Something was emerging from the lake. Something white, groping blindly upwards.
Garamond’s identity returned to him abruptly as he recognized the spacesuited figure of Lieutenant Kraemer struggling to an upright position. He moved to help the other man and became aware of yet another ‘impossibility’ — there was gravity sufficient to give him almost his normal Earth weight. Kraemer and he leaned against each other like drunk men, bemused, stunned, helpless because there were blue skies where there should have been only the hostile blackness of space, because they had stepped through the looking glass into a secret garden. The grass moved gently, reminding Garamond of perhaps the greatest miracle of all, of the presence of an atmosphere. He felt an insane but powerful urge to open his helmet, and was fighting it when his tear-blurred eyes focused on the buildings.
They were visible at several points around the rim of the aperture, ancient buildings, low and ruinous. The reason they had not registered immediately with Garamond was that time had robbed them of the appearance of artifacts, clothing the shattered walls with moss and climbing grasses. As he began to orient himself within the new reality, and the images being transmitted from eyes to brain became capable of interpretation, he saw amid the ruins the skeletons of what had once been great machines.
“Look over there,” he said. “What do you think?”
There was no reply from Kraemer. Garamond glanced at his companion, saw his lips moving silently behind his faceplate and remembered they were still on radio communication. Both men switched to the audio circuits which used small microphones and speakers on the chest panels.
“The suit radios seem to have packed up,” Kraemer said casually, then his professional composure cracked. “Is it a dream? Is it? Is it a dream?” His voice was hoarse.
“If it is, we’re all in it together. What do you think of the ruins over there?”
Kraemer shielded his eyes and studied the buildings, apparently seeing them for the first time. “They remind me of fortifications.”
“Me too.” Garamond’s mind made an intuitive leap. “It wasn’t always possible to stroll in here the way we just did.”
“All those dead ships?”
“I’d say a lot of people once tried to come through that opening, and other people tried to keep them out.”
“But why should they? I mean, if the whole inside of the sphere is like this…” Kraemer gestured at the sea of grass. “Oh, Christ! If it’s all like this there’s as much living room as you’d get on a million Earths.”
“More,” Garamond told him. “I’ve already done the sums. This sphere has a surface area equivalent to 625,000,000 times the total surface of Earth. If we allow for the fact that only a quarter of the Earth’s surface is land and perhaps only half of that is usable, it means the sphere is equivalent to five billion Earths.
“That’s one each for every man, woman and child in existence.”
“Provided one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“That we can breathe the air.”
“We’ll find that out right now.” Garamond felt a momentary dizziness. When he had been playing around with comparisons of the size of Earth and the sphere he had treated it as a purely mathematical exercise, his mind solely on the figures, but Kraemer had gone ahead of him to think in terms of people actually living on the sphere, arriving at the aperture in fleets sent from crowded and worn-out Earth, spreading outward across those prairies which promised to go on for ever. Trying to accommodate the vision along with his other speculations about the origins and purpose of the sphere brought Garamond an almost-physical pain behind his eyes. And superimposed on all his swirling thoughts, overriding every other consideration, a new concept of his personal status was struggling to be born. If he, Vance Garamond, gave humanity five billion Earths… then he, and not Elizabeth Lindstrom, would be the most important human being alive… then his wife and child would be safe.
“There’s an analyser kit in the buggy,” Kraemer said. “Shall I go for it?”
“Of course.” Garamond was surprised by the lieutenant’s question, then with a flash of insight he understood that it had taken only a few minutes of exposure to the unbounded lebensraum of the sphere to alter a relationship which was part of the tight, closed society of the Two Worlds. Kraemer was actually reluctant to leave the secret garden by climbing down into the circular black lake, and — as the potential owner of a super-continent — he saw no reason why Garamond should not go instead. So quickly, Garamond thought. We’ll all be changed so quickly.
Aloud he said, “While you’re getting the kit you can break the news to the others — they’ll want to see for themselves.”
“Right.” Kraemer looked pleased at the idea of being first with the most sensational story of all time. He went to the edge of the aperture, lay down and lowered his head into the blackness, obviously straining to force the helmet through the membrane field which retained the sphere’s atmosphere. After wriggling sideways a little to obtain his grip on the buggy’s leg, Kraemer slid out of sight into the darkness. Garamond again felt a sense of dislocation. The fact that he had weight, that there was a natural-seeming gravity pulling him ‘downwards’ against the grassy soil created an illusion that he was standing on the surface of a planet. His instincts rebelled against the idea that he was standing on a thin shell of unknown metal, that below him was the hard vacuum of space, that the buggy was close underneath his feet, upside down, clinging to the sphere by the force of its drive.
Garamond moved away from the aperture a short distance, shocked by the incongruity of the heavy spacesuit which shut him off from what surely must be his natural element. He knelt for a closer look at the grass. It grew thickly, in mixed varieties which to his inexperienced eye had stems and laminae very similar to those of Earth. He parted the grass, pushed his gloved fingers into the matted roots and scooped up a handful of brown soil. Small crumbs of it clung to the material of his gloves, making moist smears. Garamond looked upwards and for the first time noticed the lacy white streamers of cloud. With the small sun positioned vertically overhead it was difficult to study the sky, but beyond the cloud he thought he could distinguish narrow bands of a lighter blue which created a delicate ribbed effect curving from horizon to horizon. He made a mental note to point it out to Chief Science Officer O’Hagan for early investigation, and returned his attention to the soil. Digging down into it a short distance he came to the ubiquitous grey metal of the shell, its surface unmarked by the damp earth. Garamond placed his hand against the metal and tried to imagine the building of the sphere, to visualize the creation of a seamless globe of metal with a circumference of a billion kilometres.
There could be only one source for such an inconceivable quantity of shell material, and that was in the sun itself. Matter is energy, and energy is matter. Every active star hurls the equivalent of millions of tons a day of its own substance into space in the form of light and other radiations. But in the case of Pengetty’s Star someone had set up a boundary, turned that energy back on itself, manipulating and modifying it, translating it into matter. With precise control over the most elemental forces of the universe they had created an impervious shell of exactly the sort of material they wanted — harder than diamond, immutable, eternal. When the sphere was complete, grown to the required thickness, they had again dipped their hands into the font of energy and wrought fresh miracles, coating the interior surface of the sphere with soil and water and air. Organic acids, even complete cells and seeds, had been constructed in the same way, because at the ultimate level of reality there is no difference between a blade of grass and one of steel…