Over the next week, I pointed our high-gain antennae at Harvey's World. The ion jet continued to obliterate almost every bit of the signal from the Lookout. However, by repeatedly sending the same interrogation sequence to the Lookout, and thereby receiving the same data in reply, I was able to piece together the data, literally bit by bit. By the end of the week, I had about sixty percent of the static information that the Lookout had to offer. I was able to get a still image in the visible-light band from the Lookout's camera, and the current condition of all the medical telemetry units and all the ship's systems. I was not able to get any of the archived historical records, or the real-time medical telemetry.

The Lookout, as you probably know, had two functions. First, it was an orbiting observation post for the colonists. It gave them weather information, and provided them a bird's eye view of their surroundings. Nobody, or no thing, could sneak up on them without the Lookout being wise, at least while it was passing overhead. It could function in this role largely autonomously, or it could be directed to scan for specific items, or watch specific areas on the surface. This particular Lookout was placed in a polar orbit instead of geosynchronous so that it could monitor the whole globe. The only downside of this strategy however, was that it was only within line of sight of the colonists about ²/₃ the time. My greatest fear was that some humongous multi-tentacled monster had hauled itself out of the sea, marched the fifteen kilometers to the Explorer, ate the whole ship, then crawled back in less than twenty-two minutes. One orbit the Explorer would be there, and the next it would be gone.

Secondly, the Lookout functioned as a communications link and data archive for the Explorer. One of the prime considerations of its design was to allow it to function just as it was now, as an information repository for stricken or lost ships to guide would-be rescuers. As such, virtually every bit of information that the Explorer's Mother would have held was also held on the Lookout-- and therefore accessible to me.

The first data I requested were the basics of ship's life. I was interested in the ship's status reports, its fusion power reactor's condition, the local weather . . . and the medical telemetry from the crew. The ship's status came first: all green. There was a minor imbalance in the hydrogen injectors, but otherwise the fusion core was humming along just fine. Actually, I've been a little concerned about our ship's hydrogen injectors. They had built up some induced magnetization, and this had forced them slightly out of balance too. After reading the data from Explorer, I realized we could use Explorer to get home if we had to.

The weather on Harvey's World was a balmy twenty-four degrees C. Humidity was a very pleasant, if somewhat humid, seventy-eight percent. Winds were out of the north at four KPH. Barometric pressure was holding steady at 97.66 KPa. There were lightly scattered high clouds under pale sunny skies. Even though Harvey's only got about half the sunlight that earth did since it was so far away from its sun, the beautiful weather made it a really nice place for a picnic!

The medical data came next, and it wasn't pretty. Sixteen of the readouts were redlined: death of the bearer. The bodies (or rather, the telemetry implants) were scattered in five clumps, between two-hundred and five-hundred meters from the ship, except for one which was inside the ship itself. Without a better data link to the Lookout, I couldn't get any history that would indicate when death occurred, or any of the gory details. No signals were being received from four of the modules. That could be caused by anything from the total incineration of the unlucky implant body, to mechanical failure of the unit. (One of the modules had probably been turned off when the botanist died, which accounted for one of the missing signals.) Four of the telemetry implants showed very strange data. It appeared that four crew members were still alive, but with signals so bizarre, it was impossible to say whether the telemetry units were simply malfunctioning, or the wearer had suffered some horrible injury.

"Mother," I said aloud. "Working," the computer responded. "Patch me through to the Captain and Mister Wendt," I ordered.

"Yeah Chief," came a couple of voices, just slightly out of synch. The thought hit me, here we were together with not a darn thing to do for months and we would have made a fine barbershop trio. "The weather's fine, but don't break out the picnic baskets. Picnics are rough on Harvey's World. We've got four possible survivors," I said.