Now that it was pointed out to him, he could. The circular arc displayed a slow dilation and contraction, like the pupil of a vast eye. He could see moving color patterns, fringes of green and orange and yellow and blue. And Liddy was absolutely right; the object, whatever it was, was not moving relative to the horizon. But surely, if it had been there when first they left the ship and rose to the surface, they would have noticed it.
“Look below the water,” Liddy cried. “You can see it there, too.”
The circle didn’t end at the waterline. The same pattern of expansion and contraction, much fainter, showed underneath. As the sun dipped toward the horizon and the light became less intense, you could pick out part of the circle even under water. It seemed to have its own source of illumination. And right between the two, at the surface, a narrow band of steam or white smoke created a line of brightness. The line rippled and shimmered as though it was the site of intense turbulence, a furious mixing and blurring of air and water.
“What is it?” Liddy asked. And Bony — Mister Know-it-all himself, who prided himself on having answers for everything — couldn’t even offer a guess.
“I don’t know.” He made a decision. Despite its apparently peaceful appearance, Limbo had more potential dangers than he could imagine. “We can talk about what we’ve seen when we’re back inside the ship. Come on, Liddy. Suits closed.”
He led the way into the water, over-inflating the suit as he went to make sure that it would float. The unfamiliar cramped feeling around his belly and chest was proof that the pressure was increasing. He turned to Liddy, now an overstuffed roly-poly figure who nodded to him behind her visor. He turned on his suit thrustors at a low level, and side by side they coasted out to where the beacon still emitted its steady call.
As they went he became increasingly pleased that they had left the shore when they did. From this angle the sun was even lower in the sky. The sea was calm, but submerged in water up to his neck he found visibility increasingly difficult because of reflected glints on the surface. Without the directional radio feed from the beacon they would never make visual contact.
And then there was a new worry. Although the sea was calm he could feel the pull of a current. It was urging them in the direction of the rainbow eye.
“Can you feel that?”
“The current. Bony, it’s getting stronger.”
“I know. Angle your thrustors and give them higher power. Let air out of your suit. Don’t worry if we lose radio contact when we go under. We should be close enough now to see the ship. Look down as you go.”
No point in mentioning his own worry, that with the sun setting its light would no longer penetrate all the way to the seabed. Bony released excess air, switched the thrust of his suit to high level, and drove down into blue-green water. He could sense the pull of the current, weaker now, and he could make out the shape of Liddy’s suit a few meters ahead of him. He could not see any sign of the Mood Indigo .
Unexpectedly, Liddy veered off to the right. Her eyes were exceptionally sharp, he knew that. Maybe she had caught sight of the ship and was heading in that direction. In any case, he didn’t want to lose contact. Bony changed the angle of his own drive thrustors and dived to catch up.
He was looking for the ship, but what he finally saw was a faint blur of light. He swore at his own stupidity. Of course that’s what they would see, the ship’s internal lights shining out of the ports. Friday Indigo wouldn’t be sitting in darkness. The light became steadily brighter, and finally Bony could make out its source, the bulbous, bottom-heavy shape sitting quietly on the sea floor. He had never in his life expected to be so pleased at the prospect of Friday Indigo’s company. He came up behind Liddy and watched as she went under the airlock and up to its open hatch. He took half a minute more, reeling in the surface beacon and its connecting line. He had already worried that it might have been noticed by whatever or whoever flew that strange tri-lobe aircraft through the air of Limbo. Then he joined Liddy, heaved himself into the lock, and sat panting on the edge of the hatch. It was good to be there, but he wouldn’t feel fully safe until the lock had cycled and he was once more inside the ship with both outer and inner hatches closed.
Friday Indigo was waiting for them as they emerged into the cabin of the ship — but he didn’t wait long. Bony could tell that the captain was angry or nervous because his mouth was twitching. Bony hardly had his helmet open before Friday Indigo was in his face, shouting, “For God’s sake, Rombelle, do you realize how long you’ve been gone? Hours and hours, without one damned signal back to me. You’d better have an explanation. And it had better be a lot more than you were just farting around on the surface up there.”
“It was.” Bony felt energy going out of him, like the extra air bleeding out of his suit. With his helmet still on his head and the body unit of his suit unopened he flopped down onto a drive housing. “I’m going to tell you what we saw. I’m not going to try to explain it.”
“You’ll do what I tell you to do. I don’t pay you to be a robot or a parrot.”
“I don’t trust my own judgment, sir, that’s why I don’t want to guess at explanations. I’ve been wrong about so many things about this planet. I’ll give you an example. We found land.”
“That’s great!”
“I thought so — at first. It’s just a few kilometers from here, bare black rock with no sign of life. So I concluded there must be no land life, that plants and animals hadn’t emerged from the sea yet. Then we saw something flying, and I decided that I’d been wrong. I couldn’t imagine a flying form emerging directly from a sea-life form.”
“Then you weren’t thinking straight. Haven’t you heard of flying fish?”
“I thought of that — later. But it didn’t matter, because this was nothing like a fish, and we realized that it wasn’t a bird or an animal, either. It was some kind of aircraft. But it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“God damn it!” Indigo’s dark brows lowered into a frown and he thumped the cabin wall with his open palm. “That’s terrible news. It means we don’t have this place to ourselves. We’ve been beaten to it. One of the Stellar Group expeditions came through alive.”
“I’d love to think you’re right, sir, but I don’t believe you are. The flying machine wasn’t like any aircraft or spacecraft in the solar system, but it also wasn’t like anything else I ever saw or heard of. Like nothing inside the whole Perimeter.”
To Bony, that was bad news. Friday Indigo obviously didn’t agree. He was grinning hugely. “If you’re right, we’ve got it made. Can’t you see it? A new planet, a new intelligent species, new technology like nothing you’ve ever seen. And nobody but us knows a thing about it! We’ll go up there, talk to whoever runs the flying machine — this ship has the best universal translator that you can buy — and go home with a negotiation position you wouldn’t believe.”
“If we can get home. That’s another thing. There may be a way. As we were coming back, Liddy and I saw something that we feel sure wasn’t there when we left the sea to take a look ashore.”
As Bony stripped off his suit he described the rainbow-hued arc. It was difficult to find words for something so unfamiliar, the partial circle with its darker and poorly defined extension under the water.
“When we saw it,” he said, “I couldn’t think what it might be. But as I sat puffing and panting on the lock hatch, I had an idea. The thing looks like a circle, but actually it must be a spherical region. I believe that it’s a Link access point — the same one we came through to get here.”