He was smiling.
‘And preferably,’ said Davenport, ‘whistling.’
Which he was doing himself as he walked out.
Each an Explorer
Herman Chouns was a man of hunches. Sometimes he was right; sometimes he was wrong-about fifty-fifty. Still, considering that one has the whole universe of possibilities from which to pull a right answer, fifty-fifty begins to look pretty good.
Chouns wasn’t always as pleased with the matter as might be expected. It put too much of a strain on him. People would huddle around a problem, making nothing of it, then tum to him and say, ‘What do you think, Chouns? Tum on the old intuition.’
And if he came up with something that fizzled, the responsibility for that was made clearly his.
His job, as field explorer, rather made things worse.
‘Think that planet’s worth a closer look?’ they would say. ‘What do you think, Chouns?’
So it was a relief to draw a two-man spot for a change (meaning that the next trip would be to some low-priority place, and the pressure would be off) and, on top of it, to get Allen Smith as partner.
Smith was as matter-of-fact as his name. He said to Chouns the first day out, ‘The thing about you is that the memory files in your brain are on extraspecial call. Faced with a problem, you remember enough little things that maybe the rest of us don’t come up with to make a decision. Calling it a hunch just makes it mysterious, and it isn’t.’
He rubbed his hair slickly back as he said that. He had light hair that lay down like a skull cap.
Chouns, whose hair was very unruly, and whose nose was snub and a bit off-center, said softly (as was his way), ‘I think maybe it’s telepathy.’
‘What!’
‘Nuts!’ said Smith, with loud derision (as was his way). ‘Scientists have been tracking psionics for a thousand years and gotten nowhere. There’s no such thing: no precognition; no telekinesis; no clairvoyance; and no telepathy.’
‘I admit that, but consider this. If I get a picture of what each of a group of people are thinking – even though I might not be aware of what was happening – I could integrate the information and come up with an answer. I would know more than any single individual in the group, so I could make a better judgment than the others – sometimes.’
‘Do you have any evidence at all for that?’
Chouns turned his mild brown eyes on the other. ‘Just a hunch.’
They got along well. Chouns welcomed the other’s refreshing practicality, and Smith patronized the other’s speculations. They often disagreed but never quarreled.
Even when they reached their objective, which was a globular cluster that had never felt the energy thrusts of a human-designed nuclear reactor before, increasing tension did not worsen matters.
Smith said, ‘Wonder what they do with all this data back on Earth. Seems a waste sometimes.’
Chouns said, ‘Earth is just beginning to spread out. No telling how far humanity will move out into the galaxy, given a million years or so. All the data we can get on any world will come in handy someday.’
‘You sound like a recruiting manual for the Exploration Teams. Think there’ll be anything interesting in that thing?’ He indicated the visiplate on which the no-longer distant cluster was centered like spilled talcum powder.
‘Maybe. I’ve got a hunch – ’ Chouns stopped, gulped, blinked once or twice, and then smiled weakly.
Smith snorted. ‘Let’s get a fix on the nearest stargroups and make a random pass through the thickest of it. One gets you ten, we find a McKomin ratio under 0.2.’
‘You’ll lose,’ murmured Chouns. He felt the quick stir of excitement that always came when new worlds were about to be spread beneath them. It was a most contagious feeling, and it caught hundreds of youngsters each year. Youngsters, such as he had been once, flocked to the Teams, eager to see the worlds their descendants someday would call their own, each an explorer-
They got their fix (made their first close-quarters hyperspatial jump into the cluster, and began scanning stars for planetary systems. The computers did their work; the information files grew steadily, and all proceeded in satisfactory routine-until at system 23, shortly after completion of the jump, the ship’s hyperatomic motors failed.
Chouns muttered, ‘Funny. The analyzers don’t say what’s wrong.’
He was right. The needles wavered erratically, never stopping once for a reasonable length of time, so that no diagnosis was indicated. And, as a consequence, no repairs could be carried through.
‘Never saw anything like it,’ growled Smith. ‘We’ll have to shut everything off and diagnose manually.’
‘We might as well do it comfortably,’ said Chouns, who was already at the telescopes. ‘Nothing’s wrong with the ordinary spacedrive, and there are two decent planets in this system.’
‘Oh? How decent and which ones?’
‘The first and second out of four: Both water-oxygen. The first is a bit warmer and larger than Earth; the second a bit colder and smaller. Fair enough?’
‘Life?’
‘Both. Vegetation, anyway.’
Smith grunted. There was nothing in that to surprise anyone; vegetation occurred more often than not on water-oxygen worlds. And, unlike animal life, vegetation could be seen telescopically-or, more precisely, spectroscopically. Only four photochemical pigments had ever been found in any plant form, and each could be detected by the nature of the light it reflected.
Chouns said, ‘Vegetation on both planets is chlorophyll type, no less. It’ll be just like Earth; real homey.’
Smith said, ‘Which is closer?’
‘Number two, and we’re on our way. I have a feeling it’s going to be a nice planet.’
‘I’ll judge that by the instruments, if you don’t mind,’ said Smith.
