“Here we are.” Napier opened the elevator door, revealing a tunnel-like corridor at the end of which was the Bissendorf’s astronomical observatory.

“Thanks.” Garamond fought to suppress a sense of unreality as he walked out of the elevator. He saw, as in a dream, the white-clad figure of Sammy Yamoto standing at the far end of the corridor waving to him. His brain was trying in a numbed way to deal with the paradox that moments of truth, those instants when reality cannot be avoided, always seem unreal. And the truth was that his wife and child were going to die. Because of him.

“For a man who found nothing,” Napier commented, “Sammy Yamoto’s looking pretty excited.”

Garamond summoned his mind back from grey wanderings.

Yamoto came to meet him, plum-coloured lips trembling slightly. “We’ve found something! After I spoke to Mister Napier I became curious over the fact that there was less matter per cubic centimetre than the galactic norm. It was as if the region had been swept by a passing sun, yet there was no sun around.”

“What did you find?”

“I’d already checked out the electro-magnetic spectrum and knew there couldn’t be a sun nearby, but I got a crazy impulse and checked the gravitic spectrum anyway.” Yamoto was a fifty-year-old man who had looked on many worlds in his lifetime, yet his face was the face of a man in shock. Garamond felt the first stirrings of a powerful elation.

“Go on,” Napier said from behind him.

“I found a gravity source of stellar magnitude less than a tenth of a light-year away, so…”

“I knew it!” Napier’s voice was hoarse. “We’ve found Pengelly’s Star.”

Garamond’s eyes were locked on the astronomer’s. “Let Mister Yamoto speak.”

“So I took some tachyonic readings to get an approximation of the object’s size and surface composition, and… You aren’t going to believe this, Mister Garamond.”

“Try me,” Garamond said. “As far as I can tell…” Yamoto swallowed painfully. “As far as I can tell, the object out there… the thing we have discovered is a spaceship over three hundred million kilometres in diameter!”

Like everyone else on board the Bissendorf, Garamond spent a lot of time at the forward viewscreens during the long days of the approach to the sphere.

He attended many meetings, accompanied by Yamoto who had become one of the busiest and most sought-after men on the ship. At first the Chief Astronomer had wanted to take advantage of the drive shut-down period to get a tachyonic signal announcing his discovery off to Earth. Garamond discreetly did not point out his own role as prime mover in the find. Instead he made Yamoto aware of the danger of letting fame-hungry professional rivals appear on the scene too early, and at the same time he insured against risks by ordering an immediate engine restart.

Yamoto went back to work, but the curious thing was that even after a full week of concentrated activity he knew little more about the sphere than had been gleaned in his first hurried scan. He confirmed that it had a diameter of some 320,000,000 kilometres, or just over two astronomical units; he confirmed that its surface was smooth to beyond the limits of resolution, certainly the equivalent of finely machined steel; he confirmed that the sphere emitted no radiation other than on the gravitic spectrum, and that analysis of this proved it to be hollow. In that week the only new data he produced were that the object’s sphericity was perfect to within the possible margin of error, and that it rotated. On the question of whether it was a natural or an artificial object he would venture no professional opinion.

Garamond turned all these factors over in his mind, trying to gauge their relevance to his own situation. The sphere, whatever its nature, no matter what its origins might be, was a startling find — the fact that it had been indicated on an antique Saganian star chart radically altered the accepted views about the dead race’s technological prowess. Possibly the whole science of astronomy would be affected, but not the pathetically short futures of his wife and child. What had he been hoping for? A fading sun which still emitted some life-giving warmth? An Earth-type planet with a vast network of underground caverns leading down into the heat of its core? A race of friendly humanoids who would say, “Come and live with us and we’ll protect your family from the President of Starflight”?

It was in the nature of hope that it could survive on such preposterous fantasies. But only when they were confined to the subconscious, where — as long as they existed at all — the emotions could equate them with genuine prospects of survival, enabling the man on the scaffold steps to retain his belief that something could still turn up to save him. Garamond and his wife and boy were on the scaffold steps, and the fantasies of hope were being dissipated by the awful presence of the sphere.

Garamond found that trying to comprehend its size produced an almost physical pain between his temples. The object was big enough by astronomical standards, so large that with Sol positioned at its centre the Earth’s orbit would be within the shell, assuming that the outer surface was a shell. It was so huge that, from distances which would have reduced Sol to nothing more than a bright star, it was clearly visible to the unaided eye as a disc of blackness against the star clouds of the galactic lens. Garamond watched it grow and grow in his screens until it filled the entire field of view with its dark, inconceivable bulk — and yet it was still more than 150,000,000 kilometres away.

Something within him began to cringe from it. In the early stages of the approach he had nursed the idea that, because of the smoothness of its surface, the sphere had to be an artifact. The notion faded when exposed to the mind-punishing reality of the sphere’s magnitude, because there was no way to visualize engineering on that scale, to conceive of a technology so far beyond anything mankind could dream of achieving. Then, in the final stages of the approach, the Bissendorf’s sensors became aware of a planet orbiting outside the sphere.

There was no optical evidence of the planet’s existence, but a study of its gravitic emissions showed that it was of approximately the same diameter and mass as Earth, and that its almost-circular orbit lay some 80,000,000 kilometres outside the sphere’s surface. Although the discovery of the planet was of value in itself, the real importance lay in what could now be deduced about the nature of the sphere.

Chief Astronomer Yamoto sent Garamond a report which stated, unequivocally, that it was a thin shell enclosing an otherwise normal sun.

By the time the ship had matched velocities with the hidden star and slipped into an equatorial parking orbit, it was just over two thousand kilometres from the surface of the dark sphere. The range was inconvenient for the rocket-propelled buggy which would carry the exploration party, but the Bissendorf had never been intended for close manoeuvring, and Garamond decided against jockeying in closer with the rarely-used ion tubes. He sat in the central control area and watched the stereo image of the EVA group as they prepared themselves in the muster station. Garamond knew all the men and women of his crew by sight if not by name, but there was one blond fresh-complexioned youngster he was having trouble identifying. He pointed at the screen.

“Cliff, is that one of the shuttle crew we shanghaied?”

“That’s right. Joe Braunek. He fitted in well,” Napier said. “I think you did him a favour.”

“Did Tayman select him for this mission?” “He volunteered. Tayman referred it back to me and I interviewed Braunek in person.” Napier broke off to contemplate a memory which appeared to amuse him.