Brad saw Professor Kosoff a few paces ahead of him, striding purposefully along the corridor, a sturdy, compact bear of a man, marching as if he were leading a parade.
He caught up with the staff’s director in two long-legged strides.
“Good morning, sir,” said Brad.
Kosoff seemed almost startled. He looked up at Brad, frowning slightly. Then, “Ahh, MacDaniels, isn’t it? Anthropology.”
Implanted communicator, Brad figured. Instant link with the ship’s master computer.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “I’ve been assigned to sit in on the planetology team’s meeting this morning.”
Kosoff broke into a slightly malicious grin. “Studying the tribe in its native habitat, eh?”
“That’s what anthropologists do, sir.”
“Fine. Fine,” Kosoff said airily. “I’ve decided to attend their meeting myself.”
For two months the scientific staff had been studying the planet and its inhabitants—remotely. Surveillance satellites had been established in orbit around both Mithra Alpha and Gamma. The satellites were loaded with sensors that measured the alien worlds’ atmospheres, Alpha’s all-encompassing ocean, Gamma’s globe-spanning forests, and particularly the primitive villages that dotted Gamma’s landscape.
The life forms in the planet-wide ocean of Mithra Alpha showed no obvious signs of intelligence, although they seemed to communicate among themselves, like the whales of Earth. Odysseus’s scientists concentrated their attention on Mithra Gamma.
Only the leaders of the planetology team were present for this meeting, yet there were more than two dozen men and women filing into the conference room. Brad watched them from the door as they took their seats at the long, polished conference table. They assembled themselves in what seemed like a random, unhierarchical pattern, except for the department chief, who sat himself at the head of the table, of course.
What are the relationships among these people? Brad asked himself. What’s their pecking order?
He saw that Kosoff casually pulled out a chair for himself halfway down the table, next to an attractive blonde. But all eyes shifted from the department head to Kosoff as he sat down.
There was one nonhuman member of the conference: the ship’s master computer. It contained all the data that had been amassed so far. The holographic displays along the walls of the room all bore the same computer-generated human face, bland-looking and inoffensive. It had been drawn by the ship’s psychologists to be as attractive as possible to the multiracial staff: golden tawny skin, slightly almond cast to the eyes, high cheekbones, downy hair of sandy brown. And smiling, always smiling, so that the humans it worked with and for would find it friendly no matter what it reported.
Brad almost smiled back at it as he took a chair near the foot of the table.
The chairman—Dr. Olav Pedersen, a dour-looking lean and pale Scandinavian—called the meeting to order. Then he said, in his slightly nasal voice:
“The master computer has analyzed the orbital data we have obtained so far, and has some very interesting—even disturbing—conclusions to share with us.”
Without preamble, the synthesized face of the master computer said flatly, “This planetary system is unstable.”
One of the women halfway down the table challenged, “How could an intelligent species arise on a planet that has an unstable orbit? It takes billions of years for intelligence to develop.” Brad noticed that she looked at Kosoff as she spoke.
The master computer’s avatar replied blandly, “The system was not always unstable. Some incident altered the orbits of the planets Beta and Gamma into unstable elliptical paths and pushed Mithra Alpha into its current star-hugging orbit. Very likely there were other planets in the system that were either ejected into interstellar space by the incident, or perhaps pushed into the star itself.”
“An incident, you say,” Kosoff said to the face on the wall screen. “How did it happen? And when?”
The computer’s avatar replied, “Insufficient data. It is clear that something has disrupted the planets’ orbits, probably slightly more than a hundred thousand Earth years ago. But what that something was is unknown at this time.”
One of the younger men asked, “Will the system break up, Emcee?”
“Emcee?” Kosoff asked.
Looking slightly embarrassed, the young man said, “Master Computer: Emcee. It sort of humanizes it, a little.”
Kosoff smiled at him. “Yes, I suppose it does.”
Brad nodded to himself and thought, He’s trying to go a step farther. The psychologists drew a human face for the computer; he’s given it a name. Makes it easier to work with the machine, apparently.
Fodder for his notes and, eventually, the report he would write.
Emcee resumed, “Planet Gamma is now approaching its perihelion—”
“The closest it gets to its star,” Kosoff interjected.
Unperturbed, Emcee continued, “Once it passes its perihelion it will begin its long swing away from Mithra. Conditions on the planet’s surface will become colder, even frigid.”
“Will the aliens be able to survive their winter?” the department chief asked.
“They apparently have, in the past.”
But Kosoff said, “We’d better get our work done quickly, before conditions on the planet’s surface become too difficult for us.”
“That would be a wise course to take,” said the master computer.
Dr. Pedersen asked, “Is it really necessary to make contact with the natives? Why can’t we plant the energy screen devices in uninhabited locations around the planet and leave the aliens undisturbed?”
Kosoff shook his head vigorously. “To come two hundred light-years to a planet inhabited by intelligent aliens and not make contact with them? Unthinkable!”
A woman with thickly curled brick-red hair, sitting across the table from Kosoff, objected, “But the shock of contact could harm them. That’s what the psych team believes.”
“That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Kosoff replied, his eyes fixed on her. “We are not going to throw away this opportunity.”
A man sitting at Pedersen’s right said, “Besides, suppose we plant the energy screen generators and leave without contacting them. And they discover the equipment. And try to tinker with it. They could blow up half a continent, for god’s sake.”
“Not very likely,” said the man next to him.
“But possible.”
“We could put the generators in orbit around the planet, instead of on its surface.”
“That’s possible,” Pedersen agreed.
Kosoff said, “Anthropologists have built up protocols about contacting isolated tribes on Earth, like the hunter-gatherers discovered back in the twentieth century.”
“That was nearly two hundred years before we left Earth,” Pedersen objected.
“Yes, but the protocols make sense, even today,” Kosoff responded. “They found that, in some cases, contact is less harmful to a primitive society than leaving those people isolated.”
“In any event,” the redhead said, “contact is a very delicate matter.”
“Agreed,” said Kosoff. “But we are going to make contact.”