Cliff wrestled with the images. “Let’s see the earlier pictures, from the last watch.”

Automatically, the ship kept records of the local sky. Its software was spectrally sophisticated and framed its own, limited hypotheses about the class and type of every luminous object it saw. They checked the records. The muted minds that murmured among themselves, struggling to understand the bowl, had spun endlessly in parameter-space confusions.

In the infrared, there was a glow where the “bottom” of the bowl would be. None of the instruments showed any image of the bowl during the years while the ship was approaching from behind. He thumbed through uninteresting pictures. The bowl blotted out a small dot on the sky, but nobody had noticed such a minor thing from light-years away.

The bowl’s infrared radiation showed a temperature around 20 degrees centigrade. Room temperature.

“Ah, balmy,” Abduss said. Across that vast curve, tropical conditions prevailed. The back face was cool and appeared stony. But the warmed side was at 20 degrees C. The star was less luminous than Sol—but, of course, the bowl was in continuous sunlight, so it would get pretty warm. No night.

Cliff had a mind’s eye picture of the bowl as a colossal construction, even though his common sense was screaming. When something appeared impossible, it seemed best to simply study it until understanding emerged. And wait for the captain to wake up, yes.

The first shock came from simple geometry. Mayra gave him distances and angles and he quickly found that the area of the inward-facing cap was two hundred million times that of Earth. Hovering over its star, the rim of the bowl would provide a vast, livable surface. (The biologist would wait for the captain’s take, but … Air. Water. Stores to replenish a failing ship. The Wickramsinghs nodded and smiled when he spoke of this.…)

On that area, peering through the small hole they could see, Abduss picked up reflecting optical emission … and found the spectral signatures of water. Then, with a bit more effort to see through the rippling plasma that shrouded SunSeeker, he found oxygen.

So it was an immense area designed for living … by what?

Cliff checked their distance from the bowl: 320 AU—about a hundredth of a light-year. So close! And coming up fast.

But they were still looking at the back of the cap, in the dark. He looked at the waiting faces of the Wickramsinghs and thought. They were left with some brute astronomical facts—velocities, times, food supplies.…

At their review meeting, the Wickramsinghs eyed him expectantly.

“It’s beyond me,” he said—and watched their faces, despite their best efforts, show disappointment.

“Surely we can learn more?” Mayra suggested hesitantly.

“Not at this distance,” Abduss said. “And I doubt the captain will authorize a trajectory change to get closer.”

Cliff looked at them and thought unkind thoughts. Five crews didn’t wake the captain, because there wasn’t an answer. They had been trained to keep the ship running. Schooled to stay steady. But here was something the Earthside planners had never imagined.

“I think we have two problems,” Cliff said with what he hoped was a diplomatic tone. “Supplies, yes. And this strange … object. Too much here for us to deal with.”

Abduss said carefully, “We had thought somewhat the same.”

“Look,” Mayra said directly, “it’s nearly time to take the captain up to his conscious stage—”

“I want Beth Marble brought up, too.”

Both of them blinked. “But she is—”

“Capable, right.” He could see a lot of trouble coming, and he didn’t want to be alone. Who did?

“But there is no protocol requiring—”

Cliff held up his hand and looked across the table steadily, letting them think about it. “Let’s just do it.”

“She is … not your wife.”

“No, but she has ship skills and can pilot.”

“Not until we can ask the captain,” Abduss said. His face was firm.

TWO

They told the captain when he came out of cold sleep, bleary-eyed, stiff, still lying on a slab—and then his eyes began blinking with startling speed, alert.

Abduss said, “You aren’t going to believe this.”

Captain Redwing’s skeptical grin crinkled the leathery skin around his eyes as he said, “Try me.”

So they told him, while they gingerly massaged his stiff, cold muscles and applied the necessary chemistries. Cliff hung back and bided his time while the Wickramsinghs took Redwing through the whole story.

Redwing sat up and shook his black mane, his bronzed skin blue-veined at the wrists, and said, “You’re sure?”

So they told him some more. Showed the screens, the time log, and finally the close-ups of the back of the bowl. The captain stared at the bowl image, and Cliff could see him mentally put it aside to concentrate on the supplies issue.

“The drive not running to specs. Five crew changes! You couldn’t do anything?” He jabbed a finger at the Wickramsinghs.

“We did not know what to do,” Mayra said reasonably. “There were—”

“We’ve run this way for—what?—decades!”

Abduss bristled in her defense, face stiff. “This was not in the protocols.”

“Protocols be damned. I—”

“The leptonic drive is one issue, Captain,” Cliff said, “and this thing ahead is quite another—”

“You’re Science.” Redwing cut him off with a chopping hand signal. “This is crew.”

Cliff sat back and nursed his coffee and remembered all the rumors before launch. How Redwing was from one of the families that had made a bundle out of the Indian casinos. How he’d breezed through MIT with great grades and a wake of surly enemies. Made his rep in the Mars exploration and exploitation. Been a real sonofabitch, sure, but he had gotten things goddamn well done. Maybe not the worst recommendation, considering. Cliff was going to have to follow orders.

“We cannot go on like this,” Mayra said, ever the diplomat. “Our external diagnostics are working well, so we are sure there is not some property of the interstellar gas that is the root of our drive problem. We rely on the microwave view to diagnose the ramscoop fields—”

“We’ll review it all,” Redwing said crisply. He bit his lip. “And the earlier crews—Jacobs, Chen, Ambertson, Abar, Kalaish—all top people…”

*   *   *

Redwing went through an extensive engineering review with them. Systems, flows, balances, malfunction indices. After hours of work, he was just as stumped as the ship diagnostic systems, which were better engineers than any of them. Nothing seemed wrong, but the ship could do no better. Seeker had performed perfectly in the first few decades, achieving their terminal velocity when the pressure of incoming matter on its ram fields equaled the thrust it got out of hydrogen fusion. They had been losing velocity through tens of light-years—slightly at first, then more.

Crews had tested the obvious explanations. Maybe the interstellar gas was getting too thin, so they weren’t taking in enough hydrogen to drive the fusion zone at max. That idea didn’t pencil out in the detailed numbers. The fusion drive was a souped-up version of magnetic cylinders, each a rotating torus that contained fusing plasma. Boron–proton reactions were the burning meat and potatoes, the protons shoveled in fresh from the ramscoop. The rotating magnetic equilibria held fusing plasma in their bottles, releasing the alpha particles into the nozzle that drove them forward. It had worked steadily now for centuries. It looked fine.

The next crew thought there was too much dust ahead, so perhaps the fusion burn was tamped down. They found an ingenious way to pluck dust samples from their bow shock and measure it carefully. Nothing wrong there, either.

There were more ideas and trials, and now it was getting serious. They had started with plenty of spare supplies, but now it wasn’t going to be enough.