Everything Too Normal

Every reading from Kepler-942c was perfect: oxygen concentration 21%, nitrogen 76%, carbon dioxide lower than Earth's, liquid water, a magnetic field, Earth-like gravity, broad vegetation cover. Surface temperature 22 degrees, humidity 90. It was a textbook-grade Earth 2.0, too good to be true.

Seven hours after arrival, the advance team began to feel that something was off.

The forest was quiet: no insect noise, no birds, no breathing rhythm from any large animal. The plants swayed in too neat an order. The air was missing the clutter a real ecosystem ought to have, and it carried something extra instead — an extremely faint metallic smell, the kind iron gives off when it has just been heated red. The planet had no natural iron source, no large metal deposits, no recent volcanism. The proportion was too low. Janus filed it under the warning line, in among the other grey boxes awaiting review that came up three or five times a day.

The surface itself gave a set of impressions that fought each other. The ground was wet, but the texture ran thicker than water, and the sampling tongs drew threads when they closed on it; the label could only be written as "surface slime layer". For the first 5 metres in among the trees, the shapes of the leaves still matched a few genera of early Earth plants; crouch down and look at the veins, and the match broke. On the way back, every one of them walked half a shoe-width to the left of their own outbound prints, going around a few low-hanging branches. Nobody spoke, and nobody said why they were going around.

The same event was told differently at every level of the ship. The long-range observation report said all parameters fell within the ideal range. The live readout on the advance team's faceplate HUDs said atmospheric readings normal. The biology team ordered the whole team to stop moving, stop talking, touch no equipment, and held a high-sensitivity recorder up for 4 minutes 37 seconds; what came back was 5 people breathing, the fine sound of metal loosening as the Forward Module's engine cooled, and one heartbeat amplified by a faceplate mic, 82 beats a minute. The 3 records did not contradict each other. All 3 passed. None of them put down the thing that made a person stand still and not want to go any further.

In the record field of that recording, one line was left in handwriting:

Too quiet. Everything here is just right, right enough that it looks as though someone laid it out for us on purpose.