Orbitsville

observed. To those on board acceleration remained constant, yet the Bissendorf’s speed increased sharply until, at the mid-point of the voyage, only twelve days later, it was travelling at vast multiples of the speed of light.

Retardation produced a mirror image of the distance-against-time graph, and in an elapsed time of four months the ship was in the computed vicinity of Pengelly’s Star.

* * *

“I’m sorry, Vance.” Cliff Napier’s heavy-boned face was sombre as he spoke. “There’s just no sign of it. Yamoto says that if we were within ten light-years of a black sun his instruments couldn’t miss it.”

“Is he positive?”

“He’s positive. In fact, according to him there’s less spatial background activity than normal.”

I’m not going to let it happen, Garamond thought irrationally. Aloud he said, “Let’s go down to the observatory — I want to talk to Yamoto about this.”

“I’ll put him on your viewer now.”

“No, I want to see him in person.” Garamond left the central command console and nodded to Gunther, the second exec, to take over. This was the moment he had been dreading since the Bissendorf’s engines had been shut down an hour earlier, making it possible — in the absence of the all-devouring intake fields — to carry out radiation checks of the surrounding space. The reason he was going to the observatory in person was that he had a sudden need to move his arms and legs, to respond to the crushing sense of urgency which had been absent while the ship was in flight and now was back with him again. He wanted some time away from the watchful eyes of the bridge personnel.

“I’m sorry, Vance.” Napier always had trouble adjusting to zero-gravity conditions and his massive figure swayed precariously as he walked in magnetic boots to the elevator shaft.

“You said that before.” “I know, but I’d begun to believe we were on to something, and somehow I feel guilty over the way it has turned out.”

“That’s crazy — we always knew it was a long shot,” Garamond said. You liar, he told himself. You didn’t believe it was a long shot at all. You had convinced yourself you’d find a signpost to the third world because you couldn’t face the fact that you condemned your wife and son to death.

As the elevator was taking him down he thought back, for perhaps the thousandth time, to that afternoon on the terrace at Starflight House. All he had had to do was keep an eye on Harald Lindstrom, to refuse when asked for permission to run, to do what anybody else would have done in the same circumstances. Instead, he had let the boy trick him into doing his hardened spacefarer bit, then he had allowed himself to be pressured, then he had turned his back and indulged in daydreams while Harald was climbing, then he had been too slow in reaching the statue while the first fatal millimetre of daylight opened up between the boy’s fingers and the metal construction and he was falling… and falling… falling.

“Here we are.” Napier opened the elevator door, revealing a tunnel-like corridor at the end of which was the Bissendorf’s astronomical observatory.

“Thanks.” Garamond fought to suppress a sense of unreality as he walked out of the elevator. He saw, as in a dream, the white-clad figure of Sammy Yamoto standing at the far end of the corridor waving to him. His brain was trying in a numbed way to deal with the paradox that moments of truth, those instants when reality cannot be avoided, always seem unreal. And the truth was that his wife and child were going to die. Because of him.

“For a man who found nothing,” Napier commented, “Sammy Yamoto’s looking pretty excited.”

Garamond summoned his mind back from grey wanderings.

Yamoto came to meet him, plum-coloured lips trembling slightly. “We’ve found something! After I spoke to Mister Napier I became curious over the fact that there was less matter per cubic centimetre than the galactic norm. It was as if the region had been swept by a passing sun, yet there was no sun around.”

“What did you find?”

“I’d already checked out the electro-magnetic spectrum and knew there couldn’t be a sun nearby, but I got a crazy impulse and checked the gravitic spectrum anyway.” Yamoto was a fifty-year-old man who had looked on many worlds in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock. Garamond felt the first stirrings of a powerful elation.

“Go on,” Napier said from behind him.

“I found a gravity source of stellar magnitude less than a tenth of a light-year away, so…”

“I knew it!” Napier’s voice was hoarse. “We’ve found Pengelly’s Star.”

Garamond’s eyes were locked on the astronomer’s. “Let Mister Yamoto speak.”

“So I took some tachyonic readings to get an approximation of the object’s size and surface composition, and… You aren’t going to believe this, Mister Garamond.”

“Try me,” Garamond said. “As far as I can tell…” Yamoto swallowed painfully. “As far as I can tell, the object out there… the thing we have discovered is a spaceship over three hundred million kilometres in diameter!”

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