Starplex

Chapter V

“Get me a sample of the material those spheres are made of,” barked Jag, standing up at his bridge station and looking at the director. Keith gritted his teeth, and thought, as he often did, of asking PHANTOM to translate Jag’s words less directly, inserting the human niceties of “please” and “thank you.”

“Should we send a probe?” Keith asked, looking at the Waldahud’s four-eyed face. “Or do you want to go out yourself?” If the latter, thought Keith, I’d be glad to show you the airlock door.

“A standard atmospheric-sampling probe,” said Jag. “The gravitational interplay between that many large bodies so close together must be complex. Whatever we send out might end up crashing into one of them.”

All the more reason to send Jag, thought Keith. But what he said was, “A probe it is.” He turned and looked at the workstation positioned at two o’clock to his own. “Rhombus, please take care of that.”

The Ib’s web rippled assent.

“A delta-class probe would be most appropriate,” said Jag, slipping back into his chair and speaking now into a little hologram of Rhombus above the rim of his console.

Keith tapped a key and joined the conference as well; a miniature Waldahud head popped up in front of him next to the full body shot of the Ib. “How many spheres are there in total?” asked Keith.

Rhombus’s ropes operated controls. “Two hundred and seventeen,” he said. “But they all look pretty much the same, except for some variation in size.”

“Well, then, for an initial test, it doesn’t make any difference which sphere we sample,” said Jag. “Choose the one that presents the fewest navigational difficulties. First, scoop up some of that material that’s between the spheres. Then buzz into one of the spheres and get me a sample of the gas, or whatever it is that they’re made of. Take some from the top of the clouds, and another sample from about two hundred meters down into the clouds, if the probe can stand the pressure. As you fill them, heat and pressurize the sample compartments to match the ambient at the collection points; I want to minimize chemical changes in the material.”

Lights moved up Rhombus’s sensor web, and a few moments later he was launching the probe. He switched the control-room spherical display to the view from the probe’s cameras. The stars that were behind the haze between the spheres still seemed to be twinkling; the spheres themselves were just circles of black against a backdrop that consisted of a starfield and some faint blue nebulosity beyond.

“What do you think the spheres are?” asked Rhombus, while the probe closed toward its target.

Jag moved all four of his shoulders in a Waldahud shrug. “Might be the remnants of a brown dwarf star that recently blew apart. Any fluid will take on a spherical shape in zero-g, of course. The material in between will presumably eventually be swept up by the larger bodies.”

The probe was getting close to the material between the spheres. “The fog seems to consist of gas studded with solid particles averaging about seven millimeters in diameter,” said Rhombus, whose sensor web had partially crawled onto the console in front of him so that he could read the instruments more easily.

“What kind of gas?” Keith asked.

“Its apparent molecular weight suggests a reasonably heavy or complex compound,” replied Jag, now looking at one of his monitors. “However, the absorption spectrum is that of normal space dust—carbon grains, and so on.” A pause. “There’s no discernible magnetic field around the spheres. That’s surprising; I had supposed the gas particles might have been held in place by such fields.”

“Will the probe be damaged by impact with the particles?” asked Keith.

“It pleases me to respond in the negative,” said Rhombus. “I’m slowing the probe down to avoid that.”

Part of the hologram was obscured as the hatch that covered the atmospheric scoop opened up—bad design, that. “Now collecting samples of the material between the spheres,” said Rhombus. A few moments later the view cleared as the hatch closed. “Sample bay one full,” the Ib reported. “Changing course for atmospheric skim.”

The starfield wheeled around as the probe altered its trajectory. One of the circles of blackness was soon in the center of its view. The ebony sphere grew larger and larger until it dominated everything. The probe had headlights, which Rhombus had turned on. They made two murky shafts that penetrated a few meters into the dark, swirling material. A different part of the view was obscured as another sample hatch opened.

“Taking upper-atmosphere samples,” reported the Ib, and then, a moment later, “Sample container full.”

“Adequate,” said Jag. “Now dive down two hundred meters—or however far you can go safely—and get some more sphere material.”

“Doing so, in harmonious peace,” said Rhombus’s clipped tones.

Everything was pitch-black, except for the twin pools of light from the headlight beams. They were now only penetrating a meter or so. For one brief moment, something solid seemed to be in the probe’s path—an ovoid shape the size of a dirigible—but it was gone from view almost at once.

“Depth now ninety-one meters,” said Rhombus. “Surprising. External pressure is very light—far less than I’d have expected.”

“Keep going down, then,” said Jag.

The probe continued to descend. Rhombus’s web flashed in consternation. “The pressure sensor must have been damaged—maybe an impact with a piece of gravel. I’m still reading almost no atmospheric pressure.”

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “All right. Fill a compartment here, then bring it all home.”

The third hatch did not obscure the camera at all, although its opening probably shook the craft enough that had they been able to see anything the view would have jiggled a bit.

“The internal-pressure gauge inside the sample compartment shows the same almost-zero pressure the external gauge is indicating,” said Rhombus. “Of course, they run through the same microprocessor. Anyway, the compartment should have filled instantly, given that it was a vacuum before the hatch opened.”

Rhombus left the hatch open for a few more seconds, just to be sure, then closed it, and turned the probe around, bringing it back to Starplex.

Once the probe was back in its launching tube, its sample compartments were disengaged and moved by robot arms onto conveyors, which took them down to Jag’s lab. Jag, meanwhile, took an elevator there himself.

The containers plugged into jacks on the walls of the lab. They didn’t have to be opened; sensors and cameras could look inside through the jacks.

Jag sat down in his chair—a real handcrafted Waldahud seat, not a polychair—and activated the tall, thin monitors in front of him. He then keyed in a sequence of commands that selected a standard barrage of tests, and watched with growing amazement as the results appeared on his screens.

Spectroscopy: negative findings.

Electromagnetic sweep: negative findings.

Beta decay: none.

Gamma-ray emissions: none.

Screen after screen lit up: negative findings; none; negative findings; none.

He tapped a key, and the scale beneath the testing bay read off the mass of the sample container: 12.782 kilograms.

“Central Computer,” called Jag into the air. “Check the spec sheet for this sample container. How much does it mass when empty?”

“The container’s mass is 12.782 kilograms,” barked PHANTOM in Waldahudar.

Jag swore. “The fardint thing is empty.”

“Correct,” said PHANTOM.

Jag tapped a key, and a hologram of Rhombus appeared. “Teklarg,” said Jag, calling the Ib by his name in Waldahudar, “that probe you sent out was defective. All of the sample material from its number-two container leaked out on the way back.”

“Sincere apologies, good Jag,” said Rhombus. “I submit to punishment for wasting your time, and will dispatch a replacement at once.”

“Do so,” said Jag, and he stabbed the button that cut off communications. He turned his attention to the number-one sample container… and was shocked to discover that it, too, had leaked out its contents on the way back. “Shoddy human engineering,” he grumbled to himself.

But he was grumbling even more once the second probe’s sample containers had been conveyed to his lab. The readings were the same—including the anomalously low air-pressure readings after it had dived into the large sphere.

Once again, Jag summoned up a hologram of Rhombus.

“I say with all peaceful good wishes, dear Jag, that there does not appear to be anything wrong with either probe. The container seals are perfect. Nothing should have been able to leak out.”

“Regardless, whatever samples we are collecting are getting out,” said Jag. “Which means… well, which means that whatever the samples are made of must be unusual stuff indeed.”

Lights moved up Rhombus’s web. “A fair assumption.”

Jag slid his dental plates together. “There must be a way to bring some of that material aboard for study.”

“Doubtless you have already thought of this,” said Rhombus, “and I waste both our time by mentioning the idea, but we could use a force box. You know, like the kind they use in labs for handling antimatter.”

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “Acceptable. But don’t use an EM forcefield; instead, use artificial-gravity fields to hold the contents away from the box’s walls, regardless of what acceleration we use.”

“Will do, with obeisance,” said Rhombus.

The force box was manipulated by tractor beams. It consisted of eight antigrav generators arranged as the corners of a perfect cube, with wide, paddlelike handles sticking off each face’s midpoint to give the tractors something to hold on to. The box was pushed into one of the large gray spheres, and opened there. A second box was manipulated into the swarm of gravel between two of the spheres and activated there. The two boxes were then quickly hauled back in to Starplex.

Finally, the sample containers were maneuvered into separate isolation chambers in Jag’s lab. The antigrav trick had been a success: one box did indeed contain samples of the gas that constituted the sphere, and the other held several pieces of translucent gravel plus one partially transparent rock the size of a hen’s egg. Now, at last, Jag would find out what they were dealing with.