Starborne

one another.

A strange peace unexpectedly descends on him. He has found once more that zone of calm that he had learned, in his monastery days, the secret of attaining. Everything is going to be all right, he insists. No harm will come of what has happened. And perhaps some good. And perhaps some good. Benefits lurk in the darkest places.

Noelle playsGo obsessively, beating everyone. She seems to live in the lounge twenty hours a day. Sometimes she takes on two opponents at once — an incredible feat, considering that she must hold the constantly changing intricacies of both boards in her memory — and defeats them both: two days after losing verbal-level contact with Yvonne, she simultaneously triumphs over Roy and Heinz before an astounded audience of fifteen or twenty of her shipmates. She looks animated and buoyant; they all have been told by now what has happened, but whatever sorrow she must feel over the snapping of the link she takes care to conceal. She expresses it, the others suspect, only by her manicGo -playing. The year-captain is one of her most frequent adversaries now, taking his turn at the board in the time he would have devoted to composing and dictating the communiques for Earth. He had thoughtGo was over for him years ago, but he, too, is playing obsessively these days, building walls and the unassailable fortresses known as eyes. There is satisfaction and reassurance in the rhythmic clacking march of the black and white stones. But Noelle wins every game she plays against him. She covers the board with eyes.

The quest for Planet B serves, to a considerable degree, to distract the voyagers from the problems that the disruption of contact with Earth has created. Expectations quickly begin to rise. Suddenly there is great optimism about Planet B among the members of the expedition. If there are no more cozy messages from home, there is, at least, the counterbalancing pleasure of contemplating the possibility that a wonderful new Earthlike home lies at the end of this stretch of their voyage.

Hesper has refined his correlation techniques and is able to provide them with a plethora of data of high- order reliability, so he claims, about the world toward which they go. It is, he says, the second of five planets that surround a medium-size K-type star. Whether a star of that spectral type can be hot enough to sustain temperatures in the range agreeable for protoplasmic life is something that arouses some debate aboard ship, but Hesper assures everybody that the star that is their destination is a K of better-than-median luminosity, and that Planet B is close enough to it so that there should be ample warmth, perhaps even a little too much for complete comfort.

How can Hesper know all this stuff? No one can figure it out: it is a perpetual mystery aboard the ship. He doesn’t have access to direct astronomical observation of the target system, not out here in nospace; they all are aware that he is simply playing around with a bunch of cryptic reality-analogs, a set of data-equivalents that he decodes by means of methods that nobody else can comprehend. Still, he was right enough about Planet A, so far as the question of its size, temperature range, atmospheric makeup, and other salient points was concerned. Hesper had indeed missed one small detail about Planet A that made it notably unsuitable for human settlement, but that was one that no instrument yet devised could have detected in advance of an actual manned landing.

What Hesper says about Planet B is even more encouraging than his preliminary reports on its unhappy predecessor. Planet B, Hesper asserts, is a planet of goodly size, with a diameter that is something like 15 percent greater than that of Earth, but it must be made up largely of the lighter elements, because its mass is no bigger than Earth’s and its gravitational pull, presumably, is about the same. It definitely has an atmosphere, according to Hesper, and here the news is very good indeed, the good old oxygen-nitrogen-and-a-smattering-of- CO₂, mixed pretty much the way human lungs prefer to have it, except that there’s a tad more CO₂than is found on Earth. Possibly a tad more than a tad, in truth — a bit of a greenhouse effect, Hesper admits, probably giving rise to a sort of steamy Mesozoic texture for the place. But the Mesozoic on Earth was a life-friendly era, a time of gloriously flourishing fauna and flora, and there should be nothing to worry about, Hesper tells them. Think tropical, he says; and, child of the sunblasted tropics that he is himself, his eyes light up with the thrill of anticipation. All will be well. It will be a planet-size Hawaii, he indicates. Or a planet-size Madagascar. Warm, warm, warm, lots of moisture where moisture does the most good, a shining, humid paradise, a sweet lush leafy Eden.

Well, maybe so. Some of the older members of the crew remember that the Mesozoic was the dinosaur era, and they don’t see anything particularly enticing about setting up a colony in the midst of a lot of dinosaurs. But there isn’t any logical necessity to the analogy, which others promptly point out. Evolution doesn’t have to follow the same track on every world. High humidity and tropical temperatures from pole to pole and an extra dollop of CO₂in the air may have given rise to a dominant race of giant reptiles on Earth, sure, but on Planet B the same circumstances may have brought forth nothing more complex than a tribe of happy jellyfish dreamily adrift in the balmy oceans.

Oh, the oceans. A bit of a puzzle there, Hesper has to concede. His long-distance proxy-equivalent hocus- pocus has, at least so far, failed to turn up evidence that thereare any oceans on Planet B. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering the apparent prevalence of water molecules in the atmosphere and the generally high global mean temperatures, which might reasonably have been expected to induce a lot of rainfall. But Planet B’s surface, as manifested in the surrogate form of Hesper’s long-range data, seems to have the same even texture everywhere, no inequalities of albedo or temperature or anything else significant, so either there is a single vast planetary ocean or none at all. The latter is by far the more probable hypothesis. So a little mystery exists in that quarter — one that will have to await resolution for a while, until they are much closer and can carry out some direct optical inspection of the place itself.

And then, one would assume, once there has been a good look-see from low orbit and the place is found worthy of further checking out, there will be the whole thing of sending down a drone probe again, followed, if everything looks good, by a manned ship, an exploratory party. Everyone has started to assume that thingswill look good down there, in fact that things will be downright ideal, and therefore that an exploratory party is ultimately in the cards. Which brings up some questions that have already arisen once before in the course of the voyage — the makeup of the landing party that will go down to confirm the usefulness and beauty of Planet B, and the concomitant issue of the expiration of the year-captain’s second year in office.

That second year is almost up now. And he will want to be part of any exploration team that goes down to visit Planet B, of course. So they have the troublesome business of an election to deal with, once again.

It is dealt with, quietly and quickly, in a caucus consisting of the dozen members of the expedition who care most about these matters.

“He is essential and indispensable,” Heinz says. “There’s no other plausible possibility for the job, is there? Is there?”

“Well, is there?” Paco asks. “You tell us.”

“Obviously there’s no one,” says Elizabeth. “He’ll have to be reelected.”

“You three have it very neatly worked out, don’t you?” Julia says.

Heinz gives her a quick look. “You don’t like it? Does that mean you’re volunteering to run again yourself?”

“You know I would, if I thought it would do any good. But I have to agree with you that if we took another vote, I wouldn’t be elected. He would.”

“And he will be,” says Heinz. “Just as he was last year.”

Huw says, “He’ll erupt. He’ll absolutely explode.”

“If we hand hima fait accompli ?” Sylvia says. “Simply tell him that he’s been reelected again by acclamation, and appeal to his sense of duty?”

“His sense of duty,” says Huw, “is directed entirely toward the exploration of the planets we discover. He didn’t sign on to be captain for life. It’s a job that’s supposed to rotate from year to year, isn’t it? So why would he let himself be stuck with it forever if it permanently disqualifies him from doing the one thing that he signed on to do?”

They consider that for a while. It’s a valid enough point; but in the end they agree that there’s no one else on board who can rally the necessary support. The year-captain has established himself in everyone’s mind as the captain-for-life; replacing him now with somebody else would have something of the quality of an insurrection. And who would they choose, anyway? Roy, Giovanna, Julia, Huw, Leon? Those who are qualified, even remotely, for the