“We’re stepping out, Mission Control.”
“Copy, Corvus. Keep us posted.”
Matthew, Dunne, and Sam stood in the airlock, waiting as the clean air of the Corvus leaked out of the room and the air of planet H-240 came hissing in, along with whatever noxious gases it might contain. The room looked no different through the visor of his suit as the air of one world replaced the air of another—it was odd, thought Matthew, how the things that could kill you were so often invisible.
Best not to think about it.
A light that had been flashing red turned green and the door slowly opened. It hinged down, creating a ramp from the ship to the ground.
Dunne and Sam stepped out of the ship into the moonlight, but Matthew hung back. Sam turned.
“Come on,” he said, waving an arm.
Matthew looked at his feet as he tripped down the ramp, stared at them through his visor as if they were something disconnected from his body—which, at the moment, they seemed to be. At the bottom, the ramp rested on the ground of the planet. Matthew glanced up at Dunne and Sam. Sam gazed off in the other direction, toward the horizon, while Dunne stood closer to Matthew, staring into the display screen of her sensor as she turned in a slow circle.
“Status, Corvus.”
Matthew pressed a button on the outside of his suit to patch the radio communicator in his helmet into the quantum transceiver feed. “Give us a minute, Control,” he said.
He felt dizzy—as though he had run out of breathable air and was about to fall over. He took in a sharp breath, but it seemed as if the oxygen wasn’t absorbing into his bloodstream or reaching his brain. His vision went sharp, and he suddenly felt as though he was going to topple over where he stood.
“Calm down, Matthew.” Sam had come back nearer to the ship and was staring into Matthew’s face from a few paces away. “Breathe. You don’t want to die before we’re actually supposed to, do you?”
Matthew took a deep, slow breath and laughed, even though it wasn’t really funny. He leaned over and put his hands on his knees, blinking as his vision came back into focus.
“You okay?” Dunne asked.
“He’ll be fine, doc. Just a little nerves, is all.”
“It’s just so weird,” Matthew said. “It’s weird, right?”
Sam and Dunne assented in silence—it was weird. They were on another planet, billions of miles from where they had started. Yet for all that, the landscape felt so similar to Earth, and that was the most dizzyingly strange thing of all: the fact that this place that was totally alien to Matthew could also be so strikingly, eerily familiar. Like any other place he’d ever been, this planet had land and sky, rocks, hills, and—strangest of all, stretching out in every direction as far as he could see—grass.
“Grass,” Matthew said aloud now, reduced to monosyllables.
“Yes,” Dunne said. She ran her hand over the top of it, letting the tips of the blades scratch at her glove. “Prairie grass.”
“Does that mean this place will support life?” Matthew asked. “If grass can grow here, we might be able to survive too, right?”
Dunne squinted and looked again at her handheld sensor. “I don’t know. A lot of organisms can survive in environments where humans would die almost immediately. At the bottom of the ocean, for instance—it’s a vibrant ecosystem, but if you put a human down there, they’d die within thirty seconds because of extreme water pressure and cold.”
“Cut to the chase, Doc,” Sam said. “You’re the science officer, right? Well, give us some science here. Are we going to die or what?”
Dunne poked at the display of her handheld sensor array, looking at one reading after another. “There’s oxygen in the air. More than on Earth, actually. Nitrogen. A bit more CO2 than I’d like to see, but it’s survivable.”
“Any poisonous gases?” Matthew asked.
Dunne shook her head without looking up. “Not that I can see. Though it wouldn’t take much to kill us, if there’s something small the sensor isn’t picking up.” She tapped again at the display. “Temperature is mild. About 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Fifty percent humidity. Gravity very close to Earth’s—I’m reading about 94 percent.”
“What about water?” Matthew asked. “If there’re plants, they must be getting water from somewhere, right?”
“I’m reading significant groundwater below the surface,” Dunne said.
“Is it fresh? Drinkable?”
Dunne squinted at the screen. “I can’t tell. But it doesn’t matter. We could dig wells, purify it if it’s undrinkable. All that matters is it’s there.”
Matthew’s mind raced.
Breathable air. Temperate climate. Water.
“You mean to tell me that this place is actually …” Matthew trailed off, as if saying the rest aloud—actually habitable?—would jinx it somehow.
Dunne looked up from the sensor screen, her lips parted.
“I think so,” she said. There was a laugh in her voice. “I think we might be able to survive here.”
“So … is it safe to take off our helmets?”
Dunne nodded. “If these readings are correct.”
They stood looking at each other for a few moments, not moving. It was still so hard to believe that they were safe. Matthew had been prepared to find a harsh landscape that would kill them. He’d never expected the planet they landed on to be one that might support life.
“Aw, hell,” Sam said, his voice gruff. “I’ll do it.”
He reached up and snapped his helmet off. He lifted it up over his head, then lowered it to his waist, breathing heavy through his nose.
“Well?” Matthew asked.
Sam made a gagging sound, his face contorted, and he fell to the ground in a convulsion.
Dunne and Matthew rushed toward him. Matthew’s heart was racing.
Then Sam rolled over laughing, a smile on his face.
“You should have seen your faces,” he said. “It’s fine, all right? The air’s fine. You can take off your helmets. You’re not going to die.”
Matthew looked at Dunne, grinning in spite of himself. He reached up to remove his helmet. The air rushed cool to fill his nostrils.
The three of them took off their outer suits, twisting and snapping them away bit by bit as if shedding an exoskeleton. They’d just set the last pieces of their suits on the floor when Dunne’s handheld began buzzing.
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
Dunne looked at the screen. Her face fell, went gray. She looked as though she was going to be sick.
“Another reading,” she said. “The sensor just picked it up.”
“Picked what up?” Matthew asked.
“Radiation,” Dunne said. “Lots of it. More than there was on Earth when we left.”
Matthew looked into the sky. “But it’s night. How can there be radiation?”
“It’s not solar radiation that I’m picking up. The readings are coming from the ground. If I didn’t know better, I’d say …” She trailed off.
“You’d say what?” Sam demanded.
“I’d say that the planet itself is radioactive.”