“Somebody? Who?”
“Whoever’s shining that laser at us.”
“But there’s no sign of intelligence down there,” Thornberry argued. “No radio signals, no buildings, no roads…”
“There’s the laser,” Jordan pointed out.
Hunching forward in his chair, Brandon ticked off points on his fingers. “Whoever built that laser is using it to attract our attention. They disable the rovers before the machines can get close enough to the laser for us to see what’s there. Isn’t it obvious? They don’t want machines, they want us. They want us to come down and meet them.”
“So they can cook us and eat us,” Hazzard muttered, half-joking.
“I doubt that cannibals use lasers,” Jordan said.
Meek pointed out, “But they wouldn’t be cannibals, not at all. We’re a different species from them.”
“Like beef cattle are different from us,” Hazzard maintained.
No one laughed.
They debated the situation for another hour, but Jordan realized that there was only one decision they could reasonably make.
“All right, then,” he said at last. “We can send another rover or two down, or we can send a team of people. Which should it be?”
“People!” Brandon snapped.
Thornberry countered, “I’d like to send a couple of rovers to different places around the planet and see what happens to them. See if they operate normally.”
“That would mean the area around the laser beacon is a special place,” said Meek.
“A dangerous place,” Jordan said.
Brandon shook his head. “I think they’re making it abundantly clear that they want us to come down and meet them. In person.”
“Meet who?” Jordan asked. “If there are intelligent aliens down there, capable of building a laser and disabling our rovers, why are they being so coy? Why not try to contact us? Send us a radio message. Blink the laser, use it as a communications beam.”
“Yeah,” Thornberry agreed. “If they’re intelligent they could send up a spacecraft of their own to greet us properly.”
Meek shook his head. “It’s obvious that they don’t think the same way we do.”
“Is it?” Brandon countered. “Seems to me they’re very deliberately trying to get us to go down there and meet them.”
“Luring us in,” Jordan muttered.
“But why?” Elyse asked. “Why are they behaving this way?”
Jordan looked around the table at their faces, then said, “There’s only one way to find the answer to that question. We’ll have to send a team down to the surface.”
“Right!” said Brandon.
Decisions
It took another whole day to get a landing party assembled and checked out. Jordan gathered the entire group in the wardroom and had them push all six tables together. Once all twelve of them were seated, he began to announce his decisions.
“As you know,” he began, “I try to manage our group on a consensus basis. We’re not a hierarchical organization, not like a university department. While we have leaders in the various fields of interest, such as astrobiology—”
Meek dipped his chin in acknowledgment.
Jordan went on, “All of you have been cross-trained in different specialties.”
Thornberry interrupted, “And we have a squad of robots to help us.”
Nodding, Jordan resumed, “That’s right. The robots are going to be of enormous help.”
“Like the two rovers dozing down on the surface,” Brandon sneered.
Thornberry shot him a dark scowl.
“Now, about the landing team,” Jordan said, hoping to forestall an argument. “I’ve decided to go myself. Bran, you’re our planetary astronomer: I think you’re an obvious choice. And you, Harmon, you’re our astrobiologist.”
“I could go,” said Paul Longyear, the biologist. “Professor Meek could stay in real-time link with me.”
“No, no, no,” Meek said, wagging a forefinger vigorously. “I’ll go to the surface myself. You stay here and monitor the biosensors, Paul.”
Longyear looked crestfallen, but said nothing.
Rank hath its privileges, Jordan repeated to himself, a little surprised that Meek was so insistent on going himself. His estimation of the man rose a notch.
“I want to go, too,” said Elyse. She was sitting beside Brandon, as usual.
Gently, Jordan said, “I’m afraid we won’t need an astrophysicist on this jaunt. Later, once we know more about what’s going on down there, we’ll set up a permanent base and we’ll all go to the surface.”
Elyse was obviously unhappy with Jordan’s decision, but Brandon looked relieved.
Jordan decided to keep Thornberry on the ship; the roboticist had launched two additional rovers to different points on the planet’s surface, and they were performing perfectly well, sending up reams of data. The two defunct rovers near the laser site remained quite dead, to Thornberry’s exasperated disgust.
“Mitch, you’ll be our mission controller,” Jordan told him. “Our contact with the ship.”
Thornberry’s heavy-jowled face contorted into an apologetic frown. “I hope I can keep in touch with you better than those two blasted deadbeats.”
“What about me?” Hazzard asked, from the far end of the table. “Why can’t I go with you?”
“We need you to run the ship, Geoff,” Jordan told him. Hazzard nodded acquiescence, but his expression was far from pleased.
He pointed out, “I could fly the plane that’s already down there back to the ship. Maybe recover the rovers while I’m at it.”
“You can do that from here, remotely,” said Jordan, “once we’ve reactivated the rovers.”
“Guess so,” Hazzard muttered.
“If something should … go wrong down on the surface,” Jordan added, “you’ll be in charge of the ship, Geoff. You’ll have to make the decision about what to do next.”
Dead silence. None of them wanted to face such a possibility.
Pointing to Silvio de Falla, the geologist, Jordan said, “We’ll need you on the team, Silvio.”
De Falla, short, swarthy, with a trim dark beard tracing his jawline, and large brown eyes, nodded wordlessly. But his smile spoke volumes.
“That’s it, I think,” Jordan said. “The four of us. Any questions? Suggestions?”
There were plenty, and Jordan patiently let everyone have his or her say. Finally, when the comments became patently repetitious, he concluded, “Very well, then. This afternoon we check out the landing vehicle and tomorrow we go down to the surface.”
His dreams that night were confused, jumbled, yet somehow menacing. Jordan saw himself in the beautiful, deadly Vale of Kashmir once again, but he was all alone, none of the team that should have been with him were there, not even Miriam. He was toiling down a dirt road that seemed endless, alone, not another soul in sight. Slowly, as gradually as summer wasting into autumn, the air began to thicken. It grew darker and harder to breathe. Jordan was choking, gasping, staggering as he tried to catch his breath, coughing up blood …
He snapped awake and sat up in bed, soaked in cold perspiration.
“Nerves,” he told himself. “You’ll be all right once you get down to the planet’s surface.” Still, he felt cold despite his compartment’s climate control. His hands were trembling.
He lay back on the bed and tried to think if there might be something he’d forgotten in his preparations for the landing. Four of us, he recounted. Planetary astronomy, astrobiology, and geology. Plus me. Their fearless leader. Four will be enough. If something goes wrong, if we die down there—he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember a quote from Shakespeare. What was it? From Henry V: something about, “If we are marked to die we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.”