Richard touched the control panel. Spotlights flooded space, and illuminated nothing except a silver bead.
A pale gray sphere. With nothing to give a scale it was impossible for the unaided eye to tell how big it was. But there was a scale projected on the screen. And it was growing. There were a few circles like shallow, immensely eroded craters. The Wallaby orbited it, cameras busy. There were darker patches and one black spot. It looked much like the Moon seen from Earth.
'Where on the surface is the stasis box?' asked Gatley Ivor. 'Or is it buried?'
'That is the point: the deep radar lacks fine definition yet, but it appears to be almost all stasis field. It is about nine miles in diameter.'
'The Puppeteers did not tell us it was so big,' said Melody.
'I suspect they may not have known. Perhaps they only picked it up on their deep radar at extreme range as a point whose magnitude had to be guessed. They would be too cautious to explore further themselves. Or perhaps they never saw it-the Outsiders may have told them about it. I suspect they have a standing order with the Outsiders to buy information about any stasis boxes they come across, but perhaps they thought they could no longer afford to pay extra for details like size.'
'If that is so, whether it was caution or miserliness that prevented them knowing, they made a mistake,' said Peter Robinson. 'Had they explored boldly, or bought full information, they would have discovered it is too big for an expedition of this size.'
'A Hero-a kzin-is not daunted by size,' said Charrgh-Captain.
'I think,' said Richard, 'it may not have been caution only. With so few Puppeteers left in known space, their resources and personnel are stretched thin. A Puppeteer ship that detected this at very long range would probably have been on business it could not divert from. As for miserliness, if they bought the information about it from Outsiders, well, we know the Outsiders do not sell information cheaply.'
Perhaps,' said Gay, 'when they saw an asteroid and then a stasis field indicated from a distance on deep- radar, they thought the field was somewhere on the asteroid, as we just did. They did not realize the asteroid was the whole stasis field.'
'In any event,' said Peter Robinson, 'you must agree it is too big for us to open. It is far bigger than any spaceship I have heard of. Assuming that this giant stasis field contains an artifact of a size to justify it, the chances are that there are live Slavers within. We are not equipped to handle them if they are released.'
'I am tempted in one part of me to proceed,' said Gatley Ivor. 'There may be more knowledge of the ancients here than the total of all that has been gathered to date. And yet every rational instinct says this is too big for us. I must say reluctantly that we should return with a bigger expedition-perhaps a warship.'
'Would that not simply be presenting the Slavers with the warship, should they seize the minds of its crew?' asked Charrgh-Captain. 'Think of human history and your Napoleon's march on Paris after his escape from Elba- the monkeys sent to capture him simply joined him, and the more that were sent the bigger his army became.'
'Can the Slaver Power penetrate a General Products hull?' demanded Melody.
'I believe it can,' Gatley Ivor said. 'First, because the Power is not a physical event and is not governed by the laws of physics. It is not a wave effect, nor does it depend on particles. Further, we know from ample experience that a General Products hull does not block the probing of kzinti-or even human-telepaths. Matter does not shield against telepathy.'
Charrgh-Captain's tail lashed. His ears knotted and unknotted. A kzin like Charrgh-Captain could not-physically could not-admit before either aliens or his own kind that he was too fearful to execute a task.
If we return for reinforcements, Richard thought, Charrgh-Captain will, quite legally, report the situation to the Patriarchy. Diminished as they are, they still, unlike us, have a command economy. By the time we, or the human bureaucracy, raises the finance for a bigger expedition, the Kzin might easily be here and have it open.
'It is too important simply to leave,' said Melody Fay.
'What I am saying when I say it is too big,' said Gatley Ivor, 'is that I see a high probability there are Slavers inside it. It is much more than a mere good chance. A stasis field of this size plainly contains something on the order of a spaceship or a space station. Or perhaps it was once an installation on the surface of a planet that has disappeared. I have never heard of one so big. Surely it will be crewed. Perhaps it contains a Slaver army. And one Slaver alone would be more than danger enough!' Charrgh-Captain bridled again at the mention of danger, but his ears settled back into a position of tacit acceptance and his tail stilled. Richard saw him curl it out of the way with a conscious motion. The big kzin might not like the suggestion that he would shy from danger, but this was plainly something beyond the normal. The threat of live Slavers might daunt the boldest of any species.
'At any rate,' said Richard, 'now that we are here, let us explore what we may. Our sponsors will hardly be pleased if we come away without having done that. First, we should make a survey of the accretion material and see where underneath it the stasis field begins. We can send progress reports back by hyperwave.'
No one disagreed.
'Comparing the radar pictures and what we can see visually,' Richard said a few hours later, 'we see a difference: The stasis field's mostly, as we suspected, a sphere, covered with a layer, or if you like a shell, of accreted material. However, at one point on the sphere there's a pocket, a sort of dimple, in the field.
'It looks small by comparison with the big field, but in fact it has quite a large volume: larger than our own hull. Deep-radar shows it's divided into various compartments. Also it contains smaller stasis boxes-a very dangerous set-up-and an odd linear structure. It reminded me at first of a spinal column but on finer resolution it's more like a string of large beads laid out in a row… It has a cover fitting flush with the surface so the spherical outline is not disturbed.'
'That would be where that black mark is?'
'Yes. In fact it's a hole. An obvious possibility is that it's where the mechanism for turning off the field was housed. It may still be there. Apart from the access face, which is flush with the sphere's surface, it's surrounded by the field on five sides and well protected.'
'Then we examine it,' said Charrgh-Captain. 'With suitable caution.'
Melody Fay remained in Wallaby at the weapons console. Her task was simple: Any slightest suggestion of the Slaver power or other threatening activity, and she was to use the moments she had to strike a button. Wallaby would cut loose with every weapon. That was assuming she could recognize the power before it gripped her. The rest of the expedition embarked in Joey, Wallaby's main shuttle craft. The black mark grew on the surface of the great globe as they approached.
'Not well protected enough,' said Charrgh-Captain after a time. 'Something has smashed through it. A meteor, perhaps.'
'Odd that it should have struck in the one vulnerable spot,' said Peter Robinson.
'It is the one spot such a strike would now show,' said Charrgh-Captain in a tone of freezing contempt. 'The stasis box may have passed through a meteor swarm. Or been bombarded in battle. Even without other explosives, every other hit would have vaporized on impact with the field from its own kinetic energies. That may contribute to the high metal content in the stony plating over the thing.'
To have once encountered a meteor-swarm it must have drifted a long way,' said Gay. 'This part of space is empty.'
'We know it has drifted a long way,' said Charrgh-Captain. 'It has been drifting for billions of your years and ours.'
'Perhaps it was deliberately attacked,' said Richard.
'We may soon see,' said Charrgh-Captain.
The stony surface of the sphere had grown to fill all the lower viewport now. The black mark was a jagged hole, surrounded by the rim of a shallow crater.
Joey's landing legs touched. Natural gravity was negligible, but the craft's externally mounted gravity motors cut in, anchoring it firmly. The old kzinti gravity-planer had been obsolete as a space drive since the hyperdrive ended the First Man-Kzin War centuries previously and given, eventually, both species an open doorway to the distant stars, but kzin gravity technology still had a multitude of uses.
There was no need for ladders to descend. A gentle push and they each floated down, falling slowly through the great hole that meteor or missile had smashed through layers of super-hard shielding. There were edges of twisted metal, but even if these had not been eroded by the eons, they were unlikely to tear the fabric of modern space-suits. The hole narrowed somewhat toward the bottom. They pulled themselves on and down and into what
