White, James – Sector General 05 – Sector General

there are no planets, but a lot of the dispersed wreckage will either fall into

the sun or pass closely enough to make no difference to any other survivors in

hibernation. This will begin to occur in just over eleven weeks.”

They digested that for a moment, then Tyrell’s Captain said, “I still say a

space station way out here is impossible, especially one traveling at such a

clip that its wreckage will reach the sun, there, in eleven weeks. It is far

more likely that the survivor is in a lifeboat with suspended animation

extending the duration of its consumables.”

Fletcher glared at his fellow captain, then he noticed Prilicla beginning to

tremble. He visibly calmed himself as he said,

ono i un

“It is not impossible, Major Nelson, although it is unlikely. Let us suppose

that the survivor’s race, which is at the inter­planetary flight level of

technology, was beginning to experi­ment with hyperspace generation on its space

station and inadvertently performed a random Jump and found themselves very far

indeed from home, and subsequently went into hiber­nation for the reason you

have stated. Many such accidents have occurred during early experiments with

hypertravel. In any case, I think we are drawing too many conclusions from what

is, after all, only one small piece of a very large jigsaw.”

Conway decided to join in before this spirited exchange of technical views could

devolve into a quarrel. He said placat-ingly, “But what conclusions, however few

and tentative, can we draw from the piece you have examined, Captain? And what,

however vaguely, can you see of the complete picture?”

“Very well,” said Fletcher. He quickly inserted his vision spool from the wreck

into the Recreation Deck’s display unit and began to describe everything he had

observed and deduced during his examination of the distressed vessel, which he

pre­ferred to think of as a simple, pressurized container rather than a ship. It

was a cylinder just over twenty meters in length and approximately three meters

in diameter, with ends which were flat except for a, set of eight couplings

which would enable it to be connected at either end to other similar containers.

The couplings had been designed to break open before any external shock or force

applied to adjacent structures could damage or deform the container. If the

dimensions of the other containers or space station sections were the same as

the one examined, and if the longitudinal curvature was uniform in all of them,

then approximately eighty of these sections would form a Wheel just under five

hundred meters in diameter.

He paused, but Major Nelson still had his lips pressed tightly together, and the

others, knowing that a reaction was expected of them, kept perversely silent.

The section had a double hull with only the inner one pres­surized, Fletcher

resumed, but it possessed no control, sensor, or power systems other than those

associated with the sus­pended animation equipment. The level of technology

dis­played was advanced interplanetary rather than interstellar, so the station

had no business being where it was in the first place.

But the most puzzling feature of the container was the method used to enter and

leave it.

They had already seen that there were no openings on the hull large enough to

allow entry or exit by the survivor, which meant that it had to enter and leave

via the flat, circular plate at each end of the cylinder. In Fletcher’s opinion

the creature went in one end and came out the other because physically it was

too massive to turn itself around inside its container. But there was nothing

resembling a door at either end of the cyl­inder, just the two large circular

plates whose edges were set inside the thick rims which supported the couplings.

“So far as I can see there is no operating mechanism for these endplates,”

Fletcher went on with the hint of an apology creeping into his tone. “There are

only so many ways for a door to open, and there has to be a door into and out of

that thing, but I can’t find one. I even considered explosive bolts, with the

extraterrestrial sealed in until it arrived or was taken by its rescuers to an