Chapter 3

Abel Langston was first and foremost a politician. He loved the trappings of power, the sense of control and most of all the limelight that his electoral successes had brought him in steadily growing measure. And he was determined that his new post on the five-member SES Board of Administrators would be neither his last nor his highest in his chosen field.

Thus, almost as soon as he took his seat he followed the time-honored approach of all ambitious politicians and began casting about for an Issue—a cause currently receiving little attention that could be exploited to excite popular opinion and thereby focus the public eye on his organization, his office, and in particular himself. After a couple of false starts (nobody cared all that much about the minor flaws he found in starship safety, and his attempt to expand research on interstellar communication was too long-range to garner the immediate notice he wanted) he settled on Eden.

"In two hundred years of voyaging among the stars," he intoned to his fellow board members in a publicly holocast session, "we have discovered but a single world on which life comparable to our own proliferates. Not just life, intelligent life. And what have we done with that great and unique discovery? Nothing! We have allowed a single event—a tragic one, to be sure, but just one solitary event—to frighten us away from what is potentially by far the most rewarding return that our investment in interstellar exploration could ever reap.

"Who knows why that long-ago landing failed? Did the natives feel themselves threatened? Was something in the lander party's demeanor, their appearance, their attire menacing in these creatures' perception? Did they see us as would-be conquerors? These are questions we should not, we must not, allow to remain unanswered! Think how much we may learn from contact with another species that has started the climb to civilization which has led our own selves to the place in history that we now enjoy.

"I say we must return to Eden. We owe it to ourselves—and to them, to these aliens to whom we have so much to offer."

Like butter, public opinion takes some churning before it begins to solidify, but this sort of churning was something at which Langston had considerable experience and ability, and in fairly short order (as these things go) he put together a strong body of support for the voyage. Idealists saw it as an opportunity to repair whatever unknown wrongs the landing party had committed to trigger the attack, the scientifically minded as a chance to advance the scope of human knowledge, armchair adventurers as a welcome change from the deadeningly dry results that starships kept bringing back. Of perhaps the most pragmatic value, SES bureaucrats soon recognized a means of increasing their agency's funding and jumped happily aboard the bandwagon. Within but a few months after Langston's initial proposal it was decided: a return there would be.