“You’d better have a look at this,” said Olav Pedersen, the head of the planetology department.
Kosoff leaned back in his desk chair and stared at Pedersen’s lean, pale face. He looks as if all the blood’s been drained out of him, Kosoff thought. Pasty as a ghost. Even his hair is thin, so blond it’s almost white.
But Pedersen’s blue eyes were sharp as sapphires, glittering.
“What is it?” Kosoff asked the planetologist.
“Beta is waking up.”
The office wall screen’s display lit up to show a fat crescent that Kosoff immediately recognized as planet Beta. The camera view zoomed in past scudding gray clouds to show the barren rocky surface of the planet.
Something was stirring down there. Many somethings.
“What in the name of creation is that?”
Pedersen’s voice answered, “Native life.”
Kosoff saw a clutch of the tiny rodentlike animals standing on their hind legs, frozen still, staring at what appeared to be a sizeable rock—which was splitting apart like an eggshell.
A big, meaty paw pushed out of the shell, followed by a heavy head with a mouth full of fangs.
“Good lord!” gasped Kosoff.
The catlike creature cracked the rest of the shell open and stepped out languidly on six clawed legs. It glanced at the rodents, still standing less than ten meters away, then turned and stalked off in the other direction.
The data bar at the bottom of the screen showed that the cat was not quite three meters long, without including its hairless, twitching tail.
“Native…?” Kosoff gaped at the beast. “But we haven’t seen anything like this before.”
“Neither did the Predecessors, apparently, when they did their surveillance of the Mithra system. Beta was near its apogee then, locked in deep winter. Every living thing on the planet must have been hibernating.”
“And now they’re waking up,” said Kosoff, his eyes glued to the wall display. “Good lord, look at that brute!”
“The satellite cameras have picked up eight of them, scattered across the planet.” Pedersen’s voice was quivering with excitement. “Apparently they’ve been dormant for some time. Now that the planet’s warming, they’ve awakened.”
The camera followed the beast as it padded purposefully across the barren, rock-strewn ground.
Pedersen repeated, “We’ve observed eight of them, so far. Some of the larger formations that we thought were boulders are actually some sort of eggs that have been incubating these beasts. Now they’re hatching. Maybe they’re not full grown yet.”
Kosoff’s eyes went wider still as the camera view shifted to show what looked like another rock splitting apart, with one of the big cats clawing its way out of it.
“Eggs,” Kosoff muttered.
“The biologists will want to see this.”
“I’ll call Steiner.”
“We should put more satellites around Beta before we pull out for Alpha.”
“Yes,” Kosoff agreed absently, his attention focused on the felines.
Dr. Steiner’s reedy, nasal voice came from the desk’s phone console. “Yes, Professor?”
“Come to my office right away, Ursula. Drop whatever you’re doing. Beta’s waking up!”
* * *
For the first time since leaving Earth, Kosoff was caught up in the excitement of making a truly unexpected discovery.
The huge, ferocious-looking catlike animals were awakening on Beta after an incubation of nearly half a century. Staring at his office’s wall screen, he saw that the cats made Earthly tigers look puny. Only a dozen of them had been spotted so far by the satellite cameras, scattered across Beta’s barren, rocky surface. But they seemed to be purposefully stalking across the desolate land, as if each of them had a goal in mind.
Steiner stared too, open-mouthed, as she sat before Kosoff’s desk. The wall display was following one of the huge cats as it padded over the broken, stony ground.
“It’s hunting,” she said.
“Must be hungry,” said Pedersen.
Steiner nodded. “It’s been inside that egglike thing for nearly four decades, at least.”
“Hungry, all right,” Pedersen repeated.
Kosoff shook his head. “But they go right past batches of those rodents without blinking at them.”
“And the rodents don’t seem to be afraid of them.”
“I would be afraid,” Pedersen said with some fervor. “Look at those fangs.”
The desk phone announced, “Breaking orbit in six hours. Prepare for departure.”
Kosoff wondered how long the surveillance satellites he had just ordered to be put in place around Beta could maintain their orbits when Beta and Gamma made their close approach to one another. Whatever, he told himself. We’ll put up more of them once the two planets have parted.
But he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the display screen. Where is that damned beast going? he wondered. What’s it up to?
“‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,’” he recited in an awed whisper. “‘What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’”