"I'm sorry, but I simply don't see what in blazes the Trofts are so worried about," he said, apparently to the room at large. "How can a village-level society be a threat to anyone outside its own atmosphere?"
"Let's show a little patience, shall we?" Telek said, not looking up from her own bank of displays. "We haven't even finished a complete orbit yet. All the high-tech cities may be on the other side."
"It's not just the matter of technology, Governor," Nnamdi countered. "The population density is too low to be consistent with an advanced society."
"That's anthropomorphic thinking," Telek shook her head. "If their birth rate's low enough and they like lots of room around them they could still be high-tech.
Bil, what're you getting?"
Christopher sat in silence another moment before answering. "Nothing conclusive one way or the other yet. I can see roads between some of the villages, but the tree cover's too thick to tell how extensive the network is. No satellite communications systems, though, and no broadcasts I can detect."
Joshua touched the intercom's talk switch. "Excuse me, but is there any way to see how much of the ground around the villages is being cultivated? That might be a clue."
Telek looked over at the intercom camera. "So far that's not conclusive, either," she said. "There are some good-sized candidates for crop fields, but the terrain and vegetation color scheme make real measurement iffy."
"Besides which," Christopher put in, "whether a given village is growing crops for local use or for export is something else we can't tell from up here."
"So let's go on down," Justin muttered from his place at the viewport.
Joshua looked back at his brother. Justin's face was thoughtful as he gazed at the planet below... but nowhere in expression or stance could Joshua detect the same hard knot that had taken up residence in his own stomach. "Let's be a little less anxious to throw the landing party outside, shall we?" he said tartly.
Justin blinked at him. "Sorry-did I sound callous?"
"You sounded overconfident, and that's worse. Your tendency toward optimism could be downright dangerous down there."
"Tiptoing around up here like we've got some guilty secret to hide will be better?"
Joshua grimaced. Alike as two electrons, they'd often been called... but when the crunch came it was really very easy to tell them apart. Deep down, Justin had a strangely potent variety of fatalistic optimism that refused to let him believe the universe would really hurt him. A totally unrealistic philosophy, to
Joshua's way of thinking-and all the more incomprehensible because Justin wasn't simply incapable of recognizing potential danger. He was as good at looking ahead and weighing odds as anyone else in the family; he just acted as if those odds didn't apply to him. It was this attitude, more than anything else, that had fueled Joshua's private reservations about Justin's Cobra ambitions... and had nearly persuaded him to back them out of this mission entirely.
"Aha!" Cerenkov's satisfied exclamation came from the intercom speaker into
Joshua's musings. "There we go. You wanted a city, Hersh?-well, there it is."
"I'll be damned," Nnamdi murmured, fingertips skating across his display controls. "That's a city, all right. Let's see... electric power for sure... still no radio broadcasts detectable... looks like the tallest buildings are in the ten- to twenty-story range. Bil, can you find anything that looks like a power plant?"
"Hang on," Christopher said. "Got some odd neutrino emissions here-trying to get a spectrum analysis...."
"Another city showing now-south and a little west of the first," Cerenkov reported.
Joshua let a breath hiss slowly between his teeth, caught between the desire to rush down to the lounge and see the cities for himself and the fear of missing something important en route. "I think I can see them," Justin said behind him.
"Come take a look."
Joshua joined him at the viewport, glad to have found a compromise. The cities were just barely visible. "Your telescopic vision show anything interesting?" he asked his brother.
"At this range? Don't be silly. Wait a second, though-I've got an idea."
Stepping back to the intercom, Justin busied himself with the keyboard. A moment later the crowded lounge was replaced by a slightly fuzzy still picture. "Got the ultra-high-resolution-camera feed," he told Joshua with satisfaction.
Joshua craned his neck to look. The city seemed normal enough: buildings, streets, park-like areas... "Odd angle for a street pattern, isn't it?" he remarked. "I'd think it simpler to run their streets north-south and east-west instead of whatever angle that is."
He hadn't realized the voice link with the lounge was still open until Telek's voice came in reply. "The angle, in case you're interested, is twenty-four degrees, rotated counterclockwise from true north. And the southeast-northwest streets are considerably broader than the perpendicular set. Speculations as to why? Anyone?"
"Second city's the same way," Cerenkov grunted. "The streets are only skewed twenty-three point eight degrees, but the same wide/narrow pattern's there."
"Doesn't look like they're ringed, either, the way the villages are." Justin spoke up, leafing through the ultra-camera's other shots.
There was a short pause from the other end. "What do you mean, "ringed"?" Nnamdi asked.
"There's a dark ring around each of the villages," Justin told him, backtracking a few photos. "I assumed it was shadow from the surrounding trees, but now I'm not so sure."
"Interesting," Telek grunted. "What's the number on that photo?"
"While you're doing that," Christopher put in, "we've got the neutrino spectrum identified now. Looks like they're using a tandem fission/fusion reactor system for their power supply."
Someone in the lounge gave a low whistle. "That's pretty advanced, isn't it?" another voice-Marck Rynstadt's, Joshua tentatively identified it-came in on the intercom hook-up.
"Yes and no," Christopher said. "They obviously haven't got anything as reliable as our fission plant design or they wouldn't be fiddling with a tandem system.
On the other hand, fission alone ought to be hundreds of years beyond a village society's capabilities."
"Dual cultures, then?" Joshua hazarded. "Cities and villages on separate development tracks?"
"More likely the cities are run by invading aliens," Nnamdi said bluntly, "while the villages are home to the original natives. I concede the technology issue-and it therefore becomes rather clear what the Trofts are worried about."
"That Qasama is the leading edge of someone else moving toward Troft territory,"
Telek said grimly. "Moreau-whichever of you asked-we've got an ID on those ring shadows now. They're walls, about a meter thick and two to three meters high."
The twins exchanged glances. "Primitive defenses," Justin said.
"Looks that way," Cerenkov said. "Governor, I think we'd do well to cut this part of the run to one or at most two more orbits. They're almost certainly aware by now that we're up here, and the longer we wait before landing, the less forthright and honest we look. Remember that we aren't going to be able to pretend we didn't know Qasama was here."
"At least not if we intend to use the Troft translator," Telek agreed-reluctantly, Joshua thought. Stealing a glance back at the intercom screen, he studied her face... but if she were feeling any fear at ordering them down into the snake pit, it wasn't visible. Two of them, he thought morosely, turning back to his brother and the viewport.-Or else it's me who's the odd one.
Maybe I'm just overcautious... or even an out-and-out coward.
Oddly enough, the possibility carried no sense of shame along with it. Justin and Telek, after all, wouldn't be leaving the relative safety of the Dewdrop the minute they landed; Joshua and the rest of the contact team would. An extra helping of native caution would likely be more an asset than a liability out there.
They came down on the next orbit over what Nnamdi had dubbed the "city belt," aiming for a set of runways at the north end of the northernmost of the five cities in the chain. There had been some excitement when the runways had first been noticed, Nnamdi pouncing on them as evidence that Qasama was indeed the forward base of a star-going people. Christopher, though, had suggested their width and length were more suitable for aircraft than robot glide-shuttles, and for a while a tension-sharpened argument had raged in the lounge. It was Decker