It’s going to be a long week, Jordan told himself.
Sooner or Later
It took two days to wipe the confident grin off Brandon’s face.
The afternoon that they landed was spent in setting up the laser drill. Brandon picked a spot away from the beach, up amidst the trees and ground foliage. With Jordan’s help, he set up a pair of seismometers and a miniature radio transmitter that allowed the GPS satellites in orbit overhead to fix their position with nanometer precision.
While they were doing that, the robots erected their tent. Brandon had politely refused Aditi’s offer of an energy shield.
“We won’t need it,” he said.
Jordan thought it might have been interesting to sleep out in the open, without a tent hemming in their view, but he went along with his brother’s decision. Bran’s been on field trips a lot more than I have, he told himself.
Once the tent was up and filled with their two cots and footlockers, Brandon led one of the robots, carrying a power shovel, to dig a latrine back in the brush and trees that fringed the beach. Adri and the city’s biologists had assured them that there would be no environmental problem from the latrines. Same DNA, Jordan thought. We won’t contaminate anything here.
They slept on side-by-side cots in the tent, but Jordan awoke in the middle of the night. Restless, he got up quietly from his cot and tiptoed out into the night. It was cool in nothing but his T-shirt and briefs; the breeze coming in off the sea chilled him.
Yet the sea itself was magnificently beautiful and he regretted not bringing Aditi with him to share it. No moon, but the Pup, low on the horizon, sent a stream of glittering silver across the softly murmuring sea. Stars twinkled in the sky. Jordan tried to make sense out of their configurations, but he couldn’t recognize any of the constellations he knew from Earth.
Except—he peered into the dark sky and, yes, there was Orion, leaning lopsidedly above the sea horizon. Good old Orion! Jordan’s heart leaped at the familiarity of it. Rigel, Betelgeuse, the Belt, and the Sword. Eight point six light-years from home, and there was Orion, friendly and familiar.
On an impulse, he ducked back into the tent and rummaged in the dark until he found his pocketphone. Then he went back outside and called Aditi. She was thickheaded with sleep at first, but as Jordan showed her the beach and the soft glow of the Pup she revived.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“I wish you were here,” said Jordan.
“Well, we can share the view, at least.”
He sat on the sand, his back against one of the gracefully bent trees, and held the phone so that Aditi could see the silvery waves running gently up the beach. They talked until he grew drowsy.
At last Aditi said, “You’d better get back to your bed, Jordan. You’re half asleep.”
“Good night, love,” he said.
“Good night, darling,” she replied.
“I wish you were here.”
“So do I.”
He went back to his cot and slept soundly until sunrise.
Drilling began with the morning. Brandon spent much of his time on the phone with de Falla, making certain that everything was just right, before turning on the laser. It rumbled to life, and a plume of smoke burst up from the ground.
“Won’t the smoke block the laser’s beam?” Jordan asked.
Standing with his fists on his hips like some old-time plantation overseer, Brandon replied, “De Falla says it won’t. The beam is intense enough to burn right through the smoke. It just recondenses as the gases rise above the laser’s output head. What you’re seeing won’t affect the laser at all.”
And it certainly appeared so. All day long, Jordan watched the control console that the robots had set up next to their tent. It was linked to the laser equipment by a tangle of snaking cables. The laser growled away and the graph on the console’s central screen showed a single bright green line heading straight down, deeper and deeper into the planet’s crust. By sunset it had passed the eight-kilometer mark and was still blazing away, without stopping.
“Should we leave it running overnight?” Jordan asked.
“Why not? The robots can tend to it. If there’s any problem they can wake us.”
Over their prepackaged dinners, Jordan said, “So this is what field work is all about. The robots do the work and you take the credit.”
Brandon frowned at his brother. “I gather the data. I make sense out of what the equipment is doing. I’m the brains of this operation.”
“And the robots supply the muscle.”
“Used to be grad students that provided the muscle. I put in my time as slave labor, believe me.”
“I suppose you did,” said Jordan.
They finished eating, did their ablutions, and got ready for sleep. Jordan could hear the laser growling away out in the darkness. It ruined the romantic aura of the place, he thought.
As he stretched out on his cot, hands cradling the back of his head, Brandon reminisced, “Grad students included women, of course. Field trips were a lot more interesting then.”
“Perhaps Thornberry could rig one of the robots for you,” Jordan suggested, grinning into the shadows.
“That’s a filthy idea, Jordy. I like it.”
“Ask Thornberry about it,” Jordan joked.
“You think Mitch is making out with Tanya?” Brandon asked.
“Yes,” Jordan answered without hesitation. “It’s Longyear and de Falla I wonder about. They’re both young and unattached.”
“Maybe Yamaguchi’s giving them something to dampen their sex drive.”
“Then there’s Yamaguchi herself. What about her sex drive?”
“She’s Japanese. Terrific self-discipline.”
“And Hazzard?”
“Trish.”
“That’s what I thought,” Jordan said. “What do you make of Zadar?”
Brandon didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “He’s Greek, of course…”
“Don’t be a lout!”
With a chuckle, Brandon said, “I don’t know. Demetrios is a pretty quiet guy.”
Jordan surprised himself by asking, “How serious are you about Elyse?”
“Pretty damned serious,” Brandon replied without hesitation. “She means a lot to me, and I think I mean a lot to her.”
“Good,” said Jordan. “It’s time you found someone.”
“Approval from my big brother! That’s a first.”
Surprised, almost hurt, Jordan said, “I want you to be happy, Bran.”
“Works both ways, Jordy. What about you and Aditi?”
Jordan sighed. “I didn’t think that, after Miriam, I could ever fall in love again. But I have.”
“It’s a little tricky, her not being really human.”
“She’s as human as you or I, Bran. As human as Elyse.”
Brandon didn’t reply for several moments. Then, “But when it comes time for us to leave, Jordy, what then?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t discussed it. Neither one of us wants to look that far ahead.”
“But you’ll have to, sooner or later.”
“Sooner or later,” Jordan agreed. “Sooner or later.”
Surprise
Jordan woke with sunlight glowing on the wall of the tent. Brandon’s cot was already empty, though rumpled, unmade. Jordan could see him sitting outside on the folding chair in front of the console that was monitoring the laser’s progress, wearing nothing but his skivvies. He dressed quickly, then went out to the latrine. He could hear the laser thrumming steadily.
God’s in his heaven, he thought, and the equipment’s working fine. All’s right with the world.