“Time to waken the others.”

“In a few minutes,” she said. “Remember Kapteyn. Make sure we’ve got something.”

The example of Kapteyn’s Star was written in every explorer’s memory: eight planets, all apparently with wonderful potential; and all, on close inspection, useless for human habitation or for supplies. The early colony ship that had arrived at Kapteyn had been too depleted to reach any second target.

“We’re only two light-days out,” she went on. “We can start scanning. Let’s take a look for oxygen atmospheres before we wake anyone else.”

The on-board computer picked up her command and responded to it. One oxygen world, said its soft voice. Life probability 0.92. The field of view zoomed and swung so that Lacoste first grew rapidly in size and then disappeared from the top of the screen, while a new pinpoint of light appeared at the screen center and swelled to fill it.

Fourth planet, the computer said. Overall figure of merit for Earth isomorphism, 0.86. Mean distance, 1.22; mean temperature range, 0.89 to 1.04; axial tilt—

“What the devil is that?”

The computer paused. The man’s question had no meaning.

The screen held a planet at its center, a blue-gray sphere already seen in enough detail to reveal the broad bands and swirls of atmospheric circulation patterns. But it also showed a web of hazy lines and bright spirals surrounding the planet and cradling it in multiple strands of light.

“Somebody got here ahead of us…” The woman’s voice faded before the sentence was completed. The information network among inhabited planets was in continuous operation. It was limited to light-speed, but even so she could not believe that some exploring ship had also been sent to Lacoste, unknown to them. And if another ship had arrived here, the scale of what they were seeing went beyond anything that an exploring colony might accomplish in a few years.