Prologue

The Astrum Evestigatus telescope had been less than a week in orbit when the first evidence of a complete solar system around Epsilon Eridan was gathered. Scientists had long known of one planet about the size of Jupiter in orbit around the distant star, but the new telescope showed a set of seven planets, four of which appeared to be solid. Further study and enhancement of the images showed several planets with moons and rings, and a sizable asteroid belt.

The similarities between the Epsilon Eridan System and our own Solar System had not gone un-noticed by the public, and within days mass-hysteria gripped the planet.

People proclaimed everything from the end of the world to the discovery of Planet Vulcan. Masses flocked to churches and synagogues, and several passenger airlines sold advance tickets for the first commercial flight. Meanwhile, NASA launched the Explorer III space probe across the galaxy at near the speed of light, announcing to the public that it would fly through the Eridan System about twenty years later.

Twenty years passed. Though new pictures of the Eridan System were gathered by the Evestigatus, and other telescopes, the public found newer and better things to occupy their minds. New discoveries were made, and the end of the world was proclaimed several times over again by various groups. Following several manned voyages to Mars, a group of hearty pilgrims established Offworld Colony Mars-Alpha, more popularly called 'The Little Red City that Could.' Scientists on Earth, bored with human cloning, had moved on to things like human freezing. The cryogenic stasis chamber, so popularly depicted in science fiction for nearly a century, came into being, and millions of the world's terminally ill and their clones had comforted themselves with the thought of a possible cure somewhere off in the distant future.

Explorer followed its course across the galaxy and arrived at the outer edge of the Eridan System almost exactly when NASA predicted. The small probe spent the next three years taking a long spiral orbit around the star, studying each planet in detail, and began transmitting the data. When it had completed its task, Explorer took up a stable orbit between the first and second planets and waited. Another year passed before the first of the signals reached Earth.

Twenty-four years after its launch, NASA scientists began to study the data streams from the Explorer probe. The next year was mostly uneventful, with images of the outer three gas-planets, though a new generation now was able to spread rumor and speculation while their parents were reminded that the world had indeed not ended. Interest picked up considerably, public and scientist alike, when the first data of the inner planets began to arrive.

The eyes of the world immediately focused on the fourth planet of the Eridan System, named Eridan-4 by NASA, and Vulcan by many others. Explorer had sent back a series of amazing pictures of swirling white clouds, vast blue oceans, and several land masses covered in green, all surrounded by a brilliant set of ice rings. A spectrograph of the planet's atmosphere showed a mixture of Nitrogen and Oxygen, and thermal scans showed an average six degrees Celsius on the dark side and thirty-four on the light. The planet was determined to be about eighty-five percent of the Earth's size and one-hundred-ten percent of its mass, with days roughly nineteen hours long.

It was decided that Eridan-4 could easily support human life, and could just as easily already be supporting some other kind of animal life. Instantly, religious groups were asking God for guidance and religious cults were committing mass suicide to avoid the end of the world. Some factions decided that the three million human clones living on Earth were actually aliens and began attacking them. Along with rising church attendance came rising life insurance rates and rising firearms sales, though that never made the news.

Those who had purchased tickets aboard the first commercial passenger flight regretted that United Airlines was no longer in business.

Explorer had been programmed to broadcast a message of greeting as it passed by each planet, using frequencies based on mathematical constants. The message was similar to that of the Voyager I, II, and III probes, containing everything from pictures of fishing boats, to the human anatomy, to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto. The probe was also programmed to listen for any type of response to this message and send that back to Earth as well. In three years worth of data, no response to the Explorer greeting had been received, leading scientists to believe Eridan-4 to be either uninhabited or inhabited but undeveloped.

Human arrogance would not allow for the possibility of a developed culture who were simply not listening.

Confident in the success of the Luna and Mars colonies, it was not long before NASA had drawn up the plans for a manned mission to Eridan-4. Designs were made for a spaceship not much larger than the Explorer probe, with room for a cockpit, a small laboratory, a tiny living space, and the newest generation of cryogenic chambers for the crew. NASA named its creation U.S.S. Pathfinder, but when their mailboxes, email and phone lines were immediately overrun with appeals that it be christened Enterprise, they agreed to change the name. Enterprise contained over four million electronic components, all made in Japan and assembled in the United States by the lowest bidder. The skin of the ship was formed out of a new carbon poly-fiber thought to be virtually indestructible, and the usual heat-resistant tiles were added to the underside for entry into the alien atmosphere.

While the contractors spent five years and 600 billion dollars bringing the Enterprise to life, NASA consulted the United States government and the United Nations on its crew selection.

However, much to the dismay of the U.N. and many nations around the world, President Nichols insisted on an all-American crew, saying any nation that wished to do so could spend their own money and send their own spaceship. A panel of specialized psychologists helped define the search criteria for crew candidates; NASA quickly short-listed four military pilots, three astronauts, seven field biologists, three linguists, and two doctors. After many intense evaluation sessions, the final crew was chosen.

Captain John Stewart of the 84th Airborne, from St. Louis, Missouri, was selected as mission commander and pilot. At age twenty-eight he was considered by many to be the best pilot alive, having logged considerable hours in both the X-12 Stingray and the highly classified XV-2 Mantis. He was even rumored to have flown a twentieth century F-18 Hornet, though that claim has never been substantiated. After the disaster the Air Force had experienced with its fleet of Unmanned Z-80 Assault Aircraft during the Indian-Pakistani missile crisis, Stewart had been among the first human pilots to take the skies in sixty years with the task of shooting down the rogue Z-80's.

His war-hero status and rugged good looks made him an instant success with the public, and he received several hundred marriage proposals from admiring single women around the country, who apparently did not realize that his selection for the mission would require him to leave the country for quite some time.

Dr. David Whitmore, age fifty-five, from Boston, Massachusetts, was selected as mission specialist of medicine and biology. After practicing at Boston General for ten years, Whitmore had devoted his time to researching micro-biology, bacterial and viral diseases, and had become one of the nations leading experts in the field. When he began to notice the first wrinkles on his face and gray hairs on his head, he turned his attentions to the ailments of old age, including the changing chemical dependencies in the human brain. His research won him the Nobel prize, and allowed millions of the elderly to be removed from their cryo-stasis, cured of Alzheimer's Disease. He turned his celebrity status into something of a money-making gambit when he began using his name to market age-defying cosmetics. If one could argue the ethics of his decision, there could be no argument about his success when the profits began to roll in, and he was elevated to the status of the super wealthy within a year's time. There was some discussion by the NASA selection board whether Whitmore's commercial image would lend credibility to the mission or detract from it, but there was no denying that the man was still a genius.

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