Starborne

“About what?” Huw asks savagely. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Marcus is really dead and he’s going to stay that way. He can’t be fixed, not by me, not by Leon if I bring him back up there, not by Jesus Christ himself. Believe me.” There’s Jesus Christ again, Huw thinks. The old myths keep surfacing. Something about this planet makes you want to invoke divine aid, it would seem. “Or Zeus, for that matter,” Huw says, still angry, angry at the year-captain, at Marcus, at himself, at the universe.

Once again the year-captain is slow to respond.

“I think what we have here is an uninhabitable planet,” Huw says, as the silence from above stretches intolerably. “That’s not a final conclusion but it looks pretty overwhelming. There’s something very peculiar here, some kind of a psychic field, that starts operating on you the moment you make surface contact with the planet, and it, doesn’t let up. You just go on and on, feeling horrible, every minute you’re here. Some minutes are worse than others, but none of them is ever any good. Do you understand what I’m saying, year-captain?”

“We’ve been following your ground conversations. We have some idea of what it’s been like.”

“You haveno idea, none. You only think you do. What shall I do with Marcus? Bury him here?”

“No. Bring him back with you.”

“You think he isn’t really dead?”

“I think salvaging what we can of him for the ship’s organ bank makes more sense than putting him in a hole in the ground,” the year-captain says, sounding brusque. “You’re going to start back up here right away, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“That would be aborting the mission, captain. Do you want me to do that?”

“You said the place is uninhabitable.”

“I saidI think it’s uninhabitable. We’ve only experienced one small patch of it. Suppose this psychic field, if that’s what it is, is a factor only in this one region? The least I can do is check out some other area before we write the mission off as a complete failure.”

“It’s cost us one life already, Huw.”

“Exactly. That’s why I want to make absolutely sure that we can’t use this planet before we give up on it. Marcus will really have died in vain if we let one bad experience spook us away from a planet that might have worked out for us had we only bothered to take a little more time for a good look at the rest of it.”

Still another spell of nonresponse now from on high. Huw wonders what effect Marcus’s death is having on the year-captain and the rest of them up there. He himself is growing almost numb to it, he realizes. Marcus’s twisted form, lying right at his feet, seems to him to be nothing more than a badly constructed doll now.

Once more Huw is compelled to break the silence himself. “Are you ordering me to abort the mission, captain?”

“No. I’m not doing that. What’s your actual plan, Huw?”

“I was originally going to make a trek to the seashore near here, but there’s no sense in that now. What we’re going to do is make a landing on a second continent, a brief reconnaissance. If we get the same kind of negative results there too, we’ll head for home right away. Bringing Marcus with us, as you request. What do you say?”

“Go ahead,” says die year-captain. “Check out a second continent, if that’s what you want to do.”

Huw closes Marcus’s faceplate and signals to Giovanna, and together they carry the dead man up the slope, down the far side, and across the basin to the ship. It is not an easy task, despite Marcus’s slenderness and the slightly lessened gravitational pull. The dispiriting emanations of this planet claw at their souls, robbing them of will and strength. But somehow they manage. They load Marcus into his acceleration chair and slide into their own.

Giovanna says, “You’re really going to investigate some other site before we go back?”

“I really am, yes. Don’t you think you can handle it?”

“I think it’s a waste of time.”

“So do I,” Huw says. “But we’ve worked very hard to get ourselves here. If I don’t make one more attempt at seeing if we can cope with this world, I’m going to wonder for the rest of my life whether I was too hasty in leaving. Humor me, Giovanna. I can’t turn back this fast.”

“Even with Marcus sitting here next to us and—”

“Even with,” he says. As he speaks, he is busy requesting lift-off assistance from the drive intelligence. The drone probe works its way through its sealing maneuvers, the hatch swings closed, and the usual array of readouts begins to announce the little ship’s readiness for going airborne. Huw does not attempt to take direct command of the vessel himself; he is too drained by what has occurred here, and he wants simply to sink back in his acceleration chair and let things happen around him, at least for a little while.