“Show you.” She pushed away from me gently and floated down to the bed, as I rose to the ceiling. She pushed a couple of buttons on the wall there, and the paintings faded, replaced by a huge dun circle, a planet that resembled Mars. Clear atmosphere, a wisp of cloud here and there. No obvious craters, though; I wasn’t sure what that meant scientifically. Weathering, I supposed.

“We aren’t at Wolf 25?”

“We are, apparently—just not at the planet of the Others. Another one in the same system. Much closer in.”

“Why?”

“Spy said we’re going down tomorrow. Until then, we’re free to speculate.”

Chapter 11 - DEAD WORLD

11

DEAD WORLD

Some of the humans, like Paul and Namir, were disappointed or apprehensive when they learned that we were not going down to the planet’s surface in our own lander, carried twenty-four light-years for that purpose, but instead were to go down in Spy’s “starfish” spaceship. I was relieved. Going to and from a planetary surface in a rocket is unpleasant and dangerous, even if it is “the devil we know,” as Carmen put it. We had no idea how the starfish worked, but the Others had probably been using them for a long time.

We had to cross over to their ship holding on to a cable, as before, and Snowbird did not enjoy the experience any more than I had the first time. This wasn’t in cool starlight, either. We had the huge disc of the ashen planet looming beneath us and the brilliant glare of Wolf 25 moving overhead.

Moonboy was not able to cross by himself. Paul and Namir carried him over like a deadweight.

Spy had told us that we couldn’t pronounce the name of the planet in any Martian or human languages, but that it translated to “Earth” pretty accurately. We might call it “Home” to reduce confusion.

“Whose home?” Carmen asked.

“Allow me to be mysterious,” Spy said, though the answer was obvious, if the details were not.

The air inside the ship was oppressively hot and humid, probably comfortable for humans. When we took off, though, the gravity was light, about normal for Mars.

It was not acceleration-induced “gravity,” either. It didn’t change direction or strength when the ship took off.

A circle opened in the floor of the craft, like a large window. We got an interesting view of the engine side of the iceberg/asteroid, which seemed to have diminished by about a third, in regular concentric grooves where the automatic ice- mining machines had gnawed their way around.

The landing was as smooth as the humans say their space elevator is, no lurching or vibration. As we approached the ground, though, the gravity increased to about that of Earth. Spy apologized to the two of us but said there was no way around it.