Starborne (19 page)

“
I resign,”
he says. “
This is
hopeless.”

“
Indeed,”
Huw agrees. He offers Leon his hand. “
A good game, doctor. Thank you.”

“
You
’
re welcome,”
Leon says, not very cordially.

“
You will all excuse me, please,”
says Huw. “
I will speak with the year-captain now.”

Huw rises to go out of the lo
unge. He is a big, thickly built man, rumpled and inelegant-looking, who walks with the ponderous but co
n
fident rolling stride of someone accustomed to walking the deck of a seagoing vessel. As he crosses the room, he pauses to pat Paco appreci
a
tively on t
he back, as though expressing admiration for his clowning. But also he blows a kiss in Sylvia
’
s direction. Then he proceeds down the corridor to the control cabin, where the year-captain is usually to be found.

Huw and the year-captain are old friends, if
anyone can be said to be a friend of the year-captain
’
s. They are the only two members of the expedition who actually have worked together in any sort of way before they were chosen for the voyage.

Unlike the year-captain, who has chosen to reinvent himsel
f every ten or twelve years with an entirely new career, Huw has devoted hi
m
self singlemindedly to planetary reconnaissance since he was a very young man. He is by nature an explorer. Some vagrant gene in his makeup has sparked an insatiable curiosity in h
im, not at all typical of his era: he seeks to move outward, ever outward, journeying through the realms of the universe, seeing everything that is there to be seen. The moons and planets in the vicinity of Earth first, of course. But it had a
l
ways been hi
s intention to be part of the first interstellar mission, which was already in the planning stages before he was born, and so he has spent his life designing, building, and testing equipment for use in the exploration of unfamiliar environments. Huw is a
d
escendant, so he likes to claim, of Prince Madoc of Wales, who in the twelfth century set out with two hundred followers westward into the Atlantic and came to a land unknown, where he saw many strange things. And returned to Wales and recruited colonists,
and went back to the land on the far side of the Atlantic to found a settlement of Godfearing Welshmen in the New World and to convert the Aztecs and other heathen to Christianity.

Was it so? Of course it was, Huw would say. The account of M
a
doc
’
s voyage
was right there in the chronicle of Caradoc of Llancarfan, the
Historie of Cambria now called Wales
, and who was he to call the learned Caradoc a liar? It was well known, Huw would tell you, it was a fact beyond question, that certain Aztec words were much
like Welsh, and that Indians as far north as the Great Plains had been found to be speaking the pure Welsh tongue like true Silurians when the later Eur
o
pean explorers arrived. And did Madoc
’
s blood truly run in Huw Mo
r
gan
’
s veins? Who could say it did no
t? There wasn
’
t a Welshman alive who couldn
’
t trace his ancestry, one way or another, to the glorious kings of olden days, and Madoc had been one of the greatest of those kings: there was no questioning of that.

And so this jovial ruddy-faced son of Madoc
had gone up from the green and placid precincts of happy Earth to ride in a silver bullet across the sun-blasted plains of Mercury, he had prowled the parched wast
e
lands of Mars, he had risked even the corrosive atmosphere of Venus. He was a designer and b
uilder of the equipment that protected him, the sealed and armored land-rovers, the doughty spacesuits. When he was done with Venus the moons of the outer worlds attracted him. Outward, ever outward: and it was on Ganymede of Jupiter that his path and tha
t
of the man who one day would be the year-captain of the
Wotan
first intersected.

They knew of each other, of course. Earth
’
s population in these latter days was so small, and the number of those of their particular cast of mind so few, that they could har
dly not have heard of each other. But even a small world like Earth is quite big enough for two roving men to move about freely without bumping into one another, especially if they are periodically making excursions to adjacent planets.

Life
was what the m
an who one day would be the year-captain of the
Wotan
was looking for. Not his own life; he had already found that, knew precisely where its center was located. But life outside himself, far outside, the life of other worlds. Mercury had none: the sun had
baked it clean in the horrific intervals of daylight between the long spells of te
r
rible night. The hidden landscape of Venus was too difficult to explore with any thoroughness, though it was not beyond hope that some orga
n
isms comfortable in blast-furnace
heat under a carbon-dioxide sky might have evolved there. Still, none could be found. And on Mars, grim red dusty Mars, microfossils four billion years old spoke of ancient bacteria and protozoa, but it did not seem as if they had left any living descen
d
a
nts on that harsh and uninviting world.

The moons of Jupiter and Saturn, though
—
Io, Callisto, Iapetus, T
i
tan, Ganymede
—

“
I
’
m going to Ganymede to look for microbes,”
the man who would be year-captain said, five minutes after his first meeting with Huw. “
Build me an ice-sled and a proton-storm suit. And come with me.”

They were very different kinds of men. Huw, cheerful and outgoing and exuberant, was surprised to find himself drawn so strongly to someone so remote, inaccessible, unsympathetic. It was the
attraction of opposites, perhaps. They were mirror images of one another. And yet they wanted the same thing.

Huw was puzzled by the odd combination of flightiness and profu
n
dity that was the Scandinavian man
’
s mind: the curious episode of the career in th
e theater with which he had interrupted his scientific work, for example, a thing which made no sense to Huw, and the peculiar m
e
dieval yearnings toward some sort of transcendental consummation, that he occasionally expressed, and which also seemed pure fo
olishness to Huw. But despite all that they quickly found themselves drawn toward one another. They both were fearless, hungry, determined to seek things that lay outside the placidities of the tame housebroken civilization into which they had been born.

S
o they went to Ganymede together.

Ganymede was the biggest of Jupiter
’
s moons, an immense iceball, cratered by billions of years of battering from space, grooved by the heavings of fierce internal forces. There had been an atmosphere here once, though now
it lay in frozen heaps: ammonia, methane. Together the two men skated in Huw
’
s cunningly shielded sled in eerie pale su
n
light over fields of muddy brown ice beneath the mighty eye of Jupiter. The great planet, ceaselessly spewing primordial energy, spit an
gry swarms of protons against them, but the magnetic fields of their suits deflected the onslaught. Could anything live, endure, replicate, under such a bombardment? In theory, perhaps, yes. They found no sign of life on Ganymede, though, nor on big Calli
s
to nearby. Not a microbe, not the merest speck. Nothing.

But volcanic Io was a different matter. An ocean of molten sulfur with a frozen surface; ice of sulfur dioxide forming white frost clinging to a silicate landscape; geysers spouting fiery plumes of e
lemental sulfur fifty kilometers high that came raining down as sulfuric snow, pastel yellow and orange with undertones of blue; and volcanoes everywhere, eternally belching, sending dense clouds of sulfur-dioxide debris boo
m
ing skyward that tumbled back t
o ground like a rain of cannonballs. Here, on the night side of this dire turbulent terrain, under a black sky glittering faintly with the lethal electrical discharges from Jupiter
’
s huge relentless magnetosphere, the two explorers collected the first ext
r
ate
r
restrial life ever found: sturdy one-celled entities, closer in nature to bacteria than anything else, sulfur-loving things, bright dots of scarlet against yellow ice, spreading slowly and happily across the face of the frightful little world of which
they were the supreme and absolute rulers.

Huw danced wildly, ecstatically, around those little colored splotc
h
es, flinging high his hands, shouting thick-tongued nonsensical syllables that he wanted to believe were Welsh. His companion remained m
o
tionless
, regarding him quizzically.

“
Come on, damn you,”
Huw cried. “
Dance! Dance! A celebration of life, damn you!”
He took the other man by the hand, pulled him along with him, led him in a reluctant lurching acknowledgment of their great discovery.

And then it
was on to Titan for them, Saturn
’
s chilly Titan, big enough to have held its atmosphere, a place where methane sleet fell steadily out of a hazy hydrogen-cyanide sky. Luck was with them here, too. By the gloomy shores of hydrocarbon lakes, under a thick
l
ayer of faintly glowing lemon-colored smog, they stared at sprinkles of orange against a gray shield of ammonia-methane ice. These too were living creatures. Biological processes of some sort were taking place here, anabolism, katabolism, ingestion, respi
r
ation, reproduction, whatever. Living creatures, altogether different from those of Io and unutterably different from anything native to Earth.

Those two sets of alien splotches are still the only forms of extrate
r
restrial life that the human race has ever
discovered, and the two men who found them stand face to face, now, in the control cabin of the
W
o
tan
.

“
We
’
ve been talking about the people who
’
ll be going on the landing party,”
Huw says.

“
There
’
s been no decision about a landing party,”
the year-captain
replies evenly.

“
We can at least speculate about the makeup of the party.”

“
You can at least do that. But we don
’
t have any assurance yet that we
’
ll want to make a landing at all.”

“
If we do,”
Huw says. “
Let
’
s assume that much, shall we, old brot
h
er?”

“
Al
l right. If we make a landing, then.”

“
If we do,”
Huw says, “
my feeling is that a group of three is our best bet: a biologist, a planetographer, and
—”

The year-captain says, “
Do I understand that you
’
re proposing you
r
self as a candidate for my job, Huw?”

H
uw, bewildered, shakes his head. “
Why do you say that?”

“
Naming the landing-party is my prerogative. Here you
’
ve already worked out the proper number of people to go, and, I assume, the names of the actual personnel as well. Captain
’
s work. All right: you
want to be captain, Huw, you can be captain. We
’
ll call a ship assembly and I
’
ll nominate you as my successor, and then you can pick anybody you like to go down for a look at Planet A. Assuming that you regard it as desi
r
able to make a landing in the first
place.”

Huw is still shaking his head. “
No, you don
’
t understand
—
I
’
m not trying to
—
I don
’
t want
—
I wouldn
’
t want
—”