The southern continent lay more to the west, and most was still in daylight. The land was shaped like a Y lying on its side, two arms pointing west and the tail pointing east. Between the arms clustered an archipelago of hundreds of hilly islands, no more than a few square klicks each. The northwest arm of the Y held a broad patch of desert, but the rest of the continent was a combination of forest and meadow.

"What do you think?" Chee asked.

I pointed to the lakes on the northern continent, western hemisphere. "What's the weather like here?"

Yarrun turned a dial. Cloud patterns became visible over various regions of land and sea, but the sky over the lakes was clear. "Temperate mid-autumn," Yarrun said. "The temperature is only about ten degrees Celsius at the moment, but it's just an hour after sunrise. It could go up to twenty degrees by the middle of the afternoon."

"Shirtsleeve weather," Chee grinned and Yarrun nodded.

"Okay," I decided. "Concentrate the probes there. We'll see what looks good."

"Keep the probes in high atmosphere?" Yarrun asked.

"No," I answered, "send them in as low as you want. If the place has natives, we'll give them a thrill."

Fields and Forests

In a few minutes, the lake district bloomed on the screen, marked with fifteen-meter contour lines. Moderately tall bluffs rose at several points around the lakes, but most of the shore was sandy beach. Inland, the countryside consisted of rolling hills with plenty of streams, a few marshes, clots of forest here and there, and wide stretches of grassy meadow.

"Looks pleasant enough," Prope said.

"That's what you think," I told her.

"What's wrong?"

"There are too few trees," Yarrun answered for me, scanning some figures thrown up by the computer. "All those open fields… with that kind of soil and climate, you expect forests to encroach on fields and eventually cover them. On a truly Earthlike planet, there'd be trees everywhere unless…" He turned a few dials and checked a readout. "Well, the computer gives seventy percent chance there was a forest fire south of the eastern lake, between ten and thirty years ago… but the fire only took out a few dozen hectares. Not nearly enough to explain the discrepancy. I suppose Melaquin might have evolved a particularly aggressive form of grass that doesn't need much light — one that encroaches on trees, starving out their roots…"

"Yarrun is grasping at straws," I told Chee. "The truth is, this terrain profile looks more like farmland than virgin wilderness. Not meadows, but cleared fields."

"Any sign of actual cultivation?" Chee asked.

"No," Yarrun replied, "but the probes are spreading their attention over a large area. They could easily miss cultivation on the scale of garden plots. Or larger fields that have lain fallow longer than five or ten years."

"Sentients!" Prope said in a hushed tone intended to be dramatic. She had assumed yet another pose, staring at the monitor through narrowed eyes, her head lifted to show the clean white edge of her jaw. "Do you suppose this could be a world of sentients, once great, now fallen? Yet even though the planet lies barren, something has been left behind. Something that has killed before and will kill again…"

"Shit," muttered Chee. "I told the council we shouldn't let Vacuum officers take Pulp Literature as an elective."

The Lake

"Let's do a full workup on this lake," I said, tapping the one lowest on the view screen.

"Why?" Chee asked.

"It's closest to the equator. Winter's coming to the whole lake district, and I'd prefer not to freeze my tail off if we get stranded down there."

"Explorer Ramos grew up in an unduly warm climate," Yarrun explained to the admiral. "She is rather delicate when it comes to chills."

I did not rise to the bait. Yarrun's own home colony was snowed in more than half of each year, and his people had developed an unhealthy reverence for subzero temperatures. They ascribed all manner of beneficial properties to freezing cold: it built stamina, it built strength, it built moral fiber. As far as I could tell, all it built was an irrational disdain for those of us who had the sense to be born in environments free of frostbite.

"Yarrun," I said, "check out the south lake. The southern shore."

He rubbed a dial. Far below us, one of the four probes sacrificed almost all its airspeed as it arrowed into the water. The splash was big enough for the other three probes to register: a pimple of red marked the splash point on the viewmap, until the computer factored it out.

"The water is fresh," Yarrun reported as the sunken probe began to return data. "The usual natural trace elements; no signs of industrial pollution. Microorganism count measures a bit low."

"Does that mean anything?" Prope asked.

"Probably not," I told the captain. "Lots of simple factors could decrease the micro count in a given area — anything from a strong current, to a recent rain, to a nearby school of filter-feeders."

"Still… it seems a little sinister, don't you think?"

I ignored her.

The Bluffs

"Let's concentrate on these bluffs," I said, pointing to a line of elevation on the south side of our chosen lake.

"Why there?" asked Chee as Yarrun twisted dials to send the three remaining probes on a close flyby.

I thumbed a dial myself to magnify that area of the map. "Along the top, we have open fields… good visibility. If we're in for a long stay, we can get fresh water from the lake, but in the short term, we'll be far enough away that we don't have to deal with the complexities of shoreline ecologies."

"What if something unspeakable charges the party and knocks you off the cliff?" Prope asked.

"If we see something unspeakable, I for one will jump off the cliff," I answered. "Our tightsuits will protect us from the brunt of the impact, and the long leap is a nice fast escape route."

Prope's expression showed what she thought of people who would jump off a cliff rather than face something unspeakable; but she held her tongue.

Pictures

"Pictures," Yarrun said; and the map on the screen shimmered to show a sunny meadow dotted with yellow wildflowers. Off to one side stood a deciduous tree, something like a maple; a bird flitted into the leaves, too fast to see clearly, but it had two wings, a small head, and a black or dark brown body. A few dozen meters behind the tree, the land dropped off at the edge of the bluffs, down to the sparkling blue lake.

The view slowly shifted as the transmitting probe moved along. We saw a gray rock outcrop, more deciduous trees, a thicket of brambles. Something darted into the brambles, and my mind said "rabbit" …but an Explorer had to ignore such snap judgments. The human brain is still hopelessly tied to Old Earth; it always interprets a fleeting image as something terrestrial, no matter how alien the creature might really look.

"Try it ten kilometers to the east," I said. Yarrun played with dials.

Prope sneered. "You think the meadow looks too dangerous?" she asked.

I tapped the screen. "Didn't you see that animal run into the briar patch?"

"You're afraid of a little beast like that?"

"I'm wary of a little beast like that," I told her. "I'm afraid of whatever the little beast was running from."

Our Choice

The picture dissolved into a view from another probe, this one hovering over the lake and looking shoreward to the bluffs. The cliffside was tangled with weeds and scrubby bushes. Here and there, swaths of bare sandy soil interrupted the undergrowth — gullies probably washed out by spring runoff. Erosion was slowly undercutting the top edge of the ridge; at one point, the rim had collapsed in an earth slide that dragged down a great strip of brush.