The prospect of getting an extra seven thousand kilometres away from the burning hell beneath them was welcomed by everyone. Trivial though that distance was in astronomical terms, it meant that the sky would no longet be dominated by a landscape that might have been imagined by Dante or Hieronymus Bosch. And although not even the most violent eruptions had blasted any material up to the ships, there was always the fear that Io might attempt to set a new record. As it was, visibility from Leonov’s observation deck was steadily degraded by a thin film of sulphur, and sooner or later someone would have to go out and clean it off.
Only Curnow and Chandra were aboard Discovery when Hal was given the first control of the ship. It was a very limited form of control; he was merely repeating the program that had been fed into his memory, and monitoring its execution. And the human crew was monitoring him: if any malfunction occurred, they would take over immediately.
The first burn lasted for ten minutes; then Hal reported that Discovery had entered the transfer orbit. As soon as Leonov’s radar and optical tracking confirmed that, the other ship injected itself into the same trajectory. Two minor in-course corrections were made; then, three hours and fifteen minutes later, both arrived uneventfully at the first Lagrange point, L. 1 – 10,500 kilometres up, on the invisible line connecting the centres of Io and Jupiter.
Hal had behaved impeccably, and Chandra showed unmistakable traces of such purely human emotions as satisfaction and even joy. But by that time, everyone’s thoughts were elsewhere; Big Brother, alias Zagadka, was only a hundred kilometres away.
Even from that distance, it already appeared larger than the Moon as seen from Earth, and shockingly unnatural in its straight-edged, geometrical perfection. Against the background of space it would have been completely invisible, but the scudding Jovian clouds 350,000 kilometres below showed it up in dramatic relief. They also produced an illusion that, once experienced, the mind found almost impossible to refute. Because there was no way in which its real location could be judged by the eye, Big Brother often looked like a yawning trapdoor set in the face of Jupiter.
There was no reason to suppose that a hundred kilometres would be ‘safer than ten, or more dangerous than a thousand; it merely seemed psychologically right for a first reconnaissance. From that distance, the ship’s telescopes could have revealed details only centimetres across -but there were none to be seen. Big Brother appeared completely featureless; which, for an object that had, presumably, survived millions of years of bombardment by space debris, was incredible.
When Floyd stared through the binocular eyepiece, it seemed to him that he could reach out and touch those smooth, ebon surfaces – just as he had done on the Moon, years ago. That first time, it had been with the gloved hand of his spacesuit. Not until the Tycho monolith had been enclosed in a pressurized dome had he been able to use his naked hand.
That had made no difference; he did not feel that he had ever really touched TMA-1. The tips of his fingers had seemed to skitter over an invisible barrier, and the harder he pushed, the greater the repulsion grew. He wondered if Big Brother would produce the same effect.
Yet before they came that close, they had to make every test they could devise and report their observations to Earth. They were in much the same position as explosives experts trying to defuse a new type of bomb, which might be detonated by the slightest false move. For all that they could tell, even the most delicate of radar probes might trigger some unimaginable catastrophe.
For the first twenty-four hours, they did nothing except observe with passive instruments – telescopes, cameras, sensors on every wavelength. Vasili Orlov also took the opportunity of measuring the slab’s dimensions with the greatest possible precision, and confirmed the famous 1:4:9 ratio to six decimal places. Big Brother was exactly the same shape as TMA-1 – but as it was more than two kilometres long, it was 718 times larger than its small sibling.
And there was a second mathematical mystery. Men had been arguing for years over that 1:4:9 ratio – the squares of the first three integers. That could not possibly be a coincidence; now here was another number to conjure with.
Back on Earth, statisticians and mathematical physicists were soon playing happily with their computers, trying to relate the ratio to the fundamental constants of nature – the velocity of light, the proton/electron mass ratio, the fine-structure constant. They were quickly joined by a gaggle of numerologists, astrologers, and mystics, who threw in the height of the Great Pyramid, the diameter of Stonehenge, the azimuth bearings of the Nazca lines, the latitude of Easter Island, and a host of other factors from which they were able to draw the most amazing conclusions about the future. They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on 31 December 1999 – but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.
Nor did Big Brother appear to notice the two ships that had arrived in its vicinity – even when they cautiously probed it with radar beams and bombarded it with strings of radio pulses which, it was hoped, would encourage any intelligent listener to answer in the same fashion.
After two frustrating days, with the approval of Mission Control, the ships halved their distance. From fifty kilometres, the largest face of the slab appeared about four times the width of the Moon in Earth’s sky – impressive, but not so large as to be psychologically overwhelming. It could not yet compete with Jupiter, ten times larger still; and already the mood of the expedition was changing from awed alertness to a certain impatience.
Walter Curnow spoke for almost everyone: ‘Big Brother may be willing to wait a few million years – we’d like to get away a little sooner.’
24
Reconnaissance
Discovery had left Earth with three of the little space pods that allowed an astronaut to perform extravehicular activities in shirt-sleeve comfort. One had been lost in the accident – if it was an accident – that had killed Frank Poole. Another had carried Dave Bowman to his final appointment with Big Brother, and shared whatever fate befell him, A third was still in the ship’s garage, the Pod Bay.
It lacked one important component – the hatch, blown off by Commander Bowman when he had made his hazardous vacuum-crossing and entered the ship through the emergency airlock, after Hal had refused to open the Pod Bay door. The resulting blast of air had rocketed the pod several hundred kilometres away before Bowman, busy with more important matters, had brought it back under radio control. It was not surprising that he had never bothered to replace the missing hatch.
Now Pod Number 3 (on which Max, refusing all explanations, had stencilled the name Nina) was being prepared for another EVA. It still lacked a hatch, but that was unimportant. No one would be riding inside.
Bowman’s devotion to duty was a piece of unexpected luck, and it would have been folly not to take advantage of it. By using Nina as a robot probe, Big Brother could be examined at close quarters without risking human lives. That at least was the theory; no one could rule out the possibility of a backlash that might engulf the ship. After all, fifty kilometres was not even a hair’s breadth, as cosmic distances went.
After years of neglect, Nina looked distinctly shabby. The dust that was always floating around in zero gee had settled over the outer surface, so that the once immaculately white hull had become a dingy grey. As it slowly accelerated away from the ship, its external manipulators folded neatly back and its oval viewport staring spaceward like a huge, dead eye, it did not seem a very impressive ambassador of Mankind. But that was a distinct advantage; so humble an emissary might be tolerated, and its small size and low velocity should emphasize its peaceful intentions. There had been a suggestion that it should approach Big Brother with open hands; the idea was quickly turned down when almost everyone agreed that if they saw Nina heading toward them, mechanical claws outstretched, they would run for their lives.
After a leisurely two-hour trip, Nina came to rest a hundred metres from one corner of the huge rectangular slab. From so close at hand, there was no sense of its true shape; the TV cameras might have been looking down on the tip of a black tetrahedron of indefinite size. The onboard instruments showed no sign of radioactivity or magnetic fields; nothing whatsoever was coming from Big Brother except the tiny fraction of sunlight it condescended to reflect.