“Turn the volume back up,” Harry said. “I’d rather hear Ted.”
“Come on, guys.”
“We’re all under a lot of pressure, Beth,” Norman said. “It’s going to affect everybody in different ways.”
She glared at Norman. “You’re saying Barnes was right?”
“I’m saying we’re all under pressure. Including him. Including you.”
“Jesus, you men always stick together. You know why I’m still an assistant professor and not tenured?”
“Your pleasant, easygoing personality?” Harry said.
“I can do without this. I really can.”
“Beth,” Harry said, “you see the way these cables are going? They’re running toward that bulkhead there. See if they go up the wall on the other side of the door.”
“You trying to get rid of me?”
“If possible.”
She laughed, breaking the tension. “All right, I’ll look on the other side of the door.”
When she was gone, Harry said, “She’s pretty worked up.”
Norman said, “You know the Ben Stone story?”
“Which one?”
“Beth did her graduate work in Stone’s lab.”
“Oh.”
Benjamin Stone was a biochemist at BU. A colorful, engaging man, Stone had a reputation as a good researcher who used his graduate students like lab assistants, taking their results as his own. In this exploitation of others’ work, Stone was not unique in the academic community, but he proceeded a little more ruthlessly than his colleagues.
“Beth was living with him as well.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Back in the early seventies. Apparently, she did a series of important experiments on the energetics of ciliary inclusion bodies. They had a big argument, and Stone broke off his relationship with her. She left the lab, and he published [[97]] five papers—all her work—without her name on them.”
“Very nice,” Harry said. “So now she lifts weights?”
“Well, she feels mistreated, and I can see her point.”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “But the thing is, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, you know what I mean?”
“Jesus,” Beth said, returning. “This is like ‘The girl who’s raped is always asking for it,’ is that what you’re saying?”
“No,” Harry said, still lifting up floor panels, following the wires. “But sometimes you gotta ask what the girl is doing in a dark alley at three in the morning in a bad part of town.”
“I was in love with him.”
“It’s still a bad part of town.”
“I was twenty-two years old.”
“How old do you have to be?”
“Up yours, Harry.”
Harry shook his head. “You find the wires, Butch?”
“Yes, I found the wires. They go into some kind of a glass grid.”
“Let’s have a look,” Norman said, going next door. He’d seen flight recorders before; they were long rectangular metal boxes, reminiscent of safe-deposit boxes, painted red or bright orange. If this was—
He stopped.
He was looking at a transparent glass cube one foot on each side. Inside the cube was an intricate grid arrangement of fine glowing blue lines. Between the glowing lines, blue lights flickered intermittently. There were two pressure gauges mounted on top of the cube, and three pistons; and there were a series of silver stripes and rectangles on the outer surface on the left side. It didn’t look like anything he had seen before.
“Interesting.” Harry peered into the cube. “Some kind of optronic memory, is my guess. We don’t have anything like it.” He touched the silver stripes on the outside. “Not paint, it’s some plastic material. Probably machine-readable.”
“By what? Certainly not us.”
“No. Probably a robot recovery device of some kind.”
“And the pressure gauges?”
“The cube is filled with some kind of gas, under pressure.
[[98]] Maybe it contains biological components, to attain that compactness. In any case, I’ll bet this large glass is a memory device.”
“A flight recorder?”
“Their equivalent, yes.”
“How do we access it?”
“Watch this,” Beth said, going back to the flight deck. She began pushing sections of the console, activating it. “Don’t tell Barnes,” she said over her shoulder.
“How do you know where to press?”
“I don’t think it matters,” she said. “I think the console can sense where you are.”
“The control panel keeps track of the pilot?”
“Something like that.”
In front of them, a section of the console glowed, making a screen, yellow on black.
RV-LHOOQ DCOMI U.S.S. STAR VOYAGER
Then nothing.
Harry said, “Now we’ll get the bad news.”
“What bad news?” Norman said. And he wondered: Why had Harry stayed behind to look for the flight recorder, instead of going with Ted and Barnes to explore the rest of the ship? Why was he so interested in the past history of this vessel?
“Maybe it won’t be bad,” Harry said.
“Why do you think it might be?”
“Because,” Harry said, “if you consider it logically, something vitally important is missing from this ship—”
[[99]] At that moment, the screen filled with columns:
SHIP SYSTEMS PROPULSION SYSTEMS
LIFE SYSTEMS WASTE MANAG (V9)
DATA SYSTEMS STATUS OM2 (OUTER)
QUARTERMASTER STATUS OM3 (INNER)
FLIGHT RECORDS STATUS OM4 (FORE)
CORE OPERATIONS STATUS DV7 (AFT)
DECK CONTROL STATUS V (SUMMA)
INTEGRATION (DIRECT) STATUS COMREC (2)
LSS TEST 1.0 LINE A9-11
LSS TEST 2.0 LINE A 12-BX
LSS TEST 3.0 STABILIX
“What’s your pleasure?” Beth said, hands on the console. “Flight records,” Harry said. He bit his lip.
FLIGHT DATA SUMMARIES RV-LHOOQ
FDS 01/01/43-12/31/45
FDS 01/01/46-12/31/48
FDS 01/01/49-12/31/51
FDS 01/01/52-12/31/53
FDS 01/01/54-12/31/54
FDS 01/01/55-06/31/55
FDS 07/01/55-12/31/55
FDS 01/01/56-01/31/56
FDS 02/01/56-ENTRY EVENT
FDS ENTRY EVENT
FDS ENTRY EVENT SUMMARY
8&6 !!OZ/010/Odd-000/XXX/X
F$S XXX/X% ^/XXX-X@X/X!X/X
“What do you make of that?” Norman said.
Harry was peering at the screen. “As you see, the earliest records are in three-year intervals. Then they’re shorter, one year, then six months, and finally one month. Then this entry event business.”
“So they were recording more and more carefully,” Beth said. “As the ship approached the entry event, whatever it was.”
“I have a pretty good idea what it was,” Harry said. “I just can’t believe that—let’s start. How about entry event summary?”
Beth pushed buttons.
On the screen, a field of stars, and around the edges of the field, a lot of numbers. It was three-dimensional, giving the illusion of depth.
“Holographic?”
“Not exactly. But similar.”
[[100]] “Several large-magnitude stars there …”
“Or planets.”
“What planets?”
“I don’t know. This is one for Ted,” Harry said. “He may be able to identify the image. Let’s go on.”
He touched the console; the screen changed.
“More stars.”
“Yeah, and more numbers.”
The numbers around the edges of the screen were flickering, changing rapidly. “The stars don’t seem to be moving, but the numbers are changing.”
“No, look. The stars are moving, too.”
They could see that all the stars were moving away from the center of the screen, which was now black and empty. “No stars in the center, and everything moving away …” Harry said thoughtfully.
The stars on the outside were moving very quickly, streaking outward. The black center was expanding.
“Why is it empty like that in the center, Harry?” Beth said.
“I don’t think it is empty.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“No, but it’s not empty. In just a minute we should see—There!”
A dense white cluster of stars suddenly appeared in the center of the screen. The cluster expanded as they watched. It was a strange effect, Norman thought. There was still a distinct black ring that expanded outward, with stars on the outside and on the inside. It felt as if they were flying through a giant black donut.
“My God,” Harry said softly. “Do you know what you are looking at?”
“No,” Beth said. “What’s that cluster of stars in the center?”
“It’s another universe.”
“It’s what?”
“Well, okay. It’s probably another universe. Or it might be a different region of our own universe. Nobody really knows for sure.”
“What’s the black donut?” Norman said.
[[101]] “It’s not a donut. It’s a black hole. What you are seeing is the recording made as this spacecraft went through a black hole and entered into another—Is someone calling?” Harry turned, cocked his head. They fell silent, but heard nothing. “What do you mean, another universe—”
“—Sssssh.”
A short silence. And then a faint voice crying “Hellooo …”
“Who’s that?” Norman said, straining to listen. The voice was so soft. But it sounded human. And maybe more than one voice. It was coming from somewhere inside the spacecraft.
“Yoo-hoo! Anybody there? Hellooo.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Beth said. “It’s them, on the monitor.”
She turned up the volume on the little monitor Edmunds had left behind. On the screen they saw Ted and Barnes, standing in a room somewhere and shouting. “Hellooo … Hel-lo-oooo.”
“Can we talk back?”
“Yes. Press that button on the side.” Norman said, “We hear you.”
“High damn time!” Ted.
“All right, now,” Barnes said. “Listen up.”
“What are you people doing back there?” Ted said.
“Listen up,” Barnes said. He stepped to one side, revealing a piece of multicolored equipment. “We now know what this ship is for.”
“So do we,” Harry said.
“We do?” Beth and Norman said together.
But Barnes wasn’t listening. “And the ship seems to have picked up something on its travels.”
“Picked up something? What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Barnes said. “But it’s something alien.”
“SOMETHING ALIEN”
The moving walkway carried them past endless large cargo bays. They were going forward, to join Barnes and Ted and Edmunds. And to see their alien discovery.
“Why would anyone send a spaceship through a black hole?” Beth asked.
“Because of gravity,” Harry said. “You see, black holes have so much gravity they distort space and time incredibly. You remember how Ted was saying that planets and stars make dents in the fabric of space-time? Well, black holes make tears in the fabric. And some people think it’s possible to fly through those tears, into another universe, or another part of our universe. Or to another time.”
“Another time!”
“That’s the idea,” Harry said.
“Are you people coming?” Barnes’s tinny voice, on the monitor.
“In transit now,” Beth said, glowering at the screen. “He can’t see you,” Norman said.
“I don’t care.”
They rode past more cargo areas. Harry said, “I can’t wait to see Ted’s face when we tell him.”
Finally they reached the end of the walkway. They passed through a midsection of struts and girders, and entered a large forward room which they had previously seen on the monitor. With ceilings nearly a hundred feet high, it was enormous.
You could put a six-story building in this room, Norman thought. Looking up, he saw a hazy mist or fog.
“What’s that?”
“That’s a cloud,” Barnes said, shaking his head. “The room is so big it apparently has its own weather. Maybe it even rains in here sometimes.”
The room was filled with machinery on an immense scale. At first glance, it looked like oversized earth-moving machinery, except it was brightly painted in primary colors, [[103]] glistening with oil. Then Norman began to notice individual features. There were giant claw hands, enormously powerful arms, moving gear wheels. And an array of buckets and receptacles.
He realized suddenly he was looking at something very similar to the grippers and claws mounted on the front end of the Charon V submersible he had ridden down on the day before. Was it the day before? Or was it still the same day? Which day? Was this July 4? How long had they been down here?
“If you look carefully,” Barnes was saying, “you can see that some of these devices appear to be large-scale weapons. Others, like that long extensor arm, the various attachments to pick things up, in effect make this ship a gigantic robot.”
“A robot …”
“No kidding,” Beth said.
“I guess it would have been appropriate for a robot to open it after all,” Ted said thoughtfully. “Maybe even fitting.”
“Snug fitting,” Beth said.
“Pipe fitting,” Norman said.
“Sort of robot-to-robot, you mean?” Harry said. “Sort of a meeting of the threads and treads?”
“Hey,” Ted said. “I don’t make fun of your comments even when they’re stupid.”
“I wasn’t aware they ever were,” Harry said.
“You say foolish things sometimes. Thoughtless.”
“Children,” Barnes said, “can we get back to the business at hand?”
“Point it out the next time, Ted.”
“I will.”
“I’ll be glad to know when I say something foolish.”
“No problem.”
“Something you consider foolish.”
“Tell you what,” Barnes said to Norman, “when we go back to the surface, let’s leave these two down here.”
“Surely you can’t think of going back now,” Ted said.
“We’ve already voted.”
“But that was before we found the object.”
“Where is the object?” Harry said.
“Over here, Harry,” Ted said, with a wicked grin. “Let’s [[104]] see what your fabled powers of deduction make of this.” They walked deeper into the room, moving among the giant hands and claws. And they saw, nestled in the padded claw of one hand, a large, perfectly polished silver sphere about thirty feet in diameter. The sphere had no markings or features of any kind.
They moved around the sphere, seeing themselves reflected in the polished metal. Norman noticed an odd shifting iridescence, faint rainbow hues of blue and red, gleaming in the metal.
“It looks like an oversized ball bearing,” Harry said.
“Keep walking, smart guy.”
On the far side, they discovered a series of deep, convoluted grooves, cut in an intricate pattern into the surface of the sphere. The pattern was arresting, though Norman could not immediately say why. The pattern wasn’t geometric. And it wasn’t amorphous or organic, either. It was hard to say what it was. Norman had never seen anything like it, and as he continued to look at it he felt increasingly certain this was a pattern never found on Earth. Never created by any man. Never conceived by a human imagination.
Ted and Barnes were right. He felt sure of it.
This sphere was something alien.