“Sooner the better,” Dan said.
“The campsite is in darkness now,” Estelella said, with a glance at his wristwatch. “It’ll be daylight there again in about… eight hours.”
“That puts it close to midnight, ship time.”
“Right.”
Dan said, “Let’s get a landing group together and get down there as soon as there’s enough light to see.”
“We can take off at midnight,” Estelella said.
“Good. You, me, and enough equipment to get the camp started again. Who else will we need?”
Larry was getting that helpless feeling again. Dan was running things his own way.
“You’d both better get some sleep,” he said. “And I’ll get the maintenance crew to crack the back-up shuttles out of storage, so you can get them into action as soon as possible.”
“Right.”
They got up from their chairs and headed for the door. Larry was the last to reach the doorway. Dan was still there, lingering, waiting for him.
“You’re not fooling me,” Dan said.
Larry frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t have any intention of staying here. I know that. You’re going to get the ship overhauled and patched up, and then try to convince everybody we ought to push on.”
To where? Larry almost said. But he wouldn’t give Dan the satisfaction. Instead, he asked, “You enjoyed your trip to the surface so much? You think it’s a fun place to be?”
“It’s better than this ship.”
Larry snorted. “That’s like saying that death is better than life.”
“Wrong!” Dan snapped. “Can’t you see it’s wrong? This is where we have to stay. Trying to push farther is just going to kill everybody. Is that what you want?”
“We’ve had this argument before, Dan.”
“You’re still not convinced?”
“This planet is a killer,” Larry said. “We can alter the next generation or two or even three… but I still don’t think they’ll be able to survive on Femina. The Planet’s deadly: Guido picked a good name for it.”
Dan started to answer, but Larry went on, “It’s a huge universe out there. It would be criminal of us to settle for this planet when there’ve got to be better worlds for us. Somewhere. There’s got to be.”
“We’ll see,” Dan said, his voice shaking. “We’ll see. And soon.”
Midnight.
There was no way to distinguish time on the bridge. Along the ship’s corridors and tubes, in the rec areas and cafeteria, the overhead lighting was dimmed during the night shifts. But in the working spaces, such as the bridge, everything looked the same whether it was midnight or noon. Only the people working changed. And the twenty-four hour clocks.
Larry stood behind the launch monitor, watching over his shoulders the viewscreens that showed the planet below them and the shuttle rocket sitting on the ship’s launching platform, up near the hub.
The campsite was in daylight now; under the highest magnification of the observation scopes, Larry could see a blackened smudge where the camp had been.
He turned to the screen that showed the shuttle craft. He could make out the two pressure-suited men sitting side by side in the pilot’s bubble. Estelella’s voice was checking off the countdown routine:
“Internal power on.”
“…nine, eight, seven…”
“Rockets armed and ready for ignition.”
“…five, four…”
“Tracking and telemetry on,” said a technician.
“…two, one, zero!”
The electric catapult slid the shuttle craft out past the open airlock hatch. Larry watched the viewscreen. It showed the shuttle dwindling, dwindling, becoming one more speck among the endless stars.
“Rocket ignition,” came Estelella’s voice.
The speck blossomed briefly into a glow of light. Then even that disappeared.
“Tracking on the observation telescope,” said a tech.
Larry turned toward the sound of her voice. The main screen on her console showed the shuttle craft, a tiny red-glowing meteor streaking across the broad golden landscape of the planet.
“Telemetry and voice communications strong and clear.”
Larry pressed the shoulder of the tech he was standing behind. “I’m going to my quarters to grab some sleep. Call me when they’ve landed.”
He stepped out of the glare and bustle of the bridge, into the soft shadowy nighttime lighting of the corridors. His own room was dark. He didn’t bother turning on a light, just slouched onto the bunk and waited.
The phone chimed. He touched the VOICE ONLY button.
“Yes?”
“They’ve landed. Estelella reports all okay, they’re getting out of the shuttle and starting to look around.”
“Thank you.”
Larry sat on the bunk, motionless for a long while. Then he turned to the phone again. “Valery Loring, please.”
A pause. Of course. She’s asleep by now.
Mrs. Loring’s face appeared on the viewscreen. “Larry, is that you? I can hardly see you. Don’t you have any lights on?”
“I’m sorry to wake you,” he said. “Is Val there?”
“I wasn’t asleep,” she said. “Haven’t been sleeping well lately…” Her voice trailed off. Then, “Valery’s up in the observatory. She’s been keeping very odd hours lately.”
“Oh, All right. Thank you. I’ll call her there.”
But he knew he wasn’t going to call her on the phone. He had to go up there and see her, face to face.
Two more nights, Valery was thinking. Two more nights, and then on the third morning the Council meets. Then I’ll have to tell them all the truth.
Each night for the past week she had been staying up in the observatory, sitting at the desk her father had used. The myriads of stars sprinkled across the blackness outside seemed to make the place feel colder, lonelier. Their light brought no warmth. The huge bulk of the planet was out of sight, down below the floor of the observatory, on the other side of the ship.
The big spidery telescope bulked blackly against the stars, and the smaller pieces of equipment made a hodgepodge of shadows. Black on black. Dark and darker. Only the little glowlights from the computer terminal and the viewscreens lit Val’s post.
She tried to stay awake through each night, of course. She actually got quite a bit of work done. But for long stretches of the night the telescopes and cameras and other instruments were doing their tasks and there was almost nothing for her to do. Except think. And—too often—drift into sleep, lulled by the weightlessness of the observatory and the silence.
Click!
She tensed instantly.
The sound of a hatch opening. Val strained her eyes, but could see nothing in the darkness. There were several hatches leading into the observatory, and with the tubes on nighttime lights, there wouldn’t be much of a glow to see when one of them was opened.
Padding footsteps. Slippered feet walking softly across the observatory floor.
“Who’s there?” she called.
No answer.
Dan went out on the shuttle, she knew.
“Larry, it’s you, isn’t it?”
His lean dark form seemed to coalesce out of the shadows. “Yes,” he said quietly, not five meters away from her. “It’s me.”
Her pulse was racing. “Oh… you scared me… a little.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
He was close enough now for her to see his face in the glow of the desk lights. He looked infinitely weary. He pulled up a chair and floated softly onto it. Valery noticed that he didn’t snap on the zero-g restraining belt. As calmly and unhurriedly as she could, she unclipped her own lap belt. It clicked loudly and snapped back into its resting sockets.