Chapter 2
If the probe seemed large from the daycruiser control room, it was gigantic from the vantage point of the outer framework of the damaged control sphere. Chryse Haller grasped a crossbeam as she carefully snaked a safety line around a jutting side beam. She glanced across the rounded plain and shivered at the sudden realization of just how alone she felt.
“Status check,” the daycruiser computer said into her earphones. Its voice contained metallic overtones of unease. The computer had been quite vocal in its opposition to her leaving the safety of the ship and going out alone to explore the probe.
“I want to see it with my own eyes,” she had explained in announcing her intentions.”
“You are seeing it with your own eyes,” the daycruiser responded, referring to the holo projection that hung in midair before Chryse’s couch.
“No, I mean outside. I want to touch it, to feel its solidity, to make it real!”
“It is far too dangerous. You could be injured.”
She shrugged, and then remembered that the machine only responded to voice inputs. “You’ll be monitoring my vital signs. If I get into trouble, you can fly my suit back by remote control.”
“I still recommend against this unnecessary risk.”
“Life is an unnecessary risk,” Chryse had said as she unbuckled from the pilot’s couch and aligned her axis with the daycruiser’s small central passageway. “I’m going.”
She had suited up and let the computer do complete telemetry readout on her before entering the airlock. As in everything else relating to Henning’s Roost, the suit was the best money could buy. Its air recycling system was good for a week or more, its water tanks and pharmaceutical stores were full, and its outer covering of armor made it virtually impervious to damage. If the need arose, she would be able to call the ship for help, have her message relayed to Earth, and wait for the rescue craft to arrive. It would not be comfortable, but it was safe.
Once outside the airlock, she had jetted across the two hundred meters of void separating the daycruiser from the probe and grounded on its outer frame. Above her, the sun blazed hotter than the hottest day Death Valley had ever seen. The beams beneath her boots reflected the light with a dull metallic sheen.
After she assured her mechanical nursemaid that all was well, Chryse turned her attention to the massive mechanism beneath her feet. She peered down into the depths of the open sphere, feeling for a moment like an ironworker in the upper stories of a megastructure. It took a few moments to orient herself and educate her brain to interpret the message her optic nerves were sending it.
The first thing she noticed was that not all the damage had come from the collision with the I-masses. Here and there, amid structures that appeared undamaged, were gaps that should not have been. These, she quickly realized, were the results of the salvage operation that had gone on for nearly fifty years after the probe’s destruction.
She finished her inspection and glanced up at the daycruiser. “I’m going inside. I want to see what it’s like down where the main personality was housed.”
“I do not advise it!”
“Objection noted,” she said. “I’ll be careful.”
She made her preparations. As a last step, she unhooked herself from the safety lines and chinned a control in her helmet. Two joysticks extended from her backpack to where she could reach them with gauntleted hands. She took hold of the controls and gave each a small twist. Chryse felt the slight pressure of her backpack jets responding to the command. A faint hissing sound superimposed itself over the hum of her environmental control system. She began to move across the face of the control sphere toward a fissure in the framework that appeared to extend into the center of the structure.
It took ten minutes for her to work down into the inner framework of the probe. The cabling and twisted metal were like the trees of a dense forest. As she progressed ever deeper, she passed through alternating regions of bright sunlight and ever-darker gloom. As her surroundings grew dim, Chryse felt the sudden twinge of unease that is the legacy of a thousand generations of ancestors who feared the coming of darkness. She was considering turning back when a sparkle of light caught her eye.
Her fear vanished, to be quickly replaced by curiosity. She jetted forward to find herself in a stray beam of sunlight that penetrated the interior of the hulk. As she did so, the firefly speck died away. She moved closer, and was rewarded by a polychromatic flash directly into her helmet visor. She reached out, thrust her armored glove into a recess surrounded by the frayed ends of reinforcing fibers, and pulled a multifaceted crystal from its nest.
She held the crystal close to her eyes and laughed hollowly. The mystery was a mystery no longer. The crystal was an ordinary memory module, the medium in which the vast library of Maker knowledge had been stored. They were also the functional basis of nearly every electronic gadget invented in the last three hundred years. Billions were manufactured yearly, each identical to the original designs carried aboard the probe.
She carefully placed the crystal in her belt pouch and was in the process of resealing it when a mechanical voice suddenly blared in her earphones.”
“WARNING. WARNING. YOU ARE APPROACHING THE RESTRICTED ZONE OF A PROTECTED HISTORIC MONUMENT. YOU ARE HEREBY ADVISED TO TURN BACK IMMEDIATELY. FAILURE TO COMPLY MAY LEAD TO CIVIL OR CRIMINAL PENALTIES BEING ASSESSED AGAINST YOU.”
“What the hell?” she yelped, forgetting her souvenir. She got her emotions under control and cursed herself for being so jumpy. She growled her next statement: “Those idiots at The Roost must have sent someone to keep an eye on me!”
She considered the possibility that Henning’s management was chaperoning her, and then frowned. The thought did not feel right. Such a gesture was too extravagant, even for them. It could be another tourist, of course, but the fact that she had heard the warning meant that it was being beamed in the wrong direction for a ship from Earth.
She began the delicate job of turning around and working back the way she had come. Five minutes later, she was once again at the outer framework of the probe. She shaded her eyes and craned her neck inside the helmet, scanning the black sky for some sign of the ship that had set off the guard station alarms.
“Status check!” she ordered.
For the first time since she had left the daycruiser’s airlock, the computer had nothing to say.
“Status check,” she repeated.
Again, there was only silence.
“Damn!” she muttered. She did not have time to consider the implications of the balky computer for it was at that moment that she saw the ship.
It was spherical in shape and getting larger by the second. Even with the difficulty of judging relative size in space, it was obvious that this was no rich man’s yacht. If anything, it was close to being the largest spacecraft Chryse had ever seen.
But its size was merely something she noted in passing, hardly worth mentioning when compared to the vessel’s obvious peculiarities. For almost as long as men had built spaceships, their craft had ridden on tails of plasma fire. A spacecraft drive flare was bright enough to be seen from one side of the solar system to the other—or to burn out the retinas of anyone incautious enough to stare at one for more than a second. Yet, the newcomer was decelerating with no sign of a flare. Whatever shipyard had built it, Chryse was willing to bet it could not be found anywhere in the solar system.
Mankind, it seemed, was about to welcome its second visitor from the far stars.
* * *
Julius Gruenmeier scowled, as Achilles, the largest asteroid in the leading Trojan group, grew steadily larger through the bubble of the supply boat. He watched as the domes, observation instruments, and communications gear of the System Institute for the Advancement of Astronomical Observation—SIAAO for short—slowly rose into view over Achilles’ jagged horizon. Achilles Observatory (along with its twin on Aeneas asteroid in the trailing Trojans) looked farther out into space than any other observatory in the solar system. When Achilles and Aeneas were working in concert, they anchored both ends of a 1.3 billion kilometer long baseline—far enough to be able to separate binary stars in the Andromeda galaxy into their component parts.
Not that they would be able to maintain that capability for long. Gruenmeier, in his role as Achilles’ Operations Manager, was returning from a meeting with the SIAAO Comptroller. The occasion was the Comptroller’s yearly trip out from Earth, and the subject was next year’s operating budget. The news was bad.
It was common knowledge that the Institute had made some unwise investments in the last several years. What no one outside the Board of Trustees had known was just how shaky finances really were. They knew now. Operating budgets were to be cut drastically over the next three years until the Institute’s portfolio could be returned to its former state of health. The cuts were sufficiently deep that Gruenmeier did not see how he would be able to keep both Achilles and Aeneas operating.
He was still pondering ways to slash expenses without idling any prime instruments when the supply boat entered Main Dome’s Number Three Airlock. Gruenmeier thanked the boat’s two young pilots absentmindedly, unstrapped, and pulled himself to the coffin-sized airlock amidships. Since the terminal was inside the dome itself, there was no need to suit up. He exited the ship, grabbed hold of one of the guide cables that crisscrossed the terminal decking, and pulled himself toward the passenger lounge.
He was met by his assistant, Chala Arnam. Arnam was an intense woman in her mid-forties, a fair-to-middling neutrino astronomer, and the best administrative assistant he had ever had. He was grooming her to take over Institute operations on that inevitable day the Trustees forced him into retirement. He hoped there would be something to leave her when the time came.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“Not good,” he answered.
She studied his dour expression intently, trying to read the degree of disaster there. “How bad is it?”
He sighed. “Very. They are not cutting out fat this time. They’re amputating our whole lower torso.”
“Are we going to fight?”
“How?”
“We could appeal directly to the Trustees.”
“Simonson suggested that we do so. But you and I both know that his orders come directly from them, so what is the use? Besides, even if some of them were willing to listen, there is the distance problem to overcome. We are 800 million kilometers from home out here. The damned accountants are just down the hall.”
“Perhaps you should plan a trip to Earth, Julius.”
“I’ve thought of that, and just might do it if we can come up with a viable approach.” He chewed on his lower lip as he always did when he was worried, and then abruptly changed the subject. “Anything interesting happen here while I was gone?”
“Not much,” Chala said. “Doctor Chandidibya was in to see me this morning.”
“Let me guess. He was raising a stink about not being able to monopolize the Big Ear, right?”
“Not this time. He complained about the service techs. Says they are doing their usual slipshod job. He thinks the whole lot of them should be fired.”
“Does he have any suggestions as to how we can attract better people on the salaries we pay?”
“I doubt if Dr. Chandidibya cares about minor problems like personnel staffing and retention—unless they adversely affect the operation of the thousand-meter radio scope, of course.”
“How’d you leave him?”
“Grumpy.”
“I’ll try to soothe him at dinner. Anything else?”
Chala nodded. “The technical staff has been going crazy searching for a malfunction in the high energy monitoring equipment for the last two hours.”
“What kind of malfunction?”
“They seem to be getting a ghost image of some sort. They’ve tried everything and it won’t go away.”
“Ghost?” Gruenmeier asked, suddenly happy to have something to think about other than the state of the Institute’s dismal finances.
“I’d best let Doctor Bartlett explain it. As you well know, high energy optics ain’t my field.”
Ten minutes later, Director Gruenmeier found himself listening to the explanation of the Watch Astronomer.
“We first began picking it up on the cosmic ray monitors at 16:12, shortly after the start of Second Watch. The monitors kept insisting that they had spotted a diffuse source of cosmic rays somewhere out beyond Neptune. We ran the usual maintenance checks and found nothing, so I ordered the neutrino scopes and X-ray equipment to take a look. They can see it, too.”
“What makes you think it’s a ghost then?”
“Because there isn’t anything out there! Besides which, the source is moving.”
“Moving?”
“Yes, sir. Moving fast. It appears to be traveling radially outward from the Sun.”
“Have you asked Aeneas to do a parallax measurement?”
“Yes, sir. Two-and-a-half hours ago. I expect their reply momentarily.” As though to punctuate Bartlett’s comment, several readout screens chose that moment to begin displaying data. The half dozen people in the Operations Center turned to watch.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Bartlett muttered incredulously a few seconds later. “They see it too.”
“Have you got a velocity vector yet?” Gruenmeier asked.
The watch astronomer nodded, and then hesitated as he read the figures silently. He looked up at Gruenmeier and gulped. “It says here that the radiation source is moving directly away from the sun, toward Canis Minor, sir. The exact coordinates are: right ascension, 0738; declination, plus 0518. And get this. Whatever it is, it’s moving at exactly the speed of light!”
Gruenmeier blinked. “It’s moving away from the sun?”
“Yes, sir.”
Gruenmeier turned to Chala Arnam. “Get me a top priority line to Earth. I will be sending a coded message to the Board of Trustees in about ten minutes.
He turned back to Bartlett. “Get that data reduced fast. I want everything you can deduce about the source in the next five minutes. I will need it for my squirt to Earth. I also want every instrument we have focused on this contact. Aeneas, too. Understood?”
Gruenmeier stopped, suddenly aware of the expressions of his subordinates. “What’s the matter with you two? Hop to it!”
Chala frowned. “What’s the matter, Julius? What is it?”
“Don’t you see? We have a phantom source of high-energy particles moving away from the sun at 300,000 kps on a vector straight toward Procyon. That can mean only one thing.
“They’re back, damn it. They’re back!”
* * *
Chryse Haller watched openmouthed as the starship completed its approach and began “station keeping” near the probe’s bow. The daycruiser, that floated motionless in space some two hundred meters over her head, was dwarfed in comparison to the great metal-gray sphere. She craned her neck and let her eyes drink in a myriad of construction details. Everything she saw seemed to support the hypothesis that the behemoth was extra-solar in origin. Yet, the starship did not give her the same impression of alienness that the probe did. There was something familiar about its lines.
She was so startled by the thought that she spent a few precious seconds analyzing it. Understanding came to her from a surprising direction.
Chryse Haller was an aficionado of old movies. Not the old movies of her mother’s or grandmother’s times, but the prehistoric works originally recorded on real celluloid, in 2-D, and frequently in black-and-white. The simple, uncomplicated lifestyles attracted her, making her wish she had been born five centuries earlier. Besides, at age twelve she had fallen in love with Errol Flynn.
In college, she had written a paper on the flaw of ethnocentrism (the egotistical assumption that things will always remain the same as they are now) that seemed to have been universal in the early cinema. Her subject had been the space adventures predating the first Moon landing—the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, Destination Moon, The Conquest of Space, and a few others. Each epic was filled with spaceships that were little more than obvious lineal descendants of the airplanes of the time. Even after man had gained a toehold in space, movie rockets continued to be aerodynamically sleek machines that darted about in maneuvers highly reminiscent of aerial combat.
The future, when it came, was nothing like that at all. Except for the shuttles and ferries that plied the routes between the Earth’s spaceports and low orbit, the ships of space were functional, ugly things. Like the probe beneath her boots, they were collections of geometric shapes hung together by naked beams, with all manner of things jutting out at odd angles.
The newly arrived starship was different. True, it was no winged needle, but it was streamlined. There seemed to be no protuberances at all. Nor was this smoothness of line an accident. The starship’s skin was broken by numerous airlocks, cargo hatches, machinery that might (or might not) be waste heat radiators, communications gear, and things that were not readily identifiable. There were even a number of lighted, oval windows arranged in circular rows around one end of the ship. At the center of the lighted rings was a large transparent bubble. Each of these discontinuities had been smoothed over and faired into the sleek roundness of the sphere.
Suddenly, her introspective mood gave way to a surge of adrenaline. Obviously, if this were a starship, then Earth had to learn of it, and quickly.
“Computer on!”
Her urgent words were answered by continuing silence from the daycruiser’s central brain. She crouched down, preparing to jump for her ship, when she was brushed by a strong wind from out of the depths of space.
Her reaction was more instinctive than intellectual. She chinned her maneuvering unit controls, reached out to grasp the twin joysticks, and jumped for the daycruiser, all in one smooth motion. Once space borne, she savagely twisted her power control full against the stops while fighting to keep from going into a spin.
After ten seconds, she shut down her thrusters and twisted the sticks to turn head over heels. She felt her mouth go dry as she realized that she had picked up too much speed. She was already too close to the daycruiser and would hit with enough force to give her flat feet for life.
Knowing that she had no hope of stopping in time, she applied full power anyway. As she did so, there was the crackling of a static discharge inside her suit as every hair on her body stood on end. She watched in disbelief as the daycruiser suddenly slid off to one side and she began to float toward the starship. She could feel her heart pounding in her temples while her mind struggled with the impossible. She had executed what must have been a fifty gee turn, yet had not felt the slightest sensation of acceleration.
Whoever they were, they had her.
She was fast approaching the starship now, passing into shadow as its bulk eclipsed the sun. Chryse felt a chill that had nothing to do with the sudden drop in temperature on the outside of her suit. She noticed a wisp of vapor in front of her faceplate and realized that she still had her thrusters firing at full power. Whatever the nature of the beam, it seemed to trap her exhaust gasses close to her suit. She switched off her maneuvering unit.
She slowed to a stop in the same visually violent fashion as she had started the journey. Once again, there was no sensation of acceleration. One second, she was zipping along on a course she didn’t wish to take, the next found her hanging motionless in front of a closed airlock. As she watched, the airlock opened, and perfectly ordinary light flooded out. Two figures stood silhouetted in the light. She gazed at them and felt hot tears suddenly well up in the corners of her eyes.
There was no mistaking the characteristic form of the vacsuits that the two creatures wore. They were bi-axially symmetric, possessing of a single cluster of sense organs mounted on a short, movable stalk, with two each grasping and locomotive appendages emanating from a thick torso. In other words…
They were as human as Chryse herself.