Standing alone at the edge of the battered, rain-soaked forest, Brad realized that he had to find the shuttlecraft that had carried him to Gamma’s surface.
It’s got food, tools, equipment, he remembered. And its own communications system. I could contact the ship with it! Then his momentary exhilaration faded. If the storms haven’t blown it away or damaged it.
Then he realized, It’s also got a homing beacon! His fingers trembling with excitement, Brad pecked out the beacon’s code on his wrist keyboard.
The most beautiful hum Brad had ever heard sounded gently, steadily, in his earphones. Brad felt exultant. If the beacon’s working, he thought, chances are the shuttle’s other electronic systems are working, too.
He started tramping across the soggy ground as if following the music of a marching band.
The shuttle’s built to fly me back to the starship, he told himself. Captain Desai’s people can shoot an automated program to the shuttle’s computer and the bird can take off and bring me to Alpha and the ship. And Felicia.
He recalled that there was a three-minute time lag for two-way communications from Alpha. Okay, so they’ll send a complete program, take off, fly through the atmosphere, and establish orbit. That will be the hard part, with me sitting there doing nothing. Everything preprogrammed, automated. Once in orbit around Gamma, getting to Odysseus in orbit around Alpha should be easy.
But he thought about Mnnx and Lnng and the other Gammans. I told them I’d be back tonight. What’ll they do when I don’t show up? Can they survive without me?
And Felicia. Will she be glad to see me? Is she angry that I didn’t return to her when I had the chance?
Do the Gammans know how to build a new village, for the generation that’s about to come to life? The biologists will go crazy, studying a new life form, an intelligent species that grows out of the ground, like plants.
I can’t leave them, Brad knew. I’ve interfered with their life cycle and now I’ve got to help them through the next steps. Before their long winter sets in.
I can’t leave them.
His triumphal march through the soaked, muddy meadow slowed to an almost reluctant pace. He passed the carcasses of two more of the monsters from Beta, dead and already rotting.
I can’t leave them, he repeated to himself. I’ve got to help them.
Then he spotted the shuttlecraft in the distance, sitting in the meadow where he had left it a seeming lifetime ago. Its silvery metal skin glowed warmly, invitingly, in the afternoon sunlight.
* * *
Kosoff looked down the long conference table. Every department head was present, chatting in hushed tones.
“We’re all here,” Kosoff said, by way of calling them to order. “Let’s start.”
Ursula Steiner, sitting tall and regal halfway down the table, said, “I haven’t received an agenda for this meeting.”
“Neither have I,” said Pedersen, the planetologist. “Just an announcement that you wanted us here at sixteen hundred hours. Like a summons, almost.”
“There isn’t an agenda,” Kosoff replied. “Not yet. In a sense, I’ve called this meeting to thrash out what our agenda should be once we return to Gamma.”
“That’s … unorthodox,” Steiner said.
Kosoff answered, “We’re faced with an unorthodox situation. Very unorthodox.”
Littlejohn, seated at Kosoff’s right, looked uncomfortable, upset. “You’re referring to MacDaniels’s interference with the Gammans.”
“More than that,” Kosoff said. “Much more than that.”
From the far end of the table, Elizabeth Chang spoke up in her soft, smoky voice. “MacDaniels has violated the basic rule of alien contact. He’s interfered with the aliens’ fundamental beliefs. He’s cast himself in the role of savior, almost a god.”
Littlejohn countered, “He saved the Gammans from extermination. He couldn’t stand by and let those big cats kill them all. He might have been killed himself.”
Unruffled, Chang insisted, “Still, he has violated the most basic rule of alien contact: noninterference.”
Pedersen objected, “So what was he supposed to do? Stand by and let the aliens be killed to the last man? That’s inhuman.”
“They are all going to die anyway,” said Steiner. “They can’t survive the deep freeze that the planet’s climate is heading for.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Littlejohn countered. “With our help they might be able to get through it. Or perhaps hibernate through the winter.”
“More interference,” said Chang.
“What’s done is done,” Kosoff said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We can’t undo it. The question is, where do we go from here?”
Silence. The men and women looked at each other, each one waiting for someone else to reply.
“And something else,” Kosoff added. “Something of far greater import.”
Quentin Abbott nodded vigorously. “What—or who—created this situation?”
“Exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
Hunching his shoulders slightly and leaning forward, as though preparing to push a great weight, Kosoff said, “This planetary system’s current condition is not natural. Something—” He nodded toward Abbott. “—or someone created the situation we see today.”
Abbott took up the theme. “We’ve done dozens of simulation runs regarding the orbits of this system’s planets. Alpha is a gas giant that’s losing its ocean and atmosphere at an alarming rate because it orbits so close to Mithra. Beta and Gamma are in these long, looping orbits that lock them into ice ages for most of their years.”
“And the cats transfer from Beta to Gamma when the two planets are closest,” Kosoff said. “That is not natural. Definitely not.”
“Something happened to this planetary system,” Abbott said. “Something catastrophic. Something that pushed Alpha almost into Mithra itself and locked Beta and Gamma into their extremely eccentric orbits. Probably knocked one or more other planets out of the system altogether.”
“Something?” Pedersen demanded. “What?”
“Emcee can show you the re-creation my people have put together,” Abbott said. “It boils down to this: roughly a hundred to two hundred thousand Earth years ago, this planetary system went through a cataclysmic event.”
“Perhaps so,” said Chang. “But that doesn’t mean the event wasn’t natural. Another star could have passed near enough to scramble the planets’ orbits.”
Kosoff called to Steiner. “Ursula, you’re a biologist. How do you account for having a predator arise on one planet and its prey on a different planet? How do you account for the predators flying to their prey in vehicles that are part incubators and part spacecraft?”
Steiner blinked at him.
“It can’t be natural,” Kosoff insisted. “Some intelligence designed all this and set it in motion.”
No one contradicted him.