When the futile ground survey was over Kallik raised her eyes again to scan the heavens far above the ship. She was no nearer finding Rebka and Lang, and — ominously — the Phages were no longer remaining at a safe distance. The presence of the Have-It-All, moving in its survey orbit around the planetoid, seemed to madden them. Three times Kallik had seen a Phage dropping in on a trajectory that carried it to within a couple of kilometers above the ship. Each approach came a little closer. Now she could see two more Phages, dropping in low.
She returned the Have-It-All to the surface of Glister, roughly where they had first found it, and went to her own quarters. The time for tentative measures was past. She selected equipment and carried it down from the ship to the surface. It would measure the E-M field associated with Glister and compute an external field to cancel it in magnitude and phase.
She sent a terse message to Opal, explaining what she was about to do. She could not signal to J’merlia, since Dreyfus-27 was still shielded by the mass of Gargantua.
Kallik dragged the field generator and inhibitor forty meters away from the Have-It-All. She had one more problem to solve. If she focused the field on the surface with a five- or ten-meter effective range, the device itself would sink through into Glister if the surface became fluid or gaseous. The only way to prevent that was to run a pair of lines attached to the generator right around the body of the sphere, one following a geodesic around the “equator” and the other a geodesic over the “poles.” Downward forces would then be held by tension in the cables, and supported by the surface strength of the whole of Glister.
Kallik paused for thought.
The lines would be supported, unless of course the local field cancellation somehow caused a global cancellation. Then Glister would become a ball of gas or liquid, and Kallik, the Have-It-All, and the Summer Dreamboat would plunge together into the unknown interior.
A Hymenopt had no shoulders to shrug. Instead, Kallik clucked and chirped softly to herself while she made the final connections of the thin, dislocation-free cables to the field generator. She was a fatalist. So Glister might become liquid. Well, no one ever promised that life would be risk-free. She hurried back to the Have-It-All and left a message for J’merlia on the recorder of the ship, the equivalent of “So long, it’s been nice knowing you.” If she returned safely, she could erase it.
She turned on the power, stood back, and watched.
The result was at first disappointing. The generator was a compact device, operating with microwave energy beamed from the Have-It-All. There was nothing to show that it was in operation, and the equipment stood exactly as she had left it, with no sound or movement.
Then she heard it; a faint creaking of the thin, tight-strung cables, protesting as they took up the strain of the generator’s weight. The unit itself stood on three solid legs, but now the bottom few centimeters of those legs were invisible. They had sunk through into the surface of Glister.
Kallik moved cautiously toward the field generator. Its position was stable, moving neither downward nor upward. She touched one of the taut support lines, estimating the tension. From the feel of it, the generator would have dropped right on through without them. The surface looked subtly different for a radius of about five meters from the field’s center, where the support lines bent downward and disappeared.
Kallik reached down. Her forelimb penetrated the gray surface, but she felt nothing.
She had brought with her from the ship half-a-dozen spent power canisters. She lobbed one to land by the field generator. The surface did not change in appearance, but the metal canister vanished at once and without a trace. The absence of ripples around the point of disappearance argued for a gaseous rather than a liquid region around the generator.
Kallik retreated a couple of steps. So it would swallow a power canister easily, and perhaps a Hymenopt with no more difficulty. But was the canceled field zone deep enough to provide true access to the interior? Or did it come to a solid bottom, a few meters down?
Kallik knew that she would not find answers by standing and thinking about it.
She went back to the ship and procured another length of cable, securing it first to a brace on the Have-It-All’s main hull and then cinching it around her own midriff. If someone came along and decided to fly the Have-It-All off on an interplanetary mission while Kallik was down inside Glister, she would be in deep trouble.
But she was in deep trouble anyway.
She moved to the edge of the zone of change. For a few seconds she paused there, hesitating. There was no guarantee that what she was doing would help Darya Lang and Hans Rebka — still less that it was the best way to help them. If there was a better solution, it was her duty to find it.
As she stood thinking there was a whoosh! of disturbed air not far overhead. It was a Phage, hurtling by no more than fifty meters from the surface. The dark maw was closed, but it could open in a few seconds.
Kallik whistled an invocation to Ressess-tress, the leading non-deity of the Hymenopts’ official atheism. She blinked all her eyes, stepped forward, and dropped through into the impalpable surface of Glister.
CHAPTER 12
The Incomparable — incomparably rattly, rusty, cumbersome, and smelly — was approaching Gargantua. Birdie Kelly and Julius Graves focused their attention on the satellites and waited for a detailed view of Glister itself, while E. C. Tally stared steadily at a display of the giant planet. He had been sitting silently for fifteen hours, since the moment when the Incomparable’s sensors had provided their first good look at Gargantua.
That was fine with Birdie Kelly. Tally’s designers had recognized that the embodied computer’s body would need rest, but apparently his inorganic brain functioned continuously. Over the past three days, Birdie had been wakened from sound sleep a dozen times with a touch and a polite “May I speak?”
Eventually Birdie had lost it. “Damn it, Tally. No more questions. Why don’t you go and ask Graves something for a change? Julius and Steven between ’em know ten times as much as I do.”
“No, Commissioner Kelly, that is not true.” E. C. Tally shook his head, practicing the accepted human gesture for dissent and the conventional human pause before offering a reply. “They know much more than ten times as much as you do. Perhaps one hundred times? Let me think about that.”
The first sight of Gargantua had kept him quiet for a while. But now he was perking up and coming out of his reverie over by the display screens. To Birdie’s relief, though, he was turning to Julius Graves.
“If I may speak: with respect to the communications that we have received from Darya Lang and from Kallik. Professor Lang suggests that Glister is a Builder artifact, and Kallik agrees. Does any other evidence suggest the presence of Builder activity in the vicinity of Gargantua?”
“No. The nearest artifact to Gargantua is the Umbilical, connecting Quake and Opal.” The voice was Steven Graves’s. “And it is the only one reported in the Mandel stellar system.”
“Thank you. That is what my own data banks show, but I wondered if there might be inadequacies, as there have been in other areas.” Tally reached out and tapped the screen, where Gargantua filled the screen. “Would you please examine this and offer your opinion?”
His index finger was squarely on an orange-and-umber spot below Gargantua’s equator.
“The bright oval?” Graves asked. He looked for only a moment, then turned his attention to the other screen, where the sensors were set for analysis of a volume of space surrounding Glister. “I’m sorry. I have no information about that.”
But to his own great amazement, Birdie did. He finally knew something that Graves did not! “It’s called the Eye of Gargantua,” he burst out. “It’s a great big whirlpool of gases, a permanent hurricane about forty thousand kilometers across.” He pointed to the screen. “You can even see the vortices on the image, trailing away from it on both sides.”