Kellon told Riney to set up the landing-pattern. Then he asked Darnow
skeptically,
"You surely don't expect to find much in those old cities now--not
after they've had all that ice on them for two thousand years?"
"They'll be badly damaged, of course," Darnow admitted. "But there
should be a vast number of relics. I could study here for years--"
"We haven't got years, we've got only a few months before this planet
gets too close to the Sun," said Kellon. And he added mentally, "Thank
God."
* * * * *
The ship went into its landing-pattern. Atmosphere whined outside its
hull and then thick gray clouds boiled and raced around it. It went
down through the cloud layer and moved above a dull brown landscape
that had flecks of white in its deeper valleys. Far ahead there was the
glint of a gray ocean. But the ship came down toward a rolling brown
plain and settled there, and then there was the expected thunderclap of
silence that always followed the shutting off of all machinery.
Kellon looked at Riney, who turned in a moment from the test-panel
with a slight surprise on his face. "Pressure, oxygen, humidity,
everything--all optimum." And then he said, "But of course. This place
_was_ optimum."
Kellon nodded. He said, "Doctor Darnow and I will have a look out
first. Viresson, you keep our passengers in."
When he and Darnow went to the lower airlock he heard a buzzing clamor
from the main cabin and he judged that Viresson was having his hands
full. The people in there were not used to being said no to, and he
could imagine their resentment.
Cold, damp air struck a chill in Kellon when they stepped down out
of the airlock. They stood on muddy, gravelly ground that squashed
a little under their boots as they trudged away from the ship. They
stopped and looked around, shivering.
Under the low gray cloudy sky there stretched a sad, sunless brown
landscape. Nothing broke the drab color of raw soil, except the
shards of ice still lingering in low places. A heavy desultory wind
stirred the raw air, and then was still. There was not a sound except
the clinkclinking of the ship's skin cooling and contracting, behind
them. Kellon thought that no amount of sentimentality could make this
anything but a dreary world.
But Darnow's eyes were shining. "We'll have to make every minute of the
time count," he muttered. "Every minute."
Within two hours, the heavy broadcast equipment was being trundled
away from the ship on two motor-tracs that headed eastward. On one
of the tracs rode Lorri Lee, resplendent in lilac-colored costume of
synthesilk.
Kellon, worried about the possibility of quicksands, went along for
that first broadcast from the cliffs that looked down on the ruins of
New York. He wished he hadn't, when it got under way.
For Lorri Lee, her blonde head bright even in the dull light, turned
loose all her practised charming gestures for the broadcast cameras, as
she gestured with pretty excitement down toward the ruins.
"It's so _unbelievable_!" she cried to a thousand worlds. "To be here
on Earth, to see the old places again--it _does_ something to you!"
It did something to Kellon. It made him feel sick at his stomach. He
turned and went back to the ship, feeling at that moment that if Lorri
Lee went into a quicksand on the way back, it would be no great loss.
* * * * *
But that first day was only the beginning. The big ship quickly became
the center of multifarious and continuous broadcasts. It had been
especially equipped to beam strongly to the nearest station in the
Federation network, and its transmitters were seldom quiet.
Kellon found that Darnow, who was supposed to coordinate all this
programming, was completely useless. The little historian was living
in a seventh heaven on this old planet which had been uncovered to
view for the first time in millennia, and he was away most of the time
on field trips of his own. It fell to his assistant, an earnest and
worried and harassed young man, to try to reconcile the clashing claims
and demands of the highly temperamental broadcasting stars.
Kellon felt an increasing boredom at having to stand around while all
this tosh went out over the ether. These people were having a field-day
but he didn't think much of them and of their broadcasts. Roy Quayle,
the young male fashion designer, put on a semi-humorous, semi-nostalgic
display of the old Earth fashions, with the prettier girls wearing
some of the ridiculous old costumes he had had duplicated. Barden, the
famous teleplay producer, ran off ancient films of the old Earth dramas
that had everyone in stitches. Jay Maxson, a rising politician in
Federation Congress, discussed with Borrodale the governmental systems
of the old days, in a way calculated to give his own Wide-Galaxy Party
none the worst of it. The Arcturus Players, that brilliant group of
young stage-folk, did readings of old Earth dramas and poems.
It was, Kellon thought disgustedly, just playing. Grown people, famous
people, seizing the opportunity given by the accidental end of a
forgotten planet to posture in the spotlight like smart-aleck children.
There was real work to do in the galaxy, the work of the Survey, the
endless and wearying but always-fascinating job of charting the wild
systems and worlds. And instead of doing that job, he was condemned to
spend weeks and months here with these phonies.
The scientists and historians he respected. They did few broadcasts
and they did not fake their interest. It was one of them, Haller, the
biologist, who excitedly showed Kellon a handful of damp soil a week
after their arrival.
* * * * *
"Look at _that_!" he said proudly.