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and headed for
Balshazzar. The rest of that ship continued on, on a trajectory to strike and
bury itself deep into the great gas giant, a rather minor splinter in Moby
Dick s backside.
 Did they get down okay? Woodward asked, feeling guilty that he almost hoped
that the answer would be no.
 Yes, sir. At least, no explosion, no major impact in the area they would have
gone down. Every bit of evidence says that if anybody was in that lifeboat
they re on the surface.
He sighed.  Then the choice for us is the same, I suppose. Balshazzar,
Captain.
Now let s see what s so mysterious and special about these three damned moons!
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XIII: EAST OF EDEN
 You know, Eve said to John,  when we were living in that farm village I
tried to imagine what it would be like to be truly a native there. Now we re
going to be not much different from them. It s kind of ironic.
Robey shrugged.  I dunno. The view s spectacular, but I sure can t see why
this is otherwise any different from where we were, that s for sure. All those
people, all those legends, and it s just three big moons.
 Maybe. But it doesn t have Captain Sapenza and his band underground like the
last one, she noted.
 Heaven on top, Hell below.
 I m not so sure, he said worriedly, looking at the view of the blue and
white ball on the screen as they approached.  Seems like the more a place
looks like Eden the more snakes it winds up having.
 That s why Saint Patrick is going down first, Karl Woodward told them,
overhearing their conversation.  Cromwell s not a name the Irish ever liked,
but Patrick was an Englishman no matter what they claim and our
Cromwell is very good at dealing with snakes.
Cromwell wore his combat suit, complete with knightly Saint George crosses,
but the rest of those he took with him were planetary scientists rather than
combat personnel. He didn t expect serious trouble down there; he did need to
be able to tell
Olivet
, and before it landed, that it was safe and proper to do so.
They centered in on a broad mid-latitude continent and specifically an area
not far from the eastern seacoast where the other ship s lifeboat was still
giving off homing signals. It was the logical landing site, but it was also
why Cromwell was going down loaded for bear. No telling if these people were
simply unlucky or waiting to pull a fast one.
Close up, Balshazzar looked even more like the old classical versions of
Paradise than they d imagined.
Four main continents sitting on well developed continental plates with quite a
number of islands of all sizes in the oceanic realm. In fact, only one ocean
area seemed to have no land mass at all, and it was well south and towards the
polar regions.
There was a lot of active weather; lightning was quite abundant, but not in
quantities any more dangerous than the average colonial world, and there was
some continental weather. There were, however, no ice caps, which explained
why the islands were plentiful and the continents relatively small.
Temperatures in the mid latitudes seemed to vary little, north or south,
averaging about thirty-two degrees
Celsius. The equatorial zones were considerably hotter and probably would not
be great for any long-term settlement; temperatures there easily reached
forty-five or greater, particularly during the period when the planet was on
the sunward side of the great giant, but dropped only about five degrees when
facing the big planet, no more than ten during the short night.
It was a hot world. Even the poles reached fifteen to eighteen degrees.
That was an oddity they hadn t thought of with light. With the moon s
rotation, they had a relatively normal day/night cycle even though, being
fairly small, a full day was closer to nineteen hours than the human standard
twenty-four. But when it was on the sunward side of the gas giant night was
not very dark;
even though you could follow the planetary shadow on the surface of the big
planet, the thing was so huge and so dominating that it illuminated the dark
side facing it to about fifty percent of daylight levels. This was a very
bright world overall.
And plants seemed to have evolved on it just for that. Big plants, small
plants, jungle plants, grasses, it didn t matter. Every square centimeter of
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land was covered with growth, all verdant and abundant. There didn t seem to
be much sign of animal life, but they d have to get down there to find out for
sure.
It was certainly carbon-based life, too, which held out the possibility that,
as alien as it should be, there might well be plants down there that human
beings might eat and take nourishment from.
Cromwell homed in on the lifeboat beacon and brought one of the four scout
ships Olivet had left down to the surface about a kilometer from the signal,
in a storybook meadow complete with placid fresh-water lake.
They already knew that the oxygen-nitrogen mix was breathable, but they
checked out all of the elements of the air before opening the hatches. Some
slightly heavier than normal concentrations of inert gasses might well explain
why the slightly elevated oxygen level didn t result in more intense fires,
but the overall mix had nothing new or unusual, and nothing they hadn t seen
before on other worlds.
 Too good, one of the environmental engineers commented.  Ten to one the
place smells like rotten garbage.
 There is only one way to find that out, Cromwell noted, and gave the
security code to open the hatch.
Stepping through the airlock felt like someone had soaked a wool blanket in
water and thrown it on them. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]