Starborne

The general reaction is one of surprise. Not that he would ask the biochemist Giovanna to make the journey — she is at least as qualified for the third slot as the year-captain himself, and perhaps more so — but that he has chosen two women for the group. Everyone has heard by this time of Paco’s primordial little pronunciamento about the inadvisability of risking useful wombs by letting any women at all go down to Planet A. And here is the year-captain sending not just one woman buttwo, a full 8 percent of the ship’s female complement. Is this some sort of direct rebuke of Paco? Or does the year-captain actually agree with Paco’s thesis, and is this the year-captain’s furious way of telling them all that his only recourse, now that they have prevented him from undertaking the trip, is to send Giovanna?

Nobody knows, and no one is going to ask, and the year-captain plainly is not going to say. Huw, Innelda, and Giovanna it will be, and that is that. Huw and Giovanna, everyone recalls now, were lovers in the earliest days of the journey; they are still good friends; doubtless they will work well together. The choice meets with general approval.

What is actually uppermost in the year-captain’s mind, however, is the simple fact that he is risking three priceless and irreplaceable lives on this enterprise. Men, women: that makes no difference to him. But he doesn’t want to lose anyone, and there is the possibility that he will, and he hates that idea. The trick is to choose a landing party made up of people who will be useful down there yet whose loss, if they should be lost, will not seriously cripple the ship.

The planetary mission is absolutely necessary, of course. So far everything about Planet A’s habitability has checked out admirably, at least from this modest distance, and it is now incumbent on them to send someone down there who can learn at close range what the place is like. And those who are sent may very well not come back. There is always the possibility that ugly and even fatal surprises will be waiting on that alien world for the first human explorers. More to the point, though, there is risk even in the brief journey down from orbit. The drone probe in which the mission is to be made has been designed for maximum simplicity and reliability of operation, and it has been tested and retested, naturally. But it is only a machine. Machines fail. Some of them fail quickly and some of them fail only after thousands or hundreds of thousands of operations; but failure modes often are uncomfortably random things, and even a mechanism designed to fail no more often than once in a hundred billion times may nevertheless fail the very next time it is used.

Failure — an explosion en route, a bad landing, a bungled lift-off — would mean loss of personnel. The Wotan’s personnel are not readily expendable, although some, just now, are less indispensable than others. The year-captain has given much thought to that in making his choices. There is a considerable degree of redundancy of skills aboard ship, yes, but certain people are more vital to the present purposes of the voyage at this point than others, and it would be a heavy blow to lose any of those. Huw is one of those — nobody is better equipped than Huw to cope with the unpredictabilities of an alien world’s terrain — but for that very reason he has to be part of this first mission. The year-captain hopes he comes back, of course, for there will almost certainly be other missions of this sort beyond it and Huw will be needed for those. But there is no avoiding sending Huw out on this one. Giovanna and Innelda would be serious losses, but there are others on board who could do their work almost as well. If they had been unwilling or unable to go, he might have chosen any of eight or ten others. But some had never been on the year-captain’s list. The ones he would not risk under any circumstances at this stage in the voyage are Hesper and Paco and Julia and Leon, Hesper because he is the one who finds them their worlds, Paco is the one who aims the ship toward them, Julia, the one who makes the ship follow the path that Paco has chosen, and Leon the one who keeps them in the prime of health while they wait to reach their new home. Since it is not at all sure at this moment that Planet A will be acceptable, other planets may need to be found, other galactic jumps must be planned for. Without the basic skills of those four, there is not likely ever to be demand for the skills of the others on board, the gene-bank operators and the agronomists and the construction engineers and such.