Ben Bova - New Earth

“I suppose not,” Jordan agreed.

Elyse shook her head. “Everything about this planet is strange, unexpected.”

Brandon said, “Of course.”

“How can it be here? How can it exist and bear life?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” said Meek.

“But it shouldn’t be here at all,” Elyse continued. “Not with an atmosphere and oceans. They should have been boiled away when the Pup went through its nova phase.”

“The Pup,” Meek groused. “Astronomer’s humor.”

With a glance at Elyse, Brandon countered, “Sirius has been known as the Dog Star since ancient times.”

“In the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog,” said Meek. “I’m not totally ignorant.”

Undeterred, Brandon went on, “So when Sirius B was discovered, a dwarf star accompanying the Dog Star, naturally it was called the Pup.”

“Naturally,” said Meek, scornfully.

“The point is,” Elyse said, totally intent, “when the Pup exploded it should have scoured that planet clean.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Perhaps it did,” Jordan said, “but the planet has had enough time to regenerate its biosphere.”

“That would take billions of years,” Elyse countered. “Sirius itself can’t be more than five hundred million years old, and its companion must have been formed at the same time. The Pup couldn’t have gone nova more than a few tens of millions of years ago.”

“You’re certain of that?” Meek challenged.

“Within a factor of ten or so,” said Elyse.

“That’s a pretty big margin of error,” Meek sniffed.

“Not bad for an astrophysicist,” said Jordan, smiling at her.

“Even so,” Elyse insisted, “the planet hasn’t had time to recover from the Pup’s nova explosions. It’s impossible.”

“But there it is,” Meek said, jabbing a finger toward the wall-screen display. “You can’t deny that it exists.”

“But how can it be?”

Mildly, Jordan replied, “That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Of course.”

“Another thing,” Brandon said.

Jordan groaned inwardly. Bran won’t let the argument stop. Is he trying to impress Elyse or just trying to top Meek?

“Sirius C is the only planet in the system,” Brandon pointed out. “There’s nothing else. No other planets, not even asteroids or comets. The Sirius system is totally clean, except for this one planet.”

“A planet very much like Earth,” added Meek.

Elyse said, “Between Sirius’s gravitational pull and the Pup’s, all the minor bodies must have been swept away.” Then she added, “Perhaps.”

“Do you really think so?” Jordan asked.

Elyse smiled a little. “No, not really. It’s the only explanation I could think of.”

“The system’s totally clean, except for that one Earth-sized planet,” Brandon murmured.

“It is very strange,” said Elyse.

“Scary, almost,” said Brandon.

The four of them fell silent, each wrapped in their own apprehensions. Inexplicably, Jordan flashed back to the hell of Kashmir and Miriam wasting away from the man-made toxins of the biowar.

With a force of will he raised his eyes to the display screen and said, “Well, strange or scary or whatever, we’re here to find out what this planet is all about, and by heaven that’s what we’re going to do.”

As if on cue, Trish Wanamaker’s voice came through the speaker set into the overhead. “The minisat will reach synchronous orbit in fifteen minutes.”

With heartiness he did not truly feel, Jordan said to his companions, “Let’s get back to the command center and see what the surveillance satellite has to show us.”

“But I haven’t even started my tea!” Meek bleated.

With Meek grumbling about his tea, the four of them trooped back to the command center. The ship was over the daylit side of the planet once again.

But one of the screens showed what the surveillance satellite was seeing: the darkness of the night side, broken by that single unblinking point of light.

Trish Wanamaker turned slightly in her console chair as they filed into the command center. “Starting a spectroscopic analysis of the light,” she said, over her shoulder.

“Good,” said Jordan, standing beside Hazzard, who was still slouched nonchalantly in the command chair.

Brandon and Elyse stood close to each other; Meek remained by the hatch, a skinny scarecrow with narrowed, searching eyes. Thornberry was nowhere in sight.

“Here’s the spectrum,” Wanamaker said, tapping at the console’s touchscreen.

One of the smaller display screens on the console showed a graph with a sharply peaked curve rising steeply against the grayish background.

“That can’t be right,” Hazzard muttered.

“Put it on your main screen,” Brandon told Wanamaker.

She whispered into her microphone, and the single, sharp-peaked curve appeared on the console’s central screen, like a steep mountain rising out of a jagged plain.

“That’s the spectrum of the light down on the nightside?” Elyse asked, her voice hushed, awed.

Wanamaker nodded once.

“Jesus Christ,” Brandon said, also amazed. “It’s a laser beam!”

PREPARATION

“That’s a laser shining down there?” Jordan asked, unbelieving.

“A single wavelength,” Wanamaker said, sounding just as stunned as Jordan felt.

“Not a single wavelength,” Brandon corrected.

“A damned narrow set of wavelengths,” Wanamaker admitted. “But they’re bunched together. That’s the signature of a laser beam, nothing else.”

Jordan couldn’t take his eyes off the display screen. The sharp peak twinkled, glittered against the background.

“Lasers occur in nature, don’t they?” he asked.

“In interstellar nebulae,” said Elyse. “Not in the middle of a forest.”

Hazzard said, “I remember seeing a paper about a natural laser in a planetary atmosphere.”

“Speculation,” Wanamaker said. “Never been proven. Or observed, for that matter.”

“It’s artificial,” Brandon said tightly, no doubt in him. “Man-made.”

“Not man- made,” Meek corrected.

“Better get Thornberry back here,” said Jordan.

Once Thornberry entered the command center he gaped at the display and immediately started asking Wanamaker how much the minisat could tell them about the terrain in the vicinity of the light.

“The area’ll be in daylight in another six hours,” Wanamaker responded. “We’ll be able to see it a lot better then.”

“I’m going to dinner,” Meek said. “I never got to finish my tea, you know. I’ll be back in two hours.”

Jordan watched him go, bemused slightly by Meek’s cool insistence on feeding. The rest of them stayed in the command center, swapping theories and speculations until the region where the laser was slid into the daylit side of the planet. Meek rejoined them, but kept silently aloof from the guessing games.

The area turned out to be a high plateau, heavily wooded. None of the surveillance satellite’s sensors could make out a building or roads or any signs of civilization or even a rough camp.

“Nothing but that damned spot of light,” Brandon muttered.

Thornberry shook his head, scowling at the displays. “I’ve already set up a scouting team: a pair of rovers that can get through wooded terrain. They’ll be ready to go in an hour or so.”

Jordan glanced at his wristwatch. “Wait. I suggest we have dinner and then retire for the night. We can continue this in the morning, when we’re fresh, and the area is in daylight.”

“Go to bed?” Brandon yelped. “How do you expect any of us to sleep with that going on?”