“It’s in close. The sensors aren’t picking it up.”
“Object,” said Ham, “has attached itself to us.”
They sat without moving, without talking, without breathing.
Kim gripped the arms of her chair, thinking how you really couldn’t predict what a celestial might do. “What happens if we make the jump now?” she asked, in a voice so low that Solly had had to lean forward to hear her.
“Hard to say.” He also was whispering. “We might get rid of it. Or it might come with us.”
Kim’s pulse was in her throat. “You still think it’s a bomb?”
“What else could it be?”
“Jump status achieved,” said the AI.
“Hell,” said Kim, “let’s go.”
Solly didn’t need to be persuaded. “Where?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Greenway? Or Tigris?”
“Solly, this is probably not the best time for a discussion group.”
“Your call.”
“Greenway,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Solly looked momentarily thoughtful and then directed the AI to take them home.
The jump engines took over and the lights dimmed. Then the screens were blank, Alnitak was gone, the ringed world was gone, the star-clouds were gone.
“Jump successfully completed,” said Ham.
“The object?”
“It’s still there.”
20
What is it in the cast of a dying moonbeam that suggests a pair of eyes, a watcher in the shadows?
“If it were going to blow us up,” said Kim, “I’d think it would have done so by now.”
“You’re probably right. So we should be safe. For the moment.”
“How do you mean, for the moment?”
“We can’t very well take it home.”
“Why not?”
“It might be a tracking device.”
“You don’t really think that’s so?”
“What else would it be if it’s not a bomb?”
She thought it over. “It could be a gift.”
“Like at Troy?”
“Solly, we may be getting a little paranoid here.”
“Yep. Of course, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a little paranoia when you’re being chased. We’ve no idea of their capabilities. And so far their intentions don’t seem especially friendly.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get rid of it.”
Solly nodded. “My thought exactly.”
The object clung to the hull, not far from the main air lock.
Solly got up and started for the door. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
They left the pilot’s room and walked downstairs. Solly opened a closet in the main floor entry. “Only thing we can do. Go outside and shoo it away.” He frowned. “It’s probably not dangerous, Kim. If they’d wanted to attack us, they’d have done so by now. Chances are, they’re hoping we didn’t notice we’ve got a piggyback.”
She nodded. “What do you want me to do?”
“Stay put and keep warm.” He selected an insulated bar and hefted it. “This should work.”
“How about if I go out this time?”
“How much EVA experience do you have?”
“How hard can it be?”
“It isn’t hard. But it helps to know what you’re doing.” He kissed her.
“Solly,” she said, “why would they put something on the hull that we can just go outside and remove?”
“You’re suggesting they didn’t.”
“That’s right. I’m suggesting it isn’t going to come loose.”
“Let’s find out.”
Kim had played enough chess to know the basic credo: always assume the opponent will make the best possible move. “I don’t like this,” she said.
Solly managed to look as if everything were under control. “It might be just a mind game. If it’s anything more, if something happens out there, tell Ham to head for St. Johns, okay? Don’t go home. If we have to risk losing something, let’s make it the outpost and not Greenway.”
She felt drained watching him climb into a pressure suit. And she thought suddenly of the Beacon Project. Here we are. Come get us. But no, it really couldn’t be like that. It was not reasonable.
“What irritates me about all this,” she told him over the link as he finished dressing and climbed into the air lock, “is that I never seem to be able to do anything to help.”
“So far you’ve done it all, Kim. Now sit tight and I’ll be back in a half hour.”
They ran a radio check, shut off the gravity, and turned on all the portside exterior lights. Minutes later the panel indicated the outer door had opened. She directed the AI to watch Solly with whichever imagers it could bring to bear.
“Kim,” said Ham, “he also has a camera atop his helmet.”
“Can you activate it?”
“Of course.”
“Do so.”
Pictures appeared on three screens, a side view of Solly, one from the rear, and the view from his helmet. A fourth imager locked on the object.
Solly attached his tether to a safety ring just outside the air lock and strode purposefully across the hull, secured by magnetic boots.
There were no stars, and consequently no sky. Space and time existed in this nether-universe, though the latter seemed to run at a variable rate, and the former was squeezed. This did not resemble, say, a night under thick clouds; because even the clouds would have been visible, sensible objects whose presence was felt, whose weight pressed down on an observer. This was a true void, an absence of everything, a universe which theory held to contain neither matter nor energy, save that which occasionally penetrated from outside, through the agency of jump engines.
It reminded her of the terrifying moments in the spillway, when the world had closed down on her, buried her. When the only light, cast by her wristlamp, had faded into a darkness of mind and spirit that might have gone on forever.
Solly moved among the antennas and sensors and housings littering Hammersmith’s hull. She watched him draw close to the object, watched him turn his light on it.
It had come to rest between a service hatch and a sensor mount.
“What do you think, Kim?” he asked.
“Don’t know,” she said. “Be careful.”
He touched it with the tip of his bar. There was no reaction. “I’m going to give it a poke,” he said.
“Gently,” she advised.
“Poking.”
She saw no reaction.
“It’s on pretty good,” said Solly. “Probably magnetized.”
He stooped down and tried to wedge the bar beneath it. The saddle seat irised open. Kim jumped.
So did Solly.
It was as if a dark eye looked up at them.
“Solly,” she breathed.
“I see it.” The opening was as wide around as her hand was long. The darkness was palpable, a couple of centimeters deep.
“Be careful.”
Solly waited to see whether anything else would happen. When it didn’t, he went back to trying to work the bar under the object. Kim’s view was poor: everything was a mix of shadows and bright lights and Solly’s arms. She wished they could bring it inside, look at it, but even that seemed dangerous.
Who would have believed it? They had obtained an apparently genuine extraterrestrial artifact, and they were going to throw it away.
She wanted desperately for this to be over and Solly to be back inside.
He worked the bar in and was grunting loudly as he pushed down. And suddenly the hull and the sensor mount, half-seen in the uncertain light, seemed to ripple.
The effect came and went so quickly that she wasn’t sure she’d really seen it.
The object came loose.
“Okay,” Solly said. He got his right hand under it and peeled it off like a man removing an orange skin. When it was clear, he lifted it high, held it for her to see and the imager to record, turned it a half dozen ways so they missed nothing. Then he flung it away. She watched it spin out into the dark.