The planet didn’t look threatening at all. The plants were an odd shade of orange, the distant trees (or were they simply very tall grasses?) looked harmless, and there were no obviously threatening large animals. On the other hand, there wasn’t much to be seen that looked immediately profitable, either. There weren’t any signs of civilization—no great abandoned cities, no friendly alien intelligences to welcome him, no Heechee artifacts lying about waiting to be picked up. There wasn’t even any kind of metallic structure, natural or otherwise, on the surface large enough to be detected by his lander’s sensors as he came down. But, Mendoza reassured himself, the fact that there was any kind of life ought to be worth at least a science bonus. He identified both “plant” and “animal” life—at least some of the things moved, and some of them were firmly rooted in the soil.
He took some samples of the plants, though they weren’t impressive. He trekked painfully over to the “trees” and found that they were soft-bodied, like mushrooms. There weren’t any large ferns or true grasses; but there was a kind of fuzzy moss that covered most of the soil, and there were things that moved on it. None of the moving things were very big. The largest life form Mendoza encountered was an “arthropod” about the size of his palm. The little beasts moved about in little herds, feeding on smaller beetly and buggy things, and they were covered with a dense “fur” of glassy white spicules, which made them look like herds of tiny sheep. Mendoza felt almost guilty as he trapped a few of the pretty little creatures, killed them, and put them, with samples of the smaller creatures they preyed on, in the sterile containers that would go back to Gateway.
There wasn’t anything else worth transporting. What the planet had that was really worthwhile was beauty. It had a lot of that.
It was quite near—Mendoza estimated thirty or forty light-years—a bright, active gas cloud that he thought might be the Orion Nebula. (It wasn’t, but like the one in Orion it was a nursery for bright young stars. ) Mendoza happened to land in the right season of the year to appreciate it best, for as the planet’s sun set on one horizon the nebula rose on the other. It came to fill the entire night sky, like a luminous, sea-green tapestry laced with diamonds, edged in glowing royal maroon. The “diamonds"—the brightest stars within the nebula—were orders of magnitude brighter even than Venus or Jupiter as seen from Earth, nearly as bright as Earth’s full Moon. But they were point sources, not disks like the Moon, and they were almost painful to look upon. It was the beauty that struck Mendoza. He was not an articulate man. When he got back and filed his report he referred to the planet as “a pretty place,” and so it was logged in the Gateway atlases as “Pretty Place.”
Mendoza got what he was after: a two-million-dollar science bonus for finding the planet at all, and the promise of a royalty share on whatever subsequent missions might discover on Pretty Place. That could have turned out to be really serious money. According to Gateway rules, if the planet was colonizable Mendoza would be collecting money from it for the rest of his life.
Almost at once two other missions, both Fives, copied his settings and made the same trip.
That was when they changed the name to Pretty Poison.
The follow-up parties were not as cautious as Mendoza. They didn’t keep their space suits on. They didn’t have the natural protections that had been developed by Pretty Poison’s own fauna, either. The local life had evolved to meet a real challenge; those furry silicon spikes were not for ornament. They were armor.
It was a pity Mendoza hadn’t completed his radiation checks, because those bright young stars in the nebula were not radiating visible light alone. They were powerful sources of ionizing radiation and hard ultraviolets. Four of the ten explorers came down with critical sunburn before they began to show signs of something worse. All of them, by the time they got back to Gateway, required total blood replacement, and two of them died anyway.
It was a good thing that Mendoza was a prudent man. He hadn’t spent his two million in wild carouse, expecting the vast royalties that might come as his percentage of all that colonizing his planet would bring about. The planet could not be inhabited by human beings. The royalties never came.
MISSION BURNOUT
Of the nearly thousand Heechee vessels found on Gateway, only a few dozen were armored, and most of those were Fives. An armored Three was a rarity, and when the crew of Felicia Monsanto, Greg Running Wolf, and Daniel Pursy set out in one they knew there was a certain element of danger; its course setting might take them to some really nasty place.
But when they came out of FTL and looked around they had a moment of total rapture. The star they were near was quite sunlike, a G-2 the same size as Earth’s Sol; they were orbiting a planet within the livable zone from the star, and their detectors showed Heechee metal in large quantities!
The biggest concentration was not on the planet. It was an asteroid in an out-of-ecliptic orbit—a lot like Gateway—and it had to be another of those abandoned parking garages for Heechee ships! When they approached it they saw that the guess was correct. But they also saw that the asteroid was empty. There were no ships. There were no artifacts at all. It was riddled with tunnels, just like Gateway, but the tunnels were vacant. Worse than that, the whole asteroid seemed in very bad shape, as though it were far older, and had had a far harder life, than Gateway itself.
That puzzle cleared itself up when, with the last of their resources, two of the crew ventured down to the planet itself.
It had been a living planet once. It had life now, in fact, but in scant numbers and only in its seas—algae and sea-bottom invertebrates, nothing more. Somehow or other the planet had been seared and ravaged . . . and the culprit was in view.
Six and a half light-years away from that system they discovered a neutron star. Like most neutron stars, it was a pulsar, but as their ship was nowhere near its axis of radiation they could hardly detect its jets. But it was a radio source, and their instruments showed that it was there, the remnant of a supernova.
The rest of the story the experts on Gateway filled in for them when they returned. That solar system had been visited by the Heechee, but it was in a bad neighborhood. After the Heechee left—probably knowing what was about to happen—the supernova exploded. The planet had been baked. Its gases had been driven off, and most of its seas boiled away. As the hellish heat died away a thin new atmosphere was cooked out of the planet’s crust, and the remaining water vapor had come down in incredible torrents of rain, scouring away mountain valleys, burying plains in silt, leaving nothing . . . and all of that had happened hundreds of thousands of years before.
Monsanto, Running Wolf, and Pursy got a science bonus for their mission—a small one, a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to be divided among the three of them. By Gateway standards, that wasn’t serious money. It was enough to pay their bills on Gateway for a few extra weeks. It was not nearly enough to retire on. All three of them shipped out again as soon as they found another berth, and from their next voyage none of them ever returned.
Probably the Gateway prospectors should have taken it for granted that hospitable, Earth-like planets were bound to be a lot rarer than malignant ones. Their own solar system made that much clear. Anyway, all those years of listening to Project Ozma radio signals should have taught them that much. What they found out was that there was a myriad different kinds of hostile environments. There was Eta Carina Seven; it was the right size, it had air, it even had water—when it wasn’t frozen, anyway. But Eta Carina Seven had a highly eccentric orbit. It was pretty well iced over, though still on its way to its frigid aphelion, and there were terrible storms. One lander never came back at all. Three of the others were damaged, or lost at least one crew member.