She looked puzzled. “Burp?”
Jordan rummaged in his mind for a definition. “Like when you’ve gobbled down your food too fast.” And he pantomimed a burp.
“Ah!” Laughing, Aditi said, “You mean ‘expel forcibly, belch, erupt, explode.’”
“You sound like a dictionary.”
“I’m quoting from a dictionary.”
Surprised, Jordon blurted, “You have a dictionary memorized?”
Again she laughed brightly. “No, but I can call one up when I need to.”
He understood. “You have a communications system? Built in?”
Aditi tapped her short-cropped red hair. “Inside the skull. We all do. It’s installed in childhood.”
Impressed, Jordan muttered, “That beats carrying a phone around, I suppose.”
When they reached the base camp, Meek eyed the minihorse and the equipment it was carrying with unconcealed hostility.
“I don’t like this,” he told Jordan. “I don’t like this at all.”
Taking the astrobiologist by the arm and leading him away from Aditi and the stolid beast, Jordan said, “Harmon, it’s for your own protection.”
“How do we know that?”
“The city is protected by an energy dome.”
Undeterred, Meek insisted, “We have no idea of how it works or what it actually does. I’m against—”
“What it does,” Jordan interrupted, “is protect you from any excess radiation caused by the storm.”
Meek’s long, craggy face was a picture of suspicion. “The Pup just happened to emit a flare. Hazzard and the others just happen to prefer leaving the ship and coming down here. Adri just happens to offer what he claims is a protective energy shield for our camp.”
“And I just happen to accept his offer,” Jordan countered, “and order the energy shield to be set up here. That’s all there is to it, Harmon.”
“I’m against it.”
“Your objection will be noted in the expedition’s record.”
“Fine.”
Jordan didn’t tell Meek that the expedition’s record was not being transmitted to Earth. Adri was blocking all their transmissions. He smiled to himself grimly. Harmon would go ballistic if he knew that.
Then he thought, perhaps I should go a little ballistic, myself.
But he kept his doubts to himself.
Hazzard and the two others arrived aboard a rocketplane that glided in smoothly to a picture-perfect landing. The astronaut looked happy to be back with everyone else.
“The ship’ll be okay,” he said, once Jordan asked him. “If there’s damage from the storm we should be able to repair it.”
“It’s just we fragile human beings that have to be protected,” Thornberry added, cocking a derisive eye at Meek.
Thornberry and Brandon helped Aditi to lift the crate of equipment from the back of the minihorse and place it squarely in the middle of their encampment. Once they uncrated it Aditi bent over the generator and tapped several switches on its top.
Jordan felt a momentary tingle through his body. Aditi peered at the readouts flickering along the top of the shield generator, then turned to Jordan and announced, “The shield is on. We are protected now.”
Aurora
Jordan decided it would be best for everyone to remain at the camp until the radiation storm abated. Meek and de Falla disappeared into the bubble tent that housed the geology lab, to pore over rock samples. Longyear joined them, together with several others, including Dr. Yamaguchi.
Thornberry bent over the shield generator, eager to learn how it worked. He quizzed Aditi, who apparently knew only how to turn the generator on and off, not its principles of operation. Hazzard, with nothing to do, walked around the camp, seemingly pleased to be free of the confines of the ship.
Jordan went from one group to another, checking on their needs, their findings.
Then he called Elyse, who was at the city’s astronomical observatory, where she was watching imagery of the Pup’s seething, boiling surface. She looked totally rapt as she stared at the screen, barely paying attention to Jordan. One of the city’s astronomers stood beside her, intently watching the readout that displayed the steeply rising level of radiation up above the atmosphere.
Jordan nodded to himself, satisfied that he had made the right decision to allow Hazzard and the others to come down to the camp, and to accept Adri’s offer of a protective shield.
When he reached the bubble tent that housed the geology lab, Meek and Longyear were sitting on folding chairs at the far side of the lab, heads together in whispered conversation. The instant Jordan stepped in, they both stiffened like naughty little boys caught raiding the cookie jar.
Jordan merely smiled and asked de Falla, who was sitting at a bench closer to the entryway, “How’s the work going, Silvio?”
“Interesting,” said the geologist. “I’m dating the rocks. You know, argon/potassium ratios, uranium/lead ratios, that sort of stuff.”
“Calculating their age from the amount of radioactive elements in them,” Jordan said.
De Falla nodded, and cast a glance at Meek and Longyear, who were sitting silent and unmoving across the lab.
“What have you found so far?”
With an almost boyish grin, de Falla said, “Confusion. Most of the samples we’ve chipped out are a lot younger than I expected. Younger by hundreds of millions of years.”
Puzzled, Jordan asked, “Younger? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.” Scratching at his neat little beard, he added, “But if these rock samples are typical of the planet, then this planet is somehow much younger than Earth. A whole lot younger.”
“Well, Elyse says Sirius itself can’t be more than half a billion years old.”
“I know. But how could this planet have evolved such a complex biosphere in so short a time? On Earth, it took more than a billion years before life crawled out of the oceans and colonized the land.”
“So this planet isn’t an exact duplicate of Earth, after all,” Jordan said.
“No, it’s not,” said de Falla. But there was little conviction in it. He seemed more doubtful of his discovery than proud of it.
Jordan left the lab tent and went to find Aditi. She was still with Thornberry, by the shield generator. Jordan asked her, “What do you know about the geology of your world?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid. Ask Adri about it; he can put you in touch with our geologists.”
He nodded and took her arm and started to walk with her among the bubble tents. Looking back at Thornberry, who was still peering intently at the generator, Jordan said, “I wonder if it’s a good idea to leave Mitch alone with your equipment.”
Aditi asked, “What do you mean?”
“I get the distinct feeling that he’d like to take the thing apart to find out how it works.”
She laughed. “He won’t be able to do that. The equipment is self-protective.”
“It resists tampering?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how it works, but if you try to open it up without tapping in the proper security code, it will give you a mild shock.”
“Really?”
“We have curious tinkerers among our people, too,” Aditi said.
Jordan found himself saying, “I think it would be best if you stayed here tonight. No sense walking back to the city in this radiation storm.”
She looked up at him. “It wouldn’t be dangerous for me, not really.”
Shaking his head, Jordan said firmly, “No. I want you to stay here tonight.” Then he laughed lightly and added, “If you don’t mind.”