It was smaller than Orbitsville, non-material in nature yet capable of reflecting or deflecting the sun’s outpourings of light and heat. Yamoto described it as a ‘globular filigree of force fields’, a phrase of which he appeared inordinately proud, judging by the frequency with which it was used in his reports. Of the inner sphere’s surface area, precisely half was made up of narrow strips, effectively opaque, curving in a general north-south direction. Their function was to cast great moving bars of shadow on the grasslands of Orbitsville, producing the alternating periods of light and darkness, day and night, without which plant life could not survive. Yamoto was not able to observe the inner sphere directly, but he could chart its structure by studying the bands of light and darkness as they moved across the far side of Orbitsville, 320 million kilometres away in the ‘night’ sky. And he was able to show that the shadow sphere not only created night and day but was also responsible for a progression of seasons. In one quarter of the sphere, corresponding to winter, the opaque night-producing strips were wider and therefore separated by narrower gaps of light; at the opposite side the strips were reduced in width to engender the shorter nights and longer days of summer.
To facilitate Yamoto’s work a small plastic observatory was prefabricated in the Bissendorf’s workshops and transferred to a site within Orbitsville. Several more buildings were added as other sections found reason to prolong their work in the interior, and the nucleus of a scientific colony was formed.
A substantial portion of the effort was put into trying to solve the annoying riddle of why no radio communicator would work inside the sphere. At first it was anticipated that a simple solution and practical remedy would be found, but the weeks slipped by without any progress being made. It appeared that the equally inexplicable synthetic gravity field was responsible for damping out all electromagnetic radiation. In an effort to get new data on the possible mechanics of the phenomenon, O’Hagan’s team took a photographic torpedo and gave it enough extra thrust to enable it to take off from the inner surface of Orbitsville. The purpose of the experiment was to measure the gravity gradient and to see if the radio guidance and telemetry systems would operate if the signals were travelling at right angles to the surface. After a flawless programmed start, the torpedo began tracing random patterns in the sky and made a programmed automatic landing several kilometres away from the aperture. Pessimists began to predict that the only long-range communication possible on Orbitsville would be by modulation of light beams.
Another discovery was that the utterly inert and incredibly hard shell of the sphere was impervious to all radiation except gravity waves. The latter were able to pass through, otherwise the star system’s outer planet would have tangented off towards interstellar space, but not even the most energetic particles entered Orbitsville from the outer universe, except by means of the aperture. Certain peculiarities in the measurements of radiation levels from Pengelly’s Star itself led O’Hagan to give Garamond a confidential report in which he suggested that flickerwing ships might not be able to operate within the sphere, due to lack of available reaction mass. The subject was earmarked for priority investigation by the fully equipped teams which would arrive later.
Garamond received an increasing number of requests from crewmen, especially those who were inactive when the main drive was not in use, for permission to stay on Orbitsville under canvas. At first he encouraged the idea, but Napier reported that the remaining personnel were becoming resentful of their relaxed and sunburned colleagues whose eyes held a new kind of contentment and surety when they returned to ship duties. Partly to combat the divisive forces, Garamond took the Bissendorf on a circuit of Orbitsville’s equatorial plane and established that no other entrances were visible.
He also set teams of men to work on moving the swarm of dead ships to a position a thousand kilometres down orbit from the aperture. With the ships at their new station, photographic teams went inside as many as was practicable and made records of their findings. They confirmed Garamond’s first guess that the hulls had been used as mines and sources of supply. The interiors were gutted, stripped to the bare metal of their hulls, and in some cases it turned out that what had first been thought of as the havoc of battle was actually the work of scavengers. An unfortunate by-product was that virtually nothing was found which would have let researchers deduce the appearance of the aliens who had built and flown the huge fleet. The most significant find was a section of metal staircase and handrailing which hinted that the aliens had been bipeds of about the same size as humans.
Where were they now?
The question came in for more discussion than did speculations on the whereabouts of the beings who had created Orbitsville. It was understood that the sphere-builders had possessed a technology of an entirely different order to that of the race which had produced the ships. The instinctive belief was that the sphere-builders were unknowable, that they had moved on to new adventures or new phases of their existence, because it would be impossible to be near them without their presence being felt. Orbitsville appeared to be and was accepted as a gift from the galactic past.
Garamond brought Aileen and Christopher into the sphere, through the newly constructed L-shaped entrance port, for a strangely peaceful vacation. Aileen was, as he had predicted, able to adjust to Orbitsville’s up-curving horizons without any psychological upsets, and Chris took to it like a foal turned loose in spring pastures. In the daytime Garamond watched the boy’s skin acquire the gold of the new-found sun, and at nights he sat outside with Aileen beneath the fabulous archways of the sky, their gratification all the more intense because of the period of despair which had preceded it.
Only in dreams, or in the half-world between consciousness and sleep, did Garamond feel any apprehension at the thought of Elizabeth advancing across the light-years which lay between Orbitsville and Earth.
To the unaided vision it would have appeared that her flagship came alone, but in fact it was at the head of a fleet of seventy vessels. An interstellar ramjet on maindrive was surrounded by its intake field, a vast insubstantial maw with an area of up to half a million square kilometres, and for this reason the closest formation ever flown was in the form of a thousand-kilometre grid. The fleet was unwieldy even by Starflight standards. It spent two days in matching velocities with the galactic drift of Pengelly’s Star and in deploying its individual units in parking orbit. When each ship had been accurately positioned and its electromagnetic wings furled, the flagship — Starflier IV — advanced slowly on ion drive until it was almost alongside the Bissendorf. Captain Vance Garamond received a formal invitation to go on board.
The very act of donning the black-and-silver dress uniform, for the first time ever in the course of a mission, made him aware that once again he was within Elizabeth’s sphere of influence. He was not conscious of any fear — Orbitsville had had too profound an effect on the situation for that — yet he was filled with a vague distaste each time he thought of the forthcoming interview. For the past four months he had been certain of the fact that Elizabeth’s consequence had been reduced to normal human dimensions, but her arrival at the head of an armada suggested that the old order was still a reality. For her, the only reality.