Chapter Four
Lisa Arden floated in midair before the orbit-to-orbit ferry’s small viewport and searched the firmament in front of her. Save for the yellow-white billiard ball that was the sun, there was nothing to see. The stars were too faint to compete with the Great Hydrogen Bomb in the Sky, and the Earth was somewhere behind her. Of the vast orbiting mirror that was their destination, there was no sign. It was as though the artifact were hidden behind some great black veil.
“Why can’t we see it?” she asked. Dieter Pavel floated beside her at the viewport in Mercanter’s Wind, the high-delta-V orbital ferry they had boarded at Equatorial Station.
“See what?” Pavel asked, moving to float directly behind Lisa. She thought he hovered closer than was necessary but decided not to make an issue of it. After all, they would be cooped up together for the next several weeks.
“PoleStar! Where is it?”
“Right in front of you,” Pavel replied. As he spoke, he pointed over her shoulder. “See the dimly glowing patch?”
She strained her eyes, and sure enough, a patch of—something—seemed to be obscuring the blackness of space. It was remarkably difficult to focus her eyes on the spot, however.
The ferry’s pilot had announced that they were bound for PoleStar shortly after leaving Equatorial Station, and while the information had answered one of Lisa’s questions, it had generated several others.
PoleStar had begun life toward the end of the last century as a power satellite. A giant orbiting mirror, it had focused sunlight on a generator to produce electricity. The electricity, in turn, had been transformed into microwaves and beamed down to a rectenna on the ground, where it was reconverted and distributed on the power grid. The project had produced a considerable number of kilowatt-hours, but never any profits. After a decade of losing money, the SolSat One Corporation had filed for bankruptcy.
The power generators, habitat, and orbiting mirror had been moved out of geosynchronous orbit to free up the valuable parking slot they occupied. Years later, the big mirror and its accompanying habitat had been purchased by speculators who planned to change the orbit of the satellite. They reasoned that if they could place the mirror into a highly elliptical polar orbit, with its apogee above the North Pole, they would be able to provide several hours of illumination each day through the long northern winter.
On paper, at least, the scheme had appeared a sure moneymaker. Unfortunately, the new owners had grossly underestimated the cost of changing the big powersat’s orbital plane from equatorial orientation to polar. They had also failed to foresee the problems associated with municipalities and other regional administrations signing up for their service. Since the mirror, renamed PoleStar, cast its light on subscriber and non-subscriber alike, people had little incentive to pay for the six hours of half-light they received each day. Eventually, PoleStar had gone bankrupt and was taken over by the weather directorate to be run as a public service.
“I see it,” Lisa said as she gazed at the faintly luminous patch in the sky.
“That’s the big mirror,” Pavel replied. “Naturally, the habitat module is still too small to see at this range.”
“But why isn’t it glowing like at home?”
“Because we aren’t in the sunbeam. All we see reflecting back to us from the mirror is the blackness of space. A mirror in space is practically invisible.”
“I believe it.”
Fifteen minutes later, they passed into the beam of light that was currently illuminating the Alaskan night. The transition was dramatic. One moment there was nothing to see. The next, a second sun appeared in the sky in front of them. This one, too, was a glowing yellow billiard ball, but with a difference. The second sun was too bright to look at directly, but as Lisa observed it with peripheral vision, she had the impression that it changed shape as it slowly drifted across the surface of the orbiting mirror.
She asked Pavel about it. He explained that the mirror was a sheet of thin reflective film stretched out across a framework of gossamer braces nearly a hundred kilometers in diameter. It was the largest (and most fragile) artifact humanity had ever constructed. When it had been an orbiting power station, the mirror had been much more concave than at present, in order to concentrate the heat of the sun on a collector satellite. The current shape was nearly flat; curved just enough to ensure that the light beam was focused on whatever area of the Earth they were illuminating.
Beyond the reflective sheet of the mirror was the tiny spherical habitat module. They watched it grow slowly larger as the second sun continued to keep pace with them. By the time they crossed out of the beam, the habitat had grown a bulge on one side. It took several minutes before the bulge resolved itself into a second globe half the size of the habitat.
“It’s a survey ship!” Lisa exclaimed. “I wonder which one.”
“Magellan,” was Pavel’s only reply.
* * *
Lisa observed that docking with a non-rotating structure in space is child’s play compared to the maneuvers required to approach any of the rotating stations. The only maneuver came at the last moment as the dumbbell shaped ferry slewed sideways to present its dorsal airlock to the large airlock at the habitat module’s “equator.” Their arrival was announced by a series of thunks as the station grappled them in.
There followed a general popping of ears as the orbital craft’s pilot bled his atmosphere down to match that of the 40-year-old habitat. Lisa Arden and Dieter Pavel made their way with their luggage to the airlock antechamber. They hung back until the round hatch swung inward. Beyond was a short tunnel filled with equipment and truncated by a lighted circle some four meters away. Lisa caught a glimpse of someone’s lower torso and legs for a moment before Dieter Pavel cut off her view as he pulled himself forward and disappeared headfirst into the tunnel.
She waited for Pavel to clear and then followed him. She found a welcoming committee at the other end of the tube. There were two of them. The older was a bald man of about fifty whose lack of hair extended even to his eyebrows.
“Greetings, new fish!” he boomed out. “Welcome to PoleStar. My name is Hancock Mueller, Station Commander. I am your host, so if you want for anything, give my office a call and we will see if we can accommodate you. Please be patient with us. We do not usually get visitors in this orbit. Between you and the survey ship, we are a little overwhelmed just now.”
Mueller “swam” to where Pavel clung to a guide rope and thrust out a bony hand. “You must be the Coordinator’s representative.”
“Dieter Pavel,” Pavel said. “Good to meet you, Commander. I take it that you received Coordinator Halstrom’s message concerning me. I’ll need an office and full access to all data.”
“An office we can arrange. This old bucket has cubic to spare. As for the data, you will have to handle that with Magellan’s chief scientist.”
“Then please show me where I can find him. I am anxious to get started.”
“Very well. Give your bag to young Adams here. He will take you to Professor Bendagar and then get you settled. The accommodations aren’t the best, I am afraid, but then we’ve had only forty-eight hours to get this show organized.”
“I am sure the accommodations will be acceptable.”
Mueller’s companion floated forward, took Pavel’s kit bag, and disappeared with him into the corridor beyond. Mueller turned to Lisa.
“You must be Miss Arden.”
She nodded.
“They didn’t tell me you were such a looker. You will brighten things up around here. I cannot tell you how tired we get of seeing the same old faces in this out-of-the-way orbit. Here, let me have your bag. I’ll take you to your quarters.” The bald man turned in preparation to leave. Before he could plant his boots on the nearby bulkhead, however, Lisa asked, “Would you mind telling me what is going on around here?”
Mueller halted in midair and turned back. “You have an appointment with Professor Bendagar at ten hundred after he finishes up with Pavel. I expect he will tell you what you need to know then. Besides, who am I to spoil the surprise?” With that, he was gone down a curved corridor, leaving behind only a bass chuckle.
* * *
Raoul Bendagar had watched the arrival of the ferry with mixed emotions—defined in this case as observing your mother-in-law fly into a cliff in your brand new sportster. On the one hand, Mercanter’s Wind was bringing the reinforcements he had requested to beef up his research team. On the other, he would have preferred to pick his own people from the staff of High Station. It had been made very clear to him that any additional scientific personnel required would be recruited on Earth, regardless of his personal wishes. Nor was that the chief scientist’s only complaint. The ferry was also bringing a government representative into his life.
Bendagar had been in the service long enough to know that the most dreaded words any high-ranking official can utter are, “We are here to help you.” Twelve hours earlier, he had heard that very statement from the World Coordinator herself. To his chagrin, that “help” had arrived with unseemly speed. Bendagar had pondered all of this with a furrowed brow as he watched the docking procedure on his office viewscreen. Too few minutes later, the annunciator chimed.
Sighing deeply, he consciously rearranged his features into a neutral mask before yelling, “Come in!”
The man who entered was younger than expected but bore the identifying look of all political appointees. It was a hard look to describe, but one familiar to anyone who has been in government service for a long time. It was a fusion of haughty self-importance with the perplexed expression of someone who has no idea what is going on. Bendagar thought of it simply as “The Look.”
Dieter Pavel crossed Bendagar’s office using the overhead grips like a child on a set of monkey bars. “Professor Bendagar?” he asked, holding out his hand to be shaken. The gesture marked him as a groundhog. Shaking hands was awkward in microgravity, especially when the other hand was needed to anchor oneself. Most microgravity dwellers confined themselves to a quick nod of greeting. Despite this, Bendagar leaned across the desk as far as his seat belt would allow and took the proffered hand.
“Mr. Pavel?”
Pavel nodded. “You were notified that I was coming, weren’t you?”
“Yesterday.”
Pavel laughed. “Sounds like you knew before I did.”
“What can we of the survey do to help you?”
Pavel pulled himself into the framework that served as the visitor’s chair and slipped his legs into the hold down straps. “You probably know that better than I do. They did not give me much guidance. Why don’t we begin at the beginning? What has happened since your people found the alien?”
“I have full reports—”
Pavel held up his hand in a restraining gesture. “I am sure you do, Dr. Bendagar. I will read them later. In the meantime, I am merely looking for an overview of the situation.”
“Very well,” Bendagar answered with something approaching resignation. “As soon as the report of a survivor came in, the captain ordered a cabin prepared to receive him. We had a busy time of it for an hour or so.”
“You took the usual precautions against disease?”
“Of course. The captain cleared out a cluster of cabins at the end of a cul-de-sac corridor, all of which are against the outer hull. The former occupants were less than happy to be evicted. We stripped the central cabin of furnishings, sealed off its connection with the ship’s environmental system and installed an air renewal unit before depressurizing the cabins around it.”
“Why did you do that?”
“To build a Class 1 bio-barrier, of course. We have yet to discover an organism more complex than a spore that can survive a journey through vacuum. We installed multiple contamination locks in the corridor leading to our holding pen and implemented full decontamination procedures for everyone going in or out. The precautions were as much for the alien as for us. We did not want him coming down with the common cold or something equally devastating. That mistake has been made far too often in the past.”
“It sounds as though you were admirably thorough.”
“If there is one thing we of the survey know, Mr. Pavel, it is how to establish a proper quarantine.”
“I never doubted it, Dr. Bendagar. What happened next?”
We equipped the holding pen with cameras and self-contained sanitation facilities, gathered up everything aboard the alien ship that resembled a foodstuff, and then brought the alien aboard in a decontaminated rescue bag. We left the bag in the cabin, sealed the door, and sat back to watch.”
“What happened?”
“After ten minutes or so, he figured out how to work the bag’s escape mechanism. He spent the next several hours exploring the cabin, randomly at first, then much more systematically. He seemed to recognize the function of the waste disposal equipment almost immediately and soon had a fair understanding of the built-in controls. Then he found the bulkhead-mounted holoscreen. Once he learned to operate that, he barely moved for the next three days.”
“Then there is no doubt he is intelligent?”
“None whatever.”
“What does he do now?”
“He splits his time between watching the screen and watching us watch him.”
“What about communication?”
Bendagar grimaced. “That is a problem. He still shows no sign of recognizing that we are speaking to him and has not attempted to communicate, at least, none that we have recognized. That is why I asked to have a linguist assigned to my team. We need to take a more professional approach to the matter than we’ve been able to manage up ‘til now.”
“How long do you think it will be before we will be able to talk to him?”
“Weren’t you listening? We don’t know that we can talk to him.”
“I meant no criticism by my remark, sir,” Pavel answered. Humility did not come easy to him, but he had learned long ago about the scientific temperament. In his opinion, scientists were like poorly designed computer interfaces. One must put up with their idiosyncrasies if one wants to obtain any information. “I only meant that the coordinator has a number of questions she wants asked. I would like to give her some idea of how long it will be.”
“Give our new linguist a week or so, and perhaps we can tell you that. Believe me, Pavel, there are a lot of questions we of the survey want answered, too.”
“Such as?”
“The first thing we want to know is how long they’ve had star travel.”
Pavel nodded. “That way we can gauge their level of technological development.”
“That, too, but mostly we want to get some measure of the distance between us and their civilization.”
“I am afraid I don’t understand.”
“You were told they use some sort of wormhole transportation, weren’t you?”
“Not that I know what that means.”
“It’s a method for moving between two widely separated points without crossing the intervening space in between.”
“What has that to do with where they are located?”
“Everything. When their gate formed in the New Eden system, it produced a powerful gravity wave. Now gravity waves are very persistent phenomena. Had any alien-induced gravity waves yet reached the solar system, we would have detected them. Since none have, we can set a lower limit on the distance to the alien’s home system. Their stars can be no closer than the number of light-years equal to the time that has passed since they first developed this method of travel.”
“You have lost me, Dr. Bendagar.”
“It is simple, really. Let us say that they invented the stargate a thousand years ago. Since gravity waves are omni-directional and travel at the speed of light, the fact that we have yet to detect that first wave would indicate that their systems are more than a thousand light-years from here. Likewise, that wave they set off in the New Eden system should be getting here in about a century.”
“You speak of ‘their stars.’ Coordinator Halstrom believes we face at least one interstellar hegemony, and maybe two. Do you agree?”
“Of course. The autopsies on the dead and our tests on the survivor conclusively prove they came from different star systems. If you find widely divergent organisms together on the same starship, what other conclusion is there?”
“Any indication of how many stars we are talking about?”
“None. Of course, when we can finally speak to our guest, that is something we will ask him.”
“Why do you suppose they attacked you, Dr. Bendagar?”
“Another matter we hope to explore with Butch.”
“Butch?”
“The alien. We have to call him something, at least until we learn what he calls himself.”
“Do you subscribe to this theory that they are inherently warlike? I have always believed that war was incompatible with an interstellar civilization.”
“I always believed that too,” the scientist said, “right up until the moment they vaporized Scout Three.”
“Perhaps that was unintentional. You know that such accidents aren’t unknown where automated weapons systems are involved.”
“You have seen the tapes. Did it look like an accident to you?”
“What it looked like to me is immaterial,” Pavel said smoothly. “I would hate to think that we were ready to begin an interstellar war over a single, regrettable incident.”
“Tell those who died how ‘regrettable’ it was,” Bendagar responded.
Pavel noted that the scientist was becoming impatient. One thing a life in politics taught a person was to judge accurately when one’s welcome was wearing thin. He decided to change the subject.
“When can I see the alien?”
“Anytime you want,” Bendagar replied. He checked his chronometer and said, “Except, he is probably asleep just now. You may want to wait until after dinner. We’ll introduce you and Miss Arden to the staff, then take you down to meet Butch.”