Slowly another crescent appeared, while another, opposite, faded. He switched the view screen to a higher wavelength and the field of black became Prussian blue, with the crescents appearing as faintly green rims of shadowy spheres. Joneny’s cruiser was a compact fifty-foot chrono-drive, with a six-week time margin — which wasn’t much for star-hopping. However, they didn’t allow students more, claiming that such unreliable “youngsters” were always producing paradoxes that annoyed the hell out of the Clearing Center. Some of the big ships were given a couple of years to play around with, which was a little more reasonable; for in the shorter time, if you got yourself into some catastrophic situation with a critical moment more than six weeks in the past, you were simply out of luck. You had a choice of oscillating back and forth between critical moment and climax while broadcasting wildly for help until someone came along and got you (which wasn’t very likely to happen), or you just went through with it and hoped — and there wasn’t much hope in a spatial catastrophe. As a result, the powers that be were always complaining about the number of accidents involving students. The whole setup was unfair.
At a thousand miles’ distance, he cut his speed to two hundred miles an hour and crept along beside them, wondering how he was going to find out which was Beta-2. And what to do first: identify and explore the abandoned Beta-2, or talk (if they would talk) to the inhabitants of one of the other ships?
A further question nagged at him, although it had nothing to do with his research — directly. The last thing he had learned from the library crystals concerned the other empty ship, the Sigma-9:
…completely gutted, [ran the voice on the crystal]. There is a great, irregular section of the hull ripped away and the skeletal interior glints under the light of Leffer with a strange iridescence. The remainder of the hull is cracked nearly in two. There is no chance that there are any survivors. It is amazing that the momentum and the automatic drive mechanism kept such a twisted wreck in flight to the ultimate goal.
He increased the magnification on the view screen until the spheres filled the whole wall. As he watched, another ship emerged from the cluster. There was no difficulty in identifying it as Sigma-9. It looked like a crushed eggshell, with a fine spider-webbing of girders feathering the edges of the cracks. The main damage was indeed an enormous area missing from the hull, from which fissures radiated in all directions, a dangling fragment here and there.
His first thought was that there must have been a tremendous explosion inside the ship, but reflection on the way that it had been constructed convinced him that any explosion of a magnitude sufficient to tear out such a large section of the hull would have forced the remainder apart. Laws learned in his course in collidal physics ruled out any exterior impact. It was, in fact, a completely impossible kind of wreckage. But there it hung, directly in front of him.
He let the mechano take him into the cluster and switched the screen to normal magnification, watching the great spheres grow. When he was seventy miles from the nearest one, he stopped the cruiser again and studied it, without result. Finally, at a speed of only seventy miles an hour (giving himself time for further reflection), he moved in. At the forty-two-second mark, he jammed the Time Stop.
And time stopped.
For all practical purposes, he was in an envelope of chronological stasis, his cruiser perhaps ten feet above the surface of a starship. He switched the screen to mobile vision, and the image grew until it surrounded him. He lowered the point of view until he seemed to be standing on the hull. Then he looked around.
The horizon was frighteningly close, and the plates he had expected to be smooth and even looked like gnawed cheese, rotten, crystallized into ruts and flaking mounds, green with a color of their own, deeper than the light lent by the far sun. He looked up.
And stopped breathing. Fourteen times the size of the appearance of the moon from Earth hung the Sigma-9. He knew that nothing moved in this stasis. He knew he was safely in his ship, minutes away from a dozen stars and their safe planets. Yet the looming, gutted wreck seemed to be careening toward him through the blackness, shimmering.
He screamed, threw one hand over his eyes and jammed the other against the mobile vision switch. Quivering, he was back in his ship; the view screen was only a six-foot window in front of him once more.
No. The mind was still not ready for unlimited space. Even the edge of an air-helmet window was something real to hang on to. But the wreck itself, shimmering with green fire — it was something so terrible that he had been unable to watch it directly for more than seconds before he felt it was falling to engulf him…shimmering?
Joneny took his moist palm off the hammock arm. Shimmering? It must have been part of the optical illusion of the wreck’s falling. He was in time stasis. Nothing could be shimmering. But he remembered the gaseous green glow that seemed to spark over the wreck. He swung the view screen up to take another look at Sigma-9, this time from the psychological safety of his seat. Green and broken, it shimmered against space.
Panic caught his stomach. Something must be wrong with the time margin. His eyes flashed over dead warning lights. Nothing was out of place. He was about to jettison himself into hyperspace before something went really haywire, but his hand stopped. There was Leffer. He switched on a filter and increased magnification.
A sun’s surface under time stasis looks very different from the view under normal time flow. Something known as Keefen’s effect makes it look like a rubber ball dipped in glue, then rolled in parti-colored glitter. Each color shines out in a separate dot, distinct and prismatic; under ordinary chronology, it has the texture of fluorescent orange peel. Keefen’s effect was in full display.
So he was in time stasis. But something was going on around Sigma-9 that didn’t care.
At a crawl of fifteen miles an hour he switched back to normal time flow and began looking for an entrance. It was a corroded blister on the hull, and he hovered above the lock, for the hell of it, broadcasting his identity beam to see what it netted. To his surprise a voice came through his speaker in accented English:
“Your ears are unplugged, but your eyes are black. Your ears are unplugged, but your eyes are black. No admittance while your eyes are black. Please identify yourself. Over.”
The static voice was from an automatic answering station, but its message left him bewildered. He sent out his identity beam again and this time spoke as welclass="underline" “If this is a robot answering, please get a human agent to let me in. I’d like to talk to a human agent.”
“Your ears are free of wax, free and unplugged,” came the voice again. “But your eyes are blind. We can’t see you at all.”
Then Joneny got the idea. The robot could apparently discern articulation changes. He wants my visual as well, Joneny thought. He put an image of himself through on a simple ban and waited for a return picture on the screen.
“Your eyes see clearly. Just a moment and we will give you an entrance pattern.”
In a corner of the viewing screen the flickering black-and-white pattern appeared, a series of white circles and black lines. Across it was written in block letters:
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE CITY OF GAMMA-5
Below, one of the blisters began to turn. The shuttle ships it had been built to accommodate were almost three times the size of Joneny’s little cruiser. Shalings from the crystallized hull broke off in chunks and a drift of fine powder. Rotating, it sunk and divided into thirds, slipping back into the ship’s hull. A mechano maneuvered Joneny’s cruiser over the tunnel. As the ship turned, Joneny glimpsed the Sigma-9 on the view screen and remembered what he had said to the professor: “What could be safer than interstellar space, sir?” The ships had supposedly indestructible drives and hulls of immense strength. What had chewed up the plating — or had smashed the Sigma-9 like a porcelain shell? He resolved his curiosity by determining to consult his ship’s tiny iridium cell computer on the problem and see if it could suggest any answer from a measurement of the stresses and strains still held in the shattered metal. Before he was finished, he would go over and make an extensive investigation. Even the first reporters had done no valuable research. As the triple doors of the first lock closed, he made a disgusted sound and waited for the landing process to finish.