“Councilor, it doesn’t rotate.”
“I can see that. But it’s very common for planets and moons not to rotate. They become tidally locked to some other body.”
“Tidally locked bodies do rotate. They turn so that they always present the same face to the parent, which means their day is the same as their year. But they rotate. Everything rotates, everything in the universe: electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, moons, planets, stars, gas clouds, galaxies—everything but that planetoid in the display.”
“Let me see the data.” Julian Graves stared at the screen filled with numbers provided by E.C. and went silent for half a minute.
Tally computed tenth roots for the first million integers and waited impatiently. He knew what was happening. Julian Graves had once been two separate entities, Julius Graves and an interior mnemonic twin. The twin had originally been intended as no more than a memory augment, housed in an added pair of cerebral hemispheres inside Julius Graves’s big-domed head. The emergence of a second personality, Steven Graves, had been a surprise to everyone. The two had slowly merged, to become Julian Graves, but for certain tasks it was still better to maintain separation.
Like now. Steven had the computational talent, and it was of an order that even Tally had learned to respect. At quiet moments in the past they had indulged in calculation face-offs, and sometimes—to Tally’s amazement—Steven Graves held his own. They had discussed it, and decided that although E.C. had better circuit speeds than human neurons by a factor of ten to the fifteenth, Steven compensated for that by the specialized pattern recognition hardware built into the human brain, and by computational parallelism which Tally could not match.
Now Steven must be performing his own analysis of the data. That deduction was verified when Julian Graves blinked his blue eyes, nodded, and said, “Indeed, the planetoid does not appear to rotate with respect to the most distant parts of the universe. But the observations you have provided, like all measurements, are accurate only to within certain confidence limits. We feel obliged to point out that rotational speeds of objects follow statistical distributions. Thus there is a finite probability that a given rotation speed, no matter how small, will be encountered. That is what we are seeing here.”
“May I speak?”
But speaking had done no good at all. He had been unable to persuade Julian Graves that the non-rotating planetoid was worthy of investigation. Tally had terminated the discussion before it could go on too long. He was learning the ways of humans. Better to stop talking, take the Tally-ho on its way, and offer direct proof to Julian Graves that Tally was right and Steven was wrong.
Unfortunately that might be no easy task. The ship was closing fast on the planetoid, and the observation chamber at the front of the Tally-ho offered a direct view of what even E.C. had to admit was an unpromising object.
Tally’s find was so small that although gravity could hold it together, it could not impose the spherical shape common to large bodies. From a distance it appeared as an uneven chip of dark rock, about seventy kilometers long and perhaps half that along each of the other main axes. Tally used a high-magnification scope and searched for any sign of the Phages that often swarmed near Builder artifacts. He saw nothing. He performed a routine laser scan of the surface, and read the reflected spectrum. Rock, rock, and more rock. Of course, since the body was not turning on any axis he could examine only one side of it, but when Tally calculated the odds not even he could hold out hope that the other side would be any different.
It was time to give up, accept that Steven Graves was right and E.C. was wrong, and move on to his official mission of seeking the edge of the dark zone and the planet of the Marglotta. Except that while he had been busy examining the reflected spectrum, the Tally-ho had continued to close on its target. The navigation equipment would not permit a collision—it was far too smart for that—but when E.C. raised his head and glanced again through the port of the observation chamber, the chip of rock had grown to a great uneven lump that filled the whole sky.
And it had changed. The whole surface, uniform from a distance, was marked by a regular pattern of studs. It looked to Tally as though a meticulous, gigantic, insane, and overactive riveter had been given a free hand on the planetoid. He rejected that hypothesis on the basis of its improbability, and upon giving the surface a closer inspection realized that he had confused bulges with indents. Those were not studs, they were holes. The body was riddled with them. He glanced at the range monitor, estimated the angle subtended by one of the holes, and at once knew its diameter: 2.7 meters. More than wide enough to admit a suited human, but not nearly enough to permit the Tally-ho to enter.
So what now?
He had agreed to keep Julian Graves informed as to anything he found, but a message sent to Graves would surely lead to an undesirable result. E.C. would be told to stay where he was until the survival team specialists came to offer assistance. It would do no good to point out that Tally’s brain, if not his body, could survive an acceleration of hundreds of gees and temperatures up to four thousand degrees. That was more than could be said for any human, no matter how well trained.
E.C. edged the Tally-ho sideways and closer to the planetoid, so that he could shine a beam directly down one of the round holes. The blackness within was absolute, with no sign of reflected light. He wondered how that could be, and what material lined the tunnel. It would surely be all right for him to determine at least that much information. Although Graves had told E.C. to keep the Pride of Orion informed, he had not suggested that every independent action was forbidden.
Tally commanded the Tally-ho to maintain a precise fifty-meters separation from the planetoid. He put on a suit and went across to the communications console.
I have discovered a planetoid to which some intelligent agent may have made modifications. My signal beacon will direct you here, should you feel it worthwhile to investigate. E. Crimson Tally.
That was enough. He really was beginning to understand how humans thought and operated. Be casual. More was less.
He instructed the console to send his message after a five minute delay. That would give him enough time to leave the Tally-ho and make his way to the surface of his find.
As soon as he arrived inside he knew why there had been no reflection from the walls of the tunnel. There were no walls. The hole that Tally had entered expanded outward as soon as he was inside. The slab had no interior, it was nothing more than a paper-thin shell surrounding vacuum. He could see tiny circles of starlight, entering through the million other holes scattered all over the surface.
As a possible Builder artifact this was a total failure. It contained no mysteries, and it just sat there and did nothing at all.
Tally was ready to retreat when he noted something slightly unusual. While outside the planetoid, the gravitational force exerted on him had been tiny, hardly enough to notice. That was just as it should be for such a small body. But now that he was inside, his suit had to apply a constant thrust to hold him in position.
He turned off that thrust, and at once began to fall. That made no sense at all; or rather, it made sense only if some invisible object of high density sat at the middle of the lump of rock.
It was still of no more than slight interest, but since he was here he might as well take a look. E.C. allowed himself to drop for a few more kilometers. His suit’s inertial system kept a continuous track on how far he had fallen, and just how long it was taking. His conversion of those numbers to a law of force was automatic and almost instantaneous, and it occupied only a tiny fraction of his attention. The results were another matter. They concentrated all his resources. Since he was falling freely he had felt no force on his body, but his acceleration had been increasing exponentially. If he fell for another twenty-six kilometers, the extrapolated value was infinite.