Somebody whistled. “That’s right, 115 light-years. Expensive proposition. Bellcomm offered to match funds, but we haggled and . . . they wound up paying ninety percent.
“Well, it seemed reasonable. No way we could colonize a planet that far away. Besides, it’s a B5 star, not likely to have anything interesting.
“The Bellcomm people, Drs. Wiley and Eisberg, had been mapping gravity waves. They caught a strong pulse from Achernar. Looking back over the records, they found similar pulses occurring for over twenty years, at irregular intervals.
“You’re all familiar with the normal mechanisms that produce gravity waves. There’s nothing about Achernar that suggests it could be a source. So they wanted to go take a look.
“We tapped Shirley O’Brien’s team for this, a thirty-minute jump. Outfitted them as we would a normal trailbreaker assignment, plus some gadgets the Bellcomm people gave them. This is what came back.”
The auditorium lights dimmed and the podium and Riley disappeared, replaced by an image of the LMT chamber. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then half a GPEM suit appeared. It toppled over and spilled. Collective gasp of anguish.
The lights returned; Riley was wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “All right, it’s not very pretty. But it’s the chance we all take, every time we step on to that crystal.
“That’s what we thought it was, just a horrible slingshot accident. Evidently O’Brien had gotten separated from her team, and had the black box off-center when return time came up. How they could manage to get separated on a thirty-minute jump we didn’t know.
“Her personnel recorder was intact, though, and she was carrying an automatic holo camera for Bellcomm. So we could find out what happened.”
He paused and shook his head. “I won’t keep you in suspense,” he said quietly. “What they found was an anomalous Earthlike planet. An inhabited planet.
“Quiet, please. The people, the creatures, on this planet were evidently not indigenous. They seemed also to be an exploration team. And they found O’Brien, not vice versa.
“They landed on nightside and waited for their floater.” Riley nodded at the projectionist.
The Tamers were standing in a broad savannah in dim blue moonlight. There were dark mountains on the horizon, and large single trees every couple of hundred meters. They were talking excitedly. O’Brien had just relayed the information that the planet had a terrestrial atmosphere.
They were taking soil and plant samples when the floater came. They started to get on board; race to where Achernar was visible before their half hour ran out.
Then another floater landed.
It was a round platform enclosed by a railing, inside a semitransparent dome. The dome disappeared when it touched the ground.
There were four human beings on the platform; two very female and two very male, wearing nothing but dark tan skin and silver belts. They were beautiful.
They hopped lightly out of their floater and approached O’Brien’s team. The woman leading them raised her right hand in a gesture that seemed to mean “wait.” Or perhaps a sign of peaceful intent. Then the sky fell.
Between them and the mountains a huge black mass settled noiselessly. In the dim light, no details were visible, only a slender ellipsoid about three kilometers long by a half kilometer wide. A spaceship.
O’Brien had found her voice. “Don’t do anything that might seem aggressive. We must look pretty fearsome in the suits.”
A seam opened in the front of the ship and warm yellow light poured out. The woman beckoned them toward the light.
“Should we go with her?” one of the crew said.
“It-I don’t know,” O’Brien said. “Yes. But everybody stay close to me. We jump in twenty-one minutes.”
She led them to a ramp that had slid out of the opening in the ship. The Tamers waited while the aliens went up the ramp, which had no apparent moving part but acted like a conveyor belt, and then followed them up.
The ramp was at one end of a corridor that appeared to extend the full length of the ship. Its walls were a seamless, glassy substance that radiated a uniform, soft yellow light.
When the last of them stepped off the ramp, the floor closed behind him. Then there was a hollow “boom,” perhaps the ramp sliding back into place.