It's a beautiful world, Lyrane is. Like Earth must have been before
it got cluttered up with people. No cities, no smoke, no industrial
complexes--just green plains, snowy mountains, dark forests, blue seas,
and white polar caps all wrapped in cotton clouds swimming in the
clearest atmosphere you ever saw. It made my eyes ache to look at it.
And it affected the crew the same way.
We were wild to land. We came straight in along the equatorial plane
until we hit the Van Allen Belt and the automatics took over. We
stopped dead, matched intrinsics and skirted the outer band, checking
the radiation quality and the shape of the Belt. It was a pure band
that dipped down at the poles to form entry zones. There was not a sign
of bulges or industrial contaminants.
Naturally we had everything trained on the planet while we made our
sweeps--organic detectors, radar, spectroanalytic probes--all the
gadgets the BEE equips us with to make analysis easy and complete. The
readings were so homelike that every man was landsick. I wasn't any
different from the rest of them, but I was in command and I had to be
cautious about setting the _Two Two Four_ down until we'd really wrung
the analytic data dry.
So, while the crew grumbled about hanging outside on a skyhook, we kept
swinging around in a polar orbit until we knew that world below us like
a baby knows its mother. It checked clean to five decimal places, which
is the limit of our gadgetry. Paradise, that's what it was--a paradise
untrod by human foot. And every foot on the ship was itching.
"When we gonna land, Skipper?" Alex Baranov asked me. It was a gross
breach of discipline, but I forgave him. Alex was the second engineer,
an eager kid on his first flight out from Earth. Like most youngsters,
he thought there was romance in space, but right now he was landsick.
Even worse than most of us. And, like most kids, he'd leap where
angels'd dread to walk on tiptoe.
"We'll land," I assured him. "You'll be down there pretty soon."
He hurried off to tell the others.
We set the ship down in the middle of one of the continental land
masses in an open plain surrounded by forest and ran a few more tests
before we stepped out, planted the flag, and claimed the place for the
Confederation. After that we had an impromptu celebration to thoroughly
enjoy the solid feel of ground under our feet and open sky overhead. It
lasted all of five minutes before we came to our senses and posted a
guard.
It was five minutes too long. Alex Baranov had a chance to get out of
sight and go exploring, and, like a kid, he took it. We didn't miss him
for nearly ten minutes more, and in fifteen minutes a man can cover
quite a bit of territory.
"Anyone see where he went?" I asked.
"He was wearing a menticom," one of the crew offered. "Said he wanted
to look around."
"The idiot!" I snapped. "He had no business going off like that."
"Nobody told him not to," Dan Warren said. Dan was my executive
officer, and a good hand in case of trouble, but he left the command
decisions to me, and of course I figured that everybody knew the
cardinal rule of first landings. The net result was that Alex had
disappeared.