"That's it!" Jimmy yelled from the bridge. He shot into the common room, hooked a hand around a support pole like a gigantic orangutan, and friction-spiraled to a halt. "That's why we only got the signals every fifteen and twenty-seven days back home!"

"You lost me with that one," Anne called from the galley, where she and Sofia were getting lunch ready.

"Without an ionosphere to contain radio waves, you could only use line-of-sight signals, like microwave towers at home," George explained. "If you wanted to broadcast over a wider region, you could aim a really strong signal at the moons, and it would bounce back in a cone that would cover a lot of the planet's surface."

"So what we were picking up at home was the scatter around the moons, every time they moved into line with Earth," Jimmy said, crowing with happiness at clearing up that little mystery.

"What's an ionosphere?" Anne asked. Jimmy gaped at her. "Sorry. I've heard the word but I don't know what it is, really. I'm a doctor, Jim, not an astronomer!" George broke up but Jimmy, too young for the first Star Trek, didn't get it.

"Okay: solar radiation knocks electrons off atmospheric molecules at the top of the atmosphere, right? That makes them ions," Jimmy began.

"Listen up," D.W. cut in, as he pushed himself into the common room from the bridge. "Be ready to give a summary of everything you've learned tomorrow at nine. I got decisions to make."

Then he was gone, disappearing into his cabin, leaving people shaking their heads and muttering. Anne watched him go and rotated toward Sofia. "What do you think? PMS?"

"It's a form of affection," Sofia smiled. "The squadron commander is back on duty. He doesn't want his people killed by enthusiasm and cabin fever, but no one wants to come this far and then go back without visiting the surface, especially not D.W. There's a great deal of pressure on him."

"I see your point," Anne said, impressed by the analysis, which she considered precisely one brick shy of the full load, and wondered if Sofia was unaware or very discreet. Discreet, Anne decided. Sofia didn't miss much and she knew D.W. very well. "Which way is he leaning? Do you know?"

"He keeps his own counsel. From what I've gathered, we could survive on the surface. Maybe D.W. will go down alone or with one or two others and leave the rest on the ship."

Anne closed her eyes, sagging as much as one could while weightless. "Oh, Sofia, I think I would literally rather die than stay inside here one minute longer than I have to."

Sofia was surprised to see the woman look every day of her age for once, and for a dreadful moment she thought that Anne would burst into tears. Sofia reeled her in for the kind quick embrace she had received in the hundreds from the older woman. It was not an impulsive act, for hardly anything Sofia Mendes did was impulsive. But now, at last, she'd soaked up enough affection to give some back.

"Oh, Sofia, I love you all," Anne said, laughing and taking a quick swipe at her eyes with a sleeve. "And I am mortally sick of every last one of you. Come on. Let's get these guys fed."

The next morning was as tense and demanding as anything Anne had ever sat through. Or floated through, in this case. She meant to follow it all but found herself distracted and savagely restless during a long debate about whether the lander fuel would combust properly in the atmosphere of the planet. The air was breathable, and the weather was stinking hot but wouldn't kill them. There were a lot of thunderstorms and cyclones going on at any given time, which could have been due to the season or to the amount of energy pouring into the system from the three suns.

Marc's presentation was thorough but frustrating. He could delineate boundaries between ecological regions but who knew what that predominantly lavender stuff was? It might be something like a deciduous forest in summer or something like grasslands or something like conifer forest or even an enormous algae mat. "Whatever it is," Marc pointed out with a shrug, "there is a great deal of it." Terrain was easier for him to interpret with confidence. Open bodies of water were sometimes plain, but Marc warned that they could be confused with swampy areas. Tidal zones were remarkably extensive—not surprising with multiple moons. There were obvious oxbow lakes and many river systems. He believed there were areas of cultivated land but told them, "It is quite easy to confuse agricultural plantations with mixed species forest."

Let's just go, Anne thought as Marc droned on. Fuck this shit. Let's just do it. Pack some sandwiches, get in the goddam lander, and go down and throw open the doors and just live or die.

Startled by her own fretfulness, she looked around and saw it in the others as well, but then Marc said, "And this is the source of the radio transmissions." There was an exhalation and a murmur all around. Marc outlined an area near the coast. "This appears to be a city in a high valley ringed by several mountains. There is not the confluence of roads I expected, but these lines here may be canals leading from the two rivers you can see, here and here. This may be a port. I would guess that this semicircular area could be a good harbor."

There were other regions showing features that suggested cities elsewhere on the continent, but they'd come because of the music, so there was no serious discussion of landing near those. Despite this unanimity, an argument broke out over how close to the transmitter city they should approach initially.

Alan Pace was astonished that there was any question at all. He wanted to make contact with the city inhabitants immediately and directly. "With respect to Sandoz, the musical communication could be drawn on at the very beginning, just as we used music to make contact with the Guarnari in the eighteenth century. Also, there are the precedents of Xavier and Ricci, who determined to go as quickly as possible to the cities of Japan and China, and worked with the educated classes first."

"You don't think we'd scare the lights out of 'em, just showin' up in all our alien glory some afternoon?" D.W. asked Alan.

"We could tell them we're from France," Emilio suggested thoughtfully. Even Alan cracked up.

"Maybe we won't be all that big a surprise to them. Human beings have been speculating about alien species for hundreds of years," Jimmy Quinn said, ignoring Emilio but grinning. "With all the moons and suns, these folks have got to be interested in astronomy."

"Do you think so, Jim?" Anne asked, joining the discussion for the first time. "With three suns, very little of the planet is in darkness at any one time, or for very long. They might not pay any attention at all to the night sky."

"They're aiming radio at the moons," Sofia and Jimmy said simultaneously. Everyone laughed, and Anne shrugged and nodded, admitting defeat.

"Anyway, it seems to me that we'd do best to go where the high tech is. I'm willing to bet that this here" — George pointed to a lake in the mountainous area near the city—"is a hydroelectric dam. See? This could be the spillway. If they can build stuff like this and figure out how to bounce radio off their moons, they've got to be at least as technologically advanced as nineteenth- or twentieth-century Earth. So they're probably reasonably sophisticated. I say we go for it. Land in the center of town."

Marc was very much disturbed by this line of reasoning and appealed directly to D.W. "Father, it seems to me that we should learn something of the planet before we deal with the intelligent species, if for no other reason than to send basic ecological data back for the next party, in case something happens to us. We need to get our bearings first."

D.W. turned to Anne. "How long do you expect it to take us to get used to gravity again?"