“Well?”

“He says he’s entitled to log the flying time because you wrecked his shuttle and dumped it near Saturn.”

Garamond nodded his approval. “What about the other shuttle pilot? The one with the blue chin.”

“Shrapnel? Ah… he didn’t fit in so well. In fact, he’s pretty resentful. He wouldn’t sign on the crew and I’ve had to keep him under surveillance.”

“Oh? I seem to remember sending him an apology.”

“You did. He’s still resentful.”

“I wonder why?”

Napier gave a dry cough. “He wasn’t planning to be separated from his wife for this length of time.”

“I’m a self-centred bastard — is that it, Cliff?”

“Nothing like it.”

“Don’t give me that — I recognize that Chopin cough you get every time I go off the rails.” Garamond visualized the shuttle pilot, tried to imagine the man in the context of a family like his own, but found the exercise strangely difficult. “Shrapnel knows he’ll only be away for a year. Why doesn’t he try to make the best of it?”

Napier coughed once more. “The EVA group are about ready to go.”

“Your TB is back again, Cliff. What did I say that time?” Garamond stared hard at his next-in-command.

Napier took a deep breath, altering the slopes of his massive chest and shoulders. “You don’t like Shrapnel, and he doesn’t like you, and that amuses me — because you’re both the same type. If you were in his shoes you’d be broody and resentful and looking for an opportunity to twist things back the way you wanted them. He even looks a bit like you, yet you sit there telling everybody he’s weird.”

Garamond gave a smile he did not feel. Napier and he had long ago discarded all remnants of formal relationship, and he felt no resentment at the other man’s words, but he found them disturbing. They had implications he did not want to examine. He selected the EVA group’s intercom frequency and listened to the clamorous, overlapping voices of the men as the buggy was sealed and the dock evacuation procedure began. They were complaining in a good-natured way about the discomfort of the space-suits which they normally donned only twice a year in practice drills, or about the difficulty of carrying instruments and tool kits in gloved hands, but Garamond knew they were genuinely excited. Life on board an S.E.A. vessel consisted of routine outward journeys, brief pauses while it was established by long range instruments that the target suns had no planets or no usable planets, and equally dull returns to base. This was the first occasion in the Bissendorf’s entire span of service on which it had been necessary for men to leave its protective hull and venture into alien space with the object of making physical contact with something outside humanity’s previous experience. It was a big moment for the little exploratory team and Garamond found himself wishing he could take part. He watched as the outer doors of the dock slid aside to reveal a blackness which was unrelieved by stars. At a distance of two thousand kilometres the sphere not only filled one half of the sky, it was one half of the sky. The observed universe was cut into two hemispheres — one of them glowing with starclouds, the other filled with light-absorbent darkness. There was no sensation of being close to a huge object, rather one of being poised above infinite deeps.

The restraining rings opened and allowed the white-painted buggy to jet out clear of the mother ship. Its boxy, angular outline shrank to invisibility in a few seconds, but its interior and marker lights remained in view for quite a long time as the craft moved ‘downwards’ from the Bissendorf. Garamond stayed at central control while the buggy descended, watching several screens at once as its cameras sent back different types of information. At a height of three hundred metres the buggy’s commander, Kraemer, switched on powerful searchlights and succeeded in creating a greyish patch of illumination on the sphere’s surface.

“Instruments show zero gravity at surface,” he reported.

Garamond cut in on the circuit. “Do you want to go on down?”

“Yes, sir. The surface looks metallic from here — I’d like to try a touchdown with magnetic clamps.”

“Go ahead.”

The indistinct greyness expanded on the screens until the clang of the buggy’s landing gear was heard. “It’s no use,” Kraemer said. “We just bounced off.”

“Are you going to let her float?”

“No, sir. I’m going to go in again and maintain some drive pressure. That should lock the buggy in place against the surface and give us a fixed point to work from.”

“Go ahead, Kraemer.” Garamond looked at Napier and nodded in satisfaction. The two men watched as the buggy was inched into contact with the surface and held there by the thrust of its tubes.

Kraemer’s voice was heard again. “Surface seems to have a reasonable index of friction — we aren’t slipping around. I think it’s safe to go out for samples.”

“Proceed.”

The buggy’s door slid open, spacesuited figures drifted out and formed a small swarm around the splayed-out landing gear. Bracing themselves against the tubular legs, the figures went to work on the vaguely seen surface of the sphere with drills, cutters and chemicals. At the end of thirty minutes, by which time the team operating the valency cutter could have sliced through a house-sized block of chrome steel, nobody had managed even to mark the surface. The result was in accordance with Garamond’s premonitions.

“This is a new one on me,” said Harmer, the chemist. “We can’t make a spectroscopic analysis because the stuff refuses to burn. At this stage I can’t even say for sure that it’s a metal. We’re just wasting our time down here.”

“Tell Kraemer to bring them up,” Garamond said to Napier. “Is there any point in firing the main ionizing gun against it?”

“None at all,” put in Denise Serra, the Chief Physicist. “If a valency cutter at a range of one centimetre achieved nothing there’s no point in hosing energy all over it from this distance.” Garamond nodded. “Okay. Let’s pool our ideas. We’ve acquired a little more information, although most of it is negative, and I’d like to have your thoughts on whether the sphere is a natural object or an artifact.”

“It’s an artifact,” Denise Serra said immediately, with characteristic firmness. “Its sphericity is perfect and the surface is smooth to limits of below one micron. Nature doesn’t operate that way — at least, not on the astronomical scale.” She glanced a challenge at Yamoto.

“I have to agree,” Yamoto said. “I’ve been avoiding the idea, but I can’t conceive of any natural mechanism which would produce that thing out there. However, that doesn’t mean I can see how it was constructed by intelligent beings. It’s just too much.” He shook his head dispiritedly. The haggardness of his face showed that he had been losing a lot of sleep.

O’Hagan, the Chief Science Officer, who was a stickler for protocol, cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. “Our difficulties arise from the fact that the Bissendorf is an exploration vessel and very little more. The correct procedure now would be to send a tachyon signal back to Earth and get a properly equipped expedition out here.” His severe grey gaze held steadily on Garamond’s face.

“That’s outside the scope of the present discussion,” Napier said.

Garamond shook his head. “No, it isn’t. Gentlemen, and lady, Mister O’Hagan has put into words something which must have been on all your minds since the beginning of this mission. It can’t have been difficult for you to work out for yourselves that I’m in trouble with Starflight House. In fact, it’s personal trouble with Elizabeth Lindstrom — and I think you all know what that means. I’m not going to give you any more details, simply because I don’t want you to be involved any more than you are at present.