“Very well. Sing out when it’s time to decouple the hyperdrive.”
“Now!… sir.”
Cuiller hit the switches on reflex. It wouldn’t do any good to wander into a singularity. Stars bloomed in the nothingness beyond the wide window stripes in the ship’s surface covering.
“Which direction?” he asked.
“Off our port bow and now rolling up at, uh, 230 degrees.”
The commander looked and saw a bright yellow bead, big enough to begin showing a disk.
“Start plotting the planets, or whatever they are. I’ll wake Lieutenant Krater and get her on the console.”
“I’m awake,” she said, rolling out of her sleeping cocoon. “I felt the ship acquire momentum.”
“Jook’s got another possible planet. Give it the once over, will you, Sally? Full spectrum.”
“Gotcha.”
The crew settled into their workstations, except for Gambiel. Cuiller let the weapons officer go on sleeping, held in reserve against a probable long watch when they were underway again.
After ten minutes, both Jook and Krater spoke at once.
“Hello!”
“I’ve got-”
“One at a time,” Cuiller ordered.
“I’ve found a planet,” the navigator said. “One body, no moons. It has an equatorial radius of about 3,400 kilometers, about the same as Mars. But it’s got a lot higher mass, pulls about point-seven-nine gee. We can move around easily enough, but if there’s an atmosphere it’s going to be dense and hot The planet is far enough out from the primary for water to go liquid but not start icing down.”
“Spectral analysis says there’s atmosphere,” Krater confirmed. “Sixty-eight percent nitrogen. Twenty-two percent oxygen. Nine percent water vapor-so the air is pretty steamy, too. The rest is traces. We can breathe, unless we find pockets of poison gas or spores or something… But that’s not the big news. I’ve got a hard return!”
“On deep radar?” Jook asked eagerly.
“Of course. I thunked your planet once just for luck. And the return shows either a chunk of neutronium, or “You weren’t scanning at the core?” Cuiller asked quickly.
“Naw, it shows up right near the surface.”
“Well, well.”
“You’re not going to make us go down there, are you, Captain?” Jook asked, inserting a mock whine in his voice. “You know we’ve got a mission to complete, with lots of phantom kzinti to chase.”
“Stow it, Hugh.” Cuiller grinned. “Give me a vector to the planet Sally, when we get close enough, localize that hard return for the navigational console and send it to Hugh… We make one pass over it in low orbit, Hugh, to get a fix on landing sites, and then we head in. Right? Look sharp, everybody. We could be going home rich.”
“Aye, sir!” from both of them.
From more than ten million kilometers out, they could see with the naked eye that the planet’s disk was unbroken. It showed a pale green atmosphere, banded with broad strips of white.
“Looks like a gas giant,” Cuiller said uneasily.
“No way, Cap’n,” Jook answered. “We definitely have rock.”
The green was the color of dilute free chlorine -lots of it. On a hunch, Cuiller asked Krater to recheck the spectralysis, which was taken by comparing incident light from the G-type primary with sunlight reflected off the planet.
“I do get some dropout lines for chlorine,” she said. “But not enough to color the atmosphere like that. The machine still says what it’s got is breathable.”
From a million kilometers away, they could see little more.
“The green is probably chlorophyll,” Krater observed. “We’re looking at grass fields, swamps, taiga, or all three.”
“Should be greener then,” said Gambiel, who was awake by now and at his forward station.
“Remember all the H20 in the air,” she told him. “We’re looking through a mile or two of light haze. A lot of reflectance there.”
The haze appeared to deepen and grow whiter as they locked into an orbit. “More scatter effect,” Krater called it.
“Do you have any features around our deep return?” Cuiller asked.
“Captain, you’re looking at a billiard ball,” Jook announced. “I’m doing a navigational scan in the point one- meter range, and the spherical deviation is nil. A trifling amount of oblateness. Otherwise smooth. I mean, a rise of fifty meters would be a mountain range down there.”
“Then we can set down anywhere,” Cuiller summarized.
“Well…“Jook hesitated.
“Give me a fix on that deep radar pattern, Hugh,” Cuiller told him, “and I’ll kill the orbit.”
“You’ve got it, Cap’n. Deceleration point coming up in two minutes.”
“Sally, do you see any change in that pattern?”
“No, what you’re looking at is just what we’ve had from the first, allowing for scale change. I read the return image as just about a meter in any dimension.”
“Better all the time… You’ll have to reel in the whip now,” he told her.
Because a General Products hull blocked all radiation outside the visible spectrum, Callisto communed with her environment through a trailing string of antennas and sensors that wound on a reel in her tail section. The sensor string would not survive the buffeting of an atmospheric entry. “Aye, Captain.” Krater keyed the proper contacts.
“All right, people,” Cuiller called out, “strap in.”
He counted the whirs and clicks as the crew pulled out the gravity webbing and made themselves fast at station. Cuiller fastened himself down last.
“One minute to mark,” from Jook. “You going to take this one in manually?”
“I need the practice,” Cuiller said.
“Easier to let the computers do it…
Cuiller thought about that, looking down at the nearly white curve of the horizon. “We’ve got room to play around, surely.”
“All right… Mark!”
The commander closed a series of switches, engaging the external ion engine. The ship vibrated, and Cuiller felt his body sway forward against the retaining strands.
Callisto glided down in a long curve. Her forward quadrant glowed where the external ceramic coating- which deflected laser attacks tuned in visible light-covered the impervious General Products surface. The hull itself remained serenely clear, except for a buffeting layer of ionized air.
At 2,000 meters above the surface, Cuiller terminated the ion drive and brought her gliding around on inertial thrusters, maneuvering under his own eye-hand coordination. He glanced at the repeater from Krater’s station.
“I’m going to set down about two kilometers from that reflection,” he announced. “Not too far to walk, but not close enough to disturb it.”
No comment from the crew, which he took for agreement. As Callisto cut through the mist, the planet’s surface was revealed as a deep and startling green. Cuiller was reminded of pictures he’d seen of Ireland but then amended that. This was bright enough to be an enhanced color graphic of Ireland, with overdrive on the yellow and cyan pigments. Jook had not overstated the flatness. Even from a hundred meters up, Cuiller could not see any hill or wrinkle higher than two or three meters. No valleys either. And no boulders, trees, rivers, lakes, nor any other feature. Just a deep and rustling green vegetation.
“Settling in,” he said, killing forward motion and dropping the lift smoothly toward a steady seven-point- seven-three meters per second, just enough to counter local gravity. When the greenery-it looked like large and feathery leaves-reached up to touch the clear window in the hull’s underside, he backed the thrusters down to zero and switched them off.
“Captain!” Jook called out. “Check your navigational radar!”
