“I suppose so. But I just can’t understand what would conk out their power systems. It’s uncanny, it is. Downright spooky.”
Jordan tried to smile at the puzzled roboticist. “You’ll figure it out, Mitch, sooner or later.”
Thornberry shook his head and began to mutter his mantra, “I am maintaining a kindly, courteous, secret, and wounded silence—”
“Hey! Look!”
Jordan snapped his attention to his brother, who had walked a little way farther among the trees.
Standing again, Jordan called, “Bran, what is it?”
“I thought I saw somebody out there.” He pointed deeper into the woods.
“Somebody?”
Meek and de Falla both strained to look in the direction Brandon was pointing.
“A man, it looked like,” said Brandon.
Contact
All three of them hurried to where Brandon was standing, gazing into the trees.
“A man?” Jordan asked, a little breathless.
“A figure,” Brandon said, still looking. “I thought it was a man. In some sort of a robe.”
“An optical illusion,” Meek sniffed.
“Dammit, Harmon, I know what I saw!”
“You know what you thought you saw,” replied Meek. “The mind plays tricks on us sometimes. I remember once, when I was a graduate student—”
Brandon strode off in the direction he’d been pointing.
“Bran! Wait!” Jordan shouted after him.
“He must’ve left footprints,” Brandon said over his shoulder.
Meek shook his head. “Nonsense,” he huffed.
De Falla flailed his arms. “I don’t know if he really saw a man, but there are surely insects here.”
“Really?” said Meek.
Jordan strode to his brother’s side. Brandon was peering at the ground, searching.
“It was right about here,” he murmured.
The ground looked undisturbed to Jordan. No footprints except their own.
“I could’ve sworn I saw him.”
“It doesn’t seem all that likely, Bran,” Jordan said gently. “Perhaps it was an animal of some sort.”
“Standing on its hind legs?”
Jordan shrugged. “This is all new territory. We don’t know what to expect.”
“Maybe we’d better get those guns.”
“Not a bad idea,” Jordan agreed. The two brothers went back to the buggy and pulled out a pair of slim dart-firing rifles.
“Do you think these things could stop a bear?” Brandon asked, heading back toward the spot where he thought he’d seen someone.
“They do on Earth,” Jordan said, hefting the rifle in one hand. It felt light, more like a child’s toy than a weapon that could protect them.
De Falla shouted, “Look! Birds!”
They looked up as a flock of brightly colored birds swooped past, wings glittering in the sunlight. They certainly look like birds on Earth, Jordan thought, no matter what Meek thinks.
“Squirrels, insects, birds,” Brandon said. “Why not people?”
Turning slowly, Jordan looked all around him. He saw de Falla and Meek gazing at the birds as they flew off into the distance. The two inert rovers, with the robots bent over them. Their own buggy. And Brandon standing beside him with that sullen, stubborn look he’d known since childhood, cradling the rifle in his arms.
“There’s absolutely no sign of intelligent life on this planet, Bran. You know that.”
“I know what I saw.”
Gripping his brother’s shoulder, Jordan smiled and said, “Well, if you’re right, we’ll run into him again, I imagine.”
“You’re humoring me, Jordy.”
“Perhaps I am,” Jordan admitted. “What else can I do?”
“Help me look for him!”
“I don’t think we should get too far away from the others. And the buggy.”
“Keeping your line of retreat open?”
“It’s the sensible thing to do, don’t you agree?”
“Sensible,” Brandon said. “But wrong.”
And he started off deeper into the forest.
“Bran, wait,” Jordan called, trotting after him.
“I saw a man,” Brandon insisted. “A man in a long robe. It was sort of bluish.”
Jordan grabbed for his brother’s arm again and dragged him to a halt. “All right. You saw a man. But there’s no sign of him now.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“If he exists, we’ll see him again, no doubt. In the meantime, I think it’s foolish to go crashing off into these woods before we know more about what this place is like.”
Brandon stood there glaring at his brother for several silent moments. Then, very deliberately, he clicked open the neck ring of his biosuit and lifted up the edge of his bubble helmet. The helmet deflated into a sagging lump of nanofabric and Brandon pulled it off his head entirely. Jordan was so shocked he didn’t know what to do, what to say.
“There,” Brandon said. “I’m breathing this world’s air. It’s not harming me.”
Jordan had to swallow hard before he could say, “How do you know that? There could be microbes, viruses, all kinds of—”
“Good morning, sirs.”
They whirled around toward the sound of the softly melodious voice. Standing fifteen meters before them was a tall, lean, totally bald, vaguely oriental-looking man in an ankle-length pale blue robe, holding a small furry creature in the palm of one hand and gently stroking it with the other.
Adri
“I am Adri,” the man said, his voice soft, almost a whisper. “Welcome to New Earth.”
Jordan stared at the man, blinked once, twice, then gaped at him again. Standing beside him, Brandon was equally goggle-eyed.
The man smiled gently. “I hope I haven’t shocked you. The question of a first meeting is always very delicate, don’t you think?”
His face was spiderwebbed with age, Jordan saw. He was quite tall, a few centimeters taller than Meek, and appeared to be very slim beneath his long robe. His eyes were almond shaped, pale blue. The hue of his skin was faintly brownish yellow, almost gray. His cheeks were gaunt, hollow. His hands were thin, with long talonlike fingers that slowly stroked the furry thing he was holding.
Meek and de Falla came running up to them.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Meek. De Falla said nothing, he simply stared.
“I am Adri,” the man repeated, with a gentle smile. “I hope you’ll forgive the somewhat dramatic scenario we’ve concocted to produce this first meeting.”
“It was a surprise,” Jordan admitted. Then he said, “My name is Jordan Kell. This is my brother, Dr. Brandon Kell, Dr. Harmon Meek, and Dr. Silvio de Falla.”
“You said we,” Brandon snapped, almost accusingly. “There’s more of you?”
“Oh, my, yes. Of course. There would have to be, wouldn’t there?”
Jordan asked, “Who are you? How many of you are there?”
Looking slightly embarrassed, Adri replied, “Oh, there’s a goodly number of us here. I’m afraid we’ve kept ourselves hidden from your orbiting cameras.”
“You look human,” Jordan said, his voice hollow with awe. “You speak English.”
“Yes. We thought it best to make our first meeting as comfortable for you as possible. There’s no way to entirely avoid the shock, of course, but we do want to make it as easy for you as we can.”
“Then you’re not really human?” Meek asked.
“Oh yes, I’m as human as you are.”
“Convergent evolution,” de Falla said, his voice awed.
Adri shook his bald head. “Not quite. It’s a bit more complicated than that.” He slid the little pet into the folds of his robe, then clasped his long fingers together, as if in prayer.