6. Planetfall

Even before he opened his eyes, Loren knew exactly where he was, and he found this quite surprising. After sleeping for two hundred years, some confusion would have been understandable, but it seemed only yesterday that he had made his last entry in the ship’s log. And as far as he could remember, he had not had a single dream. He was thankful for that.

Still keeping his eyes closed, he concentrated one at a time on all his other sense channels. He could hear a soft murmur of voices, quietly reassuring. There was the familiar sighing of the air exchangers, and he could feel a barely perceptible current, wafting pleasant antiseptic smells across his face.

The one sensation he did not feel was that of weight. He lifted his right arm effortlessly: it remained floating in midair, awaiting his next order.

“Hello, Mister Lorenson,” a cheerfully bullying voice said. “So you’ve condescended to join us again. How do you feel?”

Loren finally opened his eyes and tried to focus them on the blurred figure floating beside his bed.

“Hello… doctor. I’m fine. And hungry.”

“That’s always a good sign. You can get dressed — don’t move too quickly for a while. And you can decide later if you want to keep that beard.”

Loren directed his still-floating hand towards his chin; he was surprised at the amount of stubble he found there. Like the majority of men, he had never taken the option of permanent eradication — whole volumes of psychology had been written on that subject. Perhaps it was time to think about doing so; amusing how such trivia cluttered up the mind, even at a moment like this.

“We’ve arrived safely?”

“Of course — otherwise you’d still be asleep. Everything’s gone according to plan. The ship started to wake us a month ago — now we’re in orbit above Thalassa. The maintenance crews have checked all the systems; now it’s your turn to do some work. And we have a little surprise for you.”

“A pleasant one, I hope.”

“So do we. Captain Bey has a briefing two hours from now, in Main Assembly. If you don’t want to move yet, you can watch from here.”

“I’ll come to assembly — I’d like to meet everyone. But can I have breakfast first? It’s been a long time

Captain Sirdar Bey looked tired but happy as he welcomed the fifteen men and women who had just been revived, and introduced them to the thirty who formed the current A and B crews. According to ship’s regulations, C crew was supposed to be sleeping — but several figures were lurking at the back of the Assembly room, pretending not to be there.

“I’m happy you’ve joined us,” he told the newcomers. “It’s good to see some fresh faces around here. And it’s better still to see a planet and to know that our ship’s carried out the first two hundred years of the mission plan without any serious anomalies. Here’s Thalassa, right on schedule.”

Everyone turned towards the visual display covering most of one wall. Much of it was devoted to data and state-of-ship information, but the largest section might have been a window looking out into space. It was completely filled by a stunningly beautiful image of a blue-white globe, almost fully illuminated. Probably everyone in the room had noticed the heart-breaking similarity to the Earth as seen from high above the Pacific — almost all water, with only a few isolated landmasses.

And there was land here — a compact grouping of three islands, partly hidden by a veil of cloud. Loren thought of Hawaii, which he had never seen and which no longer existed. But there was one fundamental difference between the two planets. The other hemisphere of Earth was mostly land; the other hemisphere of Thalassa was entirely ocean.

“There it is,” the captain said proudly. “Just as the mission planners predicted. But there’s one detail they didn’t expect, which will certainly affect our operations.

“You’ll recall that Thalassa was seeded by a Mark 3A fifty-thousand unit module which left Earth in 2751 and arrived in 3109. Everything went well, and the first transmissions were received a hundred and sixty years later. They continued intermittently for almost two centuries, then suddenly stopped, after a brief message reporting a major volcanic eruption. Nothing more was ever heard, and it was assumed that our colony on Thalassa had been destroyed — or at any rate reduced to barbarism as seems to have happened in several other cases.

“For the benefit of the newcomers, let me repeat what we’ve found. Naturally, we listened out on all frequencies when we entered the system. Nothing — not even power-system leakage radiation.

“When we got closer, we realized that didn’t prove a thing. Thalassa has a very dense ionosphere. There might be a lot of medium— and short-wave chatter going on beneath it, and nobody outside would ever know. Microwaves would go through, of course, but maybe they don’t need them, or we haven’t been lucky enough to intercept a beam.

“Anyway, there’s a well-developed civilization down there. We saw the lights of their cities — towns, at least — as soon as we had a good view of the nightside. There are plenty of small industries, a little coastal traffic — no large ships — and we’ve even spotted a couple of aircraft moving at all of five hundred klicks, which will get them anywhere in fifteen minutes.

“Obviously, they don’t need much air transport in such a compact community, and they have a good system of roads. But we’ve still not been able to detect any communications. And no satellites, either — not even meteorological ones, which you’d think they’d need… though perhaps not, as their ships probably never get out of sight of land. There’s simply no other land to go to, of course.

“So there we are. It’s an interesting situation — and a very pleasant surprise. At least, I hope it will be. Now, any questions? Yes, Mister Lorenson?”

“Have we tried to contact them, sir?”

“Not yet; we thought it inadvisable until we know the exact level of their culture. Whatever we do, it may be a considerable shock.”

“Do they know we’re here?”

“Probably not.”

“But surely — our drive — they must have seen that!”

It was a reasonable question, since a quantum ramjet at full power was one of the most dramatic spectacles ever contrived by man. It was as brilliant as an atomic bomb, and it lasted much longer — months instead of milliseconds.

“Possibly, but I doubt it. We were on the other side of the sun when we did most of our braking. They wouldn’t have seen us in its glare.”

Then someone asked the question that everybody had been thinking.

“Captain, how will this affect our mission?”

Sirdar Bey looked thoughtfully at the speaker.

“At this stage, it’s still quite impossible to say. A few hundred thousand other humans — or whatever the population is — could make things a lot easier for us. Or at least much more pleasant. On the other hand, if they don’t like us — ”

He gave an expressive shrug.

“I’ve just remembered a piece of advice that an old explorer gave to one of his colleagues. If you assume that the natives are friendly, they usually are. And vice versa. “So until they prove otherwise, we’ll assume that they’re friendly. And if they’re not…”

The Captain’s expression hardened, and his voice became that of a commander who had just brought a great ship across fifty light-years of space.

“I’ve never claimed that might is right, but it’s always very comforting to have it.”