“Cozy in here,” he said, grinning.
“It’s not built for comfort,” Valery agreed, shifting her weight slightly on the stiff metal chair.
“I wanted to know if you’re free for dinner tonight?” His voice rose enough to make it a question.
Val shook her head.
“Lunch?”
“Dan,” she said sadly. “I told you and Larry the same thing. Until the two of you stop fighting each other, I’m not going to have much to do with either of you. I won’t be the bait in a battle between you.
“But you said …”
“I’ve said a lot of things. Now I’m saying that the answer to both of you is no… as long as you’re fighting each other.”
“But Larry is…”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
Dan could feel hot anger rising inside him.
She almost smiled at him. “You don’t have to look so grim.”
“Don’t I?”
“No—Look, here are some of the results of the spectra I’ve taken with the main telescope. I haven’t shown them to anybody else, but I’ll show them to you.”
He shrugged. “Big thrill.”
“Don’t be fresh. And you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone until I make my report to the Council next week. I don’t want these data leaking out before I’ve had a chance to check everything through thoroughly.”
“I can keep a secret,” Dan said tightly.
“Well…” Val lowered her voice to almost a whisper. “Both stars seem to have Earthlike planets.”
“What?”
Nodding, Val went on, her voice rising with excitement. “Epsilon Indi is the closer of the two stars, so I can resolve its planets more easily. Not that I’ve been able to see anything except a pinpoint of light, even with the best image intensification. But the gravimetric measurements look good, and the spectral data…”
She turned to the twin viewscreens. “Look… here’s a spectrum I made twenty-four hours ago of the innermost planet of Epsilon Indi—the one that’s about Earth’s size and mass. And here, on the other screen, is a spectrum I made of Earth with the same telescope, a few days earlier. We’re just about the same distance from both planets—about four lightyears.”
Dan squinted at the two viewscreens. Each showed a smear of colors, crisscrossed by hundreds of dark lines. The Earth spectrum seemed to be dominated by shades of yellow, while the Epsilon Indi spectrum seemed more orange.
“The background continuum isn’t what’s important,” Valery explained. “Look at the absorption lines—” She pointed from one viewscreen to the other. “Oxygen here. And here. Nitrogen, on both. Water vapor… carbon dioxide,” her slim hand kept shifting back and forth, “and all at just about the same concentration. It’s fantastic!”
“You mean this planet’s just like Earth?”
“So close to each other that it’s hard to tell where they’re different, from this distance, at least.”
“But…” Dan’s insides were churning now. “But, the Epsilon Indi planet is just as far from us now as Earth and the solar system.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Val admitted.
“We could never make it there.”
Instead of answering, Valery turned back to the keyboard in front of the viewscreens. One of the pictures disappeared, to be replaced by another spectrogram.
“This is the spectrum of Femina… it’s much more intense than the Epsilon Indi planet’s, because we’re right next to it.”
“And the other spectrogram is still Earth’s?”
“Yes,” Val said. “And look at the differences in the atmospheric constituents. Sulfur oxides, big gobs of carbon dioxide and monoxide, other things I haven’t even identified yet.”
Even Dan’s unpracticed eye could see that the two spectrograms were very different from each other.
“Considering what you went through down there on the surface,” Valery said, “I should think you’d want to repair the ship and then push on for Epsilon Indi.”
Dan said nothing. He leaned against the acoustically insulated wall of the tiny booth; his face was pale, his eyes troubled.
“Thanks for showing me,” he said quietly. “I… won’t tell anybody until you give your report at the Council meeting.”
And then he pulled the -door open and stepped out of the booth, leaving Valery there alone to watch him walking quickly, through the tape shelves of the library.
Now I’ve told each of them, the exact opposite of what he wants to hear, she thought. Which one will come after me and try to silence me before the Council meeting?
Four days passed.
Larry sat in the main conference room, at his usual chair at the head of the table. But the table was mostly empty. Only Dan, Dr. Polanyi, Mort Campbell, and Guido Estelella were there, all clustered up close to Larry’s seat.
“From everything you’ve been telling me,” Larry was saying, looking at the chart on the viewscreen at the far end of the long, narrow room, “we have no choice but to go down to the surface again and try to repair the refining equipment.”
Polanyi folded his hands over his paunchy middle and agreed. “Whether we eventually decide to stay here or to move on, we still must have enough deuterium for many more years of living aboard the ship.”
“And we’ve got to overhaul just about everything on board,” Campbell added. “Doesn’t make a bit of difference if we’re going to live here or find another planet. The ship’s starting to fall apart. We’ve got to patch her up.”
Larry turned to Estelella. “What about rebuilding the refining equipment? That’ll take a lot of shuttling back and forth to the surface.”
The astronaut tilted his head slightly to one side. “That’s what I’m here for—I’m no use to anyone just sitting around.”
“No, I suppose not,” Larry said seriously. “How many flights will be necessary? Will you have to do all the flying yourself or will some of the other kids you’ve been training be able to help?”
“There are at least three or four who can fly the shuttle almost as well as I can,” Estelella said. It could have sounded like a boast, but he said it as a simple statement of fact. “And we can take the back-up shuttles out of storage and use them, too.”
Larry nodded thoughtfully.
“I think,” Dan said, “it’d be a good idea to have a spare shuttle on the ground next to the camp at all times. That way we’ll always have an escape route, in an emergency.”
“Good idea,” Larry said.
“The only real danger on the surface that we’ve run into are the storms,” Estelella muttered.
Polanyi said, “They appear to be tied in with the volcanic disturbances. If we could revive our full meteorological and geological teams, perhaps we could get accurate predictions of when to expect storms…”
Larry cut him off. “We can’t revive large numbers of people until we’ve made a firm decision to stay here. And that decision won’t be made until we get a full report on the other available planets.”
“We’re still going to be orbiting this planet,” Dan argued, “for a long time. Years, maybe.”
The others nodded agreement.
Dan went on, “I’m going down there with the first crew… got to see how bad the damage to the refinery really is.”
“You just got back,” Larry said. “And the medics are still…”
“I’m responsible for the equipment,” Dan snapped, his voice rising a notch louder than Larry’s. “It’s my job. I’m going down.”
Larry forced down an urge to shout back at him. “All right,” he said coldly, “then the only question is, when do we start?”