Starbridge (28 page)

"Can we breathe the air?" Rob asked.

"Unknown. We are still too far away to judge."

"When we get there, we'll have to land," Mahree said, still speaking Simiu.

She had brought her voder along, but so far hadn't bothered to strap it on.

"Can this ship perform an atmosphere landing, FriendDhurrrkk'?"

"It has belly-jets for landing. Whether I can pilot it to a safe 177

set-down is another matter," the Simiu said, his expression rueful. "I have performed many docking maneuvers at space stations, and have landed at spaceports, but I have never set down on anything but artificial terrain."

"Won't the computers help?" Rob asked, watching Dhurrrkk's face. Ever since this trip had begun, he'd practiced making himself watch the Simiu when he spoke, rather than relying solely on his voder screen.

"Yes," Dhurrrkk' replied, "they will, but it will be my responsibility to locate a suitable spot for our landing."

"How soon will we achieve orbit?"

"Four hours," Dhurrrkk' told him. "That will not leave us much time, but that cannot be helped."

The doctor nodded. I
really am getting better,
he thought, pleased. I
can
understand him pretty well now, when he speaks slowly and simply. Now if I
can just get so
I
can
pronounce
the damned language ...

"I'm trying to hold myself back from getting excited," Mahree said quietly.

"There's still so much that could go wrong. This planet's atmosphere could contain poisonous trace elements. The air may be so thin that it can't sustain us. The plants may not be something we can transplant to
Rosinante's
hydroponics area. Hell, there may not even
be
any plant life."

Rob put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a quick, hard squeeze and a peck on the forehead. "Think positive, honey. This place represents our last chance."

He felt her body tense, then she relaxed within the circle of his arm. "It's not as though it can hear us, Rob," she said, with a wry smile.

"You never know," he said. "In one of my films there was this planet that was a huge sentient life-form, and when these hapless astronauts landed on it, it--"

"Spare me," she said, laughing. "You and your films--!"

Rob dropped his arm from Mahree's shoulders as he noticed that Dhurrrkk'

was regarding both of them, his violet eyes thoughtful. "I am conscious of a change, here," he observed, at length. "I believe that I am detecting patterns of human pre-mating behavior I have viewed in your holo-vids. First the embrace, then the kiss, correct? If so, is this one of the occasions in which that activity is a precursor to mating?"

Rob opened his mouth to answer, choked instead, and hastily

178

put a hand over his mouth so he wouldn't laugh. He felt his face reddening.

Mahree colored, too, but handled herself with comparative aplomb. "No, I'm afraid not, FriendDhurrrkk'," she replied. "But it was extremely perceptive of you to notice when Rob hugged and kissed me. You are undoubtedly becoming your world's foremost expert on human behavior patterns."

Dhurrrkk's crest rose to its highest elevation. "You do me great honor, FriendMahree. Will you require privacy for any eventual activities, or are they, like your holo-vids, available for public viewing?"

Rob couldn't look at Mahree as she replied, with serene dignity, "In real life, privacy is the social rule, Dhurrrkk'."

"I understand," the Simiu said aloud in English, with, Rob thought, just a hint of regret.

"Not to change the subject," the doctor announced loudly, to extricate Mahree from any further discussion along such lines, "but I just realized I'm very hungry. Since we have several hours to wait, we might as well eat."

"But he
did
change the subject," he could hear Dhurrrkk' saying plaintively to Mahree as they left the control room. "When he said that he would not. Why would he say that?"

"It's an idiomatic expression, FriendDhurrrkk'," Mahree said, also in English, and Rob could hear her struggling not to break down and laugh. "I can't think of a way to explain it."

"A dirty joke?" Dhurrrkk' suggested, hopefully.

"Sort of," Mahree gasped, losing the battle and dissolving completely.

179

This is probably my last entry. Dhurrrkk' set us down fifteen minutes ago, and at the moment he and Rob are in the control room, checking the data from the flyovers. I'm waiting until it's time to suit up. There's not much oxygen out there. But we have to try, don't we?

I'm scared.

I'll be leaving my computer link and these journal cassettes in the airlock, which is the first place anyone who discovers
Rosinante
will enter. Unless they're Jerry's energy beings, of course ...

That's assuming that this ship will ever be found, which is not a bet I'd care to cover. Instead,
Rosinante
will probably crumble into dust or rust away thousands or millions of years from now ...

I'm leaving this account just the way I wrote it. Sometime in these past hours I came to realize that love is never something to be ashamed of feeling.

The sole UNIVERSAL TRUTH that I've learned in seventeen years is that truthful and accurate Communication is the MOST IMPORTANT thing in the cosmos. I used to think it was Love, but you can love someone and not understand them. Understanding (not necessarily acceptance) is
vital
in dealing with other people, whether those people are human, Simiu, Mizari, or energy beings.

Well, I'm out of time. To whoever finds this, in whatever language you speak, I extend a warm "Hello!"

180

And-- Goodbye.

Mahree stood in the control room door, wearing her spacesuit, its helmet tucked under her arm. She listened intently as Rob and Dhurrrkk' completed the atmospheric analysis of the chill little worldlet where
Rosinante
now rested.

"That's all very well and good," she broke in, interrupting their jargon-laden exchange impatiently after a few minutes, "but what's the bottom line? Can we
breathe
out there?"

Rob scowled at his link, considering. "Doubtful," he concluded. "At least, not for more than a minute or so. Nothing in the air can
hurt
us to breathe it, but the overall oxy level is like being on top of a high mountain, Earthside. The slightest exertion, and we'd pass out in short order."

"Could we breathe it while we're resting? Sit down and take off our helmets to conserve our breathing paks?"

"You
might--and I stress
might--
be able to, for a short time, but I wouldn't risk either Dhurrrkk' or me trying it."

Mahree bit her lip. "What about the plants?" she said.

Rob shook his head, obviously bewildered. "I just don't know," he said. "It's an extremely peculiar situation out there. Certain locations have significantly higher concentrations of O2 than others--but there's no consistent correlation between those oxy concentrations and the patches we identified as vegetation during our low-level sweep. Sometimes they coincide, sometimes they don't. We're not too far from one of the higher concentrations of oxygen, so we'll just have to take a look."

"How can there be higher concentrations of oxygen? Doesn't the gas dissipate into the atmosphere?"

"Sure--some. But this place has no tides, no weather. The temperature is a constant four degrees, just above freezing, and that doesn't vary, because there's no night. So there's no wind to move the atmosphere around. And oxygen is a comparatively heavy gas, so that when it's emitted under these circumstances, it tends to stay in one place, at least for a while." He glanced at his watch. "We'd better get going. Air's awasting."

Within minutes, the three explorers were ready. The doctor carried a sensing device to help them locate and analyze the local vegetation in their search for the O2 concentrations.

"The gravity is low," he warned Mahree as Dhurrrkk' began 181

cycling the air out of the airlock into storage, where it could be reused.

"About half a gee. Be careful."

"Does Dhurrrkk' know that?" she asked. The two humans could talk to each other, but there had been no time to adjust their suit radios to the Simiu wavelength. They could communicate sketchily by touching helmets and shouting, but that form of conversation had obvious limits.

"Yeah, he knows."

The outer doors split apart, then opened wide. Mahree stepped cautiously down the ramp, watching her footing, because the ramp was steep, and her feet had an alarming tendency to slip in the low gravity--gravity which felt doubly light, because she'd spent days now living at one and a half gee.

Finally she was standing safely on solid ground, free to look around. Mahree caught her breath with excitement, thrilled despite their desperate situation to actually be standing on an alien world.
I'm the first human to ever tread
here,
she realized.
One giant step, and all that stuff.

Slowly, searching for any patches of the vegetation that had so puzzled Rob, she rotated 360 degrees, staring avidly.

It was a bleak vista that met her eyes--cold, yet washed everywhere with a hellish scarlet illumination from the red dwarf overhead. The ground beneath her feet was hard, black-brown rock, with a thin, damp layer of dark grayish brown soil overlaying it. A dank red mist lay close along the ground, pooling deeper in any depressions. Mahree could see for a long way in most directions, because the ground, though rock-strewn and broken, was relatively flat.

She lifted her face to the sun, and her faceplate's polarizing ability automatically cut in--but the protection was hardly necessary. The light level was dim, about that of a cloudy twilight.
Dhurrrkk's going to be nearly blind,
she realized, and said as much to Rob.

"We'll have to keep him right with us," he agreed. "Will you
look
at that sun!"

"I'm looking," she said, awed. "It doesn't look small from here, does it?"

Overhead, the unnamed red dwarf dominated the cloudless sky, appearing five times the diameter of Sol or Jolie's sun, Nekkar (Beta Bootes). As it flamed dully in the deep purply red sky, it appeared almost close enough to touch; Mahree and

182

Rob could clearly make out solar prominences lashing outward from its disk.

"It probably flares every so often," Mahree said, remembering one of Professor Morrissey's astronomy lectures. "Let's hope it doesn't decide to belch out a heavy concentration of X rays while we're here."

"Let's hope it doesn't," Rob agreed fervently.

After a minute, Dhurrrkk' touched her arm, and Mahree came out of her reverie with a start. "We'd better go," she said. "We can't waste air just standing here gawking."

The three set off across the rocky ground, Rob in the lead, Dhurrrkk' and Mahree close behind him. Once the girl caught the toe of her boot on one of the multitudes of small, jagged outcrops, and stumbled badly, but her fall was slow enough that she was able to catch herself on her hands.
"Easy,"

Rob said, pulling her up one-handed in the light gravity. "One of these volcanic ridges could rip your suit. You okay?"

"Fine." she said, trying not to gasp with reaction to her near disaster, "You'd think walking in gravity this low would be easy, but it's not, the ground's so broken."

The explorers halted when they reached the little lake they'd charted during the flyby. Crimson mist obscured its surface, reflecting the light of the red sun. "How deep is that water? Any vegetation down there?" Mahree asked Rob, stepping cautiously onto the dark rocks of the "shore."

He examined his scanning device. "Not very deep. About two meters in the middle. And yes, there's plant life down there."

"Is it giving off oxygen?"

"Yes, but we can't use these plants, because the Simiu hydroponics lab, unlike
Desiree's,
is set up for land-based vegetation. The tanks are way too shallow. Not to mention that I can't envision any way of hauling enough of this water aboard to support a significant amount of plant life. Even at one-half gee, water's
heavy."

They walked on, frequently having to detour around patches of the mist that were thick enough to obscure their footing, and skirting an occasional, head-high upthrust of the black rock.

Finally, they reached the closest large patch of vegetation. The alien plants filled an entire shallow "basin" in the rocky surface, and were clumped together so closely they resembled thick moss. Each plant stood only a few centimeters above the soil that

183

nourished its roots. The moss-plants were a dull dark green in color, with tiny, fleshy-thick "leaves."

His boots hidden by a knee-high patch of mist, Rob bent over to carefully scan the plants. After a moment, he shook his head.

"No O2?" Mahree asked numbly.

"Some, but not enough. These plants photosynthesize, but..." he trailed off, then burst out, "they
can't
be the source of those higher O2 levels I was reading!"

"How many of these moss-plants would we need to keep us going?"

"Half an acre of them," Rob said disgustedly. "Forget it."

Dhurrrkk' tugged on Mahree's arm, and she leaned over to touch helmets.

After conveying the bad news, she straightened. "Okay, where's that higher O2 concentration you mentioned, Rob?"

He consulted the instrument and pointed. "Thataway."

"Let's get going."

They trudged toward the area he had indicated. Mahree checked the homing grid displayed just above eye level in her helmet, and discovered that they were now well over a straight-line kilometer away from
Rosinante.
The strangely close horizon made estimating distances by eye difficult. She cast a swift, nervous glance at the gauge showing the status of her breathing pak.

Just about two hours left. The walking's so difficult that I'm using more air
than I realized.

The thought made her want to stride faster, but she forced herself to move deliberately, fighting off the sensation of a cold hand slowly tightening around her throat.
Fear uses up oxygen,
she told herself sternly.
Calm down.