"I don't understand," said Richard.
"Nor I," said Peter Robinson.
"These things have been here for eons beyond count or comprehension," said Charrgh-Captain. "A few more hours can make little difference. We are not in a battle situation where victory and honor go to the swiftest. Indeed, if we resolve not to try to open the great sphere we are Honor-bound to at least bring away all the information we may. I see no reason why we should not take time to explore this chamber thoroughly."
Exploration revealed nothing about what might be within the great sphere. They saw other suited thrintun figures, some anchored by shaped and stasis-protected boots, some floating. They found more of them in a separate compartment standing about what might be a control panel, other evidence of the damage to the chamber ages ago, and dust that-on a smaller time-scale-might or might not have once been thrintun who had had no time to reach their suits when that damage occurred. There were other stasis boxes that probably contained stores of various kinds, or possibly slaves. Stashed away in container bins they found many smaller but also occupied stasis-suits with different head-shapes which they surmised contained thrint females. There were tools and other unidentifiable things that time had welded to whatever surface they rested on.
They photographed and recorded everything, left mobile cameras in the chamber and on the surface, and returned to Wallaby.
Wallaby's computer projected holos of the great sphere and of what they called the control chamber, with their discoveries incorporated: the row of metallic spheres apparently taken out of stasis, the damage, the row of spherical stasis fields still functioning, the other rooms and storage areas. But the holos told them no more than they had seen already. Photographs of the chamber's interior hung on the walls around them and samples of the dust were being taken apart in the all-purpose police and scientific tool generally known as an autocop. They had removed their helmets and gauntlets but the humans remained in their spacesuits-modern suits were as flexible, light and comfortable as ordinary clothing. "The control chamber must be the equivalent of the on-off button on a thrint stasis-suit," said Richard. He had been rereading the available information on the Slavers. The library contained all humanity's knowledge of them, which wasn't much. Charrgh-Captain had contributed a brick containing what the Kzin knew, or at least what the Patriarch was prepared to release to humans, which was not a great deal more.
"Of course, at the time when the stasis fields were activated, they expected other thrint to be around to turn them off within a reasonable time. Now, when we find stasis boxes of any kind, the controls are almost invariably worn away. The great problem with stasis boxes was always that once you are in stasis you can't control events. Any mechanism to turn a stasis field off has to be outside the field, so it is vulnerable to tampering or accidents, and beyond that to entropy. Sooner or later the hardest materials disintegrate.
"The solution here looks like a typically cumbersome and fallible thrint one, the clumsy work of thrintun who had good materials but suddenly had to think and design for themselves and weren't used to it. I feel the tnuctipun would have contrived something more elegant and foolproof, though at the moment I can't think what.
"The control center has as its principal feature a set of spherical stasis-boxes, all, it appears, containing metal spheres. Each opened box appears to have contained, along with other mechanisms, what appears to be an atomic clock. Of course, within the stasis field no time passes-even subatomic particles have no movement-so the clocks do nothing.
"The first clock, I guess, was not in stasis. When it recorded that a certain time had passed, it sent a signal to open the first stasis-box. Then the clock inside that became operational. In addition, the other mechanisms in it presumably became active and did whatever they were meant to do. Again, after that clock had recorded a certain time had passed, the next stasis box would be opened. I am guessing that it opened the big field, and guessing from that assumption that it perhaps subsequently closed it again. "The damage shows something interrupted the sequence, whether accidental meteor impact or deliberate attack."
"There were no sapient life-forms after the war to attack it. Not for billions of years," said Peter Robinson.
"There is a question about that point," said Gatley Ivor. "Some of the artifacts we have found seem to date from well after Suicide Night. Perhaps survivors came out of stasis and made foredoomed attempts to start again."
"Anyway, the sequence of the clocks stopped. Those"-Richard pointed to the row of perfect and undamaged spheres- "are stasis boxes still to be opened. My guess is that each contains a clock which it was planned would, after a certain time, open the next."
"How long did each clock run?"
"It's hard to say. The radioactive elements are completely decayed. I don't know how they were calibrated. I don't even know if they were opened at regular intervals. But judging by the sheer bulk of these structures and the materials used-all of which would have had their cost in resources-the builders must have been thinking in long terms. Tens or hundreds of thousands of years, at least."
Couldn't the bulk have just been for military protection?" asked Gay.
"It doesn't have a military feel about it. If it is military, why are there no signs of any defensive weapons?"
"A moment," said Peter Robinson. "I try to think as a thrint might have thought three billion years ago. You have said the great problem with stasis boxes is: How are they turned off? But that is how we see them from our point of view, for we find them when the control mechanisms have crumbled away. It was not a problem during the days of the Slaver Empire, when there were always other thrintun around to do it. That is something else that makes this different to the Slaver artifacts previously discovered: The builders of this stasis-box knew no one would be coming to turn it off! The control chamber is an attempt to defeat entropy outside a stasis field. To challenge not living enemies but Time itself."
Like the Pyramids," said Gay. "This is, perhaps, like them, a gift from the ancients to the future world."
– discontinuity-
To Richard and Gay, who had swum in the seas of Earth, the blow was-vastly intensified-as though they had been standing ankle-deep on a beach when a huge wave smashed over them from head to foot, trod them flat and marched over them to drag them under into neck-breaking darkness amid roiling, tearing sand and stones. To Melody Fay it was like the Jinxian nightmare of falling off a cliff in Jinxian gravity, to Charrgh-Captain it was worse than the worst probing in his training to resist telepathic interrogation. Then a choking feeling, tearing, unbelievable pain in body-cavities and eye. Blindness, a worse, more tearing blindness than looking on hyperspace, mouths and throats exploding. Cold. COLD. Then it was like dying.
And it was gone.
They were prostrate on the cabin floor. They got to their feet more or less slowly and shakily, and looked around.
"That was the Slaver Power," breathed Gatley Ivor. "A Slaver has come out of stasis."
How?" Even as he asked the question, Richard realized something: But the Power is not there now. Not unless it is already controlling our minds so completely that we do not know it is controlling them. That is possible, but to think on it is useless and the stuff of madness.
"We were running the Joey's gravity-motor on the surface of the sphere," said Gatley Ivor at last. "Could that have turned off a stasis field?"
"I suppose it could, if the mechanism was sensitive."