Jordan. Turning to Thornberry, he asked, “Can you arrange that, Mitch?”

With a happy grin, Thornberry replied, “By god, I’ll send two rovers. There’s safety in redundancy.” And he pushed through the crowded compartment to one of the consoles.

“Can anyone think of anything else?” Jordan asked. “Something we should be doing?”

“I still have to examine more than half of you,” said Yamaguchi. “One at a time.”

“After the exams are finished we should have dinner,” said Meek. “We need to get on a regular schedule sooner or later. I suggest sooner.”

Jordan chuckled. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Still,” glancing at the display screens, “it’s been an exciting first few hours.”

“With more to come,” Brandon added.

Most of the team went back to their individual quarters, although Hazzard, Wanamaker, and Thornberry stayed at the command center. Paul Longyear, the lead biologist, headed for the infirmary with Yamaguchi. Jordan started back toward the wardroom with Brandon, Meek, and Elyse Rudaki.

“A spot of light,” Jordan mused as he sat at one of the tables, facing the wall screen. The light was clearly discernable against the darkness of the planet’s night side. “What could it be?”

“There aren’t any other lights anywhere on the planet,” said Brandon, sitting beside him.

“None that we have seen,” said Elyse, who brought a mug of coffee from the dispenser and sat on Brandon’s other side.

From the dispensing machines, Meek said, “Whatever it is, I suppose it’s some natural phenomenon. A lava puddle, perhaps.”

“Do you think that’s likely?” Jordan asked.

“We don’t know what’s likely and what’s not, not yet,” said Meek, as he carried a tray bearing a teapot, a cup, and a plate of cookies to the table. Carefully arranging them on the table, he sat down and added, “This is a new world, after all. It might look superficially like Earth, but we shouldn’t expect it be precisely like our planet.”