Jordan started to reply to the astrobiologist, but hesitated, looking to his brother. Bran’s in charge, let him handle this.
But Brandon turned to Elyse and said, “Tell them about the gamma burst.”
Looking straight at Meek, Elyse said in a measured tone, “All the evidence I have seen convinces me that the danger is real. The core of the galaxy gave off an enormous burst of gamma energy some twenty-eight thousand years ago. The death wave will reach Earth’s vicinity in two thousand years.”
“And wipe out all life in its path,” Brandon added.
Good for you, Bran! Jordan exulted silently.
Meek looked unconvinced. “How do we know that the ‘evidence’ they showed isn’t faked?”
“Why would they do that?” Jordan blurted.
“To get us to go along with them,” Longyear replied.
“For what purpose?”
“How should we know?” Meek answered. “They’re up to something, and they’re certainly not going to tell us what it is until it suits them.”
Brandon planted his fists on his hips and asked Meek, “What do you think we ought to do?”
“Leave here immediately and go back home.”
“And the gamma burst?”
“It’s a trick. I’m sure it’s a trick.”
“And if it’s not?” Jordan asked.
Meek blinked at him several times, said nothing.
“If it’s not a trick,” Brandon said, his voice iron hard, “then we’re consigning the human race to extinction.”
Waving a long-fingered hand in the air, Meek said, “We have two thousand years to deal with that possibility.”
“And other intelligent races, they’ll be wiped out also,” Brandon went on.
“I don’t believe it!” Meek fairly shouted. “I can’t believe it!”
Jordan asked his brother, “May I have the floor?”
With a surprised grin, Brandon spread his arms and said grandly, “The floor is yours.”
Getting to his feet as Brandon sat down, Jordan began, “Harmon, Paul … we hold the fate of the human race in our hands. The twelve of us. What we decide can mean life or death for the entire human race. There’s no one we can turn to, no higher-ups that we can buck the problem to. There’s only we twelve. It’s up to us. Entirely up to us.”
Meek shook his head stubbornly. Longyear stared at Jordan, his face a frozen mask.
Jordan went on, “What this boils down to is a matter of faith. Some of us believe what the aliens have told us, some of us don’t. Those who believe point to palpable evidence, those who don’t worry that the evidence may have been faked.”
“My education isn’t a fake,” Thornberry muttered.
“But it could be a tactic,” Meek immediately countered. “They boost your brain to convince us that the rest of what they’re telling us is true.”
“That’s a possibility,” Jordan admitted. “How do we decide whether it’s true or not?”
Silence fell across the table. Longyear opened his mouth, then thought better of it and said nothing.
“This is a fundamental problem of science, isn’t it?” Jordan asked. “How do we know that what our human senses are telling us is real, or if we’re fooling ourselves?”
“You test the information,” Brandon answered. “All knowledge is testable. What you can’t test is nothing more than belief, opinion.”
“How do we test the information that Adri’s astronomers have given Elyse?”
“I’ve gone over it as carefully as I can,” Elyse said, looking up at Jordan. “I’m convinced it’s real.”
“But you’re not one hundred percent certain, are you?” Meek challenged.
Before Jordan could say anything, Brandon replied, “Harmon, nothing is one hundred percent certain. Newton gave us a scientific worldview that held up for damned near three hundred years. Then Einstein came along and showed there was more to it. And string theory eventually enlarged on Einstein’s work. Nothing is one hundred percent certain. Not forever.”
Meek started to reply, but Brandon overrode him. “In your own field, Harmon, in astrobiology it’s happened. The field exploded in the late twentieth century with the discovery of extremophiles, didn’t it? When Tommy Gold proposed a deep, hot biosphere of bacteria living miles underground, the biologists laughed at him, didn’t they?”
“But evidence proved he was right,” Meek admitted. “Eventually.”
“Nothing is one hundred percent certain,” Brandon repeated. “It can’t be. You never have the ultimate truth. There’s always more to be learned.”
“So what do we do?” de Falla asked.
Without hesitation, Brandon said, “We act on the information we have. We message Earth all the information we’ve discovered here, and warn them about the gamma burst. We keep on working with Adri’s people and plan out how we can help Earth and the other worlds that are in danger.”
Thornberry piped up. “We can build energy shields that’ll protect Earth from the gamma burst, b’god.”
“Right,” said Brandon. “That’s what we’ve got to do. Who says no to that?”
No one stirred, not even Meek. No one lifted a hand in objection or raised a voice.
Jordan, still on his feet, looked down at Brandon. You took charge at last, he said silently. You’ve become a man, baby brother.
But then he looked across the table at Harmon Meek, who was sitting rigidly, his long face crumbling into a mask of despair.
EXOPLANET
Homeworld
Two thousand light-years closer to the core of the Milky Way galaxy than Earth, a small, rocky planet orbited tightly around a tiny, faint red dwarf star. The planet hugged its parent star so closely that its year was only five Earth-days long. Its locked rotation kept one side always facing the meager warmth of its dim parent star, one side perpetually dark and cold.
The star was one of the galaxy’s most commonplace, faint and cool, but destined to continue shining feebly long after giant bright beacons such as Sirius had depleted their nuclear energy sources and destroyed themselves in titanic explosions.
The planet orbiting it was a world of stark contrasts: jagged cliffs and harsh deserts surrounding seething purple seas that crashed against the rugged cliffs and sent huge waves of violent surf surging across beaches of ruby-red sand.
Those seas teemed with life. And living creatures inhabited those deserts, carved homes for themselves in those cliffs, soared across the brooding scarlet skies.
One species of life on that planet was intelligent. Part animal, part plant, they called themselves The People and called their planet Home.
A brood of them was flying across the rocky desert, gliding on the tidal wind that blew unfailingly across their world, high above the rugged cliffs, their backs to the red sun that filled half their sky. They were long, thin, ethereal creatures, gliding on wide gossamer wings that drank in the feeble sunlight, searching for one of their family who had wandered far from their usual haunts.
Across the barren landscape they soared, incomplete as long as one of them was missing. They headed away from their sun, toward the distant shadowed land that bordered the half of their world that was always in darkness.
“This is foolishness,” grumbled one of them. “The farther from the sun we fly, the weaker we become.”
“It’s cold here,” complained another. “How can we bud in such a wasteland?”
“We cannot bud until we are complete,” said their leader, the oldest among them. “We must find Phen-he. Then we can return to the warmth and begin to bud.”