Starborne

Someone told her, later in the day, that they were moving faster than light now.

Her awareness of Yvo

— It’s happened, she told her sister. Here we are, wherever that is.

And swiftly as ever came Yvo

Hesper is in his element. The year-captain has called a general meeting of the crew, and Hesper will lecture them on his newest findings and conclusions. The year-captain has resolved to make his move. He will declare that Hesper has identified a world that holds potential for settlement — several, as a matter of fact — and that they will immediately begin to direct their course toward the most promising of them with the intention of carrying out an exploratory landing.

Large as the Wotan is, and it is very large indeed as spaceships go, there is no chamber aboard the ship big enough to contain all fifty voyagers at the same time. The general meeting is held in the great central corridor on the uppermost deck, spilling outward from the gaming lounge. People sprawl, lean, cling to the rungs on the sides of the walls.

Hesper, standing before them with his arms folded cockily, flashes the brightest of grins, first-magnitude stuff, and says, “The galaxy is full of worlds. This is no secret. However, we ourselves have certain limitations of form that require us to find a world of appropriate mass, appropriate orbital distance from its sun, appropriate atmospheric mix, appropriate—”

“Get on with it,” Sieglinde calls. She is famous for her impatience, a brawny, heavy-breasted woman with close-cropped honey-colored hair and a brusque, incisive ma

Hesper’s brilliant grin vanishes instantly. The little man glowers at her.

“For you,” he says, “I have found just the right planet. It is something like Jupiter, but reallylarge, and it has a mean temperature of six thousand degrees Kelvin at its surface, beneath fifty thousand kilometers of corrosive gases. Will this be satisfactory? As for the rest of us—”

Sieglinde continues to mutter, but Hesper will not be turned from his path. Relentlessly he reminds everyone once again that the sort of world they need to find is the sort of world that they would be capable of living on. Hesper spells this tautological platitude out in terms of temperature, gravitational pull, atmospheric composition, solar luminosity, and all the obvious rest, and then he asks if there are any questions. Sieglinde says something uncomplimentary-sounding in German; Zena nudges her and tells her to hush; the others remain silent.

“Very well,” Hesper says. “Let me show you now what I have found.”

He touches switches and conjures up virtual images at the far end of the corridor, where the beams of a communicator node intersect.

Hesper tells them that what they see is a star and a solar system. Hesper’s star seems not to have a name, only an eight-digit catalog number. So evidently it hadn’t ever registered on the consciousnesses of those old Arab astronomers who had given Rigel and Mizar and Aldebaran and all those other stars such lovely poetic designations, somewhere back a thousand or two years ago. All it has is a number. But it has planets. Six of them.

“This is Planet A,” he a

“So what time do we land?” Paco calls out.

Unperturbed, Hesper continues blandly: “We note also the minute presence of methane, one part in 1.5 million. That is not much methane, but why is there any? Methane rapidly oxidizes into water and carbon dioxide. If this atmosphere were in equilibrium, all the methane would have been gone long ago. Therefore we must not have an equilibrium here, do you see? Something is generating new methane to replace that which is oxidized. Ongoing metabolic processes, perhaps? The presence of bacteria, or larger organisms? Life, anyway, of one sort or another. Every indication thus far points toward viability.”

“And if the place is already inhabited?” asks Heinz. “What if they don’t want to sell us any real estate?”

“We would not, of course, intrude on a planet that has intelligent life of its own. But that can readily be determined while we are still at a distance. The emission of modulated radio waves, or even the visual signs of occupation—”

“How far is this place from our present location?” Sylvia wants to know.

Hesper looks puzzled. He spreads the fingers of his precise little hands and glances uncomfortably toward the year-captain.

The year-captain says, “There’s no easy way of answering that. While we’re in nospace we don’t have spatial coordinates relating to anything but Earth.”

“In relation to Earth, then,” Sylvia says.

“About ninety-five light-years,” Hesper tells her.

There is murmuring in the corridor. “Ninety-five light-years” is a phrase that carries the weight of serious distance.

“We should be able to reach it,” says the year-captain, making a quick and probably slightly hazy estimate, “in about seven months.”

Hesper says, “The other prime prospect, Planet B, which is eighty-six light-years from Earth, has similar characteristics, although with perhaps keener indications of the presence of organic molecules.” A new virtual pattern springs into the air in the hallways, eleven pips of light clustered about their bright little star. He begins to speak once more of spectral lines, insolation levels, temperature gradients, probable size and gravitational pull, electromagnetic emissions, and all the other criteria they must consider.

Somebody cautiously asks if they have enough information to make a decision about a landing.

The year-captain says they do. Enough to allow him to recommend a reco