Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Angelina Hesse. She was watching me. Clearly, she’d already seen the peep-show.
“It’s a very similar kind of world to our own,” said Harmall. “Apparently, though, it’s more stable. Less axial tilt, a trifle smaller, with a shorter day. A single moon, but much smaller than our own—less influential in terms of tides. Little evidence of tectonic activity and no noticeable vulcanism. Not much in the way of mountains; the seas are shallow and there are vast shallow swamps covering fully half the planetary surface. What you or I would call solid ground accounts for only a seventh of the surface, not counting islands in the swamplands, which are legion. No deserts, but there are polar ice-fields which—of course—are hidden here by cloud cover. The name given to it by the duty-crew is Naxos.”
“Why?” I inquired.
“Naxos,” explained Harmall, “was the island where Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus, and from which she was subsequently rescued by Dionysus, who gave her a place among the stars.”
I wasn’t altogether convinced of the propriety of that, but it was hardly for me to question it.
“One full crew was revived,” the blond man went on. “Captain d’Orsay, following the procedure laid down, floated a technical crew down to the surface. There they established a bubble-dome, following the rules with regard to sterile environments. The dome was completely sealed, with a space between the two membranes of the shell that could be evacuated, with a double airlock and the usual facilities for showering down. No one went outside, of course, without a sterile suit. This ground-crew consisted of twenty people. A reserve of thirty waited aboard ship. Six of the twenty were ecosystemic analysts, but as you can imagine, they’d had no opportunity to develop the experience that is routinely available nowadays. Similarly, their equipment was crude compared to what we can put into the field.
“All the early results implied that the planet was both habitable and safe. The one obvious danger was oxygen intoxication: the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere at ground level is a little higher on Naxos than on Earth. They found no obvious evidence of biological threat. They found that the basis of the life-system was a nucleic acid similar to DNA, and that the supplementary cell biochemistry was a reasonable analogue of our own. They worked, of course, mostly with plant specimens, and they carried out their work with all due precautions—at least, we suppose that they did. In view of what happened, there must be some doubt. Perhaps they got careless when nothing showed up to worry them.”
He paused, and began to prod the button under the screen again. The green world disappeared, to be replaced by a series of shots taken on the planet’s surface. All stills. Long-shots and close-ups, mixed in together. Stands of trees, individual flowering plants, flat expanses of tall grass. Ponds and streams decked out with rafts of vegetation or trailing pennants of weed. Insects ranging from small, rounded bugs to big dragonflies, with chimerical water-beasties thrown in for good measure. A few creatures that wore their skeletons inside instead of out, but none bigger than my hand, mostly soft and moist of skin—nothing that could properly be insulted if you decided to call it a frog.
There were half a dozen points in the sequence where I wanted to call “stop,” but I let the chances go. There’d be other times. FTL journeys are notoriously boring—what’s there to do in zero-g but study hard?
Then the pictures changed to interior shots. The dome and its staff. People at work and people at rest. The lab, where everyone wore plastic bags and polythene festoons made the whole working area into a parody of a membrane-filled cell. Chromatograms by the dozen, plotting out in pastel-colored clouds the chemical make-up of the not-so-very-alien life-system. White mice, unprotected by plastic bags, running free and waiting (though they surely didn’t know it!) to give warning of any pathogens by falling ill and maybe dying. Canaries, too, testing the local seeds for digestibility. The mice and the canaries looked suspiciously healthy, bearing in mind the baleful comments Harmall had appended to his last instalment of the Naxos saga.
The show finished without offering the least pictorial evidence of anything going wrong. The lights came on again.
“Well?” I said to the man from the Space Agency.
“They blew it,” he said. “They all died. Every last one, within the space of a single night. They never got a chance to find out what it was that hit them. They couldn’t provide the shipboard personnel with a single clue. They started dying, and they had no way to fight.”
“Cross-systemic infection,” I said. “Instant epidemic. That’s what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” replied Harmall. “That’s up to you, if you want the job.”
“Nobody else went down from the ship?”
Harmall shook his head. “By this time, the crew had the HSB in orbit and ready to burn. Captain d’Orsay considered that a state of emergency had arisen. The captains of the other crews were revived, and d’Orsay handed over command to Captain Juhasz. Rather than send a second technical crew to follow the first, he decided to wait for a time for a response to the beacon. He considered—correctly—that three hundred and fifty years of technical progress and expanding knowledge might allow him to call upon greater resources than he already had on the Ariadne. All further investigation of the surface was carried out by robot probes—which were not, of course, permitted to return.”
“We three, then, are being invited to play detective?” This time the question came from Zeno.
“That’s right,” said Harmall. “As I’ve said, there are manifest dangers. On the other hand, you start with one advantage: the bodies are there for examination. An autopsy might reveal the cause of death. Forewarned is forearmed.”
“How long will they have been dead by the time we get there?” I wanted to know.
“Nearly two months,” he told me.
Obviously, it wasn’t going to be a nice job. On the other hand, I was only a humble geneticist. Angelina Hesse was a physiologist. In my book, that made her number-one scalpel-wielder. Zeno and I were the hit men—we had to sort out the cure once the disease was identified.
“Why no pathologist?” I inquired.
“There is one,” said Harmall. “He’s coming in from a station in the belt.”
“A Soviet?”
“That’s right. Vesenkov—know him?”
I shook my head. Theoretically, the principle of freedom of information applies to research findings in pure science. For a while, I’d actually bothered to keep up with the bulletins published in English by the Soviets, but I’d eventually realized that they were never going to tell me anything non-trivial that I didn’t already know. Whether acknowledged or not, the principle of sovereignty extended to knowledge as well as to territory. We probably had agents who knew everything that appeared in the Soviets’ own bulletins, just as they had agents who read ours in the original, but information like that doesn’t filter back to the poor sods who do all the work.
“This is a matter for the concern of the entire race,” said Harmall smoothly. “We’re obliged to permit a soviet observer to participate in our investigations. We asked them to supply a competent professional, and they of course agreed. He’ll be here in two days. The Earth Spirit should be just about ready to set out by then, assuming that you can have your equipment stowed quickly enough. You can discuss weight and size restrictions with the quartermaster. Are you still with us?”
I was still with him. It had never crossed my mind to consider the possibility of backing out. Obviously, the Ariadne’s team had made a mistake. I thought of myself as the kind of man who never made mistakes. Ergo, I figured, there was nothing to be scared of.
I broached what seemed to me, at the time, to be a much more important question. “On the basis of what you’ve shown us,” I said, “Naxos isn’t as...well-developed...as Earth. In an evolutionary