Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“We have a plan for dividing the new world—which you still have not named—into nineteen cells,” said the expendable.

Ram looked at the holographic globe, rotated it several times, and said, “So you exclude the three smaller continents.”

“We thought those could remain as preserves for the original biota of this unnamed planet.”

“Call the planet ‘Garden,’ since you want a name. Though who’ll ever use it but us, I have no idea.”

“The colonists will say ‘back on Earth’ and ‘here on Garden,’” said the expendable. “You may be interested to know that not one of the expendables or the ships’ computers predicted your choice of ‘Garden.’ The front-runner was ‘Ram,’ but some of us thought you were too modest for that.”

“It’s not a matter of modesty. I intend to live with these people—or at least one ship’s worth of them—and it would lead to ridicule and loss of face for me to try to make them call the world by my name.”

“That was my reasoning. But I now have the advantage of continued association with you, which the others lack.”

“I never imagined the expendables were given to wagering.”

“There are no stakes. It’s merely a matter of testing our predictive algorithms.”

“The divisions of the two larger continents look fine to me. I assume they all contain adequate resources.”

“Adequate for what?”

“For . . . human life.”

“Breathable air, potable water, arable soil, and survivable weather seemed to us to be all that was needed.”

“I was thinking of iron, coal . . .”

“This planet has no fossil fuels. Lacking a moon to create serious tides, Garden was much slower in developing life. Right now it is in the lush phase of plant growth, and its atmosphere has three times the carbon dioxide of Earth. In a few hundred million years, it would have had fossil fuels—except that of course we’ll put an end to that.”

“Why?”

“Because humans probably cannot digest the local flora and fauna. The chance of all the proteins being left-handed like those of Earth is probably fifty-fifty, and the chance of finding all the essential amino acids within the correct handedness is quite small. We need to establish Earth flora and fauna so that humans can flourish here.”

“Are you seriously proposing to wipe out all the existing flora and fauna on the two continents we’re using?”

“We intend to arrive on the planet in such a way as to wipe out all surface life, or as much of it as we can. That was the plan from the beginning, whether it was explained to you or not.”

“So the three small continents—”

“We will re-seed them with Garden’s native life forms after the extinction event. Here are the main steps of the plan: First, we visit the surface of Garden to make as complete a collection as possible of native life forms. Then we crash the ships into the planet at an angle and speed calculated to make the necessary changes, including mass extinction. Then we wait for the atmosphere to return to a breathable state, and re-seed the planet. Sometime before two hundred years are up, the human colonists, including you, will be wakened from stasis and brought out onto the surface of Garden to begin colonization.”

“Extinction event. Our coming is meant to be a disaster?”

“Those are the instructions we were given. It will be much easier to engineer the whole thing with nineteen ships to work with instead of one.”

“What are the other ‘necessary changes’?”

“As you can see, Garden has no moon. It must have captured a sizeable asteroid, but it was inside the Roche limit, which is why there is a ring. This provides noticeable and continuous illumination at night, so nocturnal fauna will thrive, but the only tides are solar.”

“We’re going to make a moon?”

“I thought you disliked being ridiculous.”

“Then what are you getting at?”

“Without a substantial moon to slow down Garden’s rate of rotation, days are only 17.335 hours long. This is below the tolerance limits of the human biological clock. The rotation of the planet must be slowed to allow days of no less than twenty hours, preferably 22 to 26. The original plan called for bombarding the planet with asteroids at the right speed and angle, but with nineteen ships, we can achieve the desired slowing of Garden’s rotation rate by bringing in all the ships at the same time, at the correct angle against the direction of spin, and at enough speed to compensate for the smaller mass.”

“You’re going to crash the ships into the surface.”