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He had done something about it, of course. He had set up a Scanning Service throughout the asteroid belt, a body whose function it was to supervise the automated receptors that constantly swept the sky, and to detect at as great a distance as possible the copious waste-energy disposal of an approaching Settlement.

It had taken some time to set it all up properly, but for a dozen years now, every scrap of dubious information had been followed up, and, every once in a while, something seemed sufficiently questionable to be referred to Pitt. And every time it happened, it set off the clanging of an alarm bell in Pitt's head.

It turned out always to be nothing - so far - and the initial relief was always followed by a kind of rage against the Scanners. If anything was uncertain, they washed their hands of it, let it go, turned it over to Pitt. Let him deal with it, let him suffer, let him make the hard decisions.

It was at this point that Pitt's self-pity became lachrymose, and he would begin to stir uneasily at the possibility that he might be showing weakness.

There was this one, for instance. Pitt fingered the report that his computer had uncoded, and that had inspired this mental self-pitying survey of his own continuous, unbearable and underappreciated service to the Rotorian people.

This was the first report that had been referred to him in four months, and it seemed to him that it was of minimal importance. A suspicious energy source was approaching, but allowing for its probable distance, it was an unusually small source - a smaller source by some four orders of magnitude than one would expect of a Settlement. It was a source so small that it was all but inseparable from noise.

They might have spared him this. The report that it was of a peculiar wavelength pattern that seemed to make it of human origin was ridiculous. How could they tell anything about a source so weak - except that it was not a Settlement, and therefore could not be of human origin, whatever the wavelength pattern?

Those idiot Scanners must not annoy me in this fashion, thought Pitt.

He tossed the report aside petulantly, and picked up the latest report from Ranay D'Aubisson. That girl Marlene did not have the Plague, even yet. She madly persisted in putting herself in danger in more and more elaborate ways - and yet remained unharmed.

Pitt sighed. Perhaps it didn't matter. The girl seemed to want to remain on Erythro, and if she remained, that might be as good as having her come down with the Plague. In fact, it would force Eugenia Insigna to stay on Erythro, too, and he would be rid of both of them. To be sure, he would feel safer if D'Aubisson, rather than Genarr, were in charge of the Dome and could oversee both mother and daughter. That would have to be arranged in the near future in some way that would not make Genarr a martyr.

Would it be safe to make him Commissioner of New Rotor? That would certainly rate as a promotion and he would be unlikely to refuse the position, especially since, in theory, it would place him on an even rank with Pitt himself. Or would that give Genarr a bit too much of the reality of power in addition to the appearance? Was there an alternative?

He would have to think of it.

Ridiculous! How much easier it would all have been if that girl Marlene had only done something as simple as getting the Plague.

In a spasm of irritation at Marlene's refusal to do so, he picked up the report on the energy source again.

Look at that! A little puff of energy and they bothered him with it. He wasn't going to stand for it. He punched a memo into the computer for instant transmission. He was not to be bothered by minutiae. Keep an eye out for a Settlement!

81

Onboard the Superluminal, the discoveries came like a series of hammer blows, one after the other.

They were still at a great distance from the Neighbor Star when it became apparent that it possessed a planet.

‘A planet!’ said Crile Fisher with tense triumph. ‘I knew-’

‘No,’ said Tessa Wendel hastily, ‘it's not what you think. Get it through your head, Crile, that there are planets and planets. Virtually every star has some sort of planetary system or other. After all, more than half the stars in the Galaxy are multiple-star systems, and planets are just stars that are too small to be stars, you see. This planet we see isn't habitable. If it were habitable, we wouldn't see it at this distance, especially in the dim light of the Neighbor Star.’

‘You mean, it's a gas giant.’

‘Of course it is. I would have been more surprised if there hadn't been one than at finding out that one exists.’

‘But if there's a large planet, there may be small planets, too.’

‘Maybe,’ conceded Wendel, ‘but scarcely habitable ones. They'll either be too cold for life, or their rotation will be locked and they'll be showing only one side to the star, which would make it too warm on one side and too cold on the other. All that Rotor could do - if it were here - would be to place itself in orbit around the star, or possibly around the gas giant.’

‘That might be exactly what they've done.’

‘For all these years?’ Wendel shrugged. ‘It's conceivable, I suppose, but you can't count on it, Crile.’

82

The next blows were more startling ones.

‘A satellite?’ said Tessa Wendel. ‘Well, why not? Jupiter has four sizable ones. Why should it be surprising that this gas giant has one?’

‘It's not a satellite like any that exists in the Solar System, Captain,’ said Henry Jarlow. ‘It's roughly the size of Earth - from the measurements I've been able to make.’

‘Well,’ said Wendel, maintaining her indifference, ‘what follows from that?’

‘Nothing, necessarily,’ said Jarlow, ‘but the satellite shows peculiar characteristics. I wish I were an astronomer.’

‘At the moment,’ said Wendel, ‘I wish someone on the ship was, but please go on. You're not completely ignorant of astronomy.’

‘The point is that since it revolves around the gas giant, it shows one face only to the gas giant, which means that all sides of it face the Neighbor Star in the course of its revolution around the gas giant. And the nature of the orbit is such that, as near as I can tell, the temperature of the world is in the liquid-water stage. And it has an atmosphere. Now I don't have all the subtleties at my fingertips. As I said, I'm not an astronomer. Still, it seems to me that there's a good chance that the satellite is a habitable world.’

Crile Fisher received the news with a wide smile. He said, ‘I'm not surprised. Igor Koropatsky predicted the existence of a habitable planet. He did it without any data on the subject. It was just a matter of deduction.’

‘Did Koropatsky do that? And when did he talk to you, I wonder?’

‘Some time before we left. He reasoned that nothing was likely to have happened to Rotor on the way to the Neighbor Star and, since they didn't return, that they must have found a planet to colonize. And there it is.’

‘And just why did he tell you this, Crile?’

Crile paused and considered, then said, ‘He was interested in making certain that the planet would be explored for possible future use by Earth, when the time came for our old planet to be evacuated.’

‘And why do you suppose he didn't tell me this? Do you have any idea?’

‘I suppose, Tessa,’ said Crile carefully, ‘that he thought I would be the more impressionable of the two of us, more eager to urge that the planet be explored-’

‘Because of your daughter.’

‘He knew of the situation, Tessa.’

‘And why didn't you tell me this?’

‘I wasn't sure there was anything to tell. I felt that I might as well wait and see if Koropatsky was right. Since he was, I am now telling you. The planet must be habitable by his reasoning.’