succumbed to the temptation.
Of the Five, she was the only observational astronomer, even though her specialty was not in the optical spectrum. She felt it her responsibility to accumulate as much data as possible, in the tunnels and in the ordinary four-dimensional space-time into which they would periodically emerge. The presumptive black hole from which they exited would always be in orbit around some star or multiple-star system. They were always in pairs, always two of them sharing a similar orbit—one from which they were ejected, and another into which they fell. No two systems were closely similar. None was very like the solar system. All provided instructive astronomical insights. Not one of them exhibited anything like an artifact—a second dodecahedron, or some vast engineering project to take apart a world and reassemble it into what Xi had called a device.
At this time they emerged near a star visibly changing its brightness (she could tell from the progression of f/stops required)—perhaps it was one of the RR Lyrae stars; next was a quintuple system; then a feebly luminous brown dwarf. Some were in open space, some were embedded in nebulosity, surrounded by glowing molecular clouds.
She recalled the warning “This will be deducted from your share in Paradise.” Nothing had been deducted from hers. Despite a conscious effort to retain a professional calm, her heart soared at this profusion of suns. She hoped that every one of them was a home to someone. Or would be one day.
But after the fourth jump she began to worry. Subjec-tively, and by her wristwatch, it felt something like an hour since they had “left” Hokkaido. If this took much longer, the absence of amenities would be felt.
Probably there wereaspects of human physiology that could not be deduced even after attentive television viewing by a very advanced civilization.
And if the extraterrestrials were so smart, why were they putting us through so many little jumps? All right, maybe the hop from Earth used rudimentary equipment because only primitives were working one side of the tunnel. But after Vega? Why couldn't they jump us directly to wherever the dodec was going?Each time she came barreling out of a tunnel, she was expectant. What wonders had they in store for her next? It put her in mind of a very upscale amusement park, and she found herself imagining Hadden peering down his telescope at Hokkaido the moment the Machine had been activated.
As glorious as the vistas offered by the Message makers were, and however much she enjoyed a kind of proprietary mastery of the subject as she explained some aspect of stellar evolution to the others, she was after a time disappointed. She had to work to track the feeling down. Soon she had it: The extraterrestrials were boasting. It was unseemly. It betrayed some defect of character.
As they plunged down still another tunnel, this one broader and more tortuous than the others, Lunacharsky asked Eda to guess why the subway stops were put in such unpromising star systems. “Why not around a single star, a young star in good health and with no debris?”
“Because,” Eda replied, “—of course, I am only guessing as you ask—because all such systems are inhabited…”
“And they don't want the tourists scaring the natives,” Sukhavati shot back. Eda smiled. “Or the other way around.”
“But that's what you mean, isn't it? There's some sort of ethic of noninterference with primitive planets.
They know that every now and then some of the primitives might use the subway…”
“And they're pretty sure of the primitives,” Ellie continued the thought, “but they can't be absolutely sure. After all, primitives are primitive. So you let them ride only onsubways that go to the sticks. The builders must be a very cautious bunch. But then why did they send us a local train and not an express?”
“Probably it's too hard to build an express tunnel,” said Xi, years of digging experience behind him.
Ellie thought of the Honshu-Hokkaido Tunnel, one of the prides of civil engineering on Earth, all of fifty-one kilometers long.
A few of the turns were quite steep now. She thought about her Thunderbird, and then she thought about getting sick. She decided she would fight it as long as she could. The dodecahedron had not been equipped with airsickness bags.
Abruptly they were on a straightaway, and then the sky was full of stars. Everywhere she looked there were stars, not the paltry scattering of a few thousand still occasionally known to naked-eye observers on Earth, but a vast multitude—many almost touching their nearest neighbors it seemed—surrounding her in every direction, many of them tinted yellow or blue or red, especially red. The sky was blazing with nearby suns. She could make out an immense spiraling cloud of dust, an accretion disk apparently flowing into a black hole of staggering proportions, out of which flashes of radiation were coming like heat lightning on a summer's night. If this was the center of the Galaxy, as she suspected, it would be bathed in synchrotron radiation. She hoped the extraterrestrials had remembered how frail humans were.
And swimming into her field of view as the dodec rotated was… a prodigy, a wonder, a miracle. They were upon it almost before they knew it. It filled half the sky. Now they were flying over it. On its surface were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of illuminated doorways, each a different shape. Many were polygonal or circular or with an elliptical cross section, some had projecting appendages or a sequence of partly overlapping off-center circles. She realized they were docking ports, thousands of different docking ports— some perhaps only meters in size, others clearly kilometers across, or larger. Every one of them, she decided, was the template of some interstellar machine like this one. Bigcreatures in serious machines had imposing entry ports. Little creatures, like us, had tiny ports. It was a democratic arrangement, with no hint of particularly privileged civilizations. The diversity of ports suggested few social distinctions among the sundry civilizations, but it implied a breathtaking diversity of beings and cultures. Talk about Grand Central Station! she thought.
The vision of a populated Galaxy, of a universe spilling over with life and intelligence, made her want to cry for joy.
They were approaching a yellow-lit port which, Elbe could see, was the exact template of the dodecahedron in which they were riding. She watched a nearby docking port, where something the size of the dodecahedron and shaped approximately like a starfish was gently insinuating itself onto its template.
She glanced left and right, up and down, at the almost imperceptible curvature of this great Station situated at what she guessed was the center of the Milky Way. What a vindication for the human species, invited here at last! There's hope for us, she thought. There's hope! “Well, it isn't Bridgeport.”
She said this aloud as the docking maneuver completed itself in perfect silence.
CHAPTER 20
Grand Central Station
All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
Angels need an assumed body, not for themselves, but on our account.
The devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.
THE AIRLOCK Was designed to accommodate only one person at a time. When questions of priority had come up—which nation would be first represented on the planet of another star—the Five had thrown up their hands in disgust and told the project managers that this wasn't that kind of mission. They had conscientiously
