Huck was a Mars-sized ball of nickel and iron, a rusty brown color, pocked with craters, hot and dry and dead. Tom was larger and darker, cooler, but just as damaged by impacts and just as dead. Jim was Earthlike; it had a good-sized atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen, its range of temperatures stayed generally between - 30°C and + 50°C, and there was a great abundance of water on the planet’s surface. But there was no life, none on the rocky, dusty land, none in the mineral-salted water, nothing, not so much as a single cyanobacterium. Jim was the best hope Gillette had in the Hannibal system, but he investigated Becky and Aunt Polly as well. They were the less-dense gas giants of the system, although neither was so large as Uranus or Neptune. There was no life in their soupy atmospheres or on the igneous surfaces of their satellites. Gillette didn’t bother to name the twenty-three moons of the five planets; he thought he’d leave that to the people who came after him. If any ever did.
Next, Gillette had to take care of the second purpose of the mission. He set out an orbiting transmission gate around Jim, the most habitable of the five planets. Now a ship following in his path could cross the scores of light-years instantaneously from the gate Gillette had set out at his previous stop. He couldn’t even remember what that system had been like or what he had named it. After all these years they were all confused in his mind, particularly because they were so identical in appearance, so completely empty of life.
He sat at a screen and looked down on Jim, at the tan, sandy continents, the blue seas, the white clouds and polar caps. Gillette’s cat, a gray Maine coon, his only companion, climbed into his lap. The cat’s name was Benny, great-grandson of Methyl and Ethyl, the two kittens Jessica had brought along. Gillette scratched behind the animal’s ears and under his chin. “Why aren’t there any cats down there?” he asked it. Benny had only a long purr for an answer. After a while Gillette tired of staring down at the silent world. He had made his survey, had put out the gate, and now there was nothing to do but send the information back toward Earth and move on. He gave the instructions to the ship’s computer, and in half an hour the stars had disappeared, and Gillette was traveling again through the darkness of null space.
HE REMEMBERED HOW excited they had been about the mission, some thirty years before. He and Jessica had put in their application, and they had been chosen for reasons Gillette had not fully understood. “My father thinks that anyone who wants to go chasing across the galaxy for the rest of his life must be a little crazy,” said Jessica.
Gillette smiled. “A little unbalanced, maybe, but not crazy.”
They were lying in the grass behind their house, looking up into the night sky, wondering which of the bright diamond stars they would soon visit. The project seemed like a wonderful vacation from their grief, an opportunity to examine their lives and their relationship without the million remembrances that tied them to the past. “I told my father that it was a marvelous opportunity for us,” she said. “I told him that from a scientific point of view, it was the most exciting possibility we could ever hope for.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Look, Leslie, a shooting star. Make a wish. No, I don’t think he believed me. He said the project’s board of governors agreed with him and the only reason we’ve been selected is that we’re crazy or unbalanced or whatever in just the right ways.”
Gillette tickled his wife’s ear with a long blade of grass. “Because we might spend the rest of our lives staring down at stars and worlds.”
“I told him five years at the most, Leslie. Five years. I told him that as soon as we found anything we could definitely identify as living matter, we’d turn around and come home. And if we have any kind of luck, we might see it in one of our first stops. We may be gone only a few months or a year.”
“I hope so,” said Gillette. They looked into the sky, feeling it press down on them with a kind of awesome gravity, as if the infinite distances had been converted to mass and weight. Gillette closed his eyes. “I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you, too, Leslie,” murmured Jessica. “Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” she said. “I might have been afraid to go with you if you weren’t worried, too. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ll have each other, and it’ll be exciting. It will be more fun than spending the next couple of years here, doing the same thing, giving lectures to grad students and drinking sherry with the Nobel crowd.”
Gillette laughed. “I just hope that when we get back, someone remembers who we are. I can just see us spending two years going out and coming back, and nobody even knows what the project was all about.”
Their good-bye to her father was more difficult. Mr. Reid was still not sure why they wanted to leave Earth. “A lot of young people suffer a loss, the way you have,” he said. “But they go on somehow. They don’t just throw their lives away.”
“We’re not throwing anything away,” said Jessica. “Dad, I guess you’d have to be a biologist to understand. There’s more excitement in the chance of discovering life somewhere out there than in anything we might do if we stayed here. And we won’t be gone long. It’s field work, the most challenging kind. Both of us have always preferred that to careers at the blackboards in some university.”
Reid shrugged and kissed his daughter. “If you’re sure,” was all he had to say. He shook hands with Gillette.
Jessica looked up at the massive spacecraft. “I guess we are,” she said. There was nothing more to do or say. They left Earth not many hours later, and they watched the planet dwindle in the ports and on the screens.
The experience of living on the craft was strange at first, but they quickly settled into routines. They learned that while the idea of interstellar flight was exciting, the reality was duller than either could have imagined. The two kittens had no trouble adjusting, and the Gillettes were glad for their company. When the craft was half a million miles from Earth, the computer slipped it into null space, and they were truly isolated for the first time.
It was terrifying. There was no way to communicate with Earth while in null space. The craft became a self-contained little world, and in dangerous moments when Gillette allowed his imagination too much freedom, the silent emptiness around him seemed like a new kind of insanity or death. Jessica’s presence calmed him, but he was still grateful when the ship came back into normal space, at the first of their unexplored stellar systems.
Their first subject was a small, dim, class-M star, the most common type in the galaxy, with only two planetary bodies and a lot of asteroidal debris circling around it. “What are we going to name the star, dear?” asked Jessica. They both looked at it through the port, feeling a kind of parental affection.
Gillette shrugged. “I thought it would be easier if we stuck to the mythological system they’ve been using at home.”
“That’s a good idea, I guess. We’ve got one star with two little planets wobbling around it.”
“Didn’t Apollo have . . . No, I’m wrong. I thought—”
Jessica turned away from the port. “It reminds me of Odin and his two ravens.”
“He had two ravens?”
“Sure,” said Jessica, “Thought and Memory. Hugin and Mugin.”
“Fine. We’ll name the star Odin, and the planets whatever you just said. I’m sure glad I have you. You’re a lot better at this than I am.”
Jessica laughed. She looked forward to exploring the planets. It would be the first break they had in the monotony of the journey. Neither Leslie nor Jessica anticipated finding life on the two desolate worlds, but they were glad to give them a thorough examination. They wandered awe-struck over the bleak, lonely landscapes of Hugin and Mugin, completing their tests, and at last returned to their orbiting craft. They sent their findings back to Earth, set out the first of the transmission gates, and, not yet feeling very disappointed, left the Odin system. They both felt that they were in contact with their home, regardless of the fact that their message would take a long time to reach Earth, and they were moving away too quickly ever to receive any. But they both knew that if they wanted, they could still turn around and head back to Earth.