Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (36 page)

The terrain underfoot was knee high in grass. In the distance, across the river to the east of the landing site, dense forest swept gradually upward to an escarpment of mountains stretching from north to south, looking pretty much like our Himalayas. Behind the shuttle, about a mile distant, another forest began at the edges of our open space and spread westward into infinity. The sky was cloudless, azure blue with bands of pink and lime green close to the horizon—presumably, a haze of denser air thickened by moisture.

The earthlings walked en masse away from the shuttle toward a low rise, where they intended to plant Earth’s flag and a rod containing a homing beacon. There was a gasp from us all when some kind of flying creatures burst out of the deep grass and took wing, flying swiftly away over the river. They were no more than a blur: larger than robins and purple colored. We could see them clearly enough to know they were indeed birds and not airborne malevolent reptiles (as imagination tends to visualize the unknown).

Up on the
Kosmos
, we could hear what sounded like birdsongs. There was a variety of unfamiliar calls, with plentiful musical notes, some discordant, but the whole blending into a wondrous symphony. The soldiers at the head of the group startled another group of birds, which scuttled away through the grass and stopped nearby to regard the newcomers. They resembled pheasant, though their heads were peacock blue and their tail feathers bright orange, trailing three or four feet behind them. They uttered low chip-chip-chip cries, but did not seem unduly alarmed by the invasion.

The flag and beacon were planted in the ground, and then followed brief speeches (predictable wording, I need not record it here). The flag rippled in a light breeze, displaying the image of planet Earth on a sea of cobalt blue, surrounded by the word
Unitas
in major languages.

After the speeches were concluded, and memorable media soundbite comments had been made by the Captain and Skinner for the historical record, we listened to random radio banter. There was a discussion between the head of the military group and a subordinate, who asked for permission to remove masks. Skinner gave the order, and three of the forty military men did so (brave self-sacrificers). They laid their weapons on the ground and inhaled deeply, grinned, threw their arms into the air, and began dancing around. They, like everyone else, had been cooped up for nine years, and now their jubilation was unrestrained. They strode about the area, laughing for no reason, shouting too. One of them ran to the embankment of the river and looked down on the surface of the water, which was about a hundred feet below. He ran back to the group, calling jokes to his companions about going fishing. Presently, a few more men tore off their masks and began running about like children. The elders and dignitaries chuckled, observing the antics for a time, and when it seemed certain that no negative effects were to be had from Nova’s air, everyone removed their masks. The precaution against infecting the planet with Earth’s microbes seemed to be tossed to the winds. It is evident, therefore, that this thoughtful consideration of an alien environment was never anything other than a token gesture.

Voices called out, “The air’s so sweet!”, “Pure air!”, “Feel the wind!”, and similar ejaculations. The grass was full of wildflowers in all the colors, none of them species that we know on Earth. For example, there is a long-leafed plant with a cluster of beads crowned by pink petals, which gives off a perfume so strong that men just knelt down and inhaled it with intense pleasure (again with no adverse effects). Interestingly, there is a kind of bee that swarms the flowers, as large as a bumble bee, uniformly golden, carrying pods loaded with pollen. When some were captured on Don’s fluorescent orange baseball cap, where they had congregated in the hope of a new kind of nectar, they buzzed like our home bees, but were found to be without stingers.

Bio-scans revealed no living thing in the immediate environs, other than the birds and a variety of insects. None of the latter bothered the landing party, though there were several lazy inspections by a four-winged butterfly of some kind, bright red and as large as a human hand. There was also a species of something that resembles a dragonfly, with a foot-long tubular body, iridescent green with eight whirring wings. Despite the warmth of the day (22°C), there were no stinging / blood-sucking parasitical insects.

In the absence of perceivable threats, the landing party wandered at random, entirely caught up in the uniqueness of the moment and the sheer joy of entering nature once again, or should I say, a new and undiscovered nature. Close to the river, there were low thickets drooping with white berries that resembled grapes. Tempting as it was, no one tried to eat them, since strictest orders prohibited this.

The Trillionaire and his custodians sat on camp chairs by the shuttle’s ramp, Don smiling and smiling, his eyes shaded by sunglasses, chattering at his caregivers, who nodded incessantly but had little opportunity to reply. The Nephew, scion of privilege, his unmasked face now revealed as somewhat aged since I’d last seen it, wandered off by himself, pointing his camera this way and that. Skinner kept close to the flag, where he was the subject of a few more media interviews. The Captain was busy back and forth with the military, and he also rambled farther into the grasslands, accompanied by KC staff. I was pleased to see Paul Yusupov with him.

We watched the panorama screens for hours, envying the people on the ground, yearning to be with them, wondering when our turn would come.

Later in the day, a great deal of gear and several aircraft and ground vehicles were offloaded from the other shuttles that had now landed. The AECs (air exploration crafts) have jet and hover capabilities, and are large enough for two pilots, two scientists, and a collection chamber. The LECs (land exploration crafts) are the same shape and size, and are propelled by treads. From my vantage point, it looked like there were about a dozen of each. When the machines had been parked in rows, the military guys began to pitch their enviro tents, in which they would have their temporary quarters, remaining on ground until the engineering team sets up more permanent accommodations during the coming days.

As Alpha Centauri-A began to set, and her two sister stars shone more brightly in the northern sky, the departure time arrived. Those who had to return to the
Kosmos
did so with obvious reluctance.

Day 42

We’ve been watching numerous presentations on the establishment of the base camp—dubbed “Base-main”. All four large shuttles are constantly ferrying supplies down from the
Kosmos
, unloading their holds, building mountains of materials.

The soldiers’ enthusiasm for Nova seems unabated, though they have imported many distractions to fill their idle hours. They are not permitted to venture beyond the immediate compound until full-spectrum security has been completed and the exploration missions begin. Today, I watched them make a volleyball court, and enjoyed their subsequent play.

Day 43
:

This afternoon, soldiers played baseball with the mountain massif as a backdrop, the game occasionally disrupted by flights of purple birds crossing the screen. Pure bliss, that sound of the ball clonking on the bat, nine innings, with some great home runs. However, it had a musical soundtrack of sorts. Sitting on a packing crate beside the diamond, a solitary man made his electric guitar rant and roll, an old hit from a Roadkill album that I listened to endlessly when I was in college. I must be getting old because today I found it nerve-wracking. Mercifully, the A/V people lowered the volume for the captive audience upstairs in the sky.

Day 53
:

Nova is not as innocent as we had supposed. Of course, everyone knew that nature would be cruel wherever organic life exists, though I think there is a secret longing for Eden in every heart. The stingerless bee and the lack of carnivorous mammals in the immediate region had raised hopes. Could it be true? Could there really be a place in the universe where violent death does not reign?

During the past week, AEC scanners and LEC zoologists have come upon dozens of species of quadrupeds that exhibit little or no alarm / escape behavior—which means they are accustomed to nothing threatening them. For example, everywhere there are herds of deerlike creatures, which are a little larger than North American deer, mauve colored at the head, the hue sliding into magenta at the rump. The males have bony antler buds; none have yet been found with full racks. Then there is an animal that resembles the South American tapir, chocolate brown with horizontal black stripes. There are also beaver-like rodents, their hides in shades of yellow and twice as large as our beaver. They build dams in the swamps and creeks feeding the river. Unlike ours, they do not build protective lodges; instead, they make open nests on the banks of waterways. With all such creatures, there is a pattern of calm avoidance, a not-get-in-your-way attitude combined with mild curiosity, but apparently no fear. They are uniformly herbivores.

There is an albino, long-haired mammal, a combination of bear and giant sloth, that lives in the foothills of the mountains. After one was anaesthetized by dart gun, the zoologists discovered that its claws are useless for tearing meat, though sufficiently hard to grip tree trunks when it climbs to the forest canopy to chew on leaves and berries. Its teeth are ideally suited for grinding the tough leaves of an aromatic deciduous tree that resembles the eucalyptus. The leaves are arm-length, smelling of lavender rather than menthol. This tree does not produce hard seed-casings but rather a translucent green pod the size of an apple covered with fibrous gel—something like a gooseberry.

The trees of the nearby forests stretch upward hundreds of feet, with few lower branches. The forest floor is covered with ferns that are green or blue or turquoise during the daylight hours, turning pink in the dusk.

The low bushes covered with white “grapes” that were spotted by the river on the first day have been analyzed as high in fructose. The lab rabbits and monkeys on the
Kosmos
devour them eagerly with no ill effects. It was announced that a biologist ate one as an experiment and pronounced it delicious, tasting like lemon combined with mango. The black-market people, no doubt, will soon be harvesting it to make their moonshine.

Along the river shore, there dwells a “duck-billed platypus” of sorts that defies categorizing, very shy, about the size of a hamster, at home on land and water. Apparently, its diet is minnows and miniature frogs (yup, some small-scale killing does happen). As far as classic amphibians go, there is a shell-less turtle and a myriad of larger frog species. The latter are all flamboyantly colored, but unlike similar frogs in the rain forests of our planet, none of those so far examined have poison glands. They are cacophonous night-singers, deafening, but musically so. They have webbed feet like our home frogs but retain their tadpole tails into adulthood; their eyes are iridescent orbs which can rotate in all directions, doubtless adapted for night vision. They eat insects. None of the aforementioned creatures display fright or flight behavior, nor any aggression toward humans.

I have wandered a bit far from my point. The sad fact is that there is at least one dangerous species on the planet. During the second week of construction of the base camp, two soldiers stripped down to khaki shorts and went strolling barefoot alongside the river. Without warning, a snake darted out of a shadowed overhang of the riverbank and sank its fangs into one man’s ankle. The other beat the creature off with a stick, and it darted away into a hole in the sand. The victim fell to the ground and became delirious within a minute or so. His comrade carried him back to the base, and the medical team worked as fast as they could to inject antidotes brought from Earth, but to no avail. Without regaining consciousness, the man died of intracranial brain hemorrhage a few hours after the incident, despite every effort to revive him.

The surviving soldier described the snake to the authorities as less than a meter long, very fast, and aggressive. Searching through computer photos of Earth’s snakes, he identified it as similar to the saw-scaled viper common to the Middle East. Analysis of the victim’s blood confirmed that the venom is chemically very close to that of Earth’s
Echis coloratus
. The venom of this species is extremely toxic, doubly so in the female of the species.

The public announcement has sobered everyone—I think not so much because of the death of a fellow human being but because our myth has died.

Day 61
:

The base camp is completed, a square kilometer of human habitation within a bio-detection perimeter fence, high-wire mesh, low-charge electricity, and surveillance cameras. The “deer” bumble into it from time to time, and then go leaping away into the grass to nurse their sore spots, not seriously harmed. More common is the skiff of dead rodents found each morning, killed by the fence, mouse-like creatures with tawny fur and large black eyes. Alive, they are easy to capture, again displaying no fear, only a mild disquietude if they are picked up in the hand. They feed on the wild grains of the grassland. A burrow discovered in the grass by the main camp gate revealed a female and twelve nursing offspring.

The imaginative among us humans have conjectured that these creatures are the indigenous intelligent beings of the planet, since they have thoughtful inquisitive expressions, like that of a ponderous old man looking up from a weighty book, gazing at the inexplicable behavior of unruly children. In fact, they do not learn from their mistakes, and while they refrain from biting us if we pick them up in the hand, neither do they attempt any form of communication known to man. They make barely audible clicking noises when alive (from the throat, not by gnashing of teeth). They are “cute”. They die in droves.

Though the carnage is probably regretted by most of us, I doubt that anyone grieves over the snakes that have been zapped by the wire. No more than ten corpses have been found, two species, including the one that closely resembles the saw-scaled viper and another that looks like the gray
malpolon
of the Middle East. The zoologists inform us that they are both virulently poisonous, and thus anyone who goes beyond the perimeter should exercise caution.