20
Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline, 1847 CE
When you’re proceeding into the atmosphere of a gas giant, you don’t want to do anything too quickly. There are occasional rocks and ice, magnetic fields, serious lightning, and extreme winds. And of course, once inside the atmosphere, you don’t have much vision.
Compared with stars, gas giants aren’t very big. And, since you’re not blinded by light, you normally get a good look at the atmosphere before you make entry. You’re looking down onto a collection of clouds that seem to continue forever. There’s no sense of a horizon the way there is when you stand on a Rimway hill and watch the sun set. I wasn’t sure about the exact size of the one we’d picked for our refueling stop, but Belle estimated its diameter at about 130,000 kilometers.
There was a large storm adrift in the atmosphere. It was probably one of those thousand-year monsters, but there was no way to know. They’re common on Jovian worlds. “You’ll want to keep away from that,” said Gabe, who was with me on the bridge. He’s usually on his game, but occasionally he can be Master of the Obvious.
There was a ring system, with something like thirty moons. They glittered in the sunlight. One of the moons looked as if it had vegetation. That was possible because we weren’t that far out from the sun. Temperatures there would have been cold but probably not frigid.
As we approached on that first night, we watched a movie after dinner. It was a comedy, but nobody laughed much. Afterward I got back onto the bridge. Gabe joined me again. The gray mist spread out below us in every direction. “You ever do this before?” he asked.
“A few times.”
“We’re just going to skim the surface, right?”
“We’ll go down into the atmosphere, but not too deep, Gabe. The farther down we go, the more quickly we fill the tanks. And the only issue we have to be concerned with is turbulence. There’s no real danger here, as long as we don’t do anything stupid.”
“You mean there are no rocks or anything in there we might crash into?”
“We’ll have the scanners on. And of course the force fields. If any junk gets in there, the gravity takes it down pretty quickly. We should be fine.”
A gas giant doesn’t rotate the way a solid world does. The equator spins slightly faster than the polar regions. This one’s equator was moving at about 40,000 kilometers per hour. We were midway up over the northern hemisphere. We’d left the storm far behind us.
The fuel level had gotten low. Not dangerously so, but taking care of it was the right call. We weren’t burning much during the approach. Just riding in. Half a dozen of the moons were visible, as of course were the rings, which were thin but bright.
Finally I told everyone to buckle in. Then we began decelerating again. When I had it down to about forty kilometers per hour, equivalent to barely moving, I lowered the collectors. “Everybody hang on,” I said. “It’ll get a little bumpy.” And we dipped into the atmosphere.
We were riding through an endless cloud. I had virtually no visibility. Belle used the scanner to search the area ahead for anything that might be a problem. “There’s nothing alive here anywhere, is there?” Gabe asked.
“No. Scientists say conditions in these places just don’t allow life to get started.” I was watching the fuel tanks begin to fill. “Though I suspect they’d say something similar about trees.”
He pushed back in his seat. “I hate moving when I can’t see what’s in front of us.”
“I know. I’ve never been comfortable with this either. But when we travel this far, we haven’t much in the way of an alternative.”
The wind began to pick up. A gust hit us on the port side, almost turning us over. We leveled off and I got on the allcomm to assure Alex and Robbi Jo that everything was okay.
“How long’s this going to take?” Gabe asked. When I asked what was wrong, he clapped his hands together. “Nothing, really. I’m okay. I guess it’s just a sense that the laws of physics aren’t as reliable as they used to be. Too much strange stuff going on.”
I understood. I suspected my view of the cosmos would never be the same either. Not because of our immediate environment, but because of Alex and Gabe welcoming the snake. “We’ll need about another twenty minutes to fill up,” I said. “Maybe we should think about getting a bigger vehicle. On this kind of flight, a yacht just doesn’t cut it.”
We continued to rock and roll, but there was nothing we couldn’t get through. Twenty-five minutes passed before Belle said it was okay to pull out. “The tanks are full.”
We came out of the gas back into a sky full of stars, moons, and rings. Next was to visit nearby systems and take a look at terrestrial worlds. We submerged for an hour and surfaced well outside the Korella system. Our assumption was that the Korella visitors, when they left, would have chosen another class-K star. Belle had already conducted a spectranalysis of everything within a dozen light-years. She’d found six nearby.
The immediate problem was that we were in unknown territory, so we couldn’t be certain about the distances the six stars were from us and from each other. But there was a process. Belle recorded the angular position of each. Then we submerged again, stayed about twenty minutes, and returned to normal space. The angular positions of the stars had changed, and Belle was able to calculate ranges. The closest one was six light-years away.
“Okay,” said Alex. “Let’s start with that one.”
“Not a good idea,” said Belle. “It works well if we find what we’re looking for immediately. But if we don’t and then go to the next closest one, and continue until we have visited all six, which could happen, we will travel considerably farther than if we plan the flight to accommodate all six from the beginning.”
She was right, and Alex told her to set up a route that would take us to all six through the shortest distance.
Gabe asked Robbi Jo whether the Columbia had already looked at them during its Visitation mission. “I’m embarrassed to say this,” she said, “but I don’t know. I might recognize them when we get there. But Vince was doing the piloting. I was just pretty much looking out windows. And there are a ton of stars in the area.”
“No problem,” Gabe said. “Belle, I assume you have the alternate route set up?”
“Give me another minute.”
“Closest one is probably best,” said Gabe. “That’s the one they would have been most likely to select.”
Alex leaned out of his chair. “Of course. But what are the odds that it has a Goldilocks world? They’d probably have to go deeper to find one.”
Belle produced a plan that would take us first to a star that was nine light-years away. “About eleven hours,” I said.
Alex held up both hands. “Let’s go.”
Two planets were orbiting in the habitable zone. The nearer one was nothing more than an oversized rock. We visited the other one, which had forests, jungles, oceans, and a wide array of animals.
Belle reported no radio signals. We spent three days looking for lights or any other sign of occupants. But there was nothing.
The second star had no planets. The third had nothing in the zone except a gas giant. The fourth star was the one nearest to Korella, the one that could have been our first visit. Again, two planets orbited in the zone. One was not much more than a desert. The other was filled with giant lizards. Not a place you would want to go for a walk.
Neither of the other destinations gave us anything. There were five worlds in the two habitable zones, but they were all piles of rock and sand with occasional meteor craters. There was no indication there’d ever been so much as an insect on any of them. “What do we do now?” asked Robbi Jo. “Look for more class-K stars?”
“I think it’s over,” said Gabe.
Alex wasn’t ready to quit. “We’ve invested too much to just walk away.”
Gabe was at the end of his patience. “They could be on a relatively nearby star and we could still spend years out here without finding them.”
I waited for Alex and Gabe to make the call. It took a while before, finally, Gabe agreed to spend another two weeks. “After that,” he said, “we clear out. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“So where,” I asked, “do we go next?”
“I’ve been doing some research,” said Alex.
“Okay.”
“Do you know why K-class stars are more likely to produce living worlds?”
“They’re stable and they don’t put out much radiation.”
“And they live a long time.”
“Okay.”
“If we were looking for a place to set up a colony, we probably wouldn’t care much whether the star lives a hundred million years or a billion, would we?”
“I guess not.”
“Chase, the villagers wouldn’t care much what class the star was, as long as it wasn’t near the end of its life.” He looked out through the wraparound. Stars were everywhere. “Two of them are closer to Korella than any of the ones we looked at.”
We designated them Alpha and Beta. Alpha was a half hour away. We arrived there, well inside the system, and got a quick reading from Belle. “Two worlds in the zone,” she said. “One looks to be strictly gas. But I wouldn’t describe it as a giant. The other looks green. No sign of oceans, though. Not on this side, anyhow.”
“Okay,” I said. “Any radio transmissions?”
“Negative.”
Alex was seated beside me. “Let’s go take a look,” he said.
It had a moon, and we could make out vegetation. No oceans, apparently, but there was plenty of water.
As we got closer and watched the world rotate, we became certain that there were no oceans. Lakes were scattered everywhere, though, many connected by tangled rivers. The world was decidedly green. My first impression was that it was a happy combination of sunlight, water, and vegetation. “Paradise,” said Robbi Jo. “If they came here to look, it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t have moved in. Assuming they don’t have giant snakes with mental abilities.”
And Belle spotted a satellite. “Probably artificial,” she said.
Gradually it slipped behind the planet.
“Let’s use the drive,” Alex said. “Take us to the dark side. Let’s see if there are any lights.”
When we surfaced, we were looking down on unbroken darkness.
“Nothing there,” said Gabe.
“Where’s the satellite?” asked Alex.
“It should be visible in a few minutes,” Belle said. “Or if you want, we can change course and accelerate the process.”
“That’s okay,” said Alex. “Just take us closer.”
An hour later we slipped into orbit. We needed another twenty minutes before the satellite showed up. It was coming in our direction. Belle turned the scope on it. I’d swung around in my seat to talk with Robbi Jo, who’d come onto the bridge. “What the hell?” said Gabe. And Alex, back in the cabin, said, “No, no, no. That’s not possible. Belle, you’ve screwed up somewhere.”
Robbi Jo’s eyes left me to focus on the monitor. They went immediately wide.