Voyage From Yesteryear

Jay,

I thought you might need a hand with these so I did them last night. If my hunch is right, things have probably gotten a bit difficult for you. There’s no sense in upsetting people who don’t mean any harm. Take it from me, he’s not such a bad guy.

STEVE

Jay blinked and looked up to find Pernak watching him curiously. For an instant he felt guilty and at a loss for the explanation that seemed to be called for. “Bernard told me about it,” Pernak said before Jay could offer anything. “I guess he’s under a lot of pressure right now, so don’t read too much into it.” He stared at the box in Jay’s hand.’ “I don’t see anything–not a damn thing. Come on, Jay. Let’s take a look at that loco of yours.”

CHAPTER FIVE

CHIRON WAS ALMOST nine thousand miles in diameter, but

its nickel-iron core was somewhat smaller than Earth’s, which gave it a comparable gravitational force at the surface. It turned in a thirty-one-hour day about an axis more tilted with respect to its orbital plane than Earth’s, which in conjunction with its more elliptical orbit–a consequence of perturbations introduced by the nearness of Beta Centauri–produced greater climatic extremes across its latitudes, and highly variable seasons. Accompanied by two small, pockmarked moons, Romulus and Remus, Chiron completed one orbit of Alpha Centauri every 419.66 days.

Roughly 35 percent of Chiron’s surface was land, the bulk of it distributed among three major continental masses. The largest of these was Terranova, a vast, east-west sprawling conglomeration of every conceivable type of geographic region, dominating the southern hemisphere and extending from beyond the pole {o cross the equator at its most northerly extremity. Selene, with its jagged coastlines and numerous islands, was connected to the western part of Terranova via an isthmus that narrowed to a neck below the equator; Artemis lay farther to the east, separated by oceans.

Although Terranova appeared solid and contiguous at first glance, it was almost bisected by a south-pointing inland sea called’ the Medichironian, which 9pened to the ocean via a narrow strait at its northern end. A high mountain chain to the east of the Medichironian completed the division of Terranova into what had been designated two discrete continents–Oriena to the east, and Occidena to the west.

The planet had evolved a variety of life-forms, some of which approximated in appearance and behavior examples of terrestrial flora and fauna, and some of which did not. Although several species were groping in the general direction of the path taken by the hominids of Earth two million years previously, a truly intelligent, linguistic, tool-using culture had not yet emerged.

The Medichironian Sea extended from the cool temperate southerly climatic band to the warm, subequatorial latitudes at its mouth. Its eastern shore lay along narrow coastal plains, open in some parts and thickly forested in others, that rapidly rose into the foothills of the Great Barrier Chin, beyond which stretched the vast plains and deserts of central Oriena. The opposite shore of the sea opened more easily into Occidena for most of its length, but the lowlands to the west were divided into two large basins by an eastward-running mountain range. An extension of this range projected into t. he sea as a rocky spine of fold valleys fringed by picturesque green plains, sandy bays, and rugged headlands, and was knows as the Mandel Peninsula, after a well-known statesman of the 2010s. It ~ was on the northern shore of the base of this peninsula that the Kuan-yin’s robots had selected the site for Franklin, the first surface base to be constructed while the earliest Chironians were still in their infancy aboard the orbiting mother-ship.

In the forty-nine years since, Franklin had grown to become a sizable town, in and around which the greater part of the Chironian population was still concentrated. Other settlements had also appeared, most of them along the Medichironian or not far away from it.

Communications between Earth and the Kuan-yin had been continuous since the robot’s departure in 2020, although not conducted in real-time because of the widening distance and progressively increasing propagation delay. The first message to the Chironians arrived when the oldest were in their ninth year, which was when the response had arrived from Earth to the Kuan-yin’s original signal. Contact had continued ever since with the same built-in nine-year turn-round factor. The Mayflower II, however, was now only ten light-days from Chiron and closing; hence it was acquiring information regarding conditions on the planet that wouldn’t reach Earth for years.

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