In the single room he shared with his wife, Brad sat at the built-in desk and stared at the 3-D map. The image moved slowly, tracing a river as it weaved through forests and grassland.
“Mnnx said the city was located where two rivers met at a waterfall,” he murmured.
Emcee’s voice replied, “We’re coming to that point.”
Sizeable rivers were rare on Gamma, Brad had discovered. The surveillance satellites orbiting the planet had found only a handful.
“There,” said Emcee. “There is where the two rivers join.”
Pointing, Brad said, “And there’s the waterfall! Just below their juncture.”
“But no trace of a city,” Emcee said.
The area on both sides of the newly joined river was a strip of grassy plain. Farther back from the river’s edge a thick forest covered the ground.
“Ground-penetrating radar hasn’t detected anything?” Brad asked.
“Nothing,” Emcee replied. “And this is the only place on the planet where two rivers join, with a waterfall just after their juncture.”
Felicia burst into the room. “We found it! We found the control system for the eggs. It’s fantastic!”
Looking up, Brad saw that she was all smiles. Felicia practically danced across the little room and sat herself on Brad’s lap.
“It’s incredible!” she said, her voice brimming with excitement. “The whole system is microscopic, built right into the eggshell itself. The entire shell is laced with nanometer-sized control units!”
She kissed Brad soundly, then jumped to her feet again and tugged on his arm. “Come on, the whole bio team is celebrating over in the dining hall.”
Brad rose slowly, turned back to the holographic display, and instructed Emcee, “Scan the area again. Highest power with the ground-penetrating radar.” With a glance at Felicia’s happy face, he added, “I’ll be back in a couple of hours, I guess.”
Emcee’s image took form in the holotank. “Very well.” Brad thought of the line from A Thousand and One Nights: “Hearkening and obedience.”
* * *
Even the normally cool Dr. Steiner was beaming happily as she sat at the head of a table filled with nearly a dozen of the people of her biology team. They had pushed two ordinary tables together and were celebrating with fruit juices from the dining hall’s galley. Brad thought that perhaps the juice glasses had been reinforced with something stronger, but he quickly realized that the biologists didn’t need alcohol; they were high on their discovery.
As he and Felicia pulled up a pair of chairs from one of the unoccupied tables, Brad saw that Professor Kosoff’s image filled the dining hall’s display screen, hovering above all the others, twice as large as life, smiling benignly through his beard.
“Nanomachines built into the shell of the vehicles,” Kosoff was saying. “Incredible.”
“But true,” said Steiner. Her blond hair, usually tied into a prim coil, hung loosely past her shoulders. “We only have a fragment of the shell, of course, but it’s indisputable: the shell structure is laced with nanometer-sized electronic units.”
Beaming like a proud father, Kosoff said, “The engineering staff up here is trying to understand how the system works.”
Steiner stiffened slightly. “I doubt that we have a large enough sample to provide enough evidence for that.”
Kosoff waved a hand in the air. “You know engineers. They’ll chew on what you’ve provided them like dogs gnawing on a bone.”
“Maybe we can find more fragments of the shells,” Felicia said, “before they disintegrate entirely.”
Kosoff nodded; Steiner looked doubtful.
The celebration lasted through the normal dinner hour and well into the night. Littlejohn and several of the anthropologists joined the festivities, as well as a handful of the planetologists. Brad tried to get into the happy mood of it all, but the fact that Emcee couldn’t find any trace of a city kept nagging at him.
It’s got to be there, he kept telling himself. If it’s not, then everything that Mnnx and his people believe is nothing but a fairy tale.
The rest of the ground crew trickled in and joined the festivities. Laughter and increasingly raucous jokes filled the dining hall. Brad sat through it all, feeling like an outsider, but happy for Felicia. This is her night, he told himself, time and again.
At last the party started to break up, and he and Felicia said good night to Steiner and the others. It was deep night outside; the camp was lit only by low-intensity lamps on the ground outside each building. They could see the stars crowding the black sky above.
“Which one is the Sun?” Felicia asked, her voice suddenly wistful.
Brad shook his head. “Too dim to make out from here.”
“It’s far away.”
“Two hundred and some light-years,” said Brad.
“Far away,” she repeated.
Unbidden, the lines from an old poem popped into Brad’s consciousness. He recited:
Ah love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Felicia stared at him. “Ignorant armies. That’s what we are, aren’t we?”
“Our job is to beat back the ignorance,” said Brad. “To learn. To understand.”
“I suppose so.”
“It is,” he said with absolute certainty.
But Felicia whispered again, “We’re a long way from home, aren’t we?”
Brad slid his arms around her. “Wherever you are is home, Fil.”
She nestled her head against his shoulder. “That’s very sweet of you.”
Arms wrapped around each other, they headed for their quarters. Neither of them noticed a meteor streak across the sky and disappear in an eyeblink.