Sam eventually admitted he had given up trying to make sense of the data he was getting. And pretty soon he wasn't getting anything.
"Nothing out there, I guess," he said. "I'm not equipped for radio astronomy, so there's no use even speculating."
Along about a Tuesday morning… Actually, it was a Tuesday, and it was the fourteenth of March―at least it was back on a little blue planet some billions of light-years away, billions of years in the future, or the past, who knows. Anyway, along about a Tuesday morning we spotted something up ahead. That is, Sam did through the light-amplifier. I looked into the scope. Nothing but a faint smudge of light. Couple hours later, though, it was brighter.
"A star?" I ventured. "That'd mean we're nonsuperluminal, wouldn't it?"
"I think so. Actually, judging from the blue-shift, I'd say we were strolling along at a little under point nine cee and decelerating."
"So that's our destination."
"Well, seeing that there's no other place around the place, I reckon that must be the place… I reckon."
"Hmph."
"Except that's no dang star," Sam said.
"What is it?"
"Beats the living hell out of me."
I sat back in the driver's seat. "From what Yuri's been telling us, we're billions of years back in the history of the universe, no telling how many billions. Obviously far enough back so that stars haven't even formed yet. Maybe this is a quasar."
"No, if you swing that thing to these settings, you'll see something that looks like what a quasar should look like."
I positioned the scope and looked. A fuzzy blob of light with a faint spike coming out of it came into focus. "Yeah, that's what they're supposed to look like―some of 'em, anyway. But it should be a lot brighter, shouldn't it? I mean, if we're back when quasars first formed, we should be a hell of a lot closer to them, and…" I sat back. "Hell, who am I kidding. What I know about astronomy you couldn't stuff a flea with."
"Maybe it isn't a quasar," Sam said. "I was just guessing. Why not ask Yuri?"
"We've been picking his brains for three days now. Zoya's and Oni's, too. They're sleeping." I thought a moment, then said, "Yuri told me that if we had the right kind of microwave scoop we could tune in the cosmic background radiation and calculate exactly how far back we are."
"If we had the right kind of microwave scoop," Sam snorted. "Look, this is fun, but another hour and we're gonna be there. So let's wait."
So we did.
When we first began to see some detail, the strange object looked like a small star cluster with a bright core that was a bit off-center. Then it got very strange. It wasn't a cluster but a perfect sphere of stars with a brilliant spot near the very edge. But here was a problem.
"Those can't be stars," Sam said. "We're too close to that thing. They're just points of light."
"Artificial objects?"
"Gotta be."
Soon, an interior feature revealed itself, a solid disk bisecting the sphere. We were viewing it almost edge-on. It had the albedo of a planetary body and reflected its light from the much smaller sunlike disk riding just below the outer surface of the sphere. Our magic spaceship changed course, and eventually the disk tilted up toward us. I got out the missile aiming sight, cranked it up to full gain and had a look.
The surface of the disk was a world.
There were blue areas and brown areas―seas and continents. Wisps of cotton floated just above the surface. Clouds. As we got closer, rivers, mountain ranges, and other details appeared. A patchwork of tans and browns and greens spread over the land masses and details of the coastal regions revealed themselves. There were deserts, plains, and areas of what seemed to be thick vegetation. All this geography, though, was on a smaller scale than one would expect. It looked like a planet in miniature.
"Five thousand kilometers in diameter," Sam said. "Exactly."
"Nice round number."
The star sphere was just that. It was like a glass bubble spattered with drops of luminous paint. Not everything in the skies above the planet-disk orbited in the same plane, though. The sun-thing, whatever it was, hung a little lower, and there were other points of light and a smaller, less luminous disk―a moon-thing?―which looked as if they were borne along on inner concentric spheres.
The entire construct―it had to a construct―looked like a medieval astronomer's orrery.
"A damn planetarium," Sam said.
"It's a working model of the Ptolemaic universe," Roland said. "Though I think even Ptolemy accepted a spherical Earth, so it's a mixture of ancient astronomies, probably alien ones at that."
Beyond this, no one was willing to speculate.
The disk of the surface tilted full face toward us and we began our descent. We could see now that the back side of the sunlike object, also a disk, was dark.
In a few minutes we reached the surface of the star globe and found nothing there. Individual stars were still only points of light, all floating in exactly the same plane.
"What, no crystalline ethereal spheres?" Sam complained.
"Well, you wouldn't see them anyway," Yuri pointed out, "if I remember my ancient astronomy correctly." He laughed. "Imagine crashing into one and leaving a hole."
"So all these screwy objects up here are just artificial satellites of this even goofier planet," I said.
We dropped quickly. The sun object, which had become a dark oval when we got above it, turned its bright side to us again and we were in brilliant daylight. You couldn't look directly at it, and it looked for all the world like a sun, a Sol-type one at that. The stars faded and a blue canopy of sky came up, dark and cold at first, lightening and warming as we continued to drop.
The surface was a patchwork of every kind of terrain. There were deep forests, wastelands, mountains, grasslands, stretches that looked like alien planets, stranger areas where it was hard to tell what was going on. It was a crazy quilt down there. And there were signs of intelligent life. I could see roads now, though not many. Structures, too, some very big and very unusual ones, dotting the landscape at random. I didn't see any cities but there was an immense green-colored edifice below that seemed centrally placed. It could have been an arcology of some sort. The thought made my skin crawl.
The jumble and variety reminded me of something, and the notion was so incongruous, when juxtaposed with my expectations of what this place could possibly be, that I laughed aloud. I was reminded of what, in my day, used to be called disneyworlds. I forget what they're called now―in fact, I really don't know if there are any on the colonized planets. Amusement park is another and even older term.
Were we being taken on a school picnic?
In any event, we were about to land. I looked back at everybody. We were all armed, Lori included. Everyone had the same expression: a little fear mixed with expectation. We had discussed what to do at journey's end. We had no idea of what to expect, but we all knew it could be bad. That was one possibility. It was also possible that we could be greeted by brass bands and cheering crowds, and be hailed as intrepid explorers. We could hope. Of course, nobody had any delusions of defending ourselves against either the Roadbuilders, if they were down there, or the Bugs, if this was their home planet. But the slight glimmer of hope existed that we could be set free, and so could Moore and his gang. We simply did not know. In any event, and for any event, we were prepared.
I looked down and saw a familiar sight. The black band of the Skyway. So we never really did get off it. Just a detour, as Susan had said. But one thing we did not see on this planet was a portal. The Skyway was here all right, but this was it. This was Road's End.