"What do I look like?" she asked.
I could see her sitting across a small table, looking at me over graceful hands that held a wine glass.
"Don't you know?"
She shook her golden curls. "I never thought about it until now."
I found a thick, stainless metal tray in the galley and brought it to her. She looked at her reflection. She held it to her breast with hands folded over it and closed her troubled eyes.
We recorded the presence of an unknown mass ten days later. It was on the orbit we had intercepted. The electronic radar screen gave us the first indication, transmitting its speed and size into figures that were fed into the calculator. We set the ship on automatic control, tracking the body by instrument. For the next two weeks we were in a constantly shortening trajectory.
Our course was navigated by the slower moving stars beyond the planet as the sleek ship carried us closer, day by day. The discovery of the planet had snapped Karen out of the lethargic condition she had come to know as her existence.
Carl worked with her in the lab while we installed the deceleration cots in the navigation room. The padded chair in the control room was positioned so I could check our rate of fall in the radar when we came in tail first. The last two days sleep was forgotten as we spent our time in front of the screen, watching the image grow larger and larger, processing the constant readings into the automatic equipment that gave us specifications on our new world.
It was slightly larger than Earth, with a mass six times heavier than water. On the last day we began to perceive the variations in the surface. It was mostly covered with water, with a large land mass cutting diagonally from the tipped polar cap to the high south latitudes. Other lands masses were revealed as the planet revolved in thirty earth hours.