Starborne

So is it done, step by step. And it comes to pass that the maneuver is successful.

It seems at first as if nothing has happened. There had been no perceptible sensation when they originally shunted into nospace, and there is none coming out, either. No sense of being turned inside-out (or outside-in), no banshee wails in the corridors, no flashing of gaudy colors up and down the visual spectrum and perhaps a little way beyond.

Indeed, there is no indication whatever that anything has changed aboard the Wotan. Except that — suddenly, astoundingly, miraculously — the throbbing gray nothingness of interlacing energy fields which was all that any of them had had to look at for the past year is gone from the viewplate, and the voyagers find themselves staring at jet-black sky, a dazzling golden sun not very much different from the one under which they had been born, and a bright scattering of planets. One, two, three, four, five, six planets, so it seems.

That is a stu

The year-captain is on the phone to Zed Hesper, who remains holed up in his sca

This is the place, Hesper opines. They have accurately navigated the murky seas of nospace — Paco must be congratulated — and are sitting right in the middle of the solar system that contains his Planet A. Planet A itself is the fourth of the six worlds of this G2 sun, Hesper reminds him.

But it is not so easy to tell, at least not merely by glancing into the viewplate, which of the six planets is the fourth from its primary. If the Wotan ’s position in relation to this solar system were optimally inclined to the plane of its ecliptic at a nice ninety-degree angle, one could perhaps casually line the planets up in their actual order of distance from the sun just by peering at the screen. But the Wotan is not so conveniently positioned. At the place where they have emerged from nospace the voyagers have a skimming, edge-on, rim-shot kind of view of this solar system. And each of the six worlds is chugging along in its own orbit, naturally, some of them at perihelion at the moment and others at aphelion, and from the point of view of the Wotan, confronting the whole system on the skew as it is, they are strewn randomly around the sky.

Hesper knows which of the six is Planet A, though. Hesper knows all ma

It looks like a world.

It looks likethe world. The world of their dreams; their home away from home; the New Earth that they have crossed this immense gulf to find.

All of Hesper’s data-analogies and equivalencies have turned out to be smack-on-the-nose accurate. It is a miracle, the information that the sharp-nosed little man has managed to conjure out of the scrambled nospace numbers with which he works. Planet A seems to be exactly what he said it would be, an Earth-size world, more or less, with what appear to be blue oceans and patches of green vegetation and brown soil. There is a sprawling tentacular ice cap at the northern pole and a smaller, more compact cap at the southern one. There seem to be thin clouds scudding through what seems to be an atmosphere.

“Break out the champagne!” Paco yells. “We’re home!”

But there is no champagne, the supply that they brought from Earth having been exhausted the night of the six-month a

Still, all the early signs are promising. And the year-captain is neither surprised nor greatly displeased by Paco’s boisterousness. Boisterousness is one of Paco’s specialties. Besides, they have at least managed successfully to find their way to this place. That calk for a little jubilation, whether or not the planet turns out to be one they can use.

Julia has some more work to do now: braking the starship in such a way that it will glide down into orbit around Planet A. Because nospace travel takes place outside the classical Newtonian conceptual framework of the laws of motion, the “acceleration” that the stardrive imparted to the Wotan during its journey and the “velocity” that the ship thereby attained bear no relation to the starship’s movements now that it has departed from nospace. It is traveling, in fact, at the same speed it had been making at the instant it shunted from realspace to nospace in its departure from Earth. Since it had been positioned at that time in orbit not far above the surface of Earth, it is still moving now at its former orbital velocity. The starship is essentially still in orbit around Earth. But Earth is no longer nearby.

So Julia must make the necessary adjustments. The Wotan is not equipped for extended travel through realspace, but the braking motor with which the starship is equipped will be sufficient for a maneuver of this sort. It is a simple operation; Julia copes with it with ease.

Meanwhile Marcus and I

But Hesper’s figures continue to be right on the mark. The gravity is reasonable, even alluring: .093 Earth-norm. A handy nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, a little shorter on oxygen and heavier on nitrogen than might be ideal, but probably breathable. Traces of carbon dioxide, argon, neon, helium, none of these deployed in perfect Earthlike proportions but basically close enough to be okay. No sign of free atmospheric hydrogen, which would be a bad thing, indicating disagreeably low temperatures. Definite and heartening presence of water vapor in the air, not a lot, but enough. A dry place, mostly, this planet, but dry like Arizona, not dry like Mars. And there is just a touch of methane, too, precisely as Hesper had predicted — indicating a strong likelihood that the processes of life are going on down there. Not a certainty — the methane could be bubbling up out of subterranean vents, perhaps — but nevertheless there’s a decent probability that living things are growing and eating and digesting and farting, maybe, and dying and decaying, all of which are methane-producing processes, on the cheerful turf of Planet A.

I