Starborne

the probes for a manned voyage. And if anyone aboard the Wotan thinks that the year- captain is needlessly exposing two of the most valuable members of the expedition to great risk, that person does not share those thoughts with anyone else.

Huw winks broadly and does a thumbs-up as he and the year-captain secure themselves in their acceleration chairs. It’s a long time since these two have undertaken a mission of exploration together.

“Well, old brother, shall we shove off?” Huw asks.

“Whenever you’re ready, Huw. You’re the captain aboard this ship, you know. You make the decisions.”

“Right. Right.” Huw puts the little vessel under the control of the Wotan’s drive intelligence and the mother ship’s main computer takes charge, easing the drone out of the bay. When they are a safe distance from the Wotan the drone goes into powered flight and begins its descent from orbit.

The spider-armed lopsided awkwardness of the Wotan quickly gets smaller behind them. The cloud-swaddled face of Planet B expands with breathtaking swiftness.

Then they are inside the cloud layer, which the probe has previously determined to be nothing at all like the ghastly sulfuric-acid wrapper that covers Venus, but just a lot of plain H₂O and some CO₂, your basic veil of ordinary clouds, very, very dense but chemically harmless. They drop down through it and find themselves in the mother of all rainstorms, a planetary deluge of extraordinary intensity. It falls in green loops all around them, thick, viscous-looking rain. Now they understand where this world’s oceans are. They are in constant transit through the atmosphere, going up in the form of evaporation and coming down in the form of rain, and never once pausing to accumulate on the ground.

“It is a bitch of a place for certain, old brother,” Huw declares, as he takes over from the drive intelligence and begins to seek a decent landing place.

They are close enough to the ground now to see, even through the driving rain, that their guesses from on high were correct, that this planet is completely engulfed by an enormous webwork of gigantic woody vines, seemingly endless vines whose trunks have a diameter of at least ten meters and probably more, vines like horizontal trees that crisscross and overlap and entangle, leaving no free spaces between them anywhere.

Sonar shows the underground tunnels they had noticed from above, weaving through the vines beginning at a depth of perhaps forty meters and running both laterally and downward, in some places descending for a kilometer or more. Below the tunnel zone lies something that appears to be one great solid spongy mass, hundreds of kilometers thick, out of which all the vines seem to be sprouting. It is the mother substance, apparently, the living substructure of the entire giant organism — for it is rapidly becoming clear to them now that Planet B is occupied by one immense vegetable entity, which is this spongy subterranean mass, from which all else springs. And beneath that is the stone understructure of the planet, the hidden basalt core.

Where to land? There are no open places, no meadows, no plains.

Huw expends a little reaction mass to create one, tipping the probe up on end and flaming the upper edges of a few vines until there is a satisfactorily flat landing zone below them. There is no reaction from the vines adjacent. They do not writhe, nor do they even stir; they give no indication of any sort that Huw’s assault on this very small sector of the planetary flora has caused the slightest resentment, let alone set in motion some kind of retaliatory action.

He sets the probe down nicely. Waits a moment for it to finish rocking. The landing zone he has improvised is a little on the uneven side.

“Tests, now,” Huw tells the year-captain, unnecessarily.

They run through all the prescribed extravehicular testing routines, checking this thing and that, the acid content of the rain and the possibility of atmospheric toxins and such. Not that they have any intention of exposing themselves to direct unshielded intake of the atmosphere out there, not on an alien world that they are already almost certain will be of no avail as a place where human beings might settle happily. But they are aware that extraterrestrial chemistries might provide nasty surprises even for explorers protected by spacesuits. So they take the proper precautions.

The rain is unrelenting. It works the skin of the little spaceship over like a trillion tiny hammers.

“At this point on the last planet,” Huw says, “I was already beginning to feel strange. The queasies had started to strike before I was even out of the probe.”

“And now?”

“Nothing. You?”

“Nothing at all.”

“But let’s see how it goes for us when we’re outside, shall we?”

A little comedy surrounds their going outside the ship. The year-captain, having previously made it clear that he looks upon Huw as the leader of the party, indicates with a nod that he will defer to Huw in the matter of being the first to set foot on this planet. But Huw, who has been the first to set foot on one extrasolar planet already, is quite willing to let the year-captain have the honor on this one, and defers right back to him. Of course, there is the possibility that the first one outside the ship will be the recipient of some sort of disagreeable jolt, but each man, in his deference to the other, goes to some length to make it clear that such fear is definitely not an item in his considerations, not at all. Courtesy is the only issue.

“Goon,” the year-captain says irritably in the end.

“Well, then. Yes, if so you say.”

Huw shimmies through the hatch and cautiously steps down onto the charred, still faintly sizzling surface of the landing area that he has fashioned. There is a slight resilience, a little give, beneath his weight. He can detect no untoward psychological effects.

“Everything all right so far,” he announces.

The year-captain joins him. Together they walk toward the edge of the clearing; and then, after just a moment of hesitation, they step out together onto the upper surface of one of the unburned vines.

It is an unappealing surface. Big scrofulous leaves, blue-black and stemless, pocked with ugly blister-shaped air bladders, sprout directly from the wood at sparse intervals. Dull red streamers hang from their edges like bursts of entrails. In the bare places between the leaves the trunks of the vine have a disagreeably gluey texture.

“Well?” Huw asks.

“A little sticky, isn’t it?”

“I mean your mind.”

“Still functioning, thank you. And yours?”

“I was ready to scream by this point on Planet A. Alreadywas screaming a little, as a matter of fact. Things are different here, it seems. So much for Giovanna’s theory, let’s hope.”

“Vile place even so, isn’t it?” the year-captain says.

“Utterly repugnant. Absolute trumps, as repugnant goes. Shall we move a little farther onward, old brother?”

It is almost like being under water. By their calculations it’s the midday hour, with a medium-size sun hovering right above them just a few dozens of millions of kilometers away, and yet they are shrouded in a deep twilight gloom. There is one place in the sky where a somewhat lighter blurry patch stands out against the thick gray mantle of clouds: that’s the sun lurking back there, no doubt. The rain, falling as it does in dense sheets, is dispiriting in the extreme. It must not have stopped raining here in millions of years. The water hits the corrugated woody surfaces of the huge vines and goes slithering off into the narrow crevices between them. Perhaps some of it trickles downward from the planetary surface for hundreds of kilometers until it comes to rest in pockets of unimaginable darkness along the flat face of the rocky core; but most of the deluge simply bounces right back up in instant evaporation. All about them they can see heavy clouds of vapor climbing stubbornly through the furious vertical scything of the downpour.

The vines themselves form a virtually impenetrable covering. They lie side by side like the threads in some colossal tapestry, occasionally overlapping, each one stretching on and on for what may well be kilometers; there is not so much as a fingersbreadth of room between each one and its neighbor. Their greenish-purplish bark is sturdy and yet rubbery, yielding a little beneath the feet of the two explorers. It bears not just leaves but pulpy fungoid masses that sprout in random patches all over it, and also scabrous gray coatings of the local equivalent of lichen. These are soft as cheese, these parasites or saprophytes or symbiotes, whatever the case may be, creating a treacherously slippery surface, but it is difficult to avoid walking on them. Between these various excrescent