Orbitsville

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