Federation World

Chapter 3

HE stumbled as he went through the door. There was a sudden feeling of vertigo, and he instinctively put out his arms to keep his balance. It was a small room for the number of people in it, and for a moment he wondered if he was in a descending elevator.

“You’ll gel used to it in a moment,” said the woman he had met earlier. Her face was pale, as if she had recently received some kind of shock, but her smile was reassuring and sympathetic. Apart from her there were six other people in the room, three women and three men of different ages and nationalities, and some of them smiled as well. They were all standing in front of the window, but they moved aside to let Martin see the view.

At first glance the stretch of harshly-lit, stony, and obviously airless ground made him think that he was on the moon-the low gravity would have explained his difficulty in keeping balance. But it was not the moon, he saw as soon as he raised his eyes above the horizon.

The sky blazed with stars-singly, in clusters, and in great, swirling, jeweled eddies-and so dense was the star field that it was difficult to find even a tiny part of the sky which was completely dark. Except, that was, in one area high overhead where there hung an enormous, black, featureless shape which looked at least twenty times larger than the disk of the full moon seen from Earth.

It was the shape of the Federation symbol.

Martin became aware slowly that his pulse was hammering loudly in his ears, and that he had been looking at the sky with such an intensity of wonder that he had forgotten to breathe. He took a ragged breath and said, “Is-is it some kind of black hole?”

Because the room was tit only by that glorious starlight, he had not noticed the examiner until the word appeared white on a black screen. There was no sensor plate on top, and this examiner, Martin thought, was not fooling around with colored screens and subtle psychological pressures. He knew that his questions here would be answered simply and directly.

Unless they were forestalled…

… or he began to see the answers for himself.

The words, diagrams, and sharply detailed pictures flashed onto the screen, describing the Federation World, its topography, atmospheres, temperature and weather control machinery, and the light neutralizer fields which provided night and day for those species which needed them. It rotated ponderously and with seeming slowness, furnishing maximum gravity in the equatorial areas for those Citizens who had come from high-gee planets, and a diminishing artificial gravity approaching the poles where the surface was stepped and terraced so that the centrifugal force would be at right angles to the ground.

Citizens wishing to make contact with those of another species used ultralong-range aircraft or intra-plane-tary spaceships. Such contacts were encouraged, but only if they did not involve the risk of individual or species invasion of privacy. So touchy were some of the cultures that the stratosphere of the entire Federation World had been rendered opaque so that Citizens would not be able to watch each other through telescopes by looking upward and across their hollow superplanet.

The vast structure was a superthin eggshell of metal which was ultra-hard and fantastically dense, and the soils and atmospheres covering its inner surface were synthetic and produced when population additions required them. Where the atmospheres of adjoining species were mutually toxic, one-hundred-mile-high walls, transparent in the higher altitudes so as not to interfere with the sunlight, separated the two areas. These were similar to the walls which encircled the five-hundred-mile entry ports, positioned at the points of the conical polar extensions, to keep the atmosphere from being lost into extraplanetary space.

In the gravity-free polar areas were the great, thou-sand-mile-square tracts of bare metal on which were built the atmosphere and soil synthesizers, the matter transmitter units, searchship building and maintenance docks, and the power sources for the long-range projectors which could turn aside or destroy any astronomical body large enough to endanger the giant sphere by collision.

All at once the awful immensity of the Federation World, the incredibly high level of knowledge which had created and maintained it, and the inutterable pettiness of his suspicions made Martin want to run away and hide himself. He felt like an aboriginal grasshut dweller suddenly confronted with a block of skyscraper offices and Rush-hour traffic.

“You are inviting us to join you,” he said numbly, “and you built that!”

He turned quickly. The others, no doubt because they had already had this experience, turned more slowly. The wall on his right had become transparent, or maybe it was a wall-sized television screen showing a creature, lying or perhaps standing surrounded by a complex control desk. It was vaguely crablike, with too many legs; and appendages; the body was covered by warty excrescences and fleshy, frondlike growths. The single eye was wide and bulging, like a transparent sausage with two independently moving pupils. He had seen a pictoral representation of one of these beings in the reception area of the induction center, but this entity bore about as much resemblance to the picture as a real animal did to a cute cartoon treatment by Disney.

One of the being’s appendages rose ponderously to indicate the dense, shining star field and the pointed, ovoid silhouette that was the great, single world of the Federation of Galactic Sentients, and it went on,

For a few moments the screen remained blank, and ‘ Martin looked quickly at the other people in the room. The woman he had met earlier smiled faintly and said, “They do say that it is better to start a job at the bottom…” The others seemed to be looking somewhere deep within themselves and were silent.

He returned his attention to the monstrous, crablike being. Was it his imagination or was there really a glint of amusement in that great, bulging sausage of an eye as once more the non-Citizen’s words were projected onto the screen.