The transfer from the spinning station to the “stationary” spindle made me feel a little giddy, and I had to pause at the portal to settle down. Because the spindle was a zero-g environment it no longer made sense to think in terms of up and down, but in my private thoughts I always imagined the docking bays to be “downward” and the observation tower to be “upward,” on the grounds that a place where you could look at the naked stars just had to be beneath the sky; to contemplate the awful star-strewn infinity you have to think of yourself as looking up, if only because up, in metaphorical terms, is the right way to Heaven.
The boys in Astronomy were back at work, it being January the second by our Earth-imitation reckoning, and no longer a holiday. They didn’t pay any attention to me, though. They didn’t use the observation balcony much themselves; star-gazing and astronomy, they assure me, are two very different things.
I floated over to the rail, and anchored myself so I could look straight out into Sagittarius, where the center of the galaxy hid behind its curtain of interstellar dust.
The configuration of bright stars that had somehow suggested itself to the ancients as the figure of a centaur archer was lost in a starfoam sea, whose light dazzled the eyes and startled the mind. It was a sight you had to get used to—some people found it too much to bear, and it made them sick. In all probability, half of the station staff had been up here no more than once, and some might serve a five-year stretch without ever once seeing the naked stars. Some claimed that the sight made them feel as if they were in the presence of God; others that it made them feel so tiny that they were haunted by humility. They had to work hard, though, to cultivate feelings as specific and articulate as that. For me, it was a sensation that didn’t translate into any kind of awestruck silliness. It was an experience unique in itself, that didn’t need to be compared with some kind of imaginary transcendental nonsense.
There was a tiny spider working its way along the rail, plainly unimpressed by the grandeur beyond the wall, for all that it had so many eyes to see it with. It was an Earthly spider, of course. The main work of the station was to do with alien biology, but we didn’t let the specimens run around loose. Plague-paranoia forbade such recklessness, except insofar as Zeno was concerned (the Calicoi had long since served out their period of quarantine). Anyhow, only Earth and Calicos had life-systems sufficiently well-developed to have produced organisms as high on the evolutionary scale as spiders. So far.
I blew the spider off its perch, knowing that it would float around, spinning a string of invisible silk until it caught on something solid. It looked as if it had had a lot of practice in dealing with a no-g environment. It might be the hundredth generation to be born here. I wondered what kind of changes might have been made at the biochemical level by natural selection operating in zero g, and wondered briefly whether I ought to start hunting spiders to prepare for a long-term study. Then I remembered that there wasn’t time, and made a mental note to put the idea on the dictaphone. Come to think of it, spiders implied flies—some prey species, at least, maybe feeding on bits of human skin and other debris that collected here. Maybe, I thought, there was a full-blown zero-g ecosystem here, waiting to be investigated.
I looked out at the blazing panorama, wondering where the star might be that would be the sun warming Earth Three. It would be a visible star, I presumed, if it was a G-type less than two hundred light-years away, but it would be insignificant within the multitude.
All the stars I could see were within easy reach of Mars-orbit, through hyperspace, but we had managed to find the way to a mere handful of them. The rest beckoned us with light that left them hundreds or thousands of years before, but in hyperspace they were invisible. All leaps in hyperspace, save those to human-built beacons, were leaps in the dark; and darkness, in accordance with the calculus of probability, was where all such leaps came out. Our FTL ships had jumped into the spaces between stars far too remote to be seen from Earth, and had even ventured into the intergalactic gulf beyond our spiral arm, knowing they could get home again by tracking the glimmer of the HSBs in Mars-orbit. But finding other star systems—trying by random leaps to wind up within a few million kilometers of an alien star—was far, far more difficult than trying to locate half a dozen needles in a haystack.
Maybe God, I thought, is trying to tell us something. Or maybe he just doesn’t like to make things too easy.
Everyone has occasional attacks of philosophy. Even me.
CHAPTER FOUR
The shuttle carrying Jason Harmall and Angelina Hesse from Marsbase docked in the early evening, four hours before the Earth Spirit was due. Rumor flew back to us that they were whisked promptly into conference with Schumann, and we waited in the lab for the summons we knew to be due. It wasn’t long in coming.
Harmall was a tall man—almost as tall as Zeno—but he was very slim; his fingers were long and delicate, his jaw deep and narrow. His hair was very fair and his eyes were blue. Angelina Hesse, by contrast, was much squarer of frame and countenance, with serious grey-brown eyes and auburn hair. They were both in the late thirties or early forties—which made me, I suppose, the baby of the party. (Zeno, if you translated his age into our years, was pushing fifty.)
The Space Agency man demonstrated a rare capacity for observing the obvious by asking politely how old I was. I explained that I’d accomplished so much by working hard. He went on to make some equally platitudinous (and faintly insulting) observations about Zeno and the uniqueness of his position on Sule. I didn’t pay them much attention, and was glad when we could get down to business.
Courtesy of Schumann, we had a genuine conference table; we also had a wall-screen uncovered, which indicated that we had a little picture-show to look forward to. The Earth Spirit had obviously been busy transmitting on a tight beam to Marsbase.
“I want you both to understand,” said Harmall to Zeno and me, “that this is strictly a job for volunteers. If at any time you want out, simply say so, and you’re out. What I’m about to tell you is controlled information, and I’ll have to ask you not to repeat any of it for the time being—that’s just a formality. What needs to be said now is that the job is dangerous; maybe very dangerous. I have to know whether you’re prepared to accept that. Dr. Caretta?”
“I’m in,” I said, unhesitatingly. It’s easy to be brave when you’re talking in abstractions.
He only had to glance at Zeno, who nodded calmly.
“Well then, I’ll be brief. Captain D’Orsay, late of the Ariadne, is coming in on the Earth Spirit, and she can provide full details of the whole story. The Ariadne was targeted at a star-cluster a hundred and forty to a hundred and fifty light-years or so toward galactic center. There are something on the order of forty stars in the cluster, over half of them G-type. In getting there she made close enough passage to two other stars to be able to survey them for possible Earthlike planets, but drew a blank.
“Ariadne, as you know, is a colony-ship, carrying three crews in suspended animation. Officers were awakened periodically to carry out systems checks and to evaluate incoming information.
“Once into the cluster, she hit an apparent jackpot. The evidence suggests that at least ten of the G-types have planetary systems, and the odds seem good that at least half of those have life-supporting planets. Ariadne headed straight for the likeliest prospect, and found this.”
Schumann dimmed the lights, and Harmall dabbed at a button on the screen with one of his long fingers. It was a still picture, not a video-tape, but it looked as sharp now as when it was taken.
Earth, from space, looks blue with lots of white streaks. The continents never really show up very well, and they always look rather undistinguished—mottled and muddy—by comparison with the smooth, bright ocean. This world, by contrast, was mostly green-and-white. The clouds might have been Earthly clouds, white and voluminous. The other “Earthlike” worlds don’t have clouds like that. They either