A silvered dome pushed out of the pit, out of the ragged shadow, into the white blaze of the near Sun. The barrels of a dozen optical and radio telescopes, pyrometers, telescanners, and cameras thrust out at the great orb, under the blazoned slogan that the dome displayed to the universe in letters of cast bronze:
THE MIGHTIEST REWARDS THE MOST FAITHFUL
And inside the insulated, refrigerated observatory, three astronomers watched a thousand boards and gauges and dials. They were waiting.
For they had been warned.
The senior officer on duty lifted his eyes from a chronometer dial and growled, "Five minutes!"
The other two men squinted at their instruments in silence. The grizzled Technicaptain peered at them through the pale lighting of the screen that dominated the glitter of instruments. On it swam the visual image of the Sun, golden and engorged, reaching out with fat, slow tendrils of superheated gas as it lay above the rock-fanged horizon of the planet Mercury.
"Yeah," he grumbled, half to himself. "We're ready."
The junior member of the team was a lean young Technicadet, an ambitious young man already embittered by the harsh facts of survival and promotion in the Technicorps. He dared a comment: "Ready for nothing, if you ask me. This is idiot business!"
The senior officer rolled a yellowed eye toward him, but said nothing.
"So?" murmured the third man. He was a plump little Techtenant who had found a satisfying philosophy in his recent promotion. "The Machine's business is idiotic, then?"
"Now, look! I didn't mean-"
"No. But you didn't think, either. The Machine discerns the greater plan; we only execute the parts. If the Machine attaches importance to this fanciful creature, the Starchild, then we may not question its motives."
The Technicadet gestured at the huge solar globe angrily and cried, "Look! What could put that out?"
The Techtenant shrugged, and the senior officer said only, "Four minutes."
The cadet's military courtesy was worn thin under the abrasion of their long, tense vigil. He scowled at his telemetering pyrometers and grumbled, "Not a flicker! We've been here three miserable weeks, and we haven't seen a thing."
The Technicaptain rumbled, "We'll stay here three years if the Machine orders it. The Machine is above injustice or error. The Machine was built to rule the Plan, and it is guarded against human blunders."
"Oh, yes, sir. But we've seen nothing at all," cried the Technicadet. "No Starchild. No major sunspots—or whatever it is we are supposed to expect."
"Practice patience," advised the fat captain. "Or you may find yourself serving the Plan more personally. There is always a need for spare parts in the Body Bank! Three minutes."
The Technicadet subsided grudgingly apologetic. All three men sat strapped in their observation chairs, watching the great golden image of the Sun. Wreathed in its red coronal streamers, pocked in its middle latitudes with a trail of small black spots, it hung over the black horizon like a god's eye. The instruments around them clicked and murmured.
"I remember," the Techtenant said at last, as if to himself, "when that Sun was only another star in the sky. No brighter even than great Vega."
The Technicadet cried eagerly, "You were out in the Reefs?"
"Two minutes," growled the captain, but his eyes were on the young Techtenant.
He nodded. "Looking for my sister's . . . boy friend? Fiance? Looking for Boysie Gann. Because he was looking for the Starchild. And we didn't find either of them."
The cadet said simply, "I've never seen the Reefs."
"A beautiful thing," said the Techtenant. "There are spiked forests of silicon plants, shining with their own light. Like jewels, and sharp enough to shred your spacesuit. There's a growth that makes great brain-shaped masses of pure silver. There are thick stalks of platinum and gold, and there are things like flowers that are diamonds."
The cadet's breathing was suddenly loud. The grizzled old captain turned to look at him, all his recent scorn now frozen into longing—and a sort of fear. He snapped: "Pay attention to your work, man! The Reefs are dangerous business!"
"Yes, sir," the Techtenant agreed earnestly. "I saw a great beast like a nightmare, shaped like a scorpion, huge as a horse—"
"No, you fool! Dangerous to the Plan of Man. There is something there that nearly destroyed us once. If the Starchild has his way—"
He stopped himself and said only, "One minute."
The Techtenant reddened. "I'm sorry, sir. I certainly did not intend to seem unplanned. I don't mean to suggest that those savage nomads beyond the Spacewall are worth considering, even if they do believe the Starchild to be more than human."
Tend your instruments!" The captain set the example, resolutely taking his eyes from the men and the screen, clamping them on the bank of gauges and dials before him. A vagrant thought stirred his mind of the blond Togetherness girl who had first whispered the name of the Starchild to him. What had become of her? The Body Bank?
—But there was no time for that. It was only seconds now.
In spite of all the insulation and the cold air sighing from the vents, the dome was suddenly stifling. The captain felt a trickle of perspiration running down his sides. "Twenty seconds!"
The captain stood with his eyes frozen on the black chronometer needle that raced to meet the red, still one he had set. When they touched k would be the vernal equinox on Earth. And the Starchild's threat woirfd be proved an empty bluff... or would not.
Suddenly the whisper of the instruments changed. A camera shutter began clicking gently.
"Ten seconds!"
The shielded floor lamps shut themselves off. Only the instrument lights rivaled the phosphor glow from the image of the great yellow Sun in the screen.
"Five seconds! . . . Four! . . . Three! . . ."
Twenty reels of tape began to spin shrilly in the darkness; the breathing of the men was like sobs.
"Two! . . . One! . . .
"Zero!"
The captain gulped and rubbed his eyes.
There was a dimming. Then the filters went down, and then there was a burst of flame—then darkness.
The lights were gone. All of them. The Sun's image had winked out. He heard a gasp from one of the other men, then a shout. "The Star-child! He's done it!"
And the other man sobbed, "We're blind!"
That, too, was how it began. But there was more.
Like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a still pond, a wave of darkness spread out from the Sun. Three minutes after the instant of the vernal equinox it reached that clucking camera in the dome on Mercury, unseen by those sightless eyes.
In not quite three more minutes, it struck the men watching from the orbital stations above the eternal hot, dank clouds of Venus. A falling shadow of fear, it darkened their screens, whitened their faces, silenced their talk. But their instrument lights remained visible. They had not been blinded by that last great burst of light from the Sun.
Eight minutes from the Sun, the wave of blackness washed over Earth. All across the sunward face of the planet a crushing night came down. Bewildered, men paused and fumbled through the endless seconds before the city lights came on. Terror electrified those who had heard the whisper of the Starchild's threat. On the dark side of Earth and on Luna, astronomers blenched as their near, familiar stars flickered. Some had heard whispers of the Starchild too, and of a Writ of Liberation. Others merely knew that the images in their great space-borne mirrors, or in the scopes that peered up from Earth's highest mountains, suddenly were missing familiar points of light.
They came back . . .
But the Sun did not. Not then. Not for half an hour and more, and while it was gone there was panic.