"You're afraid of a little beast like that?"
"I'm wary of a little beast like that," I told her. "I'm afraid of whatever the little beast was running from."
Our Choice
The picture dissolved into a view from another probe, this one hovering over the lake and looking shoreward to the bluffs. The cliffside was tangled with weeds and scrubby bushes. Here and there, swaths of bare sandy soil interrupted the undergrowth — gullies probably washed out by spring runoff. Erosion was slowly undercutting the top edge of the ridge; at one point, the rim had collapsed in an earth slide that dragged down a great strip of brush.
The probe moved toward the land, and slowly rose to give us a view of the heights: another flowered meadow, with a few lichen-covered outcrops of rock. A short distance inland, a deep ravine ran parallel to the bluffs — probably the bed of a stream on its way to the lake. Trees grew up the sides of the ravine, but none were visible on the flat land.
"This an example of what we were talking about," I said, pointing at the screen. "If you have trees growing in the ravine, you should have trees growing in the field — it has to be easier for them to root on level ground than on a slope. But it looks like the flat has been cleared."
"Is that enough to scare you off again?" Prope asked.
"Not in the least," I answered, working to keep my temper. "Cleared terrain is good for a Landing. You're less likely to hit something on the Drop, and you have an unobstructed view of things coming to eat you." I turned to Yarrun. "What about it?"
Instead of answering, he fiddled with dials, rotating the screen's view through a slow 360 degrees. The meadow seemed very peaceful… no motion but the gentle waving of grass in the wind. "The motion sensors are picking up a lot of animal life," he reported, "but nothing big. Mostly on the order of insects, with the occasional field mouse. Which is to say, something warm-blooded the size of a field mouse."
It was easy to forget this wasn't some tame terraformed world, stocked with all the species we knew, and loved, and could kill if necessary.
"Any thoughts?" I asked the room at large. Prope looked as if she wanted to say something scathing, but knew it would only delay things. "Okay," I told Yarrun. "Have the probe drop a Sperm anchor. Immortality awaits."
Part V
LANDING
Our Robing Chambers
The Jacaranda had four robing chambers for Explorers. This was a matter of prestige. A frigate was equipped with only two robing chambers; a light cruiser had to surpass a frigate in all possible ways, so it had three chambers; and a heavy cruiser like the Jacaranda was obliged to be better still, so it had four.
All three types of ship carried only two Explorers. There was no prestige in having extra Explorers.
Suiting Up
Each of us suited up alone — Yarrun and I in our usual places, Chee in one of the dusty surplus chambers.
Suiting up was a simple procedure: I stood passively, wearing nothing but a light chemise, while robot arms did all the work. Tightsuit fabric was extremely stiff and difficult to handle. Every six months, I had to go through an emergency drill where I wrestled in and out of a suit without robot help, and it always left my hands aching with exertion.
As the suit was being sealed around me, Chee shouted through the wall, " 'And from the tents, the armorers, accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation.' What's that from, Ramos?"
"Shakespeare… Henry V," I replied, glad that I happened to remember; but I hoped Chee wouldn't quote from Timon of Athens. I had skipped Timon in the Academy Shakespeare course; Jelca had actually said yes to going on a date, and it put me in such a dither, I couldn't concentrate for three days.
The tightsuit continued to assemble around me. As it came together, robot eyes scanned every joint and seam, checking for flaws. There were eight such eyes, each as wide as my thumb, each on the end of a metal tentacle that curled through the air with the nonchalance of a cat's tail. Yarrun had given each eye a name: Gretchen, Robster, Clinky, Fang… I forget the rest. He swore they had different personalities, but I think he was putting me on.
The eyes swirled about on one last inspection-peering into my suit's crotch, armpits, the ring around my neck that my mother always claimed was dirty — then the tentacles retracted into the walls and the sterilization process began. I saw none of it; the visor in my helmet opaqued in response to the opening salvo of microwaves. However, I knew I was being bombarded by heat, UV, hard gamma, and several more exotic forms of energy the League of Peoples contended were necessary to cleanse all possible contaminants from the skin of my suit.
We followed this procedure meticulously whenever landing on unexplored planets — especially ones where there might be intelligent beings. It was a dangerous non-sentient act to introduce foreign microorganisms onto someone else's planet.
The sterilization bombardment was another reason why we always let the robots seal us into our tightsuits. If you touched the exterior of a suit with your bare hands, the resulting fingerprints turned a burnt-looking brown under the onslaught of the sterilization energy. You ended up looking like some smear-handed child had wiped chocolate on your crisp white outfit.
Fellow Explorers didn't tease you about that, but the Vacuum personnel always snickered.
Limbo
When the sterilization was complete, a bell chimed and a blue sign flashed PLEASE EXERCISE. For five minutes, we were supposed to get used to moving in the suit, by stretching, picking up small objects, doing deep knee bends, and so on. The Admiralty called this the "Limbering-Up Period." Explorers shortened the name to "Limbo."
It was a point of pride that Explorers never limbered up as specified. The prescribed exercises were invented by an Admiralty consultant who tried on a tightsuit and found (to her surprise) she couldn't get the hang of it right away. Never mind that Explorers spent much of their four years at the Academy lumbering around in tightsuits. Never mind that by the time we graduated, we felt more at home in a suit than in street clothes. A consultant came in for a day and found she was clumsy; therefore, the Admiralty immediately agreed that her ideas about tightsuits should become official Fleet policy.
The de facto Fleet policy was more mundane: instead of exercising, Explorers used their five minutes of Limbo to empty their bladders. Tightsuits had extensive facilities for handling waste, recycling the liquids into coolant water and compressing solids into cubes that could later fertilize mushrooms; but actually using these facilities required painstaking attention to the alignment of valves, tubes, and bodily orifices. It was better to relieve yourself in the quiet safety of the ship than to try it under more stressful conditions planet-down.
Besides, thinking about the mechanics of pissing took your mind off the Landing. And if you let yourself get sloppy, your suit would stink of urine for the whole mission. An Explorer could pay a severe penalty for inattention; it didn't hurt to have that kind of reminder in your nostrils for a few hours.
One Minute Warning
The PLEASE EXERCISE light went off. That meant we had one minute left. One more minute of Limbo.
During this minute, some Explorers prayed. Some sang. Some discussed final details of the Landing over their radios. Some talked to themselves about the great or mundane regrets of their lives.
Some screamed.
I don't know what Yarrun did. He never told me. I never asked.
If he had asked me the same question, I couldn't have told him what I did. I just waited. I just waited the full minute.