Return from the Stars

reduced speed. This woke the rest. When they joined us, I remember, Thomas said it had to be a ship. We often joked like that. In space there must be ships from other systems, but two mosquitoes released at opposite ends of the Earth would stand a better chance of meeting. We had reached a gap now in the cloud, and the cold, nebular dust became so dispersed that you could see stars of the sixth magnitude with the naked eye. The spot turned out to be a planetoid. Something like Vesta. A quarter of a billion tons, perhaps more. Extraordinarily regular, almost spherical. Which is quite rare. Two milliparsecs off the bow. It was traveling, and we followed. Thurber asked me if we could get closer. I said we could, by a quarter of a milliparsec.

“We drew nearer. Through the telescope it looked like a porcupine, a ball bristling with spines. An oddity. Belonged in a museum. Thurber started arguing with Biel about its origin, whether tectonic or not. Thomas butted in, saying that this could be determined. There would be no loss of energy, we hadn’t even begun to accelerate. He would fly there, take a few specimens, return. Gimma hesitated. Time presented no problem — we had some to spare. Finally he agreed. No doubt because I was present. Although I hadn’t said a thing. Perhaps because of that. Because our relationship had become… but that’s another story. We stopped; a maneuver of this kind takes time, and meanwhile the planetoid moved away, but we had it on radar. I was worried, because from the time we started back we had nothing but trouble. Breakdowns, not serious but hard to fix — and happening without any apparent reason. I’m not superstitious, but I believe in series. Still, I had no argument against his going. It made me look childish, but I checked out Thomas’s engine myself and told him to be careful. With the dust.”

“The what?”

“Dust. In the region of a cold cloud, you see, planetoids act like vacuum cleaners. They remove the dust from the space in their path, and this goes on over a long period of time. The dust settles in layers, which can double the size of the planetoid. A blast from a jet nozzle or even a heavy step is enough to set up a swirling cloud of dust that hangs above the surface. May not sound serious, but you can’t see a thing. I told him that. But he knew it as well as I did. Olaf launched him off the ship’s side, I went up to navigation and began to guide him down. I saw him approach the planetoid, maneuver, turn his rocket, and descend to the surface, like on a rope. Then, of course, I lost sight of him. But that was five kilometers…”

“You picked him up on radar?”

“No, on the optical, that is, by telescope. Infrared. But I could talk to him the whole time. On the radio. Just as I was thinking that I hadn’t seen Thomas make such a careful landing in a long time — we had all become careful on the way back — I saw a small flash, and a dark stain began to spread across the surface of the planetoid. Gimma, standing next to me, shouted. He thought that Thomas, to brake at the last moment, had hit the flame. That’s an expression we use. You give one short blast of the engine, naturally not in such circumstances. And I knew that Thomas would never have done that. It had to be lightning.”

“Lightning? There?”

“Yes. You see, any body moving at high speed through a cloud builds up charge, static electricity, from friction. There was a difference in potential between the Prometheus and the planetoid. It could have been billions of volts. More, even. When Thomas landed, a spark leapt. That was the flash, and because of the sudden heat the dust rose, and in a minute the entire surface was covered by a cloud. We couldn’t hear him — his radio just crackled. I was furious, mainly at myself, for having underestimated. The rocket had special lightning conductors, pronged, and the charge should have passed quietly into St. Elmo’s fire. But it didn’t. It was exceptionally powerful. Gimma asked me when I thought the dust would settle. Thurber didn’t ask; it was clear that it would take days.”

“Days?”

“Yes. Because the gravity was extremely low. If you dropped a stone, it would fall for several hours before hitting the ground. Think how much longer it would take dust to settle after being thrown up a hundred meters. I told Gimma to go about his business, because we had to wait.”

“And nothing could be done?”

“No. If I could be sure that Thomas was still inside his rocket, I would have taken a chance — turned the Prometheus around, got close to the planetoid, and blasted the dust off to all four corners of the galaxy — but I could not be sure. And finding him? The surface of the planetoid had an area equal to, I don’t know, that of Corsica. Besides, in the dust cloud you could walk right by him at arm’s length and not see him. There was only one solution. He had it at his fingertips. He could have taken off and returned.”

“He didn’t do that?”

“No.”

“Do you know why?”

“I can guess. He would have had to take off blind. I could see that the cloud reached, well, not quite a kilometer above the surface, but he didn’t know that. He was afraid of hitting an overhang or a rock. He might have landed on the bottom of some deep gorge. So we hung there a day, two days; he had enough oxygen and provisions for six. Emergency rations. No I one was in a position to do anything. We paced and thought up ways of getting Thomas out of this mess. Emitters. Different wavelengths. We even threw down flares. They didn’t work, that cloud was as dark as a tomb. A third day — a third night. Our measurements showed that the cloud was settling, but I wasn’t sure it would finish coming down in the seventy hours left to Thomas. He could last without food far longer, but not without oxygen. Then I got an idea. I reasoned this way: Thomas’s rocket was made primarily of steel. Provided there were no iron ores on that damned planetoid, it might be possible to locate him with a ferromagnetic indicator — a device for finding iron objects. We had a highly sensitive one. It could pick up a nail at a distance of three-quarters of a kilometer. A rocket at several kilometers. Olaf and I went over the apparatus. Then I told Gimma and took off.”

“Alone.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because without Thomas there were only the two of us, and the Prometheus had to have a pilot.”

“And they agreed to it?”

I smiled in the darkness.

“I was the First Pilot. Gimma could not give rne orders, only suggest, I would weigh the chances and say yes or no. Most of the time, of course, I said yes. But in emergencies the decision was mine.”

“And Olaf?”

“Well, you know Olaf a little by now. As you might imagine, I couldn’t take off right away. But when it came down to it, I was the one who had sent Thomas out. Olaf couldn’t deny that. So I took off. Without a rocket, of course.”

“Without a rocket… ?”

“Yes, in a suit, with a gas shooter. It took a while, but not so very long. I had some trouble with the detector, which was practically a chest, awkward to handle. Weightless, of course, but when I was entering the cloud, I had to be careful not to hit anything. I ceased to see the cloud as I approached it; first the stars began to disappear, a few at a time, on the periphery, then half the sky got black; I looked back and saw the Prometheus glowing in the distance — she had special equipment that made the hull luminous. Looked like a long white pencil with a ball at one end, the photon headlight. Then everything winked out. The transition was so abrupt. Maybe a second of black mist, then nothing. My radio was disconnected; instead, I had the detector hooked up to the earphones. It took me only a few minutes to fly to the edge of the cloud, but over two hours to drop to the surface — I had to be careful. The electric flashlight was useless, as I had expected. I began the search. You know what stalactites look like in caves…”

“Yes.”

“Something like that, only more outlandish. I’m talking about what I saw later, when the dust settled, because during my search I couldn’t see a thing, as if someone had poured tar over the window of my suit. The box I had on straps. I moved the antenna and listened, then walked with both arms extended — I’d never stumbled so much in my life. No harm, thanks only to the low gravity. With just a little visibility, of course, a man could have regained his balance ten times over. But this way — it’s hard to explain to someone who’s never experienced it — the planetoid was all jagged peaks, with boulders piled up around them, and wherever I put my foot I began falling, in that drunken slow motion, and I couldn’t jump back up: that would send me soaring for a quarter of an hour. I simply had to wait, keep trying to walk on. The rubble slid beneath me, debris, pillars, shards of rock, everything