“Of course I don’t. We made it through Summertide together, and yet you still ask me a question like that?” Darya had trouble keeping a smile off her face. “I want to live as much as you do. But put yourself in my position. I drag us all the way out here to the middle of nowhere, telling you we’ll discover clues to the Builders. And then all we find are dreary bits of rock and old mine-workings. Until a few minutes ago I thought that might be all that we would find. But you know as well as I do, Phages are found around Builder artifacts, and only there. They may even be Builder artifacts — a number of specialists have suggested that theory.” She stood up and went to stare out of the ship’s port, at the gleaming and suspiciously regular surface of the planetoid. “I was right, Hans. I felt it back on Quake, and I feel it more than ever now. We’re getting there! The Builders have been gone for a long time — but we’re close to finding out where they went.”
Kallik wanted to scramble into a suit and head off at once across the surface of the planetoid. Louis Nenda’s ship was in plain sight, a few hundred meters away, and she was itching to hurry over to it. The need to know if her master was alive or dead made her abandon any thought of caution.
It took a direct order from Hans Rebka to stop her. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I can think of ten ways you might get killed, and there must be twenty more I don’t know about. When you go, one of us goes with you. And you don’t go yet.” At his insistence Kallik settled down on her stubby abdomen and joined the other two in making a first survey of their surroundings.
Even from a distance, the body on which the Dreamboat rested had appeared anomalously massive and anomalously spherical. An hour of observation and measurement added other peculiarities. When Kallik and Hans Rebka finally put on their suits and made a first descent onto the planetoid’s surface, Darya stayed behind, monitored their progress, and entered the physical data into the Dreamboat’s log. A copy was going to J’merlia on Dreyfus-27, together with a note of their safe landing and their location. Darya prepared another copy for tight-beam transmission to Opal, with a request that it be forwarded via the Bose Network to Sentinel Gate.
She smiled to herself as she reviewed the message before sending it out. Just dull statistics, most people would say. She was giving little but the facts. But there would be high excitement over these particular dull statistics when they reached her colleagues on Sentinel Gate and were passed on in turn to Builder specialists in the spiral arm. Every last one of them would want to be here.
She kept an eye on Kallik and Hans, who were moving cautiously away from the Summer Dreamboat, and played back the message before sending it to Opal.
SURFACE TEMPERATURE: 281 K; THE SURFACE OF THE BODY IS WARM, ABOVE THE FREEZING POINT OF WATER. GIVEN ITS ENVIRONMENT, REMOTE FROM MANDEL, IT SHOULD BE HUNDREDS OF DEGREES COLDER.
FIGURE: THE BODY IS A PERFECT SPHERE TO WITHIN THE LIMITS OF OBSERVATION; RADIUS, 1.16 KILOMETERS.
SURFACE GRAVITY: 0.65 GEE; GIVEN ITS SIZE, IT SHOULD BE LESS THAN A THOUSANDTH OF THIS VALUE.
MASS: 128 TRILLION TONS.
DENSITY: ASSUMING HOMOGENEOUS COMPOSITION, 19,600 TONS PER CUBIC METER. NOTE THAT ALTHOUGH THIS IS LESS THAN SOME CECROPIAN COMMERCIAL MATERIALS, IT IS ABOUT 1,000 TIMES AS DENSE AS ANY NATURALLY OCCURRING SUBSTANCE.
ATMOSPHERE: 16 PERCENT OXYGEN, 1 PERCENT CARBON DIOXIDE, 83 PERCENT XENON. THIS IS UNLIKE THE ATMOSPHERE OF ANY PLANET IN THE SPIRAL ARM; THE XENON CONTENT IS AN UNHEARD-OF CONCENTRATION; AND A BODY OF THIS SIZE SHOULD POSSESS NO ATMOSPHERE AT ALL. NOTE THAT THIS ATMOSPHERE WILL SUSTAIN LIFE FOR ALL OXYGEN-BREATHING FORMS OF THE SPIRAL ARM.
MATERIAL COMPOSITION: THE OUTER SURFACE HAS THE APPEARANCE OF SMOOTH, FUSED SILICA. THE INTERNAL COMPOSITION IS UNKNOWN, BUT IT IS OPAQUE TO ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION OF ANY WAVELENGTH.
Darya halted the data readout and looked out of the port. Kallik and Rebka had been crouching down, close to the surface. She had asked them to do additional materials testing outside, hoping to add something to this piece of the planetoid’s description.
“Any results yet, Hans?”
Rebka straightened up. “We didn’t get what you wanted, but we’ve probably got all we’re going to. We couldn’t take samples. The surface is too hard to cut, and it’s impervious to heat. But we’ve been hitting it with precise impulses and monitoring the seismic return wavefronts. The phase delays are very peculiar. We think it’s as you suggested — the whole thing is hollow, maybe with a honeycomb structure.”
Kallik stood up also. “Which makes the high ss-ss-surface gravity even odder, since this is a hollow body.”
“Right. I’ll add that to the physical description. You can give me more detailed data when you get back. No other problems?”
“None so far. In a little while we’re going to head for Nenda’s ship. Keep monitoring.”
“I will.” With considerable satisfaction, Darya added a section to the readout:
GENERAL DESCRIPTION: THE BODY APPEARS TO BE HOLLOW, PROBABLY WITH INTERNAL CHAMBERS. GIVEN ITS ANOMALOUS PHYSICAL PARAMETERS, IT MUST BE OF ARTIFICIAL ORIGIN. THE PLANETOID’S AGE HAS NOT YET BEEN ESTABLISHED. THERE IS A GOOD POSSIBILITY THAT IT IS A BUILDER ARTIFACT. THAT HYPOTHESIS IS GIVEN SUPPORT BY THE FACT THAT PHAGES ARE TO BE FOUND CLOSE BY IN LARGE NUMBERS, LESS THAN A HUNDRED KILOMETERS AWAY FROM THE BODY’S SURFACE.
Darya paused. Better leave it at that, and not stick her neck out too far. But personally she was sure it was an artifact. And if that was the case it should be given its own name and ID number, like every other Builder artifact.
She added a final note to the message. “The artificial planetoid has been assigned the provisional Universal Artifact Catalog number 1237, and the provisional name” — she recalled the bright motes on the sphere’s image, now vanished — “the provisional name of Glister.”
“Darya?” Hans Rebka’s voice came as she was making the final entry. “Darya, we’re over at the Have-It-All now. It seems to be in working order, but you ought to see it for yourself. Can you put your suit on and walk over?”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.” Darya initiated the message transmission, put the Summer Dreamboat into self-protect mode, and moved across to the lock. In less than a minute she was outside.
She looked up. Gargantua loomed in the distance beyond the other ship. High above her head the Phages were invisible, too small to be seen from fifty or a hundred kilometers away, but she had no doubt that they were still there. Phages were always there when they were not wanted.
And what Phages! Phages smart enough to track a falling ship. Phages fast enough to head for that ship. Phages fast enough to come close to catching it.
Darya began to move slowly across the curved and polished surface. The horizon was only a couple of hundred meters away. As Louis Nenda’s ship came more and more into view she could not help glancing up every few seconds, to make sure that some marauding Phage was not diving down on her.
Phages didn’t enter powerful gravity fields; in fact, they shunned them. Sure. That was the conventional wisdom. Until today she had believed it herself. But why assume that conventional wisdom applied to these Phages, and this situation, when everything else about them was so bizarre?
It occurred to Darya that Kallik had taken a bigger risk than they realized when she had brought them down here. The alien surface of Glister might be no safer than Phage-infested space. But Kallik’s own need to know what had happened to Louis Nenda had made her blind to risk.
Darya arrived at the lock of the Have-It-All. One thing was for sure: given the behavior of these new Phages, she would have to do a major rewrite of that section of the Lang Universal Artifact Catalog. Good timing. She was supposed to begin work on the fifth edition when she got back home.