And for long minutes there was no sound except the hushing of the grasses in the wind and the distant febrile twitter of birds high in the sky. The sky gleamed, as full of the wonder of light as a glass brimful of bright water. Vins called up, “There are insects. I’ve got insects here, though they seem to be torpid.” He paused, and repeated the word, torpid. “When the dew evaporates a little they’ll surely come to life.”
Edwards grunted in reply, but his eye was on the sky. Spherical clouds, perfect as eggs, drifted in the zenith. Six of them. Seven. Eight. Edwards counted, turning his head. Ten.
Twelve.
And the air, moist with dew and fragrant with possibility, slid past him, the slightest of breezes. And light all about. And silence stained only by the swishing of the wind.
Murphy was dancing below, kicking his feet through the heavy, wet grass. “Maybe
Murphy
isn’t such a good idea, by itself,” he called, to nobody in particular. “As a name, by itself. How about the Murphy Territories? How about the
Land
of Murphy?” And then, after half a minute, when neither Edwards nor Vins replied, he added, “Don’t be sore, Vins. You can name some other place.”
Vins went into the body of the shuttle to fetch out some killing jars for the insects.
Sinclair was away for hours. The sun rose, and the dew steamed away in wreathy banks of mist. The grass dried out, and paled, and then bristled with dryness. It was a yellow, tawny sort of grass. By midday the sky was hot as a hot plate, and Murphy had stripped off his chemise.
Sinclair returned, sweating. “It goes on and on,” he said. “Exactly the same. Steppe and more steppe.”
The sun dropped over the eastern horizon. It quickly became cold.
The night sky was cloudless, stars like lit dewdrops on black; breath petaled out of their mouths in transient, ghostly puffs. Edwards slept in the shuttle. Sinclair and Vins chatted, their voices subdued underneath the enormity of the night sky. Murphy had a nicotine inhaler; he lay on the cooling roof of the crashed shuttle looking up at the stars, puffing intermittently. Later they all joined Edwards in the shuttle and slept. Over their thoughtless, slumbering heads the stars glinted and prickled in the black clarity. Hours passed. The the sky cataracted to white with the coming dawn. Ivory-colored clouds bubbled into the sky from behind the peaks of the highlands and swept down upon them. Before dawn rain started falling. Edwards woke at the drumroll sound of rain against the body of the crashed ship, sat up disoriented for a moment, then lay down again and went back to sleep.
“We’re dead, we’ve died, we’re dead,” said Murphy, perhaps speaking in his sleep.
The second day and the second night.
At breakfast, after dawn, it was still raining. The four of them ate inside the shuttle, with the door open. “Ah,” said Edwards, looking through the hatch at the shimmering lines of water. “The universal solvent.”
“But I should hate you,” said Murphy. “Because you can look at water and say
ah the universal solvent
.”
Edwards cocked his head on one side. “I don’t see your point,” he said.
“No, no,” said Murphy. “That’s not it. Oh, water, oh? This beautiful thing, this spiritual thing, purity and the power to cleanse, to baptize even. Light on water, is there a more beautiful thing? And all you can say when you see it is
ah the universal solvent
.”
Edwards put his mouth in a straight line. “But it
is
the universal solvent,” he said. “That’s one of its functions. Why do you say
oh water oh
?”
The rain outside was greeting their conversational interchanges with sustained and rapturous applause. The color through the hatch was gray. The air looked like metal scored and overscored with myriad slant lines.
“Can we lift off?” asked Sinclair. “Is there a way off of this place?”
“Feel that,” Edwards instructed. He was not talking about any particular object, not instructing any of the crew to lift any particular object. What he meant was: Feel how heavy we are. “That’s a full g. That’s what is to be overcome. We came down hard.”
“Hard,” confirmed Murphy.
“We weren’t expecting,” said Sinclair, “a whole world to pop out of the void. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then
a whole world
. We snapped our spine on this rock.”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” said Edwards, in his brusque and matter-of-fact voice. “This world did not pop out of nowhere. Worlds don’t
pop out
of nowhere.” He glowered at his colleagues. “That’s not what happened.”
“Turn it up,
Captain
,” said Murphy. He applied the title sarcastically. It was the nature of this ship that its crew worked without ranks such as captain, second-in-command, all that bag-and-baggage of hierarchy. No military ship, this. This was not a merchant vessel either. They hadn’t been sliding along the frictionless thread of Earth-Mars or Earth-Moon hauling goods or transporting soldiery or anything like that. This was science. Science isn’t structured to recognize hierarchy.
“I’m only saying,” said Edwards, sheepishly. “I don’t want to suggest that I’m in charge.”
They were silent for a while, and the rain spattered and clattered enormously all about them. Encore! Encore!
It occurred to Edwards, belatedly, that Murphy might have been saying
eau, water, eau
.
“Right,” said Vins. “We’re all in a kind of intellectual shock, that’s what I think. We’ve been here two days now, and we haven’t even formulated a plausible hypothesis of what’s going on. We haven’t even tried.” He looked around at his colleagues. “Let’s review what happened.”
Murphy had his stumpy arms folded over his little chest. “Review, by all means,” he said. But then, when Vins opened his mouth to speak again, he interrupted immediately: “
I’ve
formed a hypothesis. It’s called Murphy. This is prime land, and I claim it. When we get back, or when we at least contact help and they come get us, I shall set up a private limited company to promote the settlement of Murphy. I’ll make a fortune. I’ll be mayor. I’ll be the
alpha
male.”
“Why you think,” said Edwards, thinking literally, “that such a contract would have any legal force upon Earth is beyond me.”
“Let’s review,” said Vins, in a loud voice.
Everybody looked at him.
“We’re flying. We drop below the ecliptic plane, no more than a hundred thousand klims. More than that?”
None of the others said anything. Then Sinclair said, “It was about that.”
“We saw a winking star,” Vins said. He did not stop talking, he continued on, even though Murphy tried to interrupt him with a sneering, “Winking star, oh, that’s good on my mother’s health that’s good.” Vins wasn’t to be distracted when he got going. “It was out of the position of variable star 699, which is what we might have thought it otherwise. Except that it wasn’t where 699 should have been. As we flew, it grew in size, indicating a very reflective asteroid, or perhaps comet, out of the ecliptic. You,” Vins nodded at Sinclair, “argued it was a particolored object rotating diurnally. But it was a fair way south of the ecliptic.
Then
what happened?”
“‘We all know what happened,” said Murphy. They may all have been
homo neanderthalis
, but they were bright. They all had their scientific educations. The real deal.
“Let’s review,” said Vins. “We need to
know
what’s happened. Act like scientists, people.”
“I’m a scientist no longer,” cried Murphy, with a flourish of his arm. “I’m the king of Murphytopia.”
“What happened,” said Edwards, slowly, thinking linearly and literally, “was we were tracking the curious wobble of the asteroid. Or whatever it was. We flew close, and suddenly there was a world, a whole world, and—we came down. We reentered sideways, and there was heat damage to the craft, and then there was collision damage, and now it’s broken. And we’re sitting inside it.”
“Now,” said Vins. “Here’s a premise. Worlds don’t appear out of nowhere. Do we agree?”
Nobody disagreed.
“It’s a mountain and Mohammed thing,” offered Sinclair. “Put it this way, which is more likely? That a whole Earth-sized planet pops out of nowhere in front of us? Or that we, for some reason, have popped into a
new
place?”
“I say we’re back on Earth,” said Murphy. “It looks like a duck, and it smells like a duck, and it, uh, pulls the gravity of a duck,
then
it’s a duck.”
“The sun is rising,” Sinclair pointed out, “in
the west
. It is setting in the
east
.”
“Oh. And the asteroid was the beacon of an interdimensional sfy gateway through time and space . . .” mocked Murphy, “and we fell through, like in a sfy film, and now we’re on the far side of the galaxy?” He pronounced “SF-y” as a two-syllable word, with a ludicrous and prolonged emphasis on the central “f” sound.
“That can’t be true,” said Edwards. “Our first night, the stars were very clear. All the constellations were there. Familiar constellations.”
“Which’s what we’d expect if we were back on Earth,” said Murphy.
“But the sun
rises
in the
west
. . .” said Sinclair again.
“Maybe the compasses are broken, somehow. Distorted. Maybe you think west is east and versy-vice-a.”
“All of them? All the compasses? And besides, at night you can see the pole star, great bear, all very clearly. Oh there’s no doubt where the sun’s rising.”
“Well, let’s look at another hypothesis,” said Murphy. “There is a whole, a
whole
Earth-sized planet, about a hundred thousand kilometers south of the ecliptic between Earth and Venus. And nobody on Earth for four centuries of dedicated astronomy has noticed it. Nobody saw a whole planet, waxing and waning, between us and the sun? No southern hemisphere observatory happened to see it? Is
that
what you’re saying?”
“That is,” Vins conceded, “hard to credit.”
“So,” said Murphy. He got up, stepped to the hatch, and looked out at the hissing and rapturous rainfall. “Here’s what I think happened. We were off to investigating your
winking
star, Vins, and then we all suffered some sort of group epilepsy, or mass hysteria, or loss of consciousness, and we piloted the ship back up and toward Earth.”
“We were days away,” Vins pointed out.
“So perhaps we were in a fugue state for days. Anyway, we weren’t shaken out of it until we slammed into the atmosphere, and now we’ve crashed in the highlands in Peru, or Africa maybe.”
“There’s nowhere on Earth,” Vins pointed out, “as lovely as this. Where is there anywhere as mild, or balmy, as this? Peru, you say?”
“You ever
been
to Peru?”
“I been a lot of places, and there’s ice wherever I’ve been.”
“Never mind the climate,” said Edwards. “What about the sunrises?”
“How is it,” agreed Vins, “that the sunrise is in the west if this is Peru?”
“I don’t know. But the advantage of my hypothesis is that it’s Occam’s razor on all the stuff about planets appearing from nowhere, and it reduces all that to a single, simple problem: the sunrise.”
“And another problem,” Edwards pointed out, “which is the lack of radio traffic.”
“The radio’s broken,” said Murphy. “I’m not happy about it.”
“The radio?”
“No, not happy about the
Murphy
, the Murphytopia. I’m not happy about the status of my kingdom. I was looking forward to claiming the highlands as my personal kingdom. But if it’s, you know, Peru, then there’ll be some other bugger who’s already claimed these highlands.”
“The radio’s not broken,” said Edwards. “We can pick up background chatter. Bits and pieces. We just can’t seem to locate any—to get a fix upon—”
“Vins,” said Murphy, sitting himself down again. “Vins, Vins. What’s your theory? You haven’t told us your theory.”
“I think we’ve landed upon a banned world,” said Vins. He said this in a bright voice, but his mouth was angled downward as he spoke. “A forbidden planet.
That’s
SF-y, isn’t it?” He pronounced each of the letters in sfy separately.
“A banned world,” said Murphy, as if savoring the idea. “What an interesting notion. What a fanciful notion. What a dark horse you are, to be sure, Vins.”
The rain stopped sometime in the afternoon, and the clouds rolled away, leaving the landscape washed and gleaming under the low sun as if glazed with strawberry and peach. The long stretch of grassland directly beneath them retained some of its yellow, and it moved slowly, like the pelt of a lion. In the distance they could see a long inlaid band of bronze, curved and kinked like the marginal illustration in a Celtic manuscript: open water, glittering in the sun. And the sun went down and the stars came out.
Edwards, trying to identify where the Earth should be from their last known position, noticed something they should all have seen on the first night: that the stars hardly moved through the sky. He woke the others up.