"I'm still a prisoner on my own ship," Rath said.
"Quarantine is often difficult, but sometimes necessary."
"And was it necessary for the Authority to fire on my freighter with Magno-torpedoes? No one issued any warning before they fired. How's that going to look to the public if this is just some health check?"
"You came in with a curtain activated in an uncolonized system," Jack replied. "Every move you made was indicative of piracy. How was the Authority supposed to react?"
"Well, which is it? Am I a pirate or a patient?" Rath countered with a hint of a growl.
The visitor paused, he picked at one of his bottom front teeth with a thumb nail. "I guess this is my fault. I started us out on the wrong foot. I don't want to turn this into a debate over whose actions are right and wrong. I just wanted to make things clear. Mr. Scampion, you were not brought here against your own free will. You came here with the clear intent to steal emeralds. You admitted as such to the Authority. We did not take you to the local prosecutors because we have no intention of doing so. I hope that makes you rest a little more at ease. It will make today much easier on all of us if you stop being so confrontational.
"It is, however, necessary for me to clearly distinguish the differences between your situation and that of Mr. Smiel. He did nothing wrong, yet he was treated with a great deal of disrespect to his freedom. I must make it clear that it was not the Authority that was responsible for this, but the Health Council for Disease Control."
The man looked directly into Larinov's face and spoke as if he knew the middleman's fears intimately. "Do not be alarmed over that, Mr. Smiel. You have not contracted any disease. Your health is at no risk. It is just that the Health Council gets rather over ambitious with their own concerns."
Rath interrupted. "Hey, if there's nothing wrong with us and you're not going to turn me over for piracy, why are we basically locked up here? What the hell is going on?"
The visitor tilted his head down slightly and then nodded to himself. "Let me introduce myself. My name is Jack Lasonelli. I am, in the simplest terms, a coordinator. I work between the various councils of Regency to keep things moving smoothly. I was brought here to keep this particular endeavor from becoming bogged down with inter-council squabbles over jurisdiction and administration. You see, this is a moment many have waited for. We have discovered the first non-terrestrial life form."
Lar simply stared.
Rath spoke out with a hint of disbelief. "Where? Here?"
"On Fenrir," Jack stated.
"You're kidding. What is this... some kind of joke or something?"
Jack shook his head. "Hardly. There is a prosperous, thriving civilization on Fenrir. There is much we don't know, the proper councils are continuing much of their research with distant scans, but we do know the alien shows marked development similar to that of pre-industrialized earth."
"What? They're humans?" Rath remained bewildered
Jack snickered slightly. "It's hard to call them that. There are of course some similarities. They are bipeds; they show an amazing ability to utilize tools. But as far as appearance goes, they look more like apes, but they also seem to have lizard-like skin as opposed to coarsely-haired hides. Oh, by the way, what I'm telling you now is classified. It is illegal for you to discuss this with anyone else."
Rath didn't care about the legalities. His mind was racing with hundreds of questions. "What are you talking about? You're saying there's an advanced life form down there? That's not possible. I scanned this system. I landed there. There's nothing down on Fenrir but rock."
"We're well aware of your scouting mission, and I must admit that it leads to many questions of many different councils, especially the Exploratory Council. They have reviewed the logs on your scout and they attest that you did not cover up this finding."
"Why would I cover it up?" Rath interrupted. He was growing extremely uneasy with the conversation. He had ideas of what he'd face on piracy charges, but he never expected this. "I didn't find any damn life forms!"
Jack's face became genuinely comforting. He spoke in soothing, reassuring tones. "Mr. Scampion, please relax. You have nothing to worry about, I tried to make that clear earlier. I would have thought your greatest concern would have been possible charges over your own confession of intended piracy. That is absolutely, positively no longer a worry for you. We are going to forget about your previous intentions. It somewhat sullies this momentous occasion. In all honesty, it would be difficult to concede that the first human to land on Fenrir was a pirate. You will be remembered as a scout. It will also be explained that you were brought back to Fenrir to satisfy health concerns. That will also apply to Mr. Smiel. This has also been satisfied. There is no danger of alien viruses as we have tested both the first human to land on Fenrir and his first human contact. Everything you should be afraid of is no longer a concern."
Rath was not relieved. "But what about this other stuff? This nonsense about a life form. What am I up against with this?"
"Nothing, absolutely nothing," Jack stated almost pleasingly. "There's going to be some questions, but not about your intentions. We need to know why your scanners didn't pick up the life signs, though there are some theories. That is another reason you're still here. The three of us are going to make another landing on Fenrir today, using your scout vessel. We're going to recreate the landing sequence and rescan the planet within the atmosphere. It will test the validity of certain assumptions and hopefully provide the answer to why the life forms were not found by your ship."
5
The cockpit closed about the three men, leaving little room for movement and even less consideration for safety. But Jack had insisted that all three of them be present for atmospheric entry of Fenrir. Rath thought the company might calm his nerves; at least he hoped it would. It didn't. When the scout began to shake at the violence of entry, he broke into a cold sweat. The lack of space compounded his discomfort, and when he felt the lurch of gravity taking hold, he almost vomited.
"Do you always get this upset on reentry?" Jack questioned.
"It's not usually this bad," Rath gasped, struggling for control of his innards. "It's just a little close in here. I'm used to being alone."
A heavy shake throughout his body closed Rath’s mouth.
"But your body doesn't like this type of motion, does it?" Jack pressed.
Rath took a moment, swallowed hard. The taste of whatever was in the back of his throat burned going back down. Finally, he found the voice to respond. "I guess not, but like I said, it’s usually not this bad."
Outside the viewshield, the orange flares finally died away and the sky turned a bright blue. The stars disappeared as the atmosphere of Fenrir swallowed the scout completely. Flight controls brought the vessel to a slow descent, and the great turbulence of atmospheric entry ceased.
The council coordinator turned to Lar. "How about you, do you feel bad?"
"No, not really." Lar looked more lost than sick. "I don't get to experience this that much. I don't know what to expect." And indeed, he peered out the viewshields with a newfound curiosity. He almost ignored Jack's continued questions.
"How about air sickness? Do you ever feel uncomfortable in a shuttle or a skimmer?"
Lar just shook his head.
"So this is no real problem for you?"
"No, I guess not."
Jack turned a critical eye back to Rath, but spoke loud enough so that Lar could hear. "Your concentration is not the best at this moment is it?"
Rath was indeed paying more attention to his own problems than to Jack's questions. "Huh?"
This nonsensical word highlighted Rath's discomfort as well as his mixed concentration, and Jack nodded to Lar. "That may explain some things."
Rath wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead. He fought off a final wave of nausea with a sense of indignity. "What things?"
"You don't like reentry a
nd you seem to have a fear of heights. During your first scout, these factors could have caused you to miss something."
"I checked my screens," Rath argued. "I always check my screens and the viewshields. It's part of my job."
"Yes, I won't argue that, but that's not really my point. You seem much more concerned with your own discomfort. I'm not saying it's a crime, but it could have caused you to miss something."
The height of the craft still left Rath far from comfortable, the possibility of losing power and falling continued to strike at his consciousness like a loose shutter in a windstorm, but Jack's accusations found their way through the fear, brought out an anger which flushed his face.
"How could I miss something like life on a planet? I mean it's there or it's not. If I look out and see nothing but rock, what else am I supposed to look for?"
Jack scanned the nav coordinates. "Take a quick look now, both of you. What do you see?"
Rath pointed to the brown and yellow landscape. His voice held a tone of vindication. "The same thing I saw when I first scouted this planet, nothing."
Lar nodded his head in agreement.
"This is exactly what I saw before," Rath continued. "I don't care how sick I feel, there's nothing down there to see."
Jack smiled. "Of course this is what you saw before; I brought you in at an orbit to mimic your first scout. This is the same flight path. What you see now is exactly what you saw before you initiated automatic landing. But I would like to point something else out. At a higher altitude, more of the surface would have been visible. If we checked the viewscreens at that point, the view might have been different."
Rath shook his head obstinately. "But I'm sure I made a visual check at initial entry during my first scout. Even if there was something to see then, I would have noticed it."
"Are you certain?" Jack questioned almost sternly. He did not press with hostility, but he offered his own explanation with a degree of confidence. "Remember how badly you felt. You probably did complete your visuals, but how much attention did you give them? Surely if this planet was covered with plant life, you would have noticed, but based on your discomfort, even you would have to admit that a small pocket, a trace anomaly compared to the full expanse of the planet surface might escape your attention."
Rath wasn't so sure. It sounded plausible, then again it sounded impossible. If there was life on this planet, he was certain he would have spotted it.
Jack interrupted with a stern command. "Set your ship for automatic landing sequences, just as you did during your first scout."
More out of instinct than obedience, Rath ordered landing site selection and approach. The Boscon Props shook the vessel as they gently lowered the craft for landing. Rath exhaled as he welcomed the sensation of the props beating against hard ground. When the ship settled into touchdown, he wiped the last few beads of cold sweat from his head. Quiet settled into the cockpit as Rath shut off the engines.
Jack stared intently at the pilot.
"What?" Rath responded uneasily.
"Complete your check off and take us outside."
Rath shrugged, checked the atmospheric readings, and prepared for disembarking. He led Jack and Lar out of the starboard hatch. This time, he didn't hold his breath or run from the craft. He stood beside it, smelling the cooling metal. It threatened to bring back a touch of nausea, but he fought off any further sickness.
A lifeless desert welcomed them. Jagged brown rocks jutted up from the horizon in every direction. The surface was parched and hard. Dust, sand and rock; nothing more.
"Certainly not the garden spot of Fenrir," Jack admitted.
"I'm not convinced there is a garden spot," Rath countered.
Jack just smiled. "Take us on a walk. I'm sure you normally do a foot scout."
"Absolutely, but you're just going to see what I see now. Oh by the way, my portable is scanning for life signs. There's no reading. Nothing."
"I don't doubt that at all," Jack responded, sounding anything but defeated.
The three ambled for some time through the barren landscape. The scenery held rugged beauty, but no indication of life. Finally, Jack made his last request.
"Take us to the point where you obtained your load of emeralds and rubies."
Rath frowned and did not move.
Jack waved his hand almost apologetically. "Don't worry. I'm not trying to obtain any kind of evidence against you. I just want to retrace your trail. It's an order from the councils. It's the last step in verifying why you didn't find the Fenrites on your first scout."
Rath huffed a heavy breath but finally conceded. He brought them to a small pit where he had used the laser miner to scratch away the rock surface. He watched Jack carefully, still unsure of the coordinator's motives.
Jack just scratched an eyebrow. His narrow features appeared to thin even more under the heat. "Why don't we get back to the ship? It's hot out here and I'm getting tired. There's still much for us to see."
#
"Considerable challenges, considerable challenges indeed." Dr. Sinclair took a handkerchief and wiped the side of her neck. Warmth in the council room didn't create her perspiration, questions and concerns over the Fenrites raised her anxiety and the layers of flesh simply did the rest. "I suppose we should examine the most obvious problem. The growth rate of the Fenrites is expanding exponentially. The gestation period is much shorter than Dr. Eurobian estimated. Multiple births also seem to be the rule rather than the exception. Colonies are teeming with newborns and growing infants.
"For those of you that worried of the immediate repercussions of overpopulation, I have a leading report which puts some of those concerns to rest. The Fenrites will not starve. To their credit, they have found their own solution to the restricted food supply. They have examined the plant life instilled for them and found the crop which grows the fastest and provides the greatest nutrition. They are using this food source to its greatest potential. Our scanners are already picking up extensive tracks of land utilized to support current as well as future population growth. As they deplete that which was initially provided for them, the larger than anticipated harvests will more than compensate for the loss. In effect, the Fenrites are adapting to their explosive growth by farming much larger areas of land than we expected.
"This will of course alter Dr. Morgan's planned ecosystem. A much larger percentage of Fenrir's surface will be changed from desert into farmland. A small consequence. We have many scanning reports which will provide enough data to assert our claim of Fenrir's desert-like conditions before this alteration. This new phenomena will simply be attributed to the stage of development the Fenrites achieved upon our discovery of their civilization. It will be considered part of their evolution and nothing more.
"Perhaps even more interesting, the Fenrites show particular skill toward utilizing the surrounding lands as efficiently as possible, but with a mind to future needs as well. While their main objective is to create a sufficient, reliable, and quickly available food supply, they are not ignoring other alternatives. They seem to be instinctively avoiding our own ancestor's agricultural mistakes which led to the potato famine and the dust bowl. I would theorize that they have actually retained a far greater percentage of the agricultural knowledge planted within their memory than we would have imagined. There is little else which would explain their instinctive actions to refrain from over burdening the soil and relying on a single crop. Perhaps their simple-mindedness and lack of independent thought allowed for such absorption, like pets learning a new trick."
Dr. Sinclair folded her hands and a frown creased her lips downward. "But now to the problem. We are uncertain as of yet as to the true life span of a Fenrite. Dr. Eurobian gives us some insight as to an estimate, but nothing that we can count on with any great reliance. Even if we take the short end of the estimate, the Fenrite population will still grow at a staggering rate. If such growth continues, they will eventually reach a poin
t where there is simply not enough land to cultivate. While it is nothing that threatens them in the near term, in the long run they will face food shortages.
"Some of my associates have offered solutions, none of which I can support. From the ill-conceived notion of creating a predator to the vastly more compassionate, but no less damaging alternative of supplementing the Fenrites with food shipments from our own ag-planets. I assert that we must allow the Fenrites to find their own solutions as they have already shown a propensity to achieve. Let them deal with the problem and let us learn from it. That, after all, is the basis of this entire experiment.
"Food shortages may lead to other events which our colleagues from different councils are eager to watch. Monitoring riots, war, and the political development stemming from such calamities is just another form of understanding our own past. We must allow the different branches of the scientific community to observe their fields of interest.
"Remember, we are not here to solve the Fenrites' problem. A problem I must remind some that does not exist nor will exist for some time. We can make all the projections and estimations over what might happen a century or two from now, but that does not alter the basic intent of our experiment. We merely must watch how they deal with critical junctures in their own development. The variations and similarities will tell us a great deal about our own historical decisions. We did not create this organism to dictate its lifestyle. We proceeded with this grand experiment to watch the internal development of an alien civilization. To interfere, even with the best intentions, is to break the foundation which is the cause for the Fenrites very existence."
"Now, for some good news." She rubbed her hands together as she took a surveying glance around the council chambers. "We have the scout pilot who made the initial investigation of Fenrir, the only human to physically explore Fenrir before Inception. Due to some genuine luck, achieved by the forthright decision to have the Authority secure the system, the pilot was caught attempting to pirate gems from the planet. He never turned over his report to a local Exploratory Commission, and thus, there was never a need to intercept the planet from the Council of Colonization. We have detained the pilot for some time; even allowed health officers to conduct extensive tests to satisfy their own fears that there are no communicable diseases on Fenrir. Now, a close associate of mine is debriefing the scout pilot and removing any threats that he might represent."