Starborne

Marcus is not a pretty sight as he does this, but he is, at the very least, providing a useful test of the effects of the atmosphere of Planet A on human lungs, which is something that they would have had to carry out sooner or later during the course of this landing anyway. And the effect so far is neutral, which is to say that Marcus does not appear to be suffering any obvious damage from breathing the stuff. Of course, he may be in such a state of desperate psychic disarray by now that a little lung corrosion would seem like only an incidental distraction.

Eventually Marcus straightens up. He looks numbed and addled but fractionally calmer than before, as though that wild eruption of regurgitation has steadied him a little.

“Well?” Huw says, perhaps too roughly. “Feel better now?”

Marcus does not reply.

“Give us a report on the atmosphere, at least. Now that you’re breathing the stuff, tell us what it’s like.”

Marcus stares at him, glassy-eyed. Lips moving after a moment. Speech centers not quite in gear.

“I— I—”

No good. He’s all but unhinged.

Huw, strangely, finds that he has grown almost accustomed to the panic effect by this time. He doesn’t like it — he hates it, actually — but now that he has come to understand that it is not a function of some sudden character disintegration of his own, but seems, rather, to be endemic to this miserable place, he is able to encapsulate and negate the worst of its effects. His flesh continues to crawl, yes, and cold bony fingers are still playing along the stem of his medulla oblongata, and unhappy intestinal maneuvers seem distressingly close to occurring. But there is work to do here, tests to be carried out, things to investigate, and Huw focuses on that with beneficial effect.

He says, speaking as much to his listeners aboard the Wotan as to Giovanna and the hapless Marcus, “There are a lot of possibilities. One is that this place is inhabited by sentient life-forms that we aren’t able to detect, and they’re beaming some kind of mind-scrambling ray at us that’s doing this to us. Pretty far-fetched, but at this point we can’t rule anything out. Another thought is that it’s the planet itself, radiating psychic garbage at us right out of the ground, a kind of mental radioactivity. Which is likewise on the improbable side, I admit. But both of those ideas, crazy as they sound, seem more acceptable to me than my third notion, which is that human beings come equipped with some kind of inherent terror syndrome that goes into operation when we arrive at a habitable planet that isn’t Earth, almost a sort of wizard’s spell, but one that was hard-wired into our nervous systems somewhere during the evolutionary process to prevent us, God only knows why, from settling on some other — Marcus! Damn you, Marcus, come back!”

Marcus has fled right in the middle of Huw’s windy hypothesizing, and is running now — not lurching, not staggering, butrunning, as fast as his legs will take him — across the rough parched landscape of the landing zone.

“Shit,” Huw mutters, and sets out after him.

Marcus is heading up the sloping side of the basin in which they have landed. He moves with lunatic fastidiousness around the borders of the elliptical groves of yellow-headed bushes, running in figure-eight patterns past them, up one and down the next, as he ascends the shallow rise. Huw ponderously gives pursuit. Marcus is young, long-limbed, and slender; Huw is fifteen years older and constructed in quite the opposite way, and high-speed running has never been one of his pastimes. Running seems to intensify the disagreeable quality of this place too: each pounding step sends a jolt of electric despair up the side of Huw’s leg on a direct route to his brain. He has never experienced such raggedness of spirit before. It is a great temptation to give over the chase and drop down in a fetal crouch and sob like a baby.

But Huw runs onward anyway. He knows that he needs to get a grip on Marcus, since Marcus seems incapable of getting a grip on himself, and put him back on board the probe before he does some real harm to himself as he sprints around this desert.

Marcus is moving, though, as if he plans to cover half a continent or so before pausing for breath, and Huw very quickly finds himself winded and dizzy, with a savage stitch in his side and a sensation of growing lameness in his left leg. And the terror quotient has begun to rise again, back to the levels he was experiencing right after leaving the probe. He can force himself to run, or he can fight off the demonic psychic radiation of this place, but it seems that he can’t do both at once.

He pulls up short, midway up the slope, gasping in hoarse noisy spasms and close to tears for the first time in his adult life. Marcus has vanished over the rim of the basin, losing himself among the black corona of fiercely fanged lunar-looking rocks that forms its upper boundary.