Orbitsville

five

Like everyone else on board the Bissendorf, Garamond spent a lot of time at the forward viewscreens during the long days of the approach to the sphere.

He attended many meetings, accompanied by Yamoto who had become one of the busiest and most sought-after men on the ship. At first the Chief Astronomer had wanted to take advantage of the drive shut-down period to get a tachyonic signal announcing his discovery off to Earth. Garamond discreetly did not point out his own role as prime mover in the find. Instead he made Yamoto aware of the danger of letting fame-hungry professional rivals appear on the scene too early, and at the same time he insured against risks by ordering an immediate engine restart.

Yamoto went back to work, but the curious thing was that even after a full week of concentrated activity he knew little more about the sphere than had been gleaned in his first hurried scan. He confirmed that it had a diameter of some 320,000,000 kilometres, or just over two astronomical units; he confirmed that its surface was smooth to beyond the limits of resolution, certainly the equivalent of finely machined steel; he confirmed that the sphere emitted no radiation other than on the gravitic spectrum, and that analysis of this proved it to be hollow. In that week the only new data he produced were that the object’s sphericity was perfect to within the possible margin of error, and that it rotated. On the question of whether it was a natural or an artificial object he would venture no professional opinion.

Garamond turned all these factors over in his mind, trying to gauge their relevance to his own situation. The sphere, whatever its nature, no matter what its origins might be, was a startling find — the fact that it had been indicated on an antique Saganian star chart radically altered the accepted views about the dead race’s technological prowess. Possibly the whole science of astronomy would be affected, but not the pathetically short futures of his wife and child. What had he been hoping for? A fading sun which still emitted some life-giving warmth? An Earth-type planet with a vast network of underground caverns leading down into the heat of its core? A race of friendly humanoids who would say, “Come and live with us and we’ll protect your family from the President of Starflight”?

It was in the nature of hope that it could survive on such preposterous fantasies. But only when they were confined to the subconscious, where — as long as they existed at all — the emotions could equate them with genuine prospects of survival, enabling the man on the scaffold steps to retain his belief that something could still turn up to save him. Garamond and his wife and boy were on the scaffold steps, and the fantasies of hope were being dissipated by the awful presence of the sphere.

Garamond found that trying to comprehend its size produced an almost physical pain between his temples. The object was big enough by astronomical standards, so large that with Sol positioned at its centre the Earth’s orbit would be within the shell, assuming that the outer surface was a shell. It was so huge that, from distances which would have reduced Sol to nothing more than a bright star, it was clearly visible to the unaided eye as a disc of blackness against the star clouds of the galactic lens. Garamond watched it grow and grow in his screens until it filled the entire field of view with its dark, inconceivable bulk — and yet it was still more than 150,000,000 kilometres away.

Something within him began to cringe from it. In the early stages of the approach he had nursed the idea that, because of the smoothness of its surface, the sphere had to be an artifact. The notion faded when exposed to the mind-punishing reality of the sphere’s magnitude, because there was no way to visualize engineering on that scale, to conceive of a technology so far beyond anything mankind could dream of achieving. Then, in the final stages of the approach, the Bissendorf’s sensors became aware of a planet orbiting outside the sphere.

There was no optical evidence of the planet’s existence, but a study of its gravitic emissions showed that it was of approximately the same diameter and mass as Earth, and that its almost-circular orbit lay some 80,000,000 kilometres outside the sphere’s surface. Although the discovery of the planet was of value in itself, the real importance lay in what could now be deduced about the nature of the sphere.

Chief Astronomer Yamoto sent Garamond a report which stated, unequivocally, that it was a thin shell enclosing an otherwise normal sun.

By the time the ship had matched velocities with the hidden star and slipped into an equatorial parking orbit, it was just over two thousand kilometres from the surface of the dark sphere. The range was inconvenient for the rocket-propelled buggy which would carry the exploration party, but the Bissendorf had never been intended for close manoeuvring, and Garamond decided against jockeying in closer with the rarely-used ion tubes. He sat in the central control area and watched the stereo image of the EVA group as they prepared themselves in the muster station. Garamond knew all the men and women of his crew by sight if not by name, but there was one blond fresh-complexioned youngster he was having trouble identifying. He pointed at the screen.

“Cliff, is that one of the shuttle crew we shanghaied?”

“That’s right. Joe Braunek. He fitted in well,” Napier said. “I think you did him a favour.”

“Did Tayman select him for this mission?” “He volunteered. Tayman referred it back to me and I interviewed Braunek in person.” Napier broke off to contemplate a memory which appeared to amuse him.

“Well?”

“He says he’s entitled to log the flying time because you wrecked his shuttle and dumped it near Saturn.”

Garamond nodded his approval. “What about the other shuttle pilot? The one with the blue chin.”

“Shrapnel? Ah… he didn’t fit in so well. In fact, he’s pretty resentful. He wouldn’t sign on the crew and I’ve had to keep him under surveillance.”

“Oh? I seem to remember sending him an apology.”

“You did. He’s still resentful.”

“I wonder why?”

Napier gave a dry cough. “He wasn’t planning to be separated from his wife for this length of time.”

“I’m a self-centred bastard — is that it, Cliff?”

“Nothing like it.”

“Don’t give me that — I recognize that Chopin cough you get every time I go off the rails.” Garamond visualized the shuttle pilot, tried to imagine the man in the context of a family like his own, but found the exercise strangely difficult. “Shrapnel knows he’ll only be away for a year. Why doesn’t he try to make the best of it?”

Napier coughed once more. “The EVA group are about ready to go.”

“Your TB is back again, Cliff. What did I say that time?” Garamond stared hard at his next-in-command.

Napier took a deep breath, altering the slopes of his massive chest and shoulders. “You don’t like Shrapnel, and he doesn’t like you, and that amuses me — because you’re both the same type. If you were in his shoes you’d be broody and resentful and looking for an opportunity to twist things back the way you wanted them. He even looks a bit like you, yet you sit there telling everybody he’s weird.”

Garamond gave a smile he did not feel. Napier and he had long ago discarded all remnants of formal relationship, and he felt no resentment at the other man’s words, but he found them disturbing. They had implications he did not want to examine. He selected the EVA group’s intercom frequency and listened to the clamorous, overlapping voices of the men as the buggy was sealed and the dock evacuation procedure began. They were complaining in a good-natured way about the discomfort of the space-suits which they normally donned only twice a year in practice drills, or about the difficulty of carrying instruments and tool kits in gloved hands, but Garamond knew they were genuinely excited. Life on board an S.E.A. vessel consisted of routine outward journeys, brief pauses while it was established by long range instruments that the target suns had no planets or no usable planets, and equally dull returns to base. This was the first occasion in the Bissendorf’s entire span of service on which it had been necessary for men to leave its protective hull and venture into alien space with the object of making physical contact with something outside humanity’s previous experience. It was a big moment for the little exploratory team and Garamond found himself wishing he could take part. He watched as the outer doors of the dock slid aside to reveal a blackness which was unrelieved by stars. At a distance of two thousand kilometres the sphere not only filled one half of the sky, it was one half of the sky. The observed universe was cut into two hemispheres — one of them glowing with starclouds, the other filled with light-absorbent darkness. There was no sensation of being close to a huge object, rather one of being poised above infinite deeps.

The restraining rings opened and allowed the white-painted buggy to jet out clear of the mother ship. Its boxy, angular outline shrank to invisibility in a few seconds, but its interior and marker lights remained in view for quite a long time as the craft moved ‘downwards’ from the Bissendorf. Garamond stayed at central control while the buggy descended, watching several screens at once as its cameras sent back different types of information. At a height of three hundred metres the buggy’s commander, Kraemer, switched on powerful searchlights and succeeded in creating a greyish patch of illumination on the sphere’s surface.

“Instruments show zero gravity at surface,” he reported.

Garamond cut in on the circuit. “Do you want to go on down?”

“Yes, sir. The surface looks metallic from here — I’d like to try a touchdown with magnetic clamps.”

“Go ahead.”

The indistinct greyness expanded on the screens until the clang of the buggy’s landing gear was heard. “It’s no use,” Kraemer said. “We just bounced off.”

“Are you going to let her float?”

“No, sir. I’m going to go in again and maintain some drive pressure. That should lock the buggy in place against the surface and give us a fixed point to work from.”

“Go ahead, Kraemer.” Garamond looked at Napier and nodded in satisfaction. The two men watched as the buggy was inched into contact with the surface and held there by the thrust of its tubes.

Kraemer’s voice was heard again. “Surface seems to have a reasonable index of friction — we aren’t slipping around. I think it’s safe to go out for samples.”

“Proceed.”

The buggy’s door slid open, spacesuited figures drifted out and formed a small swarm around the splayed-out landing gear. Bracing themselves against the tubular legs, the figures went to work on the vaguely seen surface of the sphere with drills, cutters and chemicals. At the end of thirty minutes, by which time the team operating the valency cutter could have sliced through a house-sized block of chrome steel, nobody had managed even to mark the surface. The result was in accordance with Garamond’s premonitions.

“This is a new one on me,” said Harmer, the chemist. “We can’t make a spectroscopic analysis because the stuff refuses to burn. At this stage I can’t even say for sure that it’s a metal. We’re just wasting our time down here.”

“Tell Kraemer to bring them up,” Garamond said to Napier. “Is there any point in firing the main ionizing gun against it?”

“None at all,” put in Denise Serra, the Chief Physicist. “If a valency cutter at a range of one centimetre achieved nothing there’s no point in hosing energy all over it from this distance.” Garamond nodded. “Okay. Let’s pool our ideas. We’ve acquired a little more information, although most of it is negative, and I’d like to have your thoughts on whether the sphere is a natural object or an artifact.”

“It’s an artifact,” Denise Serra said immediately, with characteristic firmness. “Its sphericity is perfect and the surface is smooth to limits of below one micron. Nature doesn’t operate that way — at least, not on the astronomical scale.” She glanced a challenge at Yamoto.

“I have to agree,” Yamoto said. “I’ve been avoiding the idea, but I can’t conceive of any natural mechanism which would produce that thing out there. However, that doesn’t mean I can see how it was constructed by intelligent beings. It’s just too much.” He shook his head dispiritedly. The haggardness of his face showed that he had been losing a lot of sleep.

O’Hagan, the Chief Science Officer, who was a stickler for protocol, cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “Our difficulties arise from the fact that the Bissendorf is an exploration vessel and very little more. The correct procedure now would be to send a tachyon signal back to Earth and get a properly equipped expedition out here.” His severe grey gaze held steadily on Garamond’s face.

“That’s outside the scope of the present discussion,” Napier said.

Garamond shook his head. “No, it isn’t. Gentlemen, and lady, Mister O’Hagan has put into words something which must have been on all your minds since the beginning of this mission. It can’t have been difficult for you to work out for yourselves that I’m in trouble with Starflight House. In fact, it’s personal trouble with Elizabeth Lindstrom — and I think you all know what that means. I’m not going to give you any more details, simply because I don’t want you to be involved any more than you are at present.

“Perhaps it is enough to say that this has to be my last voyage as a Starflight commander, and I want this year in full.”

O’Hagan looked pained, but he held his ground doggedly. “I’m sure I’m speaking for all the other section heads when I say that we feel the utmost personal loyalty to Captain Garamond, and that our feelings aren’t affected by the circumstances surrounding the start of this voyage. Had it turned out to be a normal, uneventful mission I, for one, wouldn’t have considered questioning its legality — but the fact remains that we have made the most important discovery since Terranova and Sagania, and I feel it should be reported to Earth without delay.”

“I disagree,” Napier said coldly. “Starflight House didn’t direct the Bissendorf to this point in space. The sphere was discovered because Captain Garamond acted independently to check out a personally-held theory. We’ll hand it over to Starflight, as a bonus they didn’t earn, at the end of the mission’s scheduled span of one year.”

O’Hagan gave a humourless smile. “I still feel…”

Napier jumped to his feet. “What do you mean when you say you feel, Mister O’Hagan? Don’t you think with your brain like the rest of us? Does the fact that you feel these things turn them into something for which you have no personal responsibility?”

“That’s enough,” Garamond said.

“I just want O’Hagan to stand over his words.”

“I said…”

“Gentlemen, I withdraw my remarks,” O’Hagan interrupted, staring fixedly at his notepad. “It wasn’t my intention to divert the discussion away from the main topic. Now, we seem agreed that the sphere is of artificial origin — so what is its purpose?” He raised his eyes and scanned the assembled officers.

There was a lengthy silence.

“Defence?” Denise Serra’s round face mirrored her doubts. “Is there a planet inside?”

“There might be a planet on the far side of the sun which hasn’t shown up much on our gravitic readings.” Yamoto said. “But if we had the technology to produce that sphere, could there be an enemy so powerful that we would have to cower behind a shield?”

“Supposing it was a case of ‘Stop the galaxy, I want to get off’? Maybe the builders were pacifists and felt the need to hide. They made a pretty good job of concealing a star.”

“I hope that isn’t the answer,” Yamoto said gloomily. “If they needed to hide…”

“This is getting too speculative,” Garamond put in. “The immediate practical question is, does it have an entrance? Can we get inside? Let’s have your thoughts on that.”

Yamoto stroked his wispy beard. “If there is an entrance, it ought to be on the equator so that ships could hold their positions over it just by going into a parking orbit the way we did.”

“So you suggest doing a circuit of the sphere in the equatorial plane?”

“Yes — in the opposite direction to its rotation. That way we would get the advantage of its seventy thousand kilometres an hour equatorial rotation and cut down on our own G-forces.”

“That’s decided then,” Garamond said. “We’ll turn around as soon as Kraemer and his team are on board. I hope we’ll recognize an entrance if we find one.”

Three duty periods later he was asleep beside Aileen when his personal communicator buzzed him into wakefulness.

“Garamond here,” he said quietly, trying not to disturb his wife.

“Sorry to disturb you, Vance,” Napier said, “but I think we’re going to reach an entrance to the sphere in a couple of hours from now.”

“What?” Garamond sat upright, aware of deceleration forces. ”How could you tell?“

“Well, we can’t be certain, but it’s the most likely explanation for the echoes we’re picking up on the long-range radar.”

“What sort of echoes?”

“A lot of them, Vance. There’s a fleet of about three thousand ships in parking orbit, dead ahead of us.”