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  “Bullshit,” Brandon snapped. “They picked us because we’re expendable. Look at us, Jordan. Aside from you, none of us are leaders in our fields. We’re all expendables. No family ties. Nobody’s going to miss us, whether we come back or not. That’s why they picked us. That’s why we’ve been given this honor.”

  Before Jordan could reply, Brandon added, “And now they’ve hung us out to dry. No backup mission. The damned politicians got their glory by sending us out here, they don’t give a damn if we get back or not.”

  “You really feel that way?”

  “Yes. Don’t you?”

  Miriam’s death flashed in Jordan’s memory once more. I killed her, he thought all over again. If I hadn’t insisted on that doomed mission to Kashmir she’d still be alive.

  “No,” he lied. “I really do feel it’s an honor to be picked for this mission. Especially for a non-scientist, a mere administrator.”

  For the first time, Brandon smiled. “Mere administrator,” he said. “One of the world’s most distinguished diplomats. And now head of this mission. They should have given you a whip and a chair. You’re going to need them.”

  Jordan smiled. “Riding herd on eleven scientists and engineers shouldn’t be that difficult, really.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I hope not.”

  Gazing straight into Jordan’s eyes, Brandon asked, “Tell me the truth now, why did you agree to come on this mission?” Before Jordan could think of a reply, Brandon added, “And don’t tell me about the honor. You’ve already had honors enough for any man.”

  “It will look very impressive on my résumé.”

  “Your résumé’s already damned impressive,” Brandon said. “Come on now, the truth.”

  To get away from the memories, Jordan knew. To get as far away from the Kashmir and Miriam’s death as humanly possible.

  “Well?” Brandon persisted.

  Jordan shrugged. “The truth? Why, I came along to be with my baby brother. Somebody’s got to keep you out of trouble.”

  The sour expression on Brandon’s face told Jordan what his brother thought of that excuse.

  “You’re a diplomat,” Brandon said, “a troubleshooter, an administrator—”

  “You mean a bureaucrat,” said Jordan.

  “What you accomplished in South America wasn’t bureaucracy. You stopped a bloody war.”

  Jordan dipped his chin in acknowledgment.

  “And China,” Brandon went on. “And the Sahel drought.”

  Don’t mention Kashmir, Jordan begged silently. Not India and the Kashmir.

  “I just don’t see what made you agree to come on this operation.”

  Forcing a smile, he said to his brother, “Adventure. Romance and adventure.”

  “Bull.”

  “And family ties,” Jordan added.

  “More bull.”

  Getting away from the memories, Jordan added silently. Getting as far away from anything connected with Miriam as I can. Away from the emptiness and the remorse. Away from the guilt. He ran a hand through his hair, wondering what he could tell his brother.

  He decided to change the subject, instead. Jordan pointed to the wall screen. “Look, there’s the terminator coming up. We’re moving into the night side.”

  Darkness swallowed the view. In a moment, though, false-color infrared imagery filled the screen. Still, there was nothing much to see, only endless forests.

  But then a pinpoint glow of light appeared in the midst of the darkness.

  A GLOW OF LIGHT

  “What the hell is that?” Brandon yelped.

  “A light,” said Jordan, staring at the screen. “A light in the midst of all that darkness.”

  “That shouldn’t be there,” Brandon said.

  “Maybe it’s a fire,” said Jordan.

  “It’s not flickering.”

  “Volcano?”

  Brandon shook his head. “Too small. Too steady.”

  Without another word they both scrambled toward the ship’s command center, the bridge, where all the system controls were.

  “I’d better call the others,” Jordan said as they hurried along the narrow passageway between the wardroom and the command center.

  The command system’s screens showed that the ship’s systems were humming along without human intervention or guidance. Four of the screens displayed the planet below them.

  The natural-light display showed the pinpoint of light on the planet’s dark side, sliding off toward the horizon now. The other screens showed an infrared view, atmospheric conditions, gravitation measurements.

  Jordan slipped quite naturally into the command chair and pressed the communications stud. “Intercom,” he spoke firmly, “connect me to all team members.”

  In an instant the communications console showed he was connected.

  “This is Jordan. The sensors show a spot of light down on the planet’s night side. We’re trying to determine what’s causing it. I’d like the planetary field team and the sensor engineer to come to the bridge, please.”

  They all came, every one of the group, jamming the compartment, making it stuffy with their body heat.

  “What on Earth could it be?” Meek asked, his eyes fixed on the light.

  “We’re not on Earth,” someone snapped.

  Thornberry replied, “On Earth it might be a village. Or maybe a roadside fast-food joint.”

  “One light,” murmured Patricia Wanamaker, Thornberry’s aide, the sensor engineer. Of the twelve men and women in the group, she was the only one not from Earth: she had been born in a space habitat orbiting the planet Saturn.

  Trish was almost Jordan’s height, heavyset, with a strong jaw set in a squarish, chunky face. Her ash blond hair was chopped mannishly short. Staring at the glow intently, she plumped herself down at one of the consoles.

  “We’d better put up a surveillance satellite to cover the area,” Jordan suggested.

  Wanamaker nodded without taking her eyes from her console’s screens. “I’ll deploy one of the minisats. Synchronous orbit, so it can hover over the area.”

  “Good,” said Jordan.

  Geoff Hazzard, standing beside Jordan, said, “I’d better stay here for a while, keep an eye on things.”

  Jordan caught his meaning. “Of course,” he said, getting up from the command chair. “I didn’t mean to usurp your seat.”

  Hazzard smiled, almost embarrassed. “It’s not my seat, Jordan. Not particularly.”

  Still, he settled himself quite naturally into the command chair, his long slim legs stretched out.

  Sitting at her console, Wanamaker clipped a communicator over her left ear and began speaking into it in a whisper. The consoles all had voice recognition circuitry, but with six of them jammed in side by side, all the team members had been trained to keep their voices low, so that their commands would not be accidentally picked up by a neighboring console. Even so, while she murmured into the communicator, her stubby fingers twitched involuntarily, as if she were using a keyboard.

  At last she looked up and announced, “Satellite launched. It’ll take eighty-six minutes for the bird to attain synchronous orbit.”

  Jordan looked around at the team. “Any other suggestions? Anything more we should be doing?”

  “Get a spectrum of that light as soon as you can,” said Brandon.

  “Put together a team to go down there and look firsthand,” said Silvio de Falla. He was Brandon’s geologist, short, solidly built, usually easygoing. But now he looked intense, eager as a greyhound who had just spotted a rabbit.

  “Right away,” Brandon agreed.

  “Now wait,” cautioned Meek. “We ought to scout the terrain first, see what we’d be up against.”

  “See what kind of topography that area has.”

  “Check for gravitational anomalies.”

  “I agree,” said Jordan. “I’d like to know what the area is like before we go barging into it.”

&n
bsp; “But what if the light disappears before we get there?” Brandon countered.

  Jordan spread his hands. “Now listen. We’ve just arrived here. It’s night down where the light is shining. We haven’t even begun to map the surface—”

  “The robotic orbiters have mapped the whole planet,” de Falla pointed out.

  “But none of the orbiters detected that light,” said Jordan.

  “Because it wasn’t there, most likely,” Brandon said.

  “Well, it’s there now, and—”

  “For how long?” Brandon insisted.

  “We have no control over that,” said Jordan, patiently. “But we do have control over our own safety. I don’t want us—any of us—to go blundering into the unknown.”

  “For god’s sake, Jordy, that’s why we’re here—to delve into the unknown!”

  “And that’s what I intend to do, Bran,” Jordan said. “But it won’t hurt to be a little cautious about it.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Hazzard added, “mission protocol calls for a robotic reconnaissance of any area we intend to send humans into.”

  Brandon’s expression was somewhere between hurt and sulky, but he said nothing more.

  “I think caution is a wise policy,” said Meek. “We’re on our own here. If anything goes wrong, we’ll get no help from anyone else.”

  From her console, Trish Wanamaker said, “We could at least send a robot down there.”

  ANALYSIS

  “Good thinking,” said Jordan. Turning to Thornberry, he asked, “Can you arrange that, Mitch?”

  With a happy grin, Thornberry replied, “By god, I’ll send two rovers. There’s safety in redundancy.” And he pushed through the crowded compartment to one of the consoles.

  “Can anyone think of anything else?” Jordan asked. “Something we should be doing?”

  “I still have to examine more than half of you,” said Yamaguchi. “One at a time.”

  “After the exams are finished we should have dinner,” said Meek. “We need to get on a regular schedule sooner or later. I suggest sooner.”

  Jordan chuckled. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Still,” glancing at the display screens, “it’s been an exciting first few hours.”

  “With more to come,” Brandon added.

  Most of the team went back to their individual quarters, although Hazzard, Wanamaker, and Thornberry stayed at the command center. Paul Longyear, the lead biologist, headed for the infirmary with Yamaguchi. Jordan started back toward the wardroom with Brandon, Meek, and Elyse Rudaki.

  “A spot of light,” Jordan mused as he sat at one of the tables, facing the wall screen. The light was clearly discernable against the darkness of the planet’s night side. “What could it be?”

  “There aren’t any other lights anywhere on the planet,” said Brandon, sitting beside him.

  “None that we have seen,” said Elyse, who brought a mug of coffee from the dispenser and sat on Brandon’s other side.

  From the dispensing machines, Meek said, “Whatever it is, I suppose it’s some natural phenomenon. A lava puddle, perhaps.”

  “Do you think that’s likely?” Jordan asked.

  “We don’t know what’s likely and what’s not, not yet,” said Meek, as he carried a tray bearing a teapot, a cup, and a plate of cookies to the table. Carefully arranging them on the table, he sat down and added, “This is a new world, after all. It might look superficially like Earth, but we shouldn’t expect it be precisely like our planet.”

  “I suppose not,” Jordan agreed.

  Elyse shook her head. “Everything about this planet is strange, unexpected.”

  Brandon said, “Of course.”

  “How can it be here? How can it exist and bear life?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out,” said Meek.

  “But it shouldn’t be here at all,” Elyse continued. “Not with an atmosphere and oceans. They should have been boiled away when the Pup went through its nova phase.”

  “The Pup,” Meek groused. “Astronomer’s humor.”

  With a glance at Elyse, Brandon countered, “Sirius has been known as the Dog Star since ancient times.”

  “In the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog,” said Meek. “I’m not totally ignorant.”

  Undeterred, Brandon went on, “So when Sirius B was discovered, a dwarf star accompanying the Dog Star, naturally it was called the Pup.”

  “Naturally,” said Meek, scornfully.

  “The point is,” Elyse said, totally intent, “when the Pup exploded it should have scoured that planet clean.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “Perhaps it did,” Jordan said, “but the planet has had enough time to regenerate its biosphere.”

  “That would take billions of years,” Elyse countered. “Sirius itself can’t be more than five hundred million years old, and its companion must have been formed at the same time. The Pup couldn’t have gone nova more than a few tens of millions of years ago.”

  “You’re certain of that?” Meek challenged.

  “Within a factor of ten or so,” said Elyse.

  “That’s a pretty big margin of error,” Meek sniffed.

  “Not bad for an astrophysicist,” said Jordan, smiling at her.

  “Even so,” Elyse insisted, “the planet hasn’t had time to recover from the Pup’s nova explosions. It’s impossible.”

  “But there it is,” Meek said, jabbing a finger toward the wall-screen display. “You can’t deny that it exists.”

  “But how can it be?”

  Mildly, Jordan replied, “That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she murmured. “Of course.”

  “Another thing,” Brandon said.

  Jordan groaned inwardly. Bran won’t let the argument stop. Is he trying to impress Elyse or just trying to top Meek?

  “Sirius C is the only planet in the system,” Brandon pointed out. “There’s nothing else. No other planets, not even asteroids or comets. The Sirius system is totally clean, except for this one planet.”

  “A planet very much like Earth,” added Meek.

  Elyse said, “Between Sirius’s gravitational pull and the Pup’s, all the minor bodies must have been swept away.” Then she added, “Perhaps.”

  “Do you really think so?” Jordan asked.

  Elyse smiled a little. “No, not really. It’s the only explanation I could think of.”

  “The system’s totally clean, except for that one Earth-sized planet,” Brandon murmured.

  “It is very strange,” said Elyse.

  “Scary, almost,” said Brandon.

  The four of them fell silent, each wrapped in their own apprehensions. Inexplicably, Jordan flashed back to the hell of Kashmir and Miriam wasting away from the man-made toxins of the biowar.

  With a force of will he raised his eyes to the display screen and said, “Well, strange or scary or whatever, we’re here to find out what this planet is all about, and by heaven that’s what we’re going to do.”

  As if on cue, Trish Wanamaker’s voice came through the speaker set into the overhead. “The minisat will reach synchronous orbit in fifteen minutes.”

  With heartiness he did not truly feel, Jordan said to his companions, “Let’s get back to the command center and see what the surveillance satellite has to show us.”

  “But I haven’t even started my tea!” Meek bleated.

  * * *

  With Meek grumbling about his tea, the four of them trooped back to the command center. The ship was over the daylit side of the planet once again.

  But one of the screens showed what the surveillance satellite was seeing: the darkness of the night side, broken by that single unblinking point of light.

  Trish Wanamaker turned slightly in her console chair as they filed into the command center. “Starting a spectroscopic analysis of the light,” she said, over her shoulder.

  “Good,” said Jordan, standing beside Hazzard,
who was still slouched nonchalantly in the command chair.

  Brandon and Elyse stood close to each other; Meek remained by the hatch, a skinny scarecrow with narrowed, searching eyes. Thornberry was nowhere in sight.

  “Here’s the spectrum,” Wanamaker said, tapping at the console’s touchscreen.

  One of the smaller display screens on the console showed a graph with a sharply peaked curve rising steeply against the grayish background.

  “That can’t be right,” Hazzard muttered.

  “Put it on your main screen,” Brandon told Wanamaker.

  She whispered into her microphone, and the single, sharp-peaked curve appeared on the console’s central screen, like a steep mountain rising out of a jagged plain.

  “That’s the spectrum of the light down on the nightside?” Elyse asked, her voice hushed, awed.

  Wanamaker nodded once.

  “Jesus Christ,” Brandon said, also amazed. “It’s a laser beam!”

  PREPARATION

  “That’s a laser shining down there?” Jordan asked, unbelieving.

  “A single wavelength,” Wanamaker said, sounding just as stunned as Jordan felt.

  “Not a single wavelength,” Brandon corrected.

  “A damned narrow set of wavelengths,” Wanamaker admitted. “But they’re bunched together. That’s the signature of a laser beam, nothing else.”

  Jordan couldn’t take his eyes off the display screen. The sharp peak twinkled, glittered against the background.

  “Lasers occur in nature, don’t they?” he asked.

  “In interstellar nebulae,” said Elyse. “Not in the middle of a forest.”

  Hazzard said, “I remember seeing a paper about a natural laser in a planetary atmosphere.”

  “Speculation,” Wanamaker said. “Never been proven. Or observed, for that matter.”

  “It’s artificial,” Brandon said tightly, no doubt in him. “Man-made.”

  “Not man-made,” Meek corrected.

  “Better get Thornberry back here,” said Jordan.

  Once Thornberry entered the command center he gaped at the display and immediately started asking Wanamaker how much the minisat could tell them about the terrain in the vicinity of the light.