Starborne

They are here to explore. So they dutifully walk around a little, fifty meters this way, thirty the other. Giovanna prods at the sandy soil and discovers a colony of shining, metallic-looking insects just below the surface, and they occupy her scientific curiosity for a minute or two.

But it is only too obvious that the same malaise of soul is afflicting them here as on the other continent. Huw keeps watching the sky for monsters; Giovanna is unable to focus her concentration very long on her investigations. The same fidgety fitfulness is afflicting them both, though neither has admitted it to the other yet. Whatever the effect is, it doesn’t seem to be a phenomenon confined to a single locality, not if two random landings have produced the same results, but must emanate from the core of this world to its entire surface.

Huw looks toward Giovanna. She is outwardly calm, but her face is pale, sweat-shiny. Evidently she, like him, has already learned some techniques for holding Planet A’s terrors at bay; but clearly it is as much of a full-time struggle for her as it is for him. A planet where you are always thirty seconds away from a wild shriek of horrible baseless fear is not a wise place to choose for mankind’s second home.

“It’s no good,” he says. “We might as well clear out of here.”

“Yes. We might as well.”

They return to the ship. Marcus, unsurprisingly, is right where they left him in his acceleration chair. To find him anywhere else would have been real occasion for shock, and yet Huw is unable to avoid wincing as he sees the strapped-in corpse lying there. Giovanna, coming in behind him, appears to avert her eyes from the sight of Marcus as she enters her chair.

“Well?” she asks, as Huw starts setting up flight instructions. “Do we try one more time somewhere else?”

“No,” says Huw. “Enough is enough.”

The year-captain says, “You think it’s absolutely hopeless, then? That we wouldn’t ever get used to the mental effects?”

Huw spreads his thick-fingered hands out before him, studying their fleshy tips rather than looking up at the other man. This is the third day since Huw’s return to the starship. He and Giovanna have just emerged from postmission quarantine, after a thorough checkout to ascertain whether they have picked up potentially troublesome alien microorganisms down below.

“I can’t say that we wouldn’tever get used to them,” he tells the year-captain. “How could I know that? In five hundred years, a thousand, we might come to love them. We might miss all that stomach-turning disorientation if it were suddenly taken away. But I don’t think it’s very likely.”

“It’s hard for me to understand how a planet could possibly put forth a psychic effect so powerful that—”

“It’s hard for me to understand it too, old brother. But I felt it, and it was real, and like nothing I had ever felt in my life. A force, a power, acting on my mind. As though there’s some physical feature down there that has the property of working as a giant amplifier, maybe, and setting up feedback loops within the nervous system of any complex organism. I’m not saying that that’s what it actually is, you understand. I’m simply telling you that the effect isthere, for whatever reason, and it makes your flesh crawl. Mademy flesh crawl. Made Giovanna’s flesh crawl. Sent Marcus into such wild panic that he lost his mind completely. Of course, as I say, there’s always a chance that we could learn to live with it after a while. The human species is very adaptable that way. But would youwant to live with it? What sort of price would we have to pay for living with it, eh, captain?”

The year-captain, monitoring Huw’s facial expressions and vocal inflections with great care, is grateful that he had had someone like Huw available to send on this mission. Huw is probably the most stable man on board, and certainly the most fearless, though it has crossed the year-captain’s mind that noisy, blustering Paco runs him a close second. Huw has been shaken deeply by the landing on Planet A: no question of that. And it isn’t simply Marcus’s death that has affected Huw so deeply. The planet itself seems to be the problem. The planet must be intolerable.

It is a matter of some regret to the year-captain that Planet A isn’t going to be suitable. He wants the expedition quickly to find a place where it can settle, before their long confinement aboard the Wotan starts creating debilitating psychological effects. And he is sorry that he will not get a chance to explore Planet A’s surface himself, awful though the place seems to be. But the intense negativity of Huw’s report leaves him no choice but to write Planet A off and get the starship heading out on the next leg of its quest.