Starborne

Huw knows he needs to regain control of himself. The last thing he wants is for any of the others to suspect what is going on inside him. No more than a few seconds have passed since his emergence from the probe, and his initial anguished screech is the only sign he has given thus far that anything is amiss.

Now the strength gained through a lifetime of self-confident high achievement asserts itself. This can’t be happening to him, he tells himself, because he is not the sort of man to whom things like this happen: Q.E.D. The initial feeling of shock at that first touch of boot against ground has given way to a kind of steady low-level discomfort: he seems to be getting used to the effect. Does not like it, does not like it at all, but is already learning how to tolerate it, perhaps.

He walks five or six paces farther away from the probe, stops, takes a deep breath, another, another. Squares his shoulders, stands as erect as is possible to stand. Pushes the welling tide of terror back down his body millimeter by millimeter, down through his legs, his ankles, his toes.

There.

It’s still there, trying to get back up into his chest to seize his heart and then move on beyond that to his lungs, his throat, his brain. But he has it, whatever the hell it is, in check. More or less. Its presence baffles him but he is holding it at bay, at the expense of considerable mental and moral energy. It requires from him a constant struggle against the profound desire to scream and weep and fling his arms around wildly. But it is a struggle that he appears to be winning, and now he can proceed with the business of taking a little look around this place.

Now he hears a moaning sound just to his left, which calls to his attention the fact that someone else is out here with him. One of the others has left the probe without waiting for the go-ahead signal; the moan is probably an initial response to the hot-griddle effect of making direct contact with this planet’s surface.

“Hey!” he yells. “Didn’t I say to stay in there until I called you out?”

It is Marcus, Huw realizes. Which is even worse: Giovanna was the one whom he had chosen to be the second one out of the probe. Marcus has exited the ship on his own authority and out of turn, and now, moving in what seems like an oddly dazed and disoriented way, he is wandering around in irregular circles near the base of the ladder, scuffing his boot against the soil and stirring up little clouds of dust.

“I’m coming out too,” Giovanna says over the phones. “I don’t feel so happy being cooped up in here.”

“No, wait—” Huw says, but it is too late. Already he sees her poking out of the hatch and starting to climb down. The year-captain is saying something over the phones, apparently asking what’s taking place down there, but Huw can’t take the time to reply just now. He is still fighting the bursts of seemingly unmotivated terror that feel as though they are pulsing up through the ground at him, and he needs to get his crew back under control too. He jogs over toward Marcus, who has stopped scuffing at the ground and now is walking, or, to put it more accurately, staggering, in a zigzag path heading away from the probe on the far side.

“Marcus!” Huw calls sharply. “Halt where you are, Marcus! That’s an order!”

Marcus shambles to a stop. But then after a couple of seconds he starts moving again in an aimless, drifting, stumbling way, traveling along a wide curving trajectory that soon begins to carry him once more away from the probe.

Giovanna is out of the ship now. She comes up alongside Huw, running awkwardly in this light-gravity environment. He peers through the faceplate of her suit and sees that her forehead is shiny with bright beads of sweat and her eyes look wild. Marcus is continuing to put distance between himself and the probe.

“I don’t know,” Giovanna says, as though replying to a question that Huw has not asked. “I feel — weird, Huw.”

“Weird how?” He tries to make his voice sound completely normal.

“Scared. Strange.” A look of shame flickers across her face. “Like I’m having some sort of a nightmare. But I know that I’m awake. Iam awake, right, Huw?”

“Wide awake,” he says. So he is not the only one, then. Both of them are feeling it too. Interesting. Interesting. And oddly reassuring, after a fashion, at least so far as he is concerned personally. But it sounds like bad news for the expedition. Huw clamps his gloved hand over Giovanna’s wrist. “Come on. Let’s go after Marcus before he roams too far.”