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“Reactor to power,” he ordered as he applied the first few control movements. Superimposed on the view of their landing site was a graph showing velocity versus altitude. Dan worked at keeping the small ship icon centered between lines representing the maximum tolerance of their approach curve.

“Ten kilometers,” the sensor operator announced. The warning was delivered in that quiet, matter-of-fact tone that denotes periods of high tension aboard ships in space. He acknowledged the report and kept his attention on the small, descending blip on his screen. So far, everything was nominal.

“One kilometer.”

“Right. Comm officer, final landing warning!”

The all hands announcement echoed through the
Whale
’s makeshift habitat volume. All over the ship, people began holding their breath. Dan made a conscious effort not to do likewise. The landing curve called for faster deceleration now and he sank into his couch as he adjusted the controls. The
Whale
slowed, then stopped, hovering ten meters above its assigned landing pad. Dan checked their alignment visually, and then reduced power to the drive field. Slowly, the
Whale
began to sink toward the surface.

There was a small swirl of dust as the field intersected the surface, then a gentle shock as they contacted the lunar soil.

Despite the one-sixth gravity, the ship groaned audibly on touchdown.

“Cut power, Engineer.”

“Cutting power now, Captain.” Laura Dresser responded.

“Comm. Have all crew prepare for debarkation. We are home, people!”

#

Mikhail Vasloff stared out his office window at the old houses that lined the opposite bank of the Prinsen Canal.
Terra Nostra
maintained its headquarters in the old section of Amsterdam despite the usurious rental rates commanded by the old canal houses. The benefits that accrued from the address on the organization’s letterhead more than offset the cost.

It was a typical cloudy day in Amsterdam, with an occasional electro cyclist gliding silently down the narrow street on the opposite bank. The city fathers were talking about outlawing the modern contraptions, forcing a return to the more picturesque foot pedal bicycle in an effort to spark tourism.

Vasloff noted that there was no corresponding suggestion that the city bring back the smelly gasoline powered canal boats of two centuries past. Even quaintness had its limits.

Old Amsterdam’s administrative problems were not his concern, of course. He had bigger things to worry about. One of these was the mysterious research program that Mark Rykand had brought to his attention. His initial inquiries into what the Stellar Survey was doing aboard PoleStar had been tentative at best. Gradually, over a span of many weeks, he had begun to gain insight. For reasons that no one seemed able to explain, there was a giant research project being assembled in orbit amid secrecy to rival that of the legendary Manhattan Project. The comparison was an apt one in Vasloff’s mind. Classified research, secret projects, and the mysterious disappearance of some of the planet’s best brains - these were the things of historical fiction, of the days when men fought and died amid the mud and blood of war. The implications of such a project in the modern day were too frightening to contemplate. The very existence of the PoleStar project meant that someone had a secret too terrible to tell, and worse, that he did not know what it was!

Frowning, he turned from his window and pressed the control inset into his eighteenth century desk. A minute later, the door to his office opened to reveal the narrow staircase that led down to the lower levels and up to the attic. At the door was Claris Beaufort, his assistant, with her own office visible behind her.

“Come in and sit down,” he ordered gruffly, not bothering to use the orator’s voice that so impressed important visitors. “What’s the latest on the PoleStar investigation?”

Claris sat and wrinkled her face. “Same as last week, I am afraid. Lots of data, but nothing conclusive.

The search programs are running up quite a bill. Perhaps we should curtail them.”

“No. Any more news about Mark Rykand?”

Her blonde hair momentarily covered her face as she shook her head. “I talked to Moira Sims two days ago. She has not heard anything since that short message telling her that he was staying aboard PoleStar.

She is getting worried.”

“What have you learned this week?”

She sat and flipped open the thin binder that she carried constantly. A moment later, her face glowed with the reflected light from a computer screen.

“You were right about how useful Salli Rheinhardt would be in this. She gave us the data code off the last letter her husband sent her from PoleStar. We got one of our people in the Postal Union to put a monitoring program on it and have now intercepted nearly two hundred personal letters from scientists aboard the station. We cannot read them, of course, but we now have their identities pretty well locked down. We have fleshed out the organization chart considerably. Care to see it?”

“Later. Just a summary for now.”

She shrugged. “They have a lot of exobiologists and other life science people, as well as a smattering from the physical sciences. About what you would expect if they were investigating a loose extraterrestrial disease.”

“Or merely handling sample overflow from High Station, which is probably what they will say if we reveal this project to the press.”

“True,” Claris replied. “The personnel lists have some oddities about them.”

“Such as?”

“There’s Mark Rykand of course. He is the same genotype as his sister. Perhaps they need him for a guinea pig to figure out what killed her.”

“In that case, they will be pulling in relatives of the other victims. Are they?”

“Don’t know, boss.”

“Well, check.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What other oddities?”

“Here’s one that has me stumped,” Claris said, gesturing at her screen. “One of the first scholars to go aboard was Lisabette Arden, out of the Multiversity of London. She is not even a scientist. She is a linguist.”

“A linguist? Now what would they need with a --?” Vasloff had been listening while leaning back in his power chair with his fingertips steepled in front of him. At the sudden thought, he sat bolt upright, moving fast enough to elicit a whine from the chair mechanism. A moment later, Claris was treated to the sight of her imperturbable superior swearing hotly in Russian.

“What is it?” she asked, worried.

“Think, Claris! What kind of a project would be of interest to both exobiologists
and
a linguist?”

“I don’t know. What kind?”

He told her in short, pungent syllables. After half a dozen words, her own eyes opened wide in horror. It made sense! At least, it fit everything they knew now.

Was it possible? Would they dare keep such a secret from the media and the people? If so, what else would they dare?

Al-Hoceima was a small city surrounding a massive resort hotel that rose above the Mediterranean’s southern shore like a granite cliff. Built nearly a century previous during the heyday of the Great Sahara Reclamation Project, the resort had originally been designed as a rest and relaxation facility for the highly paid foreign workers who had been the backbone of the project.

The reclamation project had been one of the largest and most ambitious ever undertaken, rivaling even the early space program in the resources committed. A dozen pipelines, each with a flow capacity nearly equal to that of the Nile, had snaked north from the rain-saturated interior highlands toward the great desert. Once they reached the wastelands, the pipes branched many times as they delivered their precious fluid to thousands of artificial oases. The plan called for these islands of green to be the nuclei from which life would spread until it covered the whole of the Sahara. The plan had been bold and grand, but had not considered that the desert might not be as easily tamed as human hubris allowed.

For fifty years, sweating workers by the thousands had labored to make the reclamation project a success, and for a time, they had. However, keeping the sand at bay was an eternal job, and humans are not built for eternity. Eventually the world tired of the never-ending battle and found other projects with greater claim on humanity’s limited resources. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the desert returned to overwhelm the oases and pumping stations. Pipes ruptured and were judged too expensive or difficult to repair. Pumps wore out and were never rebuilt. People moved on to other jobs and were not replaced.

Over time, the great arterial network fell into disuse. Shortly thereafter, large gaps would appear in long stretches of pipe as the nomads who still roamed the desert found them a ready source of metal. Other places, the snaking lines lay unrusting in the hot, dry desert climate. Only in a few spots was there any trace left of the vast effort and even there the sand was working at reclaiming its own.

For the past few decades, the Al-Hoceima resort had scraped along on local tourism and those who could not afford the prices charged on the Mediterranean’s northern shore. Thus, the resort had been receptive to an offer from the Stellar Survey to host a conference on the dynamics of stellar evolution.

Their financial situation was such that they had not even objected to the strange restrictions that the survey had insisted on placing on the resort staff.

Raoul Bendagar, Professor Rheinhardt, Lisa Arden, and Mark Rykand arrived from Tangier in a dilapidated flying bus whose mismatched compressors produced an irritating three cycles-per-second harmonic beat. The vehicle’s air conditioning worked, however, a fact made evident as they exited its interior into a furnace blast of heat. They hurried across a cobblestone courtyard toward the eye-searing white facade of the resort, only to find themselves blinded as they passed into the gloom within. An efficient young woman liveried in the uniform of Survey Security met them just inside the door. She ushered them straight past the usual registration desk and into an alcove where they were each asked for their identification papers before being subjected to retina scans.

“Welcome to Al-Hoceima, ladies and gentlemen,” Aretha Higgins said after the computers had confirmed their identities. “I trust that you aren’t too fatigued from your journey.”

“Being on Earth again is good enough to cure any minor ills I might have,” Dr. Bendagar answered.

“What is the conference schedule?”

“The first session begins tomorrow in the main ballroom, Doctor. You will brief the delegates at 09:00, after which the working groups will go to their various conference rooms and begin their work. Lunch will be at 12:00 and dinner at 18:00. Most have agreed to dress for dinner.”

“What about --?” Bendagar asked, jerking his thumb toward where several members of the hotel staff lounged on the opposite side of the lobby.

Miss Higgins smiled. “They will be kept out of the main hall beginning at dawn tomorrow. We will sweep for electronic listening devices every hour and, of course, we have full antieavesdropping measures in effect now. You scientists will be able to speak your minds without fear of being overheard.”

“What do we do when we aren’t attending conferences?” Lisa asked.

“There are swimming, scuba diving, and tours of one of the local villages. In addition, parties of two or more can catch the ferry over to Spain for a day of shopping if that is your desire. The hotel has also agreed to open the casino each night after dinner, including a floorshow that is considered good by local standards. It is not San Moritz, but it is the best we could do on short notice. Now, if none of you have any more questions, we will have Achmed and his people show you to your rooms.”

#

Raoul Bendagar presented his paper on the Sky Flower Nebula to the Astronomy Working Group on the third day of the “Conference on Stellar Evolution.” There was also a Biology Working Group, a Psychiatric Evaluation Group, and even a Technology Assessment Working Group. The latter was slated to depart for Luna to begin studies of the alien derelict. The small audience of specialists listened quietly as Dr. Bendagar pointed out the similarities between the Sky Flower and Crab Nebulas. When he had finished his presentation and the lights came up in the conference room, a small, dark professor of astrophysics from the Sorbonne stood and signaled for attention.

“Dr. Parmentier?”

“I think you have been conned by this pseudo-simian liar, Raoul.”

“Come now, Saul, don’t hold back. Tell us what you really think!”

The joke provoked more laughter than it deserved from the assembled scientists.

“Mock me if you will, but you will never convince me that you can identify a nebula just because some monkey drew a picture that purports to show it seven millennia hence.”

“You have seen our simulations of the Crab’s expansion patterns. They match Sar-Say’s artwork reasonably well.”

“So do half the planetary nebulas in the general catalog. We cannot very well recommend an expedition on the strength of someone’s doodling. Now if he’d taken precise measurements of the pulsar’s rotation rate as viewed from this Zzumer, then we’d have something to sink our teeth into.”

“Sar-Say was a tourist, Saul. How many tourists do you know who carry a timing synchroscope in their luggage?”

“He should have showed more foresight,” the dissenting astronomer replied. There were mutters within the crowd to show that others agreed with him.

Mark Rykand watched his boss handle the heckler with a mixture of irritation and admiration. The irritation came from the fact that he had worked half the night preparing this morning’s presentation. To have its conclusions dismissed so cavalierly was difficult to take. The admiration came from Bendagar’s aplomb at fielding the objection.

Due to a shortage of chairs, Mark had watched the presentation while leaning against the wall at the back of the room. Halfway through the talk, his feet had begun to hurt and he had rested them by periodically shifting his weight. He was not the only one having trouble adjusting to gravity. Dr. Bendagar spent most of his time soaking in the resort pool when he was not attending to conference business.