The Songs of Distant Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

was that of weight. He lifted his right arm effortlessly: it remained floating in midair, awaiting his next order.
    “Hello, Mister Lorenson,” a cheerfully bullying voice said. “So you’ve condescended to join us again. How do you feel?”
    Loren finally opened his eyes and tried to focus them on the blurred figure floating beside his bed.
    “Hello … doctor. I’m fine. And hungry.”
    “That’s always a good sign. You can get dressed – don’t move too quickly for a while. And you can decide later if you want to keep that beard.”
    Loren directed his still-floating hand towards his chin; he was surprised at the amount of stubble he found there. Like the majority of men, he had never taken the option of permanent eradication – whole volumes of psychology had been written on that subject. Perhaps it was time to think about doing so; amusing how such trivia cluttered up the mind, even at a moment like this.
    “We’ve arrived safely?”
    “Of course – otherwise you’d still be asleep. Everything’s gone according to plan. The ship started to wake us a month ago – now we’re in orbit above Thalassa. The maintenance crews have checked all the systems; now it’s your turn to do some work. And we have a little surprise for you.”
    “A pleasant one, I hope.”
    “So do we. Captain Bey has a briefing two hours from now, in Main Assembly. If you don’t want to move yet, you can watch from here.”
    “I’ll come to assembly – I’d like to meet everyone. But can I have breakfast first? It’s been a long time.”
    Captain Sirdar Bey looked tired but happy as he welcomed the fifteen men and women who had just been revived, and introduced them to the thirty who formed the current A and B crews. According to ship’s regulations, C crew was supposed to be sleeping – but several figures were lurking at the back of the Assembly room, pretending not to be there.
    “I’m happy you’ve joined us,” he told the newcomers. “It’s good to see some fresh faces around here. And it’s better still to see a planet and to know that our ship’s carried out the first two hundred years of the mission plan without any serious anomalies. Here’s Thalassa, right on schedule.”
    Everyone turned towards the visual display covering most of one wall. Much of it was devoted to data and state-of-ship information, but the largest section might have been a window looking out into space. It was completely filled by a stunningly beautiful image of a blue-white globe, almost fully illuminated. Probably everyone in the room had noticed the heart-breaking similarity to the Earth as seen from high above the Pacific – almost all water, with only a few isolated landmasses.
    And there was land here – a compact grouping of three islands, partly hidden by a veil of cloud. Loren thought of Hawaii, which he had never seen and which no longer existed. But there was one fundamental difference between the two planets. The other hemisphere of Earth was mostly land; the other hemisphere of Thalassa was entirely ocean.
    “There it is,” the captain said proudly. “Just as the mission planners predicted. But there’s one detail they didn’t expect, which will certainly affect our operations.”
    “You’ll recall that Thalassa was seeded by a Mark 3A fifty-thousand unit module which left Earth in 2751 and arrived in 3109. Everything went well, and the first transmissions were received a hundred and sixty years later. They continued intermittently for almost two centuries, then suddenly stopped, after a brief message reporting a major volcanic eruption. Nothing more was ever heard, and it was assumed that our colony on Thalassa had been destroyed – or at any rate reduced to barbarism as seems to have happened in several other cases.”
    “For the benefit of the newcomers, let me repeat what we’ve found. Naturally, we listened out on all frequencies when we entered the system. Nothing – not even power-system leakage