A World Out of Time

"They moved the Earth because the sun got too hot," Corbell speculated.

"What do you imagine? Did the State moor huge rocket motors at the North Pole and fuel them with Venus's atmosphere? The ocean would have flowed to cover the northern hemisphere! The Earth's surface would have ripped everywhere, exposing magma!"

"I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they had something besides rockets. But that was Mars you showed me, and that's Saturn, and that's Earth. There! Couldn't that be the coast of Brazil?"

"It does not match my memory." With evident reluctance Peerssa added, "If other evidence were not considered, that shoreline could be the edge of the Brazilian continental shelf, altered by the shifting of tectonic plates."

"The ocean must have dropped. Maybe some megatons of water vapor got left behind when they moved the Earth."

"The State could not have moved the Earth. There would have been no need, because Sol was not an incipient red giant."

"Computer! You can't go against your theories, can you? What if we were in the ergosphere of a black hole longer than we thought? We might have lost more than three million years. In tens of millions of years, could the sun be a red giant?"

"Nonsense. We would never have found Sol at all."

That was the last straw, because it was true. Corbell was an uncomfortably old man with a cold-sleep hangover. "All right," he said between his teeth, "you win the argument. Now, for purposes of discussion, we are going to assume that that planet is Earth. At long last we have come home to Earth. Now how do I get down?"

It developed that Peerssa had that all figured out.

II

Corbell's pressure suit looked clean and new. It was formfitting, with a bulging bulb of a helmet and a pointy-ended white spiral on the chest. He would not have been surprised to find it rotted with age. It had been waiting for nearly two hundred years, ship's time.

He went out the airlock with the suspicion that he was going to his death. He had never done this before... and in fact the suit held up better than he did. Panting, perspiring, with his pulse thundering irregularly in his ears, be maneuvered himself at the end of a tether and turned for a look at Don Juan.

The silver finish had dulled. Corbell winced at the sight of a gaping hole in one of the probes. Peerssa had never mentioned a meteor strike. It could as easily have hit the life-support system.

Four of the probes were missing.

The biological package probes were what made Don Juan a seeder ramship. Each of the probes held a spectrum of algae with which to seed the unbreathable reducing atmosphere of some nearby Earthlike world, to turn the atmosphere into breathable air and the world into a potential colony. Of course they had never been used for that purpose. Deprived in detail of his civil rights, Corbell had stolen the ship and lit out for the galactic core.

There had been ten probes mounted around Don Juan's waist. Now there were six. "I ran the onboard hydrogen tank nearly empty," Peerssa explained. "I had to use four of the thrust systems in the probes to make orbit around Earth. Afterward I put the probes in orbits as relay satellites. You will be able to call me from the surface, wherever you are."

"Good."

"How do you feel? Can you survive a re-entry?"

"Not yet. I'm out of shape. Give me a month."

"You'll have it. You'll have exercise too. We must make ready one of the probes for your descent."

"I'm going down in one of those?"

"They are designed to enter an atmosphere. Don Juan is not."

"I should have thought of that. I never did figure a safe way to get down. Aren't you coming down yourself?"

"Not unless you so order."

Small wonder if he sounded reluctant. It came to Corbell that Peerssa's body was the ship. He would be a total paraplegic if he survived re-entry. Corbell said, "Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves on his death. Can I do less? After I'm down, living or dead, magnanimously I free you from all orders previous or subsequent."

"Thank you, Corbell."

He had trained to work in a pressure suit, under orders from Pierce the checker. But he'd been suspended in a magnetic field, not in actual free-fall; and he had trained in a young body, long ago. The work was hard. On the second day he hurt everywhere. On the third he was back at work. He would stop only when Peerssa insisted.

"We won't try to build you a life-support system," Peerssa told him. "We'll put what you need in the capsule with you and fill the capsule with plastic foam. Your suit will be your life-support system."

But emptying the probe warhead involved moving large masses and manhandling the bulky cutting laser for hours at a time. The algae tanks and the machinery that served them had to be removed in inspection-hatch-sized pieces. Corbell dared not rip the hull. His life depended on its integrity.

He needed long rest periods. He spent them in the Womb Room, watching films of Don Juan's entry into what Peerssa now called (rightly or wrongly) the solar system.

For a computer, Peerssa had been starkly ingenious. Corbell would not have thought of using the package probes as thrusters. He would not have looked for Earth as a big new moon of what Peerssa now called Jupiter-and Peerssa nearly hadn't, either. Peerssa came that close to departing Sol with Corbell still in cold sleep, to search nearby systems for remnants of the State...

Corbell probably would have died en route.

Apparently the question of where they were no longer bothered Peerssa. It had only required Corbell's order to stop his worrying about it. But at the time, Corbell gathered, Peerssa was frantic. He had used fuel he couldn't spare to make close flybys past Saturn and Mercury.

Now Corbell looked down at the Earth and yearned. "All the mistakes I made, and still I got here. The mistakes all canceled. If I hadn't turned the receiver back on you couldn't have beamed your personality into the computer. I'd have wrecked the ship trying to run all the way at one gravity. If I'd been right about the galactic core I'd have died of old age, that far from home. It's like something led me back here."

"Your records call you an agnostic."

"Yeah. I'm whistling in the dark. I keep thinking I'll just barely get killed landing."

He was taking a long rest period in celebration. He had finally finished cleaning debris out of the probe warhead. With a meal in his hand-a layered sandwich baked like a cake-he watched the landscape roll below him. A dull red highlight gleamed on the nightside ocean, below Jupiter.

"Where do I want to land? Is there any sign of civilization down there?"

"There is evidence of the generation and use of power in three places." On the huge blue face of the planet a green arrow suddenly pointed at a green grid pattern. "Here, and on the other side of the world, and in Antarctica. My orbit does not cover Antarctica, but I can land you there."

"No, thanks. Isn't that just about California?" Thinking: Wait a minute, the west coast ought to bulge. And where's Baja California? From what seemed to be central Mexico the coast was a convex sweep all the way up to what must be Alaska.

"Most of what you called California and Baja California will be an island near the North Pole. I can land you there too."

"No. Wherever someone is generating power, that's where I want to land. There, where you put the grid pattern... which looks a little like a city, doesn't it? Right angles...

"There are many clustered buildings, yes, but no strong evidence of prepla

"If they're the ones who sent the messages, they probably won't kill me. I served their ancestral State." It might be Nevada, he thought; or Arizona. It was on the seacoast now.