Starborne (25 page)

How very peculiar, he thinks. This place is far less threatening than Venus, where the temperature at its mildest was as hot as an oven and one whiff of the atmosphere would have killed him in an instant, and he hadn
’
t felt a bit of this stuf
f there. The worst that could have happened to him on Venus was that he would die, after all, and though he was far from ready for dying, Huw quite clearly had understood ahead of time that he might be putting himself in harm
’
s way by going there. Likewis
e
when he had visited Mercury, and Ganymede, and roaring volcanic Io, and all the rest of the uncongenial but fascinating worlds and worldlets that his ventures had taken him to. So why these sensations of
—
fear!
—
as he sits here, fully spacesuited, inside th
e sealed snug-as-a-bug environment of this elegantly designed and sturdily co
n
structed little spaceship?

It is almost time for extravehicular, now. Huw steals a glance at Giovanna, cradled in the acceleration chair to his right, and at Marcus, on his other
side. He can see only their faces. Neither one looks very cheerful. Marcus is frowning a little, but, then, Marcus almost always frowns. Giovanna
’
s expression too might be a bit on the apprehensive side, and yet it might just be a look of deep concentrat
i
on; no doubt she is contemplating the experiments she intends to carry out here.

Huw remains mystified at his own attack of edginess. Is that a droplet of sweat running down the tip of his nose? Yes, yes, that is what it seems to be. And another one trickl
ing across his forehead. He appears to be doing quite a bit of perspiring. He is actually beginning to feel very poorly indeed.

Something I ate, maybe, he tells himself. My digestion is fundame
n
tally sound but there is always the odd apple in the barrel, i
sn
’
t there?

“
Well, now,”
he says, to Giovanna and to Marcus, and to everyone listening aboard the
Wotan
. “
The moment has arrived for me to go out and claim this land in the name of Henry Tudor.”

He makes sure that his tone is a ringing, hearty one. His lit
tle private joke stirs no laughter among his companions. He doesn
’
t like that. And how curious, he thinks, that he needs to
work
at sounding hearty! He runs through one final suit-check and begins to set up the hatch-opening commands.

“
When I go out,”
he s
ays, “
you stay put right where you are until I call for you, all right? Let
’
s make sure I
’
m okay before anybody tries to join me. I
’
ll give the signal and you come out next, Giovanna. We check how that goes and then I
’
ll call for you, Marcus. Is that clea
r
?”

They confirm that it is quite clear.

The hatch is open. Huw crawls through the lock, pauses for a m
o
ment, begins to descend the ladder in slow stately strides, trying to r
e
member those lines of poetry about stout Cortez silent on that peak in Darien
—
fee
ling like some watcher of the skies, was it, when a new planet swims into his ken?
—

His left boot touches the surface of Planet A.

“
Jesus Goddamn Christ!”
Huw cries, a piercing anachronistic yawp that rips not only into the earphones of his fellow explorer
s but also, alas, into the annals of exploration as the first recorded statement of the first human visitor to an extrasolar planet.

“
Huw, are you all right?”
Giovanna asks from within, and he can hear the year-captain
’
s voice coming over the line from the
Wotan
, as
k
ing the same thing. It must have been one devil of a yell, Huw thinks.

“
I
’
m fine,”
he says, trying not to sound too shaky. “
Turned my ankle a little when I put my foot down, that
’
s all.”

He completes the descent and steps away from the drone pro
be.

He is lying about his ankle and he is lying about feeling fine. He is, as a matter of fact, not feeling fine at all.

He is experiencing some sort of descent into the jaws of Hell.

The
—
uneasiness, anxiety, whatever it was
—
that he was feeling a few minut
es ago on board the probe is nothing at all, in comparison to this. The intensity of the discomfort has risen by several orders of ma
g
nitude
—
rose, actually, in the very instant that his boot touched the ground. It was the psychic equivalent of stepping on
a fiery-hot metal griddle. And now he has passed beyond anxiety into some other kind of fear which is, perhaps, bordering on real terror. Panic, even.

These feelings are all completely new to him. He finds it almost as terrifying to realize that he is capa
ble of being afraid as it is to be exp
e
riencing this intense fear.

Nor does Huw have any idea what it is that he might be afraid of. The fear is simply
there
, a fact of existence, like his chin, like his left kneecap. It seems to be bubbling up out of the
ground into him through his feet, passing up into his calves, his shins, his thighs, his groin, his gut.

What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell
—

Huw knows he needs to regain control of himself. The last thing he wants is for any of the
others to suspect what is going on inside him. No more than a few seconds have passed since his emergence from the probe, and his initial anguished screech is the only sign he has given thus far that anything is amiss.

Now the strength gained through a lif
etime of self-confident high achievement asserts itself. This can
’
t be happening to him, he tells hi
m
self, because he is not the sort of man to whom things like this happen: Q.E.D. The initial feeling of shock at that first touch of boot against ground has
given way to a kind of steady low-level discomfort: he seems to be getting used to the effect. Does not like it, does not like it at all, but is already learning how to tolerate it, perhaps.

He walks five or six paces further away from the probe, stops, t
akes a deep breath, another, another. Squares his shoulders, stands as erect as is possible to stand. Pushes the welling tide of terror back down his body millimeter by millimeter, down through his legs, his ankles, his toes.

There
.

It
’
s still there, tryin
g to get back up into his chest to seize his heart, and then move on beyond that to his lungs, his throat, his brain. But he has it, whatever the hell it is, in check. More or less. Its presence baffles him but he is holding it at bay, at the expense of c
o
nsiderable mental and moral energy. It requires from him a constant struggle against the profound desire to scream and weep and fling his arms around wildly. But it is a struggle that he appears to be winning, and now he can pr
o
ceed with the business of ta
king a little look around this place.

Now he hears a moaning sound just to his left, which calls to his a
t
tention the fact that someone else is out here with him. One of the others has left the probe without waiting for the go-ahead signal; the moan is pro
bably an initial response to the hot-griddle effect of making direct contact with this planet
’
s surface.

“
Hey
!”
he yells. “
Didn
’
t I say to stay in there until I called you out?”

It is Marcus, Huw realizes. Which is even worse: Giovanna was the one whom he
had chosen to be the second one out of the probe. Marcus has exited the ship on his own authority and out of turn, and now, mo
v
ing in what seems like an oddly dazed and disoriented way, he is wa
n
dering around in irregular circles near the base of the ladde
r, scuffing his boot against the soil and stirring up little clouds of dust.

“
I
’
m coming out too,”
Giovanna says over the phones. “
I don
’
t feel so happy being cooped up in here.”

“
No, wait
—”
Huw says, but it is too late. Already he sees her poking out of t
he hatch and starting to climb down. The year-captain is saying something over the phones, apparently asking what
’
s taking place down there, but Huw can
’
t take the time to reply just now. He is still fighting the bursts of seemingly unmotivated terror tha
t
feel as though they are pulsing up through the ground at him, and he needs to get his crew back under control, too. He jogs over toward Marcus, who has stopped scuf
f
ing at the ground and now is walking, or, to put it more accurately, staggering, in a zigz
ag path heading away from the probe on the far side.

“
Marcus!”
Huw calls sharply. “
Halt where you are, Marcus! That
’
s an order!”

Marcus shambles to a stop. But then
after a couple of seconds he starts moving again in an aimless drifting stumbling way, traveling along a wide curving trajectory that soon begins to carry him once more away from the probe.

Giovanna is out of the ship, now. She comes up alongside Huw, ru
n
n
ing awkwardly in this light-gravity environment. He peers through the faceplate of her suit and sees that her forehead is shiny with bright beads of sweat and her eyes look wild. Marcus is continuing to put distance between himself and the probe.

“
I don
’
t
know,”
Giovanna says, as though replying to a question that Huw has not asked. “
I feel
—
weird, Huw.”

“
Weird how?”
He tries to make his voice sound completely normal.

“
Scared. Strange.”
A look of shame flickers across her face. “
Like I
’
m having some sort of
a nightmare. But I know that I
’
m awake. I
am
awake, right, Huw?”

“
Wide awake,”
he says. So he is not the only one, then. Both of them are feeling it too. Interesting. Interesting. And oddly reassuring, after a fashion, at least so far as he is concerned pe
rsonally. But it sounds like bad news for the expedition. Huw clamps his gloved hand over Giova
n
na
’
s wrist. “
Come on. Let
’
s go after Marcus before he roams too far.”

Marcus is perhaps thirty meters away, now. Still maintaining his grip on Giovanna
’
s wrist
—
Huw isn
’
t certain how much in command of he
r
self she is just now, and he wants to keep the group together
—
Huw trots over the flat dusty ground toward him, half dragging Giovanna along at his side. After a moment she seems to get into the rhythm of it, copi
ng with the slightly lessened gravity and all, and they start to move with some commonality of purpose. It takes them a minute or so to catch up with Marcus, who halts, wheeling around to face them like a trapped fox, and then lurches toward them, holding
out both his hands to them in a gesture of desperate appeal.

“
Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,”
he begins to mutter, in a kind of whining sob. Invoking the archaic name, a name having no real meaning for him or any of them, but somehow bringing comfort. “
I
’
m so af
raid, Huw!”

“
Are you, now, boy?”
Huw asks. He takes the proffered hand and i
n
dicates to Giovanna that she should take the other one. And then the three of them are holding hands like children standing in a ring, staring at each other bewilderedly, while th
e year-captain in orbit high overhead continues to assail Huw
’
s ears with questions that Huw still is unable to answer. The rough sound of sobbing comes over the phones from Ma
r
cus. Giovanna is showing better self-control, but her face is still rigid with
fright.