“Anything else in the atmosphere?” asked Cimon.
“Water vapor and dust. I suppose there are a few million air-borne spores of various virulent diseases per cubic centimeter in addition to that.” He said it lightly enough, but there was a stir in the room. More than one of the bystanders looked as though he were holding his breath.
Vernadsky shrugged and said, “Don’t worry about it for now. My analyzer washes out dust and spores quite thoroughly. But then, that’s not my angle. I suggest Rodriguez grow his damn cultures under glass right away. Good thick glass.”
Ten
Mark Annuncio wandered everywhere. His eyes shone as he listened, and he pressed himself forward to hear better. The group suffered him to do so with various degrees of reluctance, in accordance with individual personalities and temperaments. None spoke to him.
Sheffield stayed close to Mark. He scarcely spoke either. He bent all his effort on remaining in the background of Mark’s consciousness. He wanted to refrain from giving Mark the feeling of being haunted by himself; give the boy the illusion of freedom instead. He wanted to seem to be there each time by accident only.
It was a most unsuccessful pretense, he felt, but what could he do? He had to keep the kid from getting into trouble.
Eleven
Miguel Antonio Rodriguez y Lopez (microbiologist; small, tawny, with intensely black hair, which he wore rather long, and with a reputation, which he did nothing to discourage, of being a Latin in the grand style as far as the ladies were concerned) cultured the dust from Vemadsky’s gas-analyzer trap with a combination of precision and respectful delicacy.
“Nothing,” he said eventually. “What foolish growths I get look harmless.”
It was suggested that Junior’s bacteria need not necessarily look harmful; that toxins and metabolic processes could not be analyzed by eye, even by microscopic eye.
This was met with hot contempt, as almost an invasion of professional function. He said, with an eyebrow lifted, “One gets a feeling for these things. When one has seen as much of the microcosm as I have, one can sense danger-or lack of danger.”
This was an outright lie, and Rodriguez proved it by carefully transferring samples of the various germ colonies into buffered, isotonic media and injecting hamsters with the concentrated result. They did not seem to mind.
Raw atmosphere was trapped in large jars and several specimens of minor animal life from Earth and other planets were allowed to disport themselves within. None of them seemed to mind either.
Twelve
Nevile Fawkes (botanist; a man who appreciated his own handsomeness by modeling his hair style after that shown on the traditional busts of Alexander the Great, but from whose appearance the presence of a nose far more aquiline than Alexander ever possessed noticeably detracted) was gone for two days, by Junior chronology, in one of the Triple G.’s atmospheric coasters. He could navigate one like a dream and was, in fact, the only man outside the crew who could navigate one at all, so he was the natural choice for the task. Fawkes did not seem noticeably overjoyed about that.
He returned, completely unharmed and unable to hide a grin of relief. He submitted to irradiation for the sake of sterilizing the exterior of his flexible air suit (designed to protect men from the deleterious effect of the outer environment, where no pressure differential existed; the strength and jointedness of a true space suit being obviously unnecessary within an atmosphere as thick as Junior’s). The coaster was subjected to a more extended irradiation and pinned down under a plastic coverall.
Fawkes flaunted color photographs in great number. The central valley of the continent was fertile almost beyond Earthly dreams. The rivers were mighty, the mountains rugged and snow-covered (with the usual pyrotechnic solar effects). Under Lagrange II alone, the vegetation looked vaguely repellent, seeming rather dark, like dried blood. Under Lagrange I, however, or under the suns together, the brilliant, flourishing green and the glisten of the numerous lakes (particularly north and south along the dead rims of the departing glaciers) brought an ache of homesickness to the hearts of many.
Fawkes said, “Look at these.”
He had skimmed low to take a photochrome of a field of huge flowers dripping with scarlet. In the high ultra-violet radiation of Lagrange I, exposure times were of necessity extremely short, and despite the motion of the coaster, each blossom stood out as a sharp blotch of strident color.
“I swear,” said Fawkes, “each one of those was six feet across.”
They admired the flowers unrestrainedly.
Fawkes then said, “No intelligent life whatever, of course.”
Sheffield looked up from the photographs with instant sharpness. Life and intelligence, after all, were by way of being his province. “How do you know?”
“Look for yourself,” said the botanist. “There are the photos. No highways, no cities, no artificial waterways, no signs of anything man-made.”
“No machine civilization,” said Sheffield. “That’s all.”
“Even ape men would build shelters and use fire,” said Fawkes, offended.
“The continent is ten times as large as Africa and you’ve been over it for two days. There’s a lot you could miss.”
“Not as much as you’d think,” was the warm response. “I followed every sizable river up and down and looked over both seacoasts. Any settlements are bound to be there.”
“In allowing seventy-two hours for two eight thousand-mile seacoasts ten thousand miles apart, plus how many thousand miles of river, that had to be a pretty quick lookover.”
Cimon interrupted, “What’s this all about? Homo sapiens is the only intelligence ever discovered in the Galaxy through a hundred thousand and more explored planets. The chances of Troas possessing intelligence is virtually nil.”
“Yes?” said Sheffield. “You could use the same argument to prove there’s no intelligence on Earth.”
“Makoyama,” said Cimon, “in his report mentioned no intelligent life.”
“And how much time did he have? It was a case of another quick feel through the haystack with one finger and a report of no needle.”
“What the eternal Universe,” said Rodriguez waspishly. “We argue like madmen. Call the hypothesis of indigenous intelligence unproven and let it go. We are not through investigating yet, I hope.”
Thirteen
Copies of those first pictures of Junior’s surface were added to what might be termed the open files. After a second trip, Fawkes returned in more somber mood and the meeting was correspondingly more subdued.
New photographs went from hand to hand and were then placed by Cimon himself in the special safe that nothing could open short of Cimon’s own hands or an all-destroying nuclear blast.
Fawkes said, ”The two largest rivers have a generally north-south course along the eastern edges of the western mountain range. The larger river comes down from the northern icecap, the smaller up from the southern one. Tributaries come in westward from the eastern range, interlacing the entire central plain. Apparently the central plain is tipped, the eastern edge being higher. It’s what ought to be expected maybe. The eastern mountain range is the taller, broader, and more continuous of the two. I wasn’t able to make actual measurements, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they beat the Himalayas. In fact, they’re a lot like the Wu Ch’ao range on Hesperus. You have to hit the stratosphere to get over them, and rugged-Wow!