First and last, the Gateway prospectors found more than two hundred planets with significant life. It drove the taxonomists happily crazy. Generations of doctoral candidates had dissertation material that could not fail to win their degrees, and hard work simply to find names for the thirty or forty million new species the prospectors found for them.
They didn't have that many names to spare, of course. The best they could do was assign classification numbers and note the descriptions. There was no hope of establishing genera or even families, although all the descriptions were fed into the databanks and a lot of computer time went into trying to discover relationships. The best descriptions were generic; DNA, or something like it, was pretty nearly universal. The next best were morphological. Most living things on Earth share such common architectural features as the rod (indispensable for limbs and bones in general) and the cylinder (internal organs, torsos, and so on), because they provide the most strength and carrying capacity you can get for the money. For the same reasons, so did most of the galaxy's bestiary. Not always,
though. Arcangelo Pelieri's crew found a mute world, full of soft-bodied things that had never developed bones or chitin, soundless as earthworms or jellyfish. Opal Cudwallader reached a planet where, the scientists deduced, repeated extinctions had kept knocking off land animals as they developed. Its principal creature, like Earthly pinnipeds and cetaceans, was a former land-dweller returned to the sea, and nearly everything else was related. It was as though Darwin's finches had colonized an entire planet.
And so on and so on, until the explorers began to think they had found every possible variation on water-based, oxygen-breathing life.
Perhaps they almost had.
But then they found the Sluggards-the same race the Heechee had known as the Slow Swimmers-and took another look at the hitherto unimagined possible flora and fauna of the gas giants.
So they had been wrong in their basic assumption that life required the chemistry of a solid planet to evolve. That was a shock to their scientists . . . but not nearly the shock that came a bit later, when they discovered that life didn't require chemistry at all.
Planets were nice, and pictures of stars were nice, but what everyone really wanted were some more samples of Heechee technology. There wasn't any doubt that there was some of the stuff waiting to be found-somewhere. The ships proved that. The little morsels picked up in the tunnels of Venus had proved it even earlier. But they just whetted the human appetite for more of these wonders.
Fourteen months after the program officially started, a mission got lucky.
Their ship was what was generally called a Five, but the system had not yet begun to operate in a standardized way. This time only four volunteers went along. They were officially chosen by the four Earth powers that had established the Gateway Corporation (the Martians took an interest later), and so they were an American, a Chinese, a Soviet, and a Brazilian. They had learned from the experience of Colonel Kaplan and others who had gone before. They brought along enough food, water, and oxygen to last them for six months; they were taking no chances this time.
As it happened, they didn't need all those provisions. Their ship
brought them back in forty-nine days, and they didn't come back empty-handed.
Their destination had turned out to be an orbit around a planet about the size of the Earth. They had managed to make the lander work, and three of them had actually used it to set foot on the surface of the planet.
For the first time in human history, men walked on the surface of a heavenly body that was not part of the Sun's entourage.
First impressions were a bit disappointing. The four-power party discovered quickly enough that the planet had had some bad times. Its surface was seared, as though by great heat, and parts of it made their radiation detectors squeal. They knew they could not stay there long. But a mile or less from the lander, down a barren slope from the mountaintop mesa where they had landed, they found some rock and metal formations that looked artificial, and poking around them they dug up three items they thought worth bringing home. One was a flat tile with a triangular design still visible on its
glazed surface. The second was a ceramic object about the size of a cigar, with thread markings-a bolt? The third was a yard-long metal cylinder, made of chromium and pierced with a couple of holes; it could have been a musical instrument, or part of a machine-even a Hilsch tube.
Whatever they were, they were artifacts.
