The Fifty Worlds held enormous diversity. Peron knew that. They were of all sizes, shapes, orbits, and environments. No two seemed even remotely alike, not even the twins of the doublet planet of Sambella. And most of them fit poorly anyone's idea of a desirable place to visit, still less as the site for another trial.
And as for Whirlygig . . .
Peron was approaching it now. He had to land there. Of all of the worlds, he thought gloomily, this one has to be the most alien and baffling.
In the past two months the Planetfest winners had orbited over a dozen worlds. The planets ranged from depressing to unspeakable. Barchan was a baking, swirling dust-ball, its surface forever invisible behind a scouring screen of wind-borne particles. They were held aloft by a thin, poisonous atmosphere. Gilby had warned them that Barchan would be a terrible choice for a trial (but he had said that about most places!). The dust and sand found its way into everythingincluding a ship's controls. There was a good chance that a landing on Barchan might be final.
Gimperstand was no better. The contestants had voted not even to look at it, after one of the ship's crew had produced a sample bottle of sap from Stinker's juicy vines. The bottle had been opened for less than two minutes. A full day later the air through the whole ship still tasted like rotting corpses. Air purifier units didn't even touch it.
From a distance, Glug had looked pretty good. The ship's telescopes and scanners showed a green, fertile world, ninety percent cloud covered. They had actually made a field trip down there, and spent a couple of hours squelching and sticking on the viscous surface. A steady gray rain drifted endlessly down from an ash-dark sky, and the sodden fronds of vegetation all drooped mournfully to touch the gluey soil. Once a boot had been placed firmly, the planet acted as though reluctant ever to release it. It clung lovingly. Walking was a pained sequence of sucking, glutinous steps, dragging the foot upward inch by inch until it came free with a disgusting gurgle. As Wilmer had put it, once you had pulled your boot out you never wanted to put it back againexcept that your other boot was steadily sinking in deeper.
Glug was revolting, but Peron thought it would still make the final list. Sy had even voted to make it his first choice. Maybe his complex thought processes had discovered something about Glug that could be turned to his advantage. Lum had pointed it out long ago to Peron and Kallen: Sy did not need an edge over others to win; all he needed was a situation that cancelled the handicap of his withered arm. Given that, he would wipe the floor with all of them.
Some of the others had also cast a tentative vote in favor of Glug; for by the time the contestants went there they had already visited some choice specimens:
Boom-Boomconstant volcanic activity and earthquakes; an ambient noise level that seemed to shatter eardrums; foul, sulphurous air and treacherous terrain, where fragile crusts of solidified lava stood above molten slag.
Firedanceonly microscopic animal life, and at any time one sixth of the vegetation that covered the whole world was a smoldering, charred mass: the rest was bone dry and ready to spring to blazing life after any random lightning stroke; ribbons of flame danced and crackled their twisting paths along the surface, changing direction unpredictably and moving far faster than a running human.
Fuzzballevery living thing, every plant or animal that lived under or on the surface, or in the salty seas of Fuzzball, served as a host to a single species of fungal growth; evolutionary adaptation appeared complete, so that the fungus did no harm; but its white, hair-fine tendrils sprouted from every inch of skin, and every animal's ears and nostrils carried their own harvest of delicate, trailing fronds; the prospect had been too much for the contestants, even though Gilby assured them that the fungus could be removed from them completely after leaving the planet. Fuzzball had received zero votes.
Goneagain sounded tolerable; but that little world had been ruled out by simple geometry. Its orbit was wildly eccentric, carrying it tens of billions of kilometers away from Cassay and Cassby. It would not return to the Inner System for another three thousand years.
And then there was Whirlygig. Peron peered ahead through the faceplate of his suit. Three hours to go, then he would be landing therewithout a ship. Later (if all went according to plan) he would leave in the same way. Meanwhile, there was not a thing to be done until the moment of grazing impact was reached. Peronnot for the first timewondered about his velocity calculation. He had checked it ten times, but if he were off by a few meters a second . . .
He resolutely turned his mind to their earlier travels, and struggled to put Whirlygig out of his thoughts for the next three hours.
There were plenty of other things to think about. For the first two weeks of the journey away from Pentecost, privacy had been impossible for all of them. The shuttle vessel was impressively big, but with thirty people squeezed into a space intended for three crew and cargo, the contestants had been shoulder to shoulder. Not until transfer to the big Inter-System ship, after a short visit to Little Moon, did they have room to spare. And at last Peron had been able to compare notes with the others.
By careful cross-checking that had taken them several days, Lum and Kallen had accounted for all the winners. Wilmer was the only bogus contestant. They had also confirmed Peron's first impression: no one had been with Wilmer in any trial, and he had been suspiciously fresh after all of them. But the reason for his presence among them? No ideas from anyone. And to add to the mystery, Wilmer certainly had been with them on all the activities since they lifted off from Pentecostwhich had sometimes been dangerous, as well as unpleasant.
Wilmer's innocent request to Gilby that they be allowed to visit The Ship, along with Gilby's answer, had registered on both Peron and Elissa. Someone wanted the winners to know that The Ship was off-limits. But again, what did it mean? How was it connected with the fact that some previous winners of the Planetfest games had not returned to Pentecost?
Peron had bounced the questions off Sy, when they had a few minutes of privacy in the Inter-System ship. Sy had stood motionless, his eyes aloof.
"I don't know why The Ship is off-limits," he said at last. "But I agree with you that Gilby was prompted to tell us that. Let me tell you of a bigger mystery. After the off-planet trials the Immortals will supposedly appear. We are told that they will come from the stars, after a journey that will take just a few days. Do you believe that?"
"I don't know." It was one of Peron's own worries. "If it is possible to travel faster than light, our theories of the nature of the universe must be wrong."
"That is possible," said Sy slowlywith a tone of voice that said clearly, that is quite impossible. "But don't you see the problem? If the Immortals can exceed light-speed, they must have improved on our theories. And if they are so friendly to us, why do they keep that better theory from us?"
Peron had shaken his head. Anything about the Immortals remained a mystery.
"It is my personal belief that nothing can exceed light-speed," said Sy at last. "I will mistrust anyone, Government or Immortal, man or woman, human or alien, who attempts to tell me otherwise without providing convincing evidence."
And he had moved quietly away, leaving Peron more puzzled than ever. Conversation with Sy often left that unsettling feeling. Lum had explained it in his offhand waySy was just a whole lot smarter than the rest of them. And Elissa had thrown in her own evaluation: Sy was not smarter, not if that meant either memory or speed of thought; but he could somehow see problems from a different angle from everyone else, almost as though he were located at a different point in space. His perspective was different, and so his answers were always surprising.
And if he weren't so strange, she had then added irrelevantly to Peron, he would be really attractive; which had of course irritated Peron greatly.
His thoughts moved inevitably back to Elissa and their last night on Pentecost. While Lum and Kallen had been working conscientiously to screen contestants, Peron had been subjected to a pleasant but intense cross-examination. He and Elissa had found a quiet place in the Planetfest gardens. They stretched out on the soft ground cover and stared up at the stars, and Elissa must have asked him a thousand questions. Did he have brothers and sisters? What was his family like? Were they rich? (Peron had laughed at the idea that his father could ever be rich.) What were his hobbies? His favorite foods? Did he have any pets back home? Had he ever been on a ship, across one of Pentecost's saltwater seas. What was his birthdate? Do you have a girl friend, back in Turcanta?
No, Peron had said promptly. But then his conscience had troubled him, and he told Elissa the truth. He and Sabrina had been very close for two years, until he had to devote all his time to preparation for the trials. Then she had found someone else.
Elissa didn't bother to disguise her satisfaction. She had quietly taken hold of Peron and begun to make love to him.
"I told you I was pushy," she said. "And you were acting as though you'd never get round to it. Come onunless you don't want me? I've wanted to do thisand especially thisever since I met you on the forest trial, back in Villasylvia."
They had done things together that Peron had never imaginedand he used to think that he and Sabrina had tried everything. Lovemaking with Elissa added a whole new dimension. They had stayed together through the night, while the fireworks of Planetfest celebrations fountained and burst above them. And by morning they seemed infinitely close, like two people who had been lovers for many months.
But that, thought Peron unhappily, made Elissa's comment about Sy much harder to take. If she thought Sy was attractivehadn't she said very attractive?did that mean she thought Sy was more interesting than he was? He remembered the last evening on Pentecost as fabulous, but maybe she didn't feel the same way. Except that everything since then suggested that she did feel that way, and why would she lie to him?
Peron's suit gave a gentle whistle, bringing him back from his dreaming. He felt irritated with his own train of thought. No denying it, he was feeling jealous. It was exactly the kind of mindless romantic mushiness that he despised, the sort of thing for which he had so teased Miria, his younger sister.
He looked straight ahead. No time for dreaming now. Here came Whirlygig, to teach him a lesson in straight thinking. He was within a couple of kilometers of the surface, travelling almost parallel to it but closing too fast for comfort.
Seen through a telescope, Whirlygig was not an interesting object. It was a polished silver ball about two thousand kilometers across, slightly oblate and roughened at the equator. Its high density gave a surface gravity at the poles of a fifth of a gee, a bit more than Earth's Moon. A person in a spacesuit, freefalling straight down to the surface of Whirlygig, would hit at a speed of two kilometers a secondfast enough that the object in the suit afterwards would hardly be recognizable as human.
But that was true for a fall toward any planet in the system, and people did not attempt landings on objects of planetary size without a ship; and the composition of Whirlygig was of no particular interest. The planet had been ignored for a long time, until finally some astronomer took the trouble to examine its rotation rate.
Then interest grew rapidly. Whirlygig was unique. What made it so had happened recently, as geological time is measured. A mere hundred thousand years ago a close planetary encounter had transferred to the body an anomalously high angular momentum. After that event Whirlygig was left spinning madly on its axis, completing a full rotation in only seventy-three minutes. And at that speed, centripetal acceleration on the equator just matched gravitational force. A ship flying in a trajectory that grazed Whirlygig's surface, moving at 1,400 meters per second at closest approach, could soft-land on the planetoid with no impact at all; and a human in a suit, with only the slightest assistance of suit steering jets, could do the same.
But theory and practice, thought Peron, were a long way apart. It was one thing to sit and discuss the problem on the Inter-System ship with the other contestants, and quite another to be racing in toward Whirlygig on a tangential trajectory.
They had drawn lots to see who would be first contestant down. Peron had "won"Gilby's term, delivered with a sadistic smile. The others, following in pairs, would face a far easier task because of Peron's actions of the next few minutes. If he arrived in one piece.
He wondered what they would do if he didn't land safelywould they nominate someone else to try again? Or would they abandon the whole idea, and move on to another planet? A contestant in theory had just one shot at the trials (Kallen was a rare exception). But death was an earnest contender in every Planetfest games. The deaths of contestants were never mentioned by the Government, and never given one word of publicity in the controlled news media; but everyone who entered the trials knew the truth. Not everyone went home a winner, or even a loser. Some contestants went forever into the shimmering heat of Talimantor Desert, or to a blood-lapped nightdeath in the woods of Villasylvia, or to a frozen tomb in the eternal snows of Capandor Mountains; or (Peron's own secret fear) to a slow asphyxiation in the underwater caverns of Charant River.
He shivered, and peered ahead. Those dangers were past, but death had not been left behind on Pentecost. He would visit Peron just as readily on Whirlygig. The equipment that Peron was hauling along behind him had seemed small when he left the ship, but now four hundred kilos of lines, springs, and pitons felt like a mountain, trailing half a kilometer directly behind him. Uncontrolled, they would envelop him on landing.
The surface felt so close that it seemed he could reach out a suited arm and touch it. He made small attitude adjustments with the suit jets. His velocity was just right for a stable orbit about Whirlygig at surface level. He turned his suit to land feetfirst, and touched, gently as a kiss.
He had landed softly, but at once there was a complication. He found he was at the center of a blinding cloud of dust, pebbles, and rock fragments. Effective gravity here on Whirlygig's equator was near to zero, and the shower of rock and sand was in no hurry to settle or disperse. Working purely by touch, Peron took one of the two pitons he was carrying, placed it vertically on the surface, and primed the charge. His hands were shaking in the gloves. Must be quick. Only thirty seconds left to secure a firm hold. Then he would have to be ready for the equipment.
The explosive charge in the top end of the piton exploded, driving the sharp point deep into the planet's surface. Peron tugged it briefly, made sure it was secure, then for double safety primed and set off the second piton. He braced two loops on his suit around the pitons, and looked back toward the moving bundles of equipment.
It seemed impossible. The equipment was still a couple of hundred meters away. The whole landing operationminutes according to his mental clockmust have been completed in just a few seconds. He had time to examine the bundle of equipment closely, and decide just where he would secure it.
It swung in toward him, drifting down to the surface. The velocity match had been exact. It was less than five minutes work to place another array of pitons in a parabolic curve along the surface, and set up catapult cables to run around the array. The final web of cables and springs looked fragile, but it would hold and secure anything with less than three hundred meters a second of relative velocity.
Peron made one last examination of his work, then activated the suit phone.
"All set." He hoped his voice was as casual as he would have liked it to be. "Come on in anytime. The catapult is in position."
He took a deep breath. Halfway. When they had explored the surface as a group, the catapult would be used to launch all the others away from Whirlygig; and Peron would be alone again. Then he would make a powered ascent (with fingers crossed) to the safety of the waiting ship.