Without the aid of the beacon they would never have found Louis Nenda's ship. Darya became convinced of that as the
Summer Dreamboat
crept closer to it. For the past hundred kilometers they had been flying through a cloud of debris—lumps of rock, water-ice, and ammonia-ice ranging from boulders the size of a house down to pea-sized hail. Even the smaller pieces could be dangerous. The clutter scattered radio signals, too, and determining the precise location of the
Have-It-All
became a trial-and-error process. No wonder the beacon had been so faint.
"I don't understand this at all," Hans Rebka complained. "Why are there so many fragments, all so close to their ship? We're having to avoid more and more of them." He was at the controls with Kallik at his side. Darya had retired to the bunks, and J'merlia had been left behind on Dreyfus-27, along with a complete record of everything seen so far and instructions to explore and maybe refurbish the old mine shafts and tunnels.
"It cannot be the result of chance." Kallik was still tracking and monitoring, using range and range-rate data to determine the trajectories. She whistled and clucked to herself as she added to the data base she had already formed. "If these fragments were in normal orbits about Gargantua, they would have dispersed, long ago, to form an extended toroidal ck-c-cloud with Gargantua at its center. Since they have not, and since physical laws have not been suspended here . . ." She leaned forward, her forward-facing black eyes intent on the display screen. "Ck-ck. I believe I have the explanation. Tell me if you s-s-see it also. Is not something there, another object, close to the location of the
Have-It-All
?"
Darya stood up from the bunk and moved forward to examine the display. Amid the diffuse reflections she saw the hint of a brighter ring of light, at roughly the computed position of Nenda's ship.
"I see something. Hans, it's another planetoid, right in the middle of the mess. In fact it explains why there
is
a mess. The whole cloud of fragments is orbiting around it, while it orbits Gargantua."
"I ck-concur. It is the reason that they have not dispersed."
"But it makes things more mysterious, not less." Hans Rebka changed the contrast of the display, so that the bright circle stood out more clearly from the background. "Look at that thing. It's tiny—a couple of kilometers across, no more. We'd never have seen it with the ordinary sort of search methods."
"You mean it shouldn't have enough mass to hold anything in orbit around it."
"Right. But it does. And we're being accelerated toward it. I'm forced to make adjustments to our own motion."
The
Summer Dreamboat
was sliding through a denser froth of orbiting fragments as the body ahead of them became larger and sharper on the display.
"And look at that outline," Darya said softly. "If that's not a perfect sphere, it's close enough to have fooled me."
Kallik was busy superimposing the latest fix for the position of Nenda's ship on the largest display screen. It became clear that the other vessel sat on or very close to the round body. The Hymenopt studied the combined image in silence for a few moments. "The
Have-It-All
is not moving relative to the planetoid. There must be enough ss-ss-surface gravity to hold it firmly in one position."
Rebka turned the
Dreamboat
and increased the thrust.
"Kallik, do a calculation for me. Assume that thing is a couple of kilometers in diameter, and suppose it's made of solid rock. What should the surface gravity be? I'd like a reasonable maximum figure."
"Ah." The Hymenopt touched four limbs to the keyboard in front of her. "A small fraction of a centimeter per second per second," she said in a few moments, "Maybe one three-thousandth of a standard gravity, no more."
"I thought so. But we're experiencing that already, while we're still fifty kilometers out! If I extrapolate all the way down, the gravity on the surface of that thing must be getting close to one gee. That's flat-out impossible, for any material we've ever heard of."
As Rebka was speaking the
Dreamboat
made a sudden jerking move to one side. Darya was thrown back onto the bunk. The other two saved themselves by clutching at the control panel.
"What was
that
?" Darya remained flat on her back as the ship took a second leap in a different direction.
"Meteorite-avoidance system." Rebka hauled himself back into position. "I put it on automatic, because there's so much stuff around here I wasn't sure we'd see it all. Good thing I did. Hold on, here comes another. And another. God, they're piling in from everywhere."
The new jerking thrusts came before he had finished speaking, throwing him forward onto the controls. He grabbed desperately for handholds.
"Where are they coming from?" Every time Darya tried to sit up, the ship made a leap in some other unpredictable direction. There was a solid thump on the outside hull, loud enough to be frightening, and the few objects that were not secured in the galley came sailing through into the cabin and rattled around there. "Can you see them?"
Even as she asked that question, her mind was posing a more abstract one. How could orbiting lumps of rock be vectoring in at them, all at once and from all directions? Random processes did not work that way.
Kallik, with hands to spare, was doing better than Hans Rebka. Without saying a word she was at work on the control panel. The ship spun on its axis, and Darya felt a powerful, steady thrust added to the jerks and surges of the collision-avoidance system.
From her position in the bunk she could still see the main display screen. It showed a circle of light surrounded by bright glittering motes. As she watched it came swooping closer at alarming speed. When they seemed ready to plunge right into its center, the ship pivoted on its axis and decelerated at maximum power. Darya was again pressed flat to the bunk's mattress. She heard a startled grunt from Hans Rebka and a thump as he fell to the floor.
Darya felt a few seconds of maximum force on her body; then all acceleration ceased. The drive turned off. Darya found herself lying in something close to normal gravity. She lifted her head.
Hans Rebka was picking himself up painfully from the floor. Kallik was still seated, clutching with both hands at the control panel. The Hymenopt stared at them with the semicircle of rear-facing eyes and bobbed her head.
"My apologies. It was wrong to take such action without seeking permission. However, I judged it necessary if this ship and its occupants were to ss-ss-survive."
Rebka was rubbing his right shoulder and hip. "Damn it, Kallik, there was no need to panic. The collision avoidance system is designed to handle multiple approaches—though I must say, I've never known a bombardment like that."
"Nor will you again, in normal ss-ss-circumstances."
"But what made you think we'd be any safer here, on the surface of the planetoid?" Darya had looked out of the port and confirmed her first impression. The
Summer Dreamboat
was sitting on a solid surface, in a substantial gravity field.
Kallik gestured out of the same port. The upper part of another ship was visible around the tight curve of the planetoid. "For two reasons. First, it was clear from the fact that the
Have-It-All
could sit on the surface with a working beacon, and therefore with working antennas, that there could be no continuous rain of materials here at the surface of the planetoid. I already thought that meant safety, even before I saw what was triggering the collision-avoidance system."
"Rocks and ice?"
"No." The black cranium turned slowly back and forth. "When I caught sight of the objects raining in on us, I had a second reason for descending rapidly. The attackers were free-space forms. I knew they would avoid any substantial gravity field, and we would be safe here." The Hymenopt turned to face Darya. "Those were not rocks or ice, Professor Lang. We were attacked by
Phages
."
Hans Rebka looked startled. But Darya jerked upright in the bunk and clapped her hands together with excitement. "Phages! That's terrific."
"Terrific?" Rebka stared at her in disbelief. "I don't know how much exposure you've had to Phages, Darya, but I can tell you this: they may be slow, but they're
nasty
."
"And these Phages are not so slow," Kallik said calmly. "They are faster than any of which I have seen reports."
"Which makes them worse." Rebka stared at the excited Darya. "Do you
want
to be killed?"
"Of course I don't. We made it through Summertide together, and yet you still ask me a question like that?" Darya had trouble keeping a smile off her face. "I want to live as much as you do. But put yourself in my position. I drag us all the way out here to the middle of nowhere, telling you we'll discover clues to the Builders. And then all we find are dreary bits of rock and old mine-workings. Until a few minutes ago I thought that might be all that we
would
find. But you know as well as I do, Phages are found around Builder artifacts, and only there. They may even
be
Builder artifacts—a number of specialists have suggested that theory." She stood up and went to stare out of the ship's port, at the gleaming and suspiciously regular surface of the planetoid. "I was right, Hans. I felt it back on Quake, and I feel it more than ever now. We're getting there! The Builders have been gone for a long time—but we're close to finding out where they went."
Kallik wanted to scramble into a suit and head off at once across the surface of the planetoid. Louis Nenda's ship was in plain sight, a few hundred meters away, and she was itching to hurry over to it. The need to know if her master was alive or dead made her abandon any thought of caution.
It took a direct order from Hans Rebka to stop her. "Absolutely not," he said. "I can think of ten ways you might get killed, and there must be twenty more I don't know about. When you go, one of us goes with you. And you don't go yet." At his insistence Kallik settled down on her stubby abdomen and joined the other two in making a first survey of their surroundings.
Even from a distance, the body on which the
Dreamboat
rested had appeared anomalously massive and anomalously spherical. An hour of observation and measurement added other peculiarities. When Kallik and Hans Rebka finally put on their suits and made a first descent onto the planetoid's surface, Darya stayed behind, monitored their progress, and entered the physical data into the
Dreamboat
's log. A copy was going to J'merlia on Dreyfus-27, together with a note of their safe landing and their location. Darya prepared another copy for tight-beam transmission to Opal, with a request that it be forwarded via the Bose Network to Sentinel Gate.
She smiled to herself as she reviewed the message before sending it out. Just dull statistics, most people would say. She was giving little but the facts. But there would be high excitement over these particular dull statistics when they reached her colleagues on Sentinel Gate and were passed on in turn to Builder specialists in the spiral arm. Every last one of them would want to be here.
She kept an eye on Kallik and Hans, who were moving cautiously away from the
Summer Dreamboat
, and played back the message before sending it to Opal.
SURFACE TEMPERATURE:
281 K; THE SURFACE OF THE BODY IS
WARM
, ABOVE THE FREEZING POINT OF WATER. GIVEN ITS ENVIRONMENT, REMOTE FROM MANDEL, IT SHOULD BE HUNDREDS OF DEGREES COLDER.
FIGURE:
THE BODY IS A PERFECT SPHERE TO WITHIN THE LIMITS OF OBSERVATION; RADIUS, 1.16 KILOMETERS.
SURFACE GRAVITY:
0.65 GEE; GIVEN ITS SIZE, IT SHOULD BE LESS THAN A THOUSANDTH OF THIS VALUE.
MASS:
128 TRILLION TONS.
DENSITY:
ASSUMING HOMOGENEOUS COMPOSITION, 19,600 TONS PER CUBIC METER. NOTE THAT ALTHOUGH THIS IS LESS THAN SOME CECROPIAN COMMERCIAL MATERIALS, IT IS ABOUT 1,000 TIMES AS DENSE AS ANY NATURALLY OCCURRING SUBSTANCE.
ATMOSPHERE:
16 PERCENT OXYGEN, 1 PERCENT CARBON DIOXIDE, 83 PERCENT XENON. THIS IS UNLIKE THE ATMOSPHERE OF ANY PLANET IN THE SPIRAL ARM; THE XENON CONTENT IS AN UNHEARD-OF CONCENTRATION; AND A BODY OF THIS SIZE SHOULD POSSESS NO ATMOSPHERE AT ALL. NOTE THAT THIS ATMOSPHERE WILL SUSTAIN LIFE FOR ALL OXYGEN-BREATHING FORMS OF THE SPIRAL ARM.
MATERIAL COMPOSITION:
THE OUTER SURFACE HAS THE APPEARANCE OF SMOOTH, FUSED SILICA. THE INTERNAL COMPOSITION IS UNKNOWN, BUT IT IS OPAQUE TO ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION OF ANY WAVELENGTH.
Darya halted the data readout and looked out of the port. Kallik and Rebka had been crouching down, close to the surface. She had asked them to do additional materials testing outside, hoping to add something to this piece of the planetoid's description.
"Any results yet, Hans?"
Rebka straightened up. "We didn't get what you wanted, but we've probably got all we're going to. We couldn't take samples. The surface is too hard to cut, and it's impervious to heat. But we've been hitting it with precise impulses and monitoring the seismic return wavefronts. The phase delays are very peculiar. We think it's as you suggested—the whole thing is hollow, maybe with a honeycomb structure."
Kallik stood up also. "Which makes the high ss-ss-surface gravity even odder, since this is a hollow body."
"Right. I'll add that to the physical description. You can give me more detailed data when you get back. No other problems?"
"None so far. In a little while we're going to head for Nenda's ship. Keep monitoring."
"I will." With considerable satisfaction, Darya added a section to the readout:
GENERAL DESCRIPTION:
THE BODY APPEARS TO BE HOLLOW, PROBABLY WITH INTERNAL CHAMBERS. GIVEN ITS ANOMALOUS PHYSICAL PARAMETERS, IT MUST BE OF ARTIFICIAL ORIGIN. THE PLANETOID'S AGE HAS NOT YET BEEN ESTABLISHED. THERE IS A GOOD POSSIBILITY THAT IT IS A BUILDER ARTIFACT. THAT HYPOTHESIS IS GIVEN SUPPORT BY THE FACT THAT PHAGES ARE TO BE FOUND CLOSE BY IN LARGE NUMBERS, LESS THAN A HUNDRED KILOMETERS AWAY FROM THE BODY'S SURFACE.