view — the cap was not at all far away, maybe a few hundred astronomical units, where an A.U. was the distance from Earth to Sol. You got used to such enormous distance measures, in the relentless training all crew had to undergo.
He tried to remember when that was … centuries ago. Yet it seemed like just a few weeks.
He looked at the image and let his eyes see it as a curved hemisphere cupped around this side of the star.
They zoomed the optics in on the disk’s flares, having to go through several settings that blanked out the blue white hot spot on the star’s surface. The glare of the hot spot was fierce, actinic, bristling with angry storms, a tiny white sun attached to the bigger pink star like an angry leech.
Above the white spot raged the filigree spikes of streaming plasma. They whirled around one another like fighting snakes, burning as they rushed up from the hot spot. It looked like they should bathe the hemispheric bowl in licking flames. But before they reached the curve of the bowl, they dovetailed into a slender jet. Among the streamers, Cliff could see little blobs and bright flecks moving out from the star, swarming up along the jet, toward the neatly circular hole in the bowl and out into the sky.
Cliff wrestled with the images. “Let’s see the earlier pictures, from the last watch.”
Automatically, the ship kept records of the local sky. Its software was spectrally sophisticated and framed its own, limited hypotheses about the class and type of every luminous object it saw. They checked the records. The muted minds that murmured among themselves, struggling to understand the bowl, had spun endlessly in parameter-space confusions.
In the infrared, there was a glow where the “bottom” of the bowl would be. None of the instruments showed any image of the bowl during the years while the ship was approaching from behind. He thumbed through uninteresting pictures. The bowl blotted out a small dot on the sky, but nobody had noticed such a minor thing from light-years away.
The bowl’s infrared radiation showed a temperature around 20 degrees centigrade. Room temperature.
“Ah, balmy,” Abduss said. Across that vast curve, tropical conditions prevailed. The back face was cool and appeared stony. But the warmed side was at 20 degrees C. The star was less luminous than Sol — but, of course, the bowl was in continuous sunlight, so it would get pretty warm. No night.
Cliff had a mind’s eye picture of the bowl as a colossal construction, even though his common sense was screaming. When something appeared impossible, it seemed best to simply study it until understanding emerged. And wait for the captain to wake up, yes.
The first shock came from simple geometry. Mayra gave him distances and angles and he quickly found that the area of the inward-facing cap was two hundred million times that of Earth. Hovering over its star, the rim of the bowl would provide a vast, livable surface. (The biologist would wait for the captain’s take, but …
On that area, peering through the small hole they could see, Abduss picked up reflecting optical emission … and found the spectral signatures of water. Then, with a bit more effort to see through the rippling plasma that shrouded
So it was an immense area designed for living … by what?
Cliff checked their distance from the bowl: 320 AU — about a hundredth of a light-year.
But they were still looking at the back of the cap, in the dark. He looked at the waiting faces of the Wickramsinghs and thought. They were left with some brute astronomical facts — velocities, times, food supplies. …
At their review meeting, the Wickramsinghs eyed him expectantly.
“It’s beyond me,” he said — and watched their faces, despite their best efforts, show disappointment.
“Surely we can learn more?” Mayra suggested hesitantly.
“Not at this distance,” Abduss said. “And I doubt the captain will authorize a trajectory change to get closer.”
Cliff looked at them and thought unkind thoughts. Five crews didn’t wake the captain, because there wasn’t an answer. They had been trained to keep the ship running. Schooled to stay steady. But here was something the Earthside planners had never imagined.
“I think we have two problems,” Cliff said with what he hoped was a diplomatic tone. “Supplies, yes. And this strange … object. Too much here for us to deal with.”
Abduss said carefully, “We had thought somewhat the same.”
“Look,” Mayra said directly, “it’s nearly time to take the captain up to his conscious stage — ”
“I want Beth Marble brought up, too.”
Both of them blinked. “But she is — ”
“Capable, right.” He could see a lot of trouble coming, and he didn’t want to be alone. Who did?
“But there is no protocol requiring — ”
Cliff held up his hand and looked across the table steadily, letting them think about it. “Let’s just do it.”
“She is … not your wife.”
“No, but she has ship skills and can pilot.”
“Not until we can ask the captain,” Abduss said. His face was firm.
TWO
They told the captain when he came out of cold sleep, bleary-eyed, stiff, still lying on a slab — and then his eyes began blinking with startling speed, alert.
Abduss said, “You aren’t going to believe this.”
Captain Redwing’s skeptical grin crinkled the leathery skin around his eyes as he said, “Try me.”
So they told him, while they gingerly massaged his stiff, cold muscles and applied the necessary chemistries. Cliff hung back and bided his time while the Wickramsinghs took Redwing through the whole story.
Redwing sat up and shook his black mane, his bronzed skin blue-veined at the wrists, and said, “You’re
So they told him some more. Showed the screens, the time log, and finally the close-ups of the back of the bowl. The captain stared at the bowl image, and Cliff could see him mentally put it aside to concentrate on the supplies issue.
“The drive not running to specs. Five crew changes! You couldn’t do
“We did not know what to do,” Mayra said reasonably. “There were — ”
“We’ve run this way for — what? — decades!”
Abduss bristled in her defense, face stiff. “This was not in the protocols.”
“Protocols be damned. I — ”
“The leptonic drive is one issue, Captain,” Cliff said, “and this thing ahead is quite another — ”
“You’re Science.” Redwing cut him off with a chopping hand signal. “This is crew.”
Cliff sat back and nursed his coffee and remembered all the rumors before launch. How Redwing was from one of the families that had made a bundle out of the Indian casinos. How he’d breezed through MIT with great grades and a wake of surly enemies. Made his rep in the Mars exploration and exploitation. Been a real sonofabitch, sure, but he had gotten things goddamn well
“We cannot go on like this,” Mayra said, ever the diplomat. “Our external diagnostics are working well, so we are sure there is not some property of the interstellar gas that is the root of our drive problem. We rely on the microwave view to diagnose the ramscoop fields — ”
“We’ll review it all,” Redwing said crisply. He bit his lip. “And the earlier crews — Jacobs, Chen, Ambertson, Abar, Kalaish — all top people…”
