Eventually Dixon managed to get to the medical box and whack a sedative into the guy’s ass.
“He’s afraid of space,” Angela explained as he slumped down.
“A space-cop who’s afraid of space?”
Even Angela reluctantly laughed.
I’d never gone for black girls particularly before, but I found myself noticing that this was one attractive young woman. She was tough, and funny, and sharp – and she looked great. Maybe this was what I’d been looking for all this time, I couldn’t help thinking (as, God help me, I’d thought so many times before). Maybe I’d just been looking in the wrong place?
Yeah, I know, I know. We were in a damaged ship in intergalactic space and so far from home that, if we could pick out our own sun in that billion-star wheel, we’d be seeing it as it was back in the Pleistocene era. And yet even then I was thinking about sex. I guess that is what you call an obsession.
I mean we had a month’s supplies at most. Maybe six week’s oxygen.
But I caught her eye anyway and smiled at her, just to let her know she was appreciated.
Angela:
It turned out that their stupid leap had not only sucked through our interceptor and turned it into scrap, it had also damaged the Defiant itself. Because they’d made the leap too early the artificial gravity of the field had been pulled back toward the Earth by real gravity – that was why Mike and I had been caught inside it. Some of the pylons at the front end of the ship had actually remained outside of the field, and so literally ceased to exist, while others further back had been bent and twisted. This was very bad news. To get home from this distance would take a minimum of three or four leaps, which was pushing things at the best of times, even without a defective engine.
So Dixon, Mehmet and Tommy suited up and went outside to see what repairs they could make, Tommy cheesily asking me if I was sure I’d be okay minding the fort and keeping an eye on Mike. Can you believe that he’d already given me the eye several times? Was this bloke entirely ruled by his dick?
“I’ll be okay,” I said, “and I promise not to answer the phone or to let in any strangers.”
Answer the phone! Even if my mum and dad could have called me up from Earth – even if there was a signal strong enough to reach this far, I mean – I’d have been dead a million years by the time their message got to me.
Pretty soon all three gallant galactonauts were back. They’d been able to straighten out a few bent pylons. But now something else was on their minds and they rushed to the sensor panel and started playing around with frequencies and filters like kids with a new video game.
“There was this dark disc in front of the galaxy,” Tommy explained to me eventually, “Mehmet spotted it first…”
“Never seen anything like it!” Mehmet interrupted. “It was…”
“Here it is!” called Dixon, pointing to a screen.
He’d used radar on whatever it was and it turned out to be a solid object the size of earth, a planet in other words.
“There’s a thing called the Ballantyne effect,” Mehmet explained to me. “A ship’s trajectory through sub-E space is always twisted in the direction of any large mass that’s in the vicinity of its notional exit point. It means that you always end up nearer to stars that you would predict on chance alone. But who’d have thought there would be any sort of object out here to pull us towards it, eh?”
“So it’s a planet with no sun,” I said.
“Yes,” Dixon told me excitedly. “A planet all on its own. It’s been assumed for a long time that they existed, but we’ve never found one before.”
“Well so what?” I said. “What use is it to us? Even Pluto would be hospitable by comparison with a planet that has no sun at all and Pluto is so cold it’s covered with solid methane. We’re trying to survive, remember? What use is a dismal place like that?”
“But the thing is, Angela,” Mehmet said excitedly, “the thing is that this planet isn’t cold!”
“And it’s not completely dark either!” said Tommy.
They were all over one another in their haste to show me the evidence. Somehow, even without a sun, this strange object had a surface as warm as Earth’s. Seen in infrared it glowed. In fact, even in the visible spectrum it glowed, though very softly, so softly that against the blazing mass of stars it still seemed dark.
And when Dixon did the spectrometry on the starlight passing round the planet’s edge, he made the most sensational discovery yet. This was a planet with breathable air.
Tommy:
Mehmet, Dixon and I had made a whole career of looking for habitable planets. And now, with very little chance of ever being able to bring the news back to Earth, it looked like we’d finally succeeded, by accident and in the least likely place imaginable.
Of course we had to go and look at it. The thing was only few days away across Euclidean space and a short delay wouldn’t make our next leap any more or less likely to succeed. The only difficulty was Angela and Mike, but she shrugged and said okay, if she was going to die, she might as well see this first – and he was strapped to a bunk and peacefully off with the fairies.
Angela:
When we’d got the Defiant in orbit, we climbed into the ship’s landing capsule and sank down towards a surface that we could now clearly see to be gently glowing over much of its area, as if the planet was covered by a huge candle-lit city. But it wasn’t a city. It was a forest. It was a shining forest of glowing trees and luminous streams and pools, that filled up all but the highest ground.
The trees were like gnarled oaks, leafless but with shining flowers along their branches. Their trunks were warm to the touch and they constantly pulsed. You could feel it if you touched them. You could even hear it. Hmmmmph – hmmmmph – hmmmmph, they went, and the sound of all of them together combined into a constant hum that pervaded the whole forest. The ground under the trees grew strange leafless flowers that shone like stars. Under the surface of pools and streams waving waterweed carried more shining flowers that made the water luminous, like a swimming pool lit up by underwater lights. And the whole forest was mild and scented like a summer evening on Earth.
“Look at that!” cried Mehmet as something bird-like with neon blue wings swept by overhead.
“Hey, come and see this!” called Dixon, squatting down to look at a clump of small shining flowers like miniature sodium streetlights.
Tommy wandered off in one direction, Mehmet in another. Neither of them said where they were going, and no one asked. Dixon settled down under a tree with his back to its warm trunk. I settled down on the mossy banks of a nearby stream. Strange melodious cries came to us from other parts of the forest. All around us the trees throbbed and hummed and shone under the great wheel of the Milky Way galaxy that filled up most of the sky. Fluttering creatures resembling fluorescent butterflies fed on the shining flowers and in the warm air vents that many of the trees had on their trunks. Bird- and batlike creatures swooped and dived among them.
I was lying by the stream watching little shining fish-things darting around in the water when I remembered that Mike was still inside the capsule.
“Dixon,” I said, “would you mind giving me a hand?”