ON THE FOURTH day they were able to pick up physical features, mountain ranges, river valleys, large brown patches that might have been plains. A section of the night side was visible, and they searched it eagerly for lights, but saw nothing.
They slept in shifts, when they slept at all. Usually, they dozed off in the common room, and left only to head for the washroom or to get something to eat. They began imagining they saw things. Someone would sit before a monitor tapping it with a pen, observing that there are lines here, looks like a building, or something there, in the harbor, maybe improvements. At one point, Winnie was convinced she could make out a mountain road, and Digger claimed he saw wakes at sea, maybe from ships. Kellie wondered whether she hadn’t spotted a dam on one of the rivers, and Jack saw changes in the color of the land that suggested agricultural development.
But in the growing clarity of the telescopes, everything faded, save forest, jungle, rivers, and coastline. The arc of the night side remained dark.
THERE WAS A substantial cloud cover, and storms were everywhere. Blizzards covered the high northern and low southern latitudes, a hurricane churned through one of the oceans, and lightning flickered in the temperate zones. Rain seemed to be falling on every continent. Bill did the usual measurements and posted the results. The planet was about 6 percent smaller than the Earth. Axial tilt twenty-six degrees. (Axial tilt was another factor that seemed to be significant if a world was to develop a biosystem. All known living worlds ranged between eighteen and thirty-one degrees.)
According to Bill, the atmosphere would be breathable, but they’d be prudent to use bottled air. The air at sea level was notably richer in oxygen content than the standard mix. Gravity was.92 standard.
The smaller moon had a retrograde movement. Both satellites were airless, and both were devoid of evidence that anyone had ever landed on them. Seventy percent of the surface was liquid water. And Lookout had a rotational period of twenty-two hours, seventeen minutes.
They went into orbit, crossed the terminator onto the night side, and almost immediately saw lights.
But they weren’t the clear hard-edged lights of cities. There was smoke and blurring and a general irregularity. “Forest fires,” said Jack. “Caused by lightning, probably.” He smiled. “Sorry.” Though probably he wasn’t.
Thirty minutes later they were back on the daylight side. There were no major cities. The night was dark as a coal sack. Jack sat down, visibly relieved, visibly disappointed, and sent off yet another report to Vadim, information to the Academy. “No sign that the world is occupied. No lights. Will look more closely.”
“So why is the cloud coming this way?” asked Winnie.
THEY MADE SEVERAL orbits and saw nothing. They zeroed in on numerous harbors and rivers, looking for any sign of improvement and finding none. There was no visible shipping, no indication of a road anywhere.
They were about to send off another message informing Broadside that the Academy need not concern itself with Lookout when Digger heard Jack’s raspy uh-oh. He glanced at the screens, which were showing nothing but night. “I saw lights,” said Jack.
“Where?” Digger knew that Jack had written the world off. He was not going to get excited again. Not about Lookout.
“They’re gone,” said Jack. “We passed over. They’re behind us. But they were there.”
“Bill?”
“Realigning the scopes now.”
The alpha screen, the prime operational monitor, went dark, and then came back on. “I’ve got it,” said the AI.
Several lights, like lingering sparks. But they didn’t go out.
“Fires?”
“What are we getting from the sensors?” asked Winnie.
Bill switched over, and they saw several hazy, luminous rings. “Somebody’s got the lights on,” said Digger. He looked over at Kellie.
“Could be,” she said.
It wasn’t London, thought Digger. But it was sure as hell something.
“What’s the ground look like?” asked Winnie.
Bill put the area on display.
The biggest of the continents stretched from pole to pole, narrowing to an isthmus in the southern temperate latitudes before expanding again. The lights were located on, or over, the isthmus.
It was about four hundred kilometers long, ranging between forty and eighty kilometers wide. It was rough country, with a mountain range running its length, lots of ridges, and three or four rivers crossing from one ocean to the other.
Digger didn’t know what he was supposed to feel. He was along on the mission, and he was dedicated to it like Jack and Winnie. But unlike them, he hadn’t expected to see anything. Nobody ever saw anything. It was a rule.
“How could we have missed that?” asked Winnie.
“It’s still raining down there,” suggested Bill. “Visibility hasn’t been very good.”
“Lock it in, Bill. I don’t want to have trouble finding it again when it gets out into the daylight.” Digger went back to the viewport and stared out at the long dark curve of the planet. There wasn’t a light anywhere to be seen. Well, they’d come around again a few more times before it would be dawn over the target area. Maybe the cloud cover would go away and they’d get a good look.
And then they’d zero in by daylight.
THEY DIDN’T SEE the lights again. But the weather cleared toward dawn, the target area rotated out into the sun, and Digger looked down on a long jagged line that traveled the length of the isthmus. A road! It couldn’t be anything else.
Simultaneously Kellie announced she could see a city. “One of the harbors,” she said, bringing it up on the monitor.
“Here’s another one.” Winnie pointed at the opposite side of the isthmus. And another here, where the isthmus widens into the southern continent. And two more, where it reaches up into the northern land mass.
Cities crowded around harbors, cities spread out along an impossibly crooked shore line, cities straddling both sides of rivers. There was even a city on a large offshore island in the western sea.
The telescope zoomed in, and they saw creatures on the road, large awkward beasts of burden that looked like rhinos. And humanoids, equally awkward, wide around the middle, waddling along, with reins in their hands and hats that looked like sombreros.
“I’ll be damned,” said Jack. “They’re actually there.”
They had pale green skin, large floppy feet (had their ancestors been ducks?), and colorful clothing. It was red and gold and deep sea blue and emerald green. Winnie counted six digits rather than five, and thought their scalps were hairless. They wore baggy leggings and long shirts. Some had vests, and everything was ornamented. There were lots of bracelets, necklaces, feathers. Many wore sashes.
“My first aliens,” said Kellie, “and we get Carpenter.” That was a reference to Charlie Carpenter, the creator of the Goompahs, an enormously popular children’s show. And the aliens did, in fact, look like Goompahs.
“Incredible,” said Winnie.
Somebody laughed and proposed a toast to Charlie Carpenter, who’d gotten there first. They were looking at the traffic on the central road just outside a city that stood on the eastern coast. While they shook their heads in amusement, Jack switched the focus and brought up a building atop a low ridge near the sea. It stopped the laughter.
The building was round, a ring of Doric columns supporting a curved roof. It glittered in the sunlight, which was just reaching it, and it looked for all the world like a Greek temple.
“Say what you like,” said Digger. “But these people know their architecture.”
THEY COUNTED TWELVE cities in all, eight through the isthmus, two on the northern continent, one in the south, and one on the island. It was sometimes difficult to determine where one city ended and another began because, remarkably, they saw no walls. “Maybe it’s a nation,” said Kellie, who’d come down from the bridge to share the moment of triumph. “Or a confederacy.”