“What do they pay one of those?”
“Give us time, Gordon. We’re still working on the matter.” Shannon smiled. It was the first time he had felt relaxed for what seemed like a very long while.
chapter six
The bus-a small personnel carrier normally used for ferrying passengers between satellites or orbiting spacecraft-was drawing near to the Ganymean ship. From where he was sitting, squeezed between the bulky shapes of two other spacesuited figures on one of the benches that ran along the sides of the cabin, Hunt could see the ship closing in toward them on the small viewscreen set into the end wall.
From close range, the impression of age and wear was even more vivid than it had been previously. The patterns of discoloration covering the ship from nose to tail, not fully resolved from 15 even under quite high magnification, were now distinct and in places suggested camouflage patterns reminiscent of movies. The outer skin was peppered irregularly with round holes of various sizes, none of them very large, each of which was surrounded by a raised rim of rounded grayish metal and looked like a miniature Lunar crater; it was as if the ship had been bombarded by thousands of tiny particles moving at enormous speed-sufficient to puncture the skin and dissipate enough energy to melt the surrounding material. Either the ship had traveled an enormous distance, Hunt told himself, or there were conditions outside the Solar System that UNSA had yet to encounter.
A rectangular aperture, easily large enough to admit the bus, had opened in the side of the Shapieron, as they now knew the Ganymean ship to be called. A soft orange glow illuminated the inside and a white beacon flashed near the center of one of the longer sides.
As the bus turned gently to home in on it, the pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “Hold on to your seats back there. We’re going in without any docking radar so it’s gonna have to be a purely visual approach. Leave all helmets in their racks until after touchdown.”
With its maneuvering jets nudging delicately, the bus inched its way through the opening. Inside the bay a bulbous craft with a
blue-black sheen was secured against the inner bulkhead, taking up most of the available space. Two large and sturdy-looking platforms, constructed perpendicular to the main axis of the ship, projected into the volume that remained; a pair of silver eggs lay side by side on one of them but the other was clear except for a beacon that had been positioned well over to one side to allow ample unobstructed landing space. The bus lined itself up, moved in to hover ten feet or so above the platform, eased itself gingerly downward and came to rest.
Hunt knew immediately that there was something strange about the situation but it took him a few seconds to realize just what it was. There were puzzled expressions on a couple of the faces around him too.
The seat was pressing up against him. He was experiencing an approximately normal weight, but he had seen no evidence of any mechanism whereby such an effect could have been achieved. Jupiter Five had sections that simulated normal gravity by means of continual rotation, although some parts of the ship were designated zero-G areas for special purposes. Instruments that needed to be trained on fixed objects, for example the camera that had~ been holding the Shapieron for the previous few hours, were mounted on projecting booms which could be counterrotated to compensate-similar in principle to ground-based astronomic telescopes. But the view of the Ganymean ship presented on the screens back at 15 had given no suggestion that the vessel, or any part of it, was rotating. Furthermore, as the bus had positioned itself for its final approach into the landing bay, thus maintaining a fixed position relative to the door, the background stars had been stationary; this meant that the pilot had not been obliged to synchronize his approach run with any rotational motion of his target. Thus, the sensation of weight could only mean that the Ganymeans were employing some revolutionary technology to produce an artificial gravity effect. Intriguing.