“May I invite all of you to dinner?” Adri asked. “A welcoming celebration.”
Meek frowned mistrustfully. “I believe it would be better if we stayed in our own base, for now. Much better.”
“You are suspicious of us, Dr. Meek.”
“Yes, quite frankly I am,” Meek replied. “I have no intention of hurting your feelings, sir, but I feel very strongly that we should follow our original mission protocol and begin to live as independently on this planet as we can.”
Very seriously, Adri asked, “Do you intend to post guards while you sleep?”
Meek blinked at him. “The robots can fill that function, I suppose.” He looked to Thornberry for confirmation.
“Oh, they make wonderful guards, they do,” said the roboticist. “They never sleep, they’re always on alert.”
“Yet they can be deactivated,” Adri said, with just a hint of mischief in his almond eyes.
Meek gaped at him.
Thornberry said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Adri. How did you shut down me two rovers, back when they first landed here?”
With a wintry smile, Adri said, “I’m afraid I’m not an engineer, as you are, sir. You’ll have to speak with some of our technical specialists about that.”
Thornberry looked decidedly unsatisfied.
Paul Longyear strode up to them. “We’re finished unloading,” the biologist reported. “The base is ready for business.”
“Good,” said Meek.
Jordan raised his voice to tell them, “I’m very proud of you, all of you. You’ve established the first human outpost beyond our own solar system.”
“Well, that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” said Meek.
Glancing at the westering suns, Adri said, “I’m afraid I must leave you now. I am truly glad that you’ve come here and I hope that you are comfortable in your independent base. Again, welcome to New Earth.”
Jordan said, “I’ll spend the night here with my companions, Adri.”
“Understandable,” the alien replied. “I’ll tell Aditi.”
Jordan felt his cheeks redden. “Yes. Thank you. Please tell her I’ll see her tomorrow.”
“I will,” said Adri. Then he turned and began walking toward the trees and the path back to the city. Jordan saw him pull his pet from his robe and fondle it as he walked.
“Strange fellow,” Thornberry murmured.
“What do you expect?” said Meek. “He’s an alien.”
Longyear watched Adri’s retreating back for long moments, then finally said, “He doesn’t seem worried about our coming here to his world.”
“Should he be?” Jordan asked.
With his dark eyes fixed on Adri’s departing figure, Longyear said, “I don’t know. If an alien starship took up orbit around Earth and a team of aliens came down and started to build a camp, wouldn’t we be worried about them? Suspicious of their motives?”
“For heaven’s sake, they know our motives,” Meek snapped. “They’ve been listening to our radio and television broadcasts for years.”
“Centuries,” Jordan corrected.
“I don’t know,” Longyear said slowly. “He just seems so … so cool about it all. Gives me the creeps.”
“That’s your Native American heritage talking,” said Thornberry. “Adri’s people have never been invaded and conquered by strangers.”
“How do you know?” Longyear wondered.
Jordan said, “I don’t think it’s got anything to do with history or heritages.”
“You don’t?” Meek challenged. “Then what?”
“I think that Adri’s people have a technology that’s superior to ours. Much superior. They have no reason to be afraid of us because they know that we can’t hurt them.”
Thornberry rubbed his jaw. “Maybe we should be afraid of them.”
What’s in a Name?
The interiors of the plastic bubble tents were divided by two-meter-high partitions into cubicles that served as quarters for individuals, and wider areas for workshops and laboratories. The largest open area was for dining, and all nine of the landing team assembled there at the end of the day.
Jordan looked down the table at the eight of them. Hazzard had returned to Gaia. He, Trish Wanamaker, and Demetrios Zadar, the team’s astronomer, planned to remain aboard the ship.
The dining area felt strangely cold to Jordan. It smelled new, unused. The dome of the bubble tent curved high above, lost in shadows. The tall partitions were bare, undecorated. Well, that will change over time, he told himself. This is our first night; after we’ve been here a while this place will start to feel more lived-in. More like home.
Two robots stood passively against the far partition of the dining area, awaiting the order to begin serving the meal. The nine people around the table were quiet, talking to each other in hushed whispers. They looked pensive, Jordan thought, uncertain, almost frightened.
He got to his feet and raised his glass of carbonated water. “Here’s to our first night on New Earth. The first of many. We have a grand adventure ahead of us.”
All the others raised their glasses, but without any real fervor.
“You may begin serving,” Jordan said to the robots as he sat down. Both machines turned and went through the open doorway to the kitchen.
Brandon, on Jordan’s right, asked, “Is that how you think of our mission: a grand adventure?”
“Why, don’t you? We’re on a new world, we’ve encountered intelligent humanlike people and their civilization. Just think of what’s ahead for us!”
“That’s what I wonder about,” said Meek, sitting a few chairs farther down the table.
“This Adri is a pretty slick fellow,” Thornberry said. “He answers our questions, but the answers don’t seem to tell us anything.”
“Do you trust him?” asked Elyse, who was sitting beside Brandon.
“If we trusted him,” Brandon said, “we’d be having dinner in his city, instead of here.”
Jordan said, “Bran, you and I have stayed at the city, we’ve partaken of Adri’s hospitality. No harmful effects. Nothing sinister.”
“It’s just too confoundingly pat,” Meek grumbled. “Too good to be true.”
Longyear and several others nodded.
“Harmon,” said Jordan gently, “perhaps you’re looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” Longyear muttered.
The robots glided into the room and began to place bowls of steaming soup before each person.
Jordan looked down the table at their suspicious faces. “Very well, you don’t trust Adri and his people. What do we do about it?”
Brandon replied instantly, “We try to find out as much as we can about them. Who they really are. Where they come from.”
“Adri says they were born here; they’re natives of this planet,” said Jordan.
“How can they be exactly like us?” Meek argued. “It’s beyond the realm of belief.”
Longyear countered, “They evolved on a planet just like Earth. Maybe it’s convergent evolution, or parallel evolution, if you want to call it that. I mean, this is the first really Earthlike planet we’ve found. Maybe wherever the conditions are the same, the results are the same, too. Inevitable.”
“I can’t believe that,” said Meek. “It goes against everything we know about biology. And statistics.”
“Maybe it doesn’t,” Longyear replied. “I mean, we have two examples of Earthlike environments and both of them have produced a human species.”
De Falla spoke up. “That’s another thing. How could this planet have survived the Pup’s explosions? How could it possibly bear any life at all?”