Starborne

There is one other non-expendable person: Noelle. The year-captain regards it as unthinkable to be sending Noelle out on a journey like this one. Noelle, you are a rare and precious flower. You are Earth’s salvation, Noelle. I would never place you at risk, never. Never.

The year-captain summons her now. “Is transmission quality all right today?”

The interference effect has been coming and going lately. The frequency of its occurrences is without discernible pattern. In any case it seems to have no connection with their position in space or with their proximity to any particular star.

This is one of the better days, Noelle tells him.

“Good,” he says. “Send forth the word, then. Let them know, back there on Earth, that we’re about to make our first planetary landing. Tell them to keep their fingers crossed for us. Maybe even to pray for us, if they can. They could look up how it’s done in some of the old books.”

Noelle is staring at him in bewilderment.

“Pray?”

“It means asking for the special favor of the universal forces,” he explains. “Never mind. Just tell them that we’re sending three of our people out to see whether we’ve found a place where we can live.”

For Huw this is the big moment of his career, the time when he takes the center of the stage and keeps it for all time. He is about to become the first human being to set foot on a planet of another star.

He has spent the past three days reconfiguring the largest of the Wotan’s three drone probes for manual operation. Unlike the probe that has already gone down to Planet A, and a second one just like it that is also on board, this one is big enough to hold a crew of three or four people, and is intended for follow-up expeditions precisely of this sort. It is default-programmed for proxy operation from the mother ship, but Huw intends to be his own pilot on the trips to and from the planetary surface. And now, after three days of programming and simulations and rechecks, he has pronounced the little vessel ready to go.

There has been one change in the personnel of the mission since the original three were named. During some celebratory horseplay in the baths involving Heinz, Paco, Natasha, and two or three others, Innelda has slipped on a soapy tile — she says she was pushed, somebody’s sly hand on her rump — and has badly sprained her leg. Leon says that she will be able to move about normally within five or six more days; but at the moment the best she can do is hobble, and Huw is unwilling to delay the expedition until she recovers, and the year-captain has backed him on that. So Marcus, whose planetographic expertise duplicates Innelda’s in many ways, has been chosen to replace her. Innelda is irate at missing her chance, but her protests to the year-captain fall on deaf ears. She will discover, before very long, that whoever it was who gave her that rude shove in the baths has done her a considerable favor; but that is the kind of thing that becomes apparent only after the fact.

The space suit — clad figures of Huw, Giovanna, and Marcus constitute a grand and glorious procession as they march through the bowels of the ship toward the drone-probe hangar. Virtually everyone turns out to see them off, everyone except Noelle, who is drained and weary after her morning colloquy with her distant sister and has gone to lie down in her cabin, and the still-angry Innelda, who is sulking inher cabin like brooding Achilles. Huw leads the way, waving majestically to the assembled onlookers like the offshoot of the great Prince Madoc of Wales that he believes himself to be. Certainly his Celtic blood is at high fervor today. What is a little trip to Ganymede, or even Venus, next to this?

He and Giovanna and Marcus settle into their cozy slots aboard the probe. Hatches close. Pressurizing begins. The Wotan’s launch bay opens and the probe slides forward, separates itself from its mother ship, emerges into open space.

A tiny nudge of acceleration, the merest touch of Huw’s finger against the control, and the probe breaks from orbit and begins to curl planetward. Soon enough the brown-blue-green bulk of Planet A is the only thing the three explorers can see from the port in front of their acceleration chairs. It is astonishing how big the planet looks as they near it. It is only an Earth-size planet, but it looms like a Jupiter before them. A year in the seclusion that is nospace has given them the feeling that the Wotan is the only object in the universe. But now there is another one.