ANALYSIS

“Good thinking,” said Jordan. Turning to Thornberry, he asked, “Can you arrange that, Mitch?”

With a happy grin, Thornberry replied, “By god, I’ll send two rovers. There’s safety in redundancy.” And he pushed through the crowded compartment to one of the consoles.

“Can anyone think of anything else?” Jordan asked. “Something we should be doing?”

“I still have to examine more than half of you,” said Yamaguchi. “One at a time.”

“After the exams are finished we should have dinner,” said Meek. “We need to get on a regular schedule sooner or later. I suggest sooner.”

Jordan chuckled. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Still,” glancing at the display screens, “it’s been an exciting first few hours.”

“With more to come,” Brandon added.

Most of the team went back to their individual quarters, although Hazzard, Wanamaker, and Thornberry stayed at the command center. Paul Longyear, the lead biologist, headed for the infirmary with Yamaguchi. Jordan started back toward the wardroom with Brandon, Meek, and Elyse Rudaki.

“A spot of light,” Jordan mused as he sat at one of the tables, facing the wall screen. The light was clearly discernable against the darkness of the planet’s night side. “What could it be?”

“There aren’t any other lights anywhere on the planet,” said Brandon, sitting beside him.

“None that we have seen,” said Elyse, who brought a mug of coffee from the dispenser and sat on Brandon’s other side.

From the dispensing machines, Meek said, “Whatever it is, I suppose it’s some natural phenomenon. A lava puddle, perhaps.”

“Do you think that’s likely?” Jordan asked.

“We don’t know what’s likely and what’s not, not yet,” said Meek, as he carried a tray bearing a teapot, a cup, and a plate of cookies to the table. Carefully arranging them on the table, he sat down and added, “This is a new world, after all. It might look superficially like Earth, but we shouldn’t expect it be precisely like our planet.”

“I suppose not,” Jordan agreed.

Elyse shook her head. “Everything about this planet is strange, unexpected.”

Brandon said, “Of course.”

“How can it be here? How can it exist and bear life?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” said Meek.

“But it shouldn’t be here at all,” Elyse continued. “Not with an atmosphere and oceans. They should have been boiled away when the Pup went through its nova phase.”

“The Pup,” Meek groused. “Astronomer’s humor.”

With a glance at Elyse, Brandon countered, “Sirius has been known as the Dog Star since ancient times.”

“In the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog,” said Meek. “I’m not totally ignorant.”

Undeterred, Brandon went on, “So when Sirius B was discovered, a dwarf star accompanying the Dog Star, naturally it was called the Pup.”

“Naturally,” said Meek, scornfully.

“The point is,” Elyse said, totally intent, “when the Pup exploded it should have scoured that planet clean.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Perhaps it did,” Jordan said, “but the planet has had enough time to regenerate its biosphere.”

“That would take billions of years,” Elyse countered. “Sirius itself can’t be more than five hundred million years old, and its companion must have been formed at the same time. The Pup couldn’t have gone nova more than a few tens of millions of years ago.”

“You’re certain of that?” Meek challenged.

“Within a factor of ten or so,” said Elyse.

“That’s a pretty big margin of error,” Meek sniffed.

“Not bad for an astrophysicist,” said Jordan, smiling at her.

“Even so,” Elyse insisted, “the planet hasn’t had time to recover from the Pup’s nova explosions. It’s impossible.”

“But there it is,” Meek said, jabbing a finger toward the wall-screen display. “You can’t deny that it exists.”

“But how can it be?”

Mildly, Jordan replied, “That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she murmured. “Of course.”

“Another thing,” Brandon said.

Jordan groaned inwardly. Bran won’t let the argument stop. Is he trying to impress Elyse or just trying to top Meek?

“Sirius C is the only planet in the system,” Brandon pointed out. “There’s nothing else. No other planets, not even asteroids or comets. The Sirius system is totally clean, except for this one planet.”

“A planet very much like Earth,” added Meek.

Elyse said, “Between Sirius’s gravitational pull and the Pup’s, all the minor bodies must have been swept away.” Then she added, “Perhaps.”

“Do you really think so?” Jordan asked.

Elyse smiled a little. “No, not really. It’s the only explanation I could think of.”

“The system’s totally clean, except for that one Earth-sized planet,” Brandon murmured.

“It is very strange,” said Elyse.

“Scary, almost,” said Brandon.

The four of them fell silent, each wrapped in their own apprehensions. Inexplicably, Jordan flashed back to the hell of Kashmir and Miriam wasting away from the man-made toxins of the biowar.

With a force of will he raised his eyes to the display screen and said, “Well, strange or scary or whatever, we’re here to find out what this planet is all about, and by heaven that’s what we’re going to do.”

As if on cue, Trish Wanamaker’s voice came through the speaker set into the overhead. “The minisat will reach synchronous orbit in fifteen minutes.”

With heartiness he did not truly feel, Jordan said to his companions, “Let’s get back to the command center and see what the surveillance satellite has to show us.”

“But I haven’t even started my tea!” Meek bleated.

*   *   *

With Meek grumbling about his tea, the four of them trooped back to the command center. The ship was over the daylit side of the planet once again.

But one of the screens showed what the surveillance satellite was seeing: the darkness of the night side, broken by that single unblinking point of light.

Trish Wanamaker turned slightly in her console chair as they filed into the command center. “Starting a spectroscopic analysis of the light,” she said, over her shoulder.

“Good,” said Jordan, standing beside Hazzard, who was still slouched nonchalantly in the command chair.

Brandon and Elyse stood close to each other; Meek remained by the hatch, a skinny scarecrow with narrowed, searching eyes. Thornberry was nowhere in sight.

“Here’s the spectrum,” Wanamaker said, tapping at the console’s touchscreen.

One of the smaller display screens on the console showed a graph with a sharply peaked curve rising steeply against the grayish background.

“That can’t be right,” Hazzard muttered.

“Put it on your main screen,” Brandon told Wanamaker.

She whispered into her microphone, and the single, sharp-peaked curve appeared on the console’s central screen, like a steep mountain rising out of a jagged plain.

“That’s the spectrum of the light down on the nightside?” Elyse asked, her voice hushed, awed.

Wanamaker nodded once.

“Jesus Christ,” Brandon said, also amazed. “It’s a laser beam!”