"They look very small," Zara said doubtfully.
"The first exploring parties had larger drive equipment," Val chimed. "Some had actual vessels, and they rode inside. It did not keep them alive."
Jon glanced at his wife, and said quickly: "Let's try them out!"
They worked beautifully. The hammering sound of the jet was unpleasantly close to the base of their skulls, but as they gained speed the sound seemed to dwindle behind them.
They returned to the bubble complex rather regretfully; it was a joyous thing to be able to swoop and circle around in the thick air of Cuckoo!
The rest of their equipment was simple enough. Personal necessities: soap, toothbrushes, toilet paper, changes of clothing. Food—not much of it, just iron rations, heavy on protein and vitamins but by no means tempting to the palate or calculated to satisfy a large appetite. "I'm not too crazy about living on that stuff for a week," Jon grunted.
"You need not," Val sang. "You eaters can subsist off the native flora and fauna well enough. You have eaten meals prepared from it already."
"That steak last night?" Zara exclaimed.
"Yes. And the salad. And the beverage. Of course, for myself I need only energy, and I get that from the power packs. But I understand there is as much of the biota here that is edible as there is on your own planet."
That left only one item. With some dismay, Zara hefted a gun that had been custom-built for her hand. "The lower trigger is a projectile," Valkyrie said. "The upper, a laser beam. Lower for food, upper to kill instantly."
"What about you?" Jon demanded.
Valkyrie tolled somberly, "I have my own weapons built in, Jon Gentry. We may need them to defend ourselves. Remember the first eight explorers!" She hung in the air, slowly fanning her wings, regarding them with her bright, silver eyes. "You will need to sleep again," she said. "And when you wake we will begin."
Zara's breath caught in her throat. "So soon?"
"So soon," Val echoed.
When her husband was already in his upper bunk, face turned away from the light and the gentle sounds of his breathing becoming deeper with sleep, Zara Gentry lingered in front of the tiny mirror, stroking her face with cream. She was not looking at herself; she was staring into space and had forgotten what she was doing.
What had made her forget was something she had remembered: that tens of thousands of light-years away, another Zara Gentry was, at that very hour, perhaps making her way through the crowded flyways of New York toward the stereostage studios for her regular nightly appearance. What would she be talking about, this other Zara? Her emotions when she volunteered for tachyon transport to Cuckoo? Her immense relief when she stepped out of the chamber and found she was still on Earth?
Zara absently wiped the cream from her face and rested her chin on her hands, framing the sentences in her mind that that other Zara Gentry would be using to open the broadcast: "Well, friends, I walked out of the chamber and back to Earth"— cut to long shot of the tachyon-transport building, pan of the chamber itself with Zara coming out of it—"and it was queer. Queasy. I don't know how to describe it. I knew that here I was. And yet at the same time I was somewhere else: out on the surface of Cuckoo, so far away that I can't even see it with the biggest telescope on Earth, / was entering a whole new existence."
She caught herself reaching for the stereostage recorder, to make a note for the opening of her next broadcast.
There would be no need for that. Not here, not ever here. Whatever else happened, this Zara Gentry was forever doomed to stay on Cuckoo. Oh, perhaps she could physically be carried to the orbiting station in a rocket, if she swung sufficient weight. But that was most unlikely, and that she would ever leave in any other way was impossible.
But after a moment she did reach for the stereostage recorder, and said into it: "For transmission to Zara Day Gentry on Earth. Zara, dear—dear me!—myself, dear ... I don't know how to address me! But I am here and well. Jon is also well, and in a few hours we are going to begin to explore the surface of Cuckoo. In my edited form I am tall and thin, just as I always wanted to be. And—dear distant self—I can tell you one other thing about me: I am afraid. Not panicky. Not crippled by it. But scared."
Scared or not, she went on to give a bright, entertaining ten minute account of what had happened since arriving on Cuckoo.
It was the least a girl could do for herself, she reflected, settling gently into her cocoon. And it was oddly comforting, to know that she would in fact be on the stereostage worldwide one more time—herself, not just that other Zara Gentry. As she drifted toward sleep she thought that a girl in her position could use all the comfort she could get.
A hundred and twenty degrees of arc around the circumference of Cuckoo swung the orbiter called Cuckoo Station. It was a strange-looking thing, about the size of a three-story house in its main dimensions, but with extensions that shot spindly towers half a mile into space and trailed filmy sheets of laminated metal and plastic for more than three miles around it. It did not look as if it could survive the faintest summer breeze. This was correct. It could not. It never needed to, for Cuckoo Station had never known an atmosphere around it; it had been created in orbit, out of the tachyon-transport cell dropped by the doomship that had brought the Galaxy's eyes and ears to Cuckoo and then gone on with its dead or dying crew.
The sentients who inhabited Cuckoo Station were quite similar to those on Ground Station One. This was not surprising. Most of those on Ground Station One were duplicated copies from the orbiter itself. One individual who was not duplicated in the station on the surface of Cuckoo was the human being named Ben Line Pertin. Partly this was because he had already been duplicated enough times on the surface of Cuckoo; he had watched himself die three ways so far, and suspected three others. Partly it was because, for the past few galactic days, he had reported himself sick.
He had felt sick. Sick and despairing. When he reported himself back for duty it was not because he really wanted to get back to his work on the orbiter, it was only because it, or anything, was better than lying in his cocoon and watching stale repeated dramas on the stereostage. He relieved his predecessor on the monitoring detail, a T'Worlie named Nlem, and sucking a bubble of coffee to wake himself up began to reel disinterestedly through the transmissions of the last few days to see if anything had happened.
Something had.
Pertin sat up so abruptly that his motion jerked the bulb of coffee out of his hand. Tiling, the Sirian eye who was conducting some incomprehensible research of its own in the monitor chamber, emitted a staccato ripping sound of electrical energy as it flung itself desperately away from the sprinkling drops of liquid. Pertin's Pmal rang with the harsh, angry accusation: "Danger! Water deleterious! Destructive! Hostile action perceived!"
"Sorry, sorry!" cried Pertin, trying to backtrack the stereo image and at the same time activate the emergency air-purification systems. He managed, but not without further anger from the Sirian—reasonably enough, Pertin knew, but he was not in a mood to be reasonable.
As soon as possible, he spun back to the beginning of the message he had sampled. It had been aimed at Earth, and of course intercepted routinely by the orbiter for information purposes. It was a personal message, and the face of the girl sending it was what had startled him.
It was Zara!
He listened to the whole message, then turned off the stereostage, sick again and dazed.
Zara Gentry.
And here on Cuckoo—only light-minutes away!— but with Jon Gentry. Her husband.