Paula turned. Tanuojin was coming in the door. He had a three-cornered coat over his shoulder. She sat back into the corner of the couch. His height even now sometimes surprised her. He and Saba hugged each other in greeting.
“You’re getting fat, being married.”
“It’s good for me. I’ve just been telling Paula, you should try it.”
Tanuojin snorted with laughter. He glanced at Paula and turned back to his lyo. “You know the probe we sent to Lalande in Melleno’s Primat—”
“No.”
“Melleno 372. The planetary spectra are coming in now. Come up to Oberon with me and look at them.”
Saba went back behind his desk to his chair. “When?”
“Now.”
“I can’t—I told Melly I’d take her to the Akopra next watch.”
“I’ll go,” Paula said.
Tanuojin flung his arm out. “To the Akopra. Here? Jesus, you’ll ruin her taste, if she has any. Bring her down to Yekka. These are the first accurate composition bands we’ve ever gotten from another solar system. Why wait?”
“Go on. Take Ybicket. Vida can fly you.”
“I’ll go,” Paula said again.
Tanuojin gave her a sour look. “With you inboard, it would take a watch and a half just to get there.” He turned to Saba, across the desk. “Go to the Akopra some other time.”
“I promised her.” Saba shrugged. “Come see me when you get back. Let Paula go with you. She’s having another one of her fits.”
She left the couch and started toward the door. Tanuojin stayed to argue with Saba. The waiting room, as large as the office, was crowded with men waiting to see him. She lingered a moment, in among the Styths, and Tanuojin came out, looking sullen.
“Are we taking David?” she asked.
“I can’t fly Ybicket by myself,” he said.
Lalande was a Class M star eight light years from the Sun, with a family of twenty-six planets. Under Melleno, the rAkellaron in a rare constructive moment had sent out six probes to nearby stars. Two had failed. Three were still in course, but waves from the Lalande probe had begun to reach the radio-pans on Oberon, outermost of Uranus’ moons. Paula strapped herself into the middle of Ybicket’s three seats. Tanuojin hooked her suit into the lifeline.
“Don’t forget,” he said to the front of the cab. “She can’t take too much acceleration, even in this fancy suit that eats up all the energy in the ship.”
“Yes, I know that,” David said.
“Don’t mouth off at me, little boy, you won’t like it.”
“How long will it take?” Paula asked. She looked up at the window, covered with the dark shutter, reflecting a red light winking on a dial on Tanuojin’s radio deck. He put the dark helmet over her head.
“Six hours.” Round inside the helmet, his voice came from over her head. He and David climbed into their places.
The ship butted down five miles of the chute into the Planet. In the holograph, Vribulo was a fibrous wall to the right of the ship, streaming long threads of tunnel. They left the city and traveled off through the magma. A thick yellow wave rushed on them. Ybicket slid in a long swoop down its crest.
“Why did he get married?” Tanuojin said. “He’s making a fool out of himself with that baby.”
“Let him alone,” Paula said. “He’s having a good time.” The ship rolled from side to side, barreling through a stretch of clear green. Ahead of them lay the Vribulo Stormbank, five thousand miles of turbulence. She remembered thinking once that two hundred kilometers an hour was a breakneck speed. David drove as fast as Saba.
The ship hurtled through the edge of the storm. She clutched her harness with both hands. Her stomach churned. If she were sick inside the helmet they would be all the way to Oberon cleaning up the mess. Tanuojin, navigating, talked steadily in her ears, guiding David through the layers of the storm. His voice was quicker than usual. She changed her mind about his lethargy. He was wound up tight as a set trap. Waiting, she thought. Waiting for something to happen.
The ship bucked and swerved, and she gulped. She had been sick once and they had teased her mercilessly for three watches. Grimly she fought against her nausea all the way to the surface of the Planet, until they escaped into space.
Oberon, second biggest moon, and farthest from Uranus, kept one face always turned to the Planet, but now, with Uranus in its variant season, the Sun seemed to rise and set. They reached the observatory in early morning. David set Ybicket down on a pad in the landing field and they got out and walked through the light gravity toward the group of buildings. Paula looked around them. Beyond the buildings of the observatory complex, with their clear domed roofs, stood the ruins of ancient houses built by the first settlers of Uranus. They had been stripped down for material to make the laboratory and the spherical houses for the telescopes. Only the foundations remained.
They went into the observatory. Through the clear domed ceiling she could see the black of space, scattered with stars. She unbuckled the wrist straps of her gloves and took them off.
Three or four men in long coats converged on them. Tanuojin greeted one by name and was introduced to the others, who bowed to him. She went slowly across the huge room before her. The floor was inlaid with a schema of the solar system. She walked down a gap through the Asteroids.
The technicians took Tanuojin off to a long bench against the circular wall. A light switched on above it. He swore at what he saw. Paula went over to his side. The technicians backed away, letting her through. The bench had a light in it, and a screen for viewing: a strip of colors was running across it. The colors ran the brilliant clear range of the spectrum. The technicians pointed to different areas and talked about calcium and hydrogen and compounds of oxygen.
She leaned on the bench, her eyes on the stream of colors, the clear deep violet and snapping yellow, pictures of worlds light years away. She glanced around the spacious, circular room. A man in a long coat came in a far door and sat down at a desk on the opposite wall. Her face was stiff with cold but the pressure suit kept her body warm. She looked up through the ceiling into the stars.
“Very good,” Tanuojin said. “Good, good, good.”
The technicians, all but one, wore white coats; the one wore a green coat, and he turned to the others and dismissed them in an important voice. Bending over the spectra, he pointed to a mass of yellow. “Akellar, let me point out the sodium lines here.” His claws were clipped short. Probably they got in his way. On the wall above the bench compasses hung, in several sizes, clear plastic shapes to measure with, clippers with toothed edges. She still had her gloves in her hand and she stuffed them under the strap on her shoulder.
“Those are rho lines,” Tanuojin said.
The film stopped moving with a sharp double click. “Some malfunction in the pulse source,” the technician said. “We noticed them right away, of course—I thought they’d been removed.” He stooped and pulled down the underside of the bench, which swung outward on curved hinged arms. The film ran along it on sprockets. “The probe fixed itself—the interference is just in this series.” He shouted over his shoulder and another man came quickly toward them. Paula moved out of the way. Brimming with apologies, they brought in another piece of film and replaced the first.
“The computer reconstructed the series awfully well.” The technician pushed the film train back into the bench.
“What’s a rho line?” Paula asked.
Tanuojin’s head turned. He spread the discarded piece of film out on the bench to one side of the screen. Without the lights behind it the film looked dull. He pointed to a band of yellow. “These spectra show which elements make up the Planet—each of the elements absorbed a characteristic wavelength of the light. These—” his claw tapped a broader gray space, “that’s a rho line. Radio interference in the transmission.” He went back to the corrected film. “Have any of the photographs come in?” he asked the technician.