Kallik retreated a couple of steps. So it would swallow a power canister easily, and perhaps a Hymenopt with no more difficulty. But was the canceled field zone deep enough to provide true access to the interior? Or did it come to a solid bottom, a few meters down?

Kallik knew that she would not find answers by standing and thinking about it.

She went back to the ship and procured another length of cable, securing it first to a brace on the Have-It-All’s main hull and then cinching it around her own midriff. If someone came along and decided to fly the Have-It-All off on an interplanetary mission while Kallik was down inside Glister, she would be in deep trouble.

But she was in deep trouble anyway.

She moved to the edge of the zone of change. For a few seconds she paused there, hesitating. There was no guarantee that what she was doing would help Darya Lang and Hans Rebka — still less that it was the best way to help them. If there was a better solution, it was her duty to find it.

As she stood thinking there was a whoosh! of disturbed air not far overhead. It was a Phage, hurtling by no more than fifty meters from the surface. The dark maw was closed, but it could open in a few seconds.

Kallik whistled an invocation to Ressess-tress, the leading non-deity of the Hymenopts’ official atheism. She blinked all her eyes, stepped forward, and dropped through into the impalpable surface of Glister.

The Incomparable — incomparably rattly, rusty, cumbersome, and smelly — was approaching Gargantua. Birdie Kelly and Julius Graves focused their attention on the satellites and waited for a detailed view of Glister itself, while E. C. Tally stared steadily at a display of the giant planet. He had been sitting silently for fifteen hours, since the moment when the Incomparable’s sensors had provided their first good look at Gargantua.

That was fine with Birdie Kelly. Tally’s designers had recognized that the embodied computer’s body would need rest, but apparently his inorganic brain functioned continuously. Over the past three days, Birdie had been wakened from sound sleep a dozen times with a touch and a polite “May I speak?”

Eventually Birdie had lost it. “Damn it, Tally. No more questions. Why don’t you go and ask Graves something for a change? Julius and Steven between ’em know ten times as much as I do.”

“No, Commissioner Kelly, that is not true.” E. C. Tally shook his head, practicing the accepted human gesture for dissent and the conventional human pause before offering a reply. “They know much more than ten times as much as you do. Perhaps one hundred times? Let me think about that.”

The first sight of Gargantua had kept him quiet for a while. But now he was perking up and coming out of his reverie over by the display screens. To Birdie’s relief, though, he was turning to Julius Graves.

“If I may speak: with respect to the communications that we have received from Darya Lang and from Kallik. Professor Lang suggests that Glister is a Builder artifact, and Kallik agrees. Does any other evidence suggest the presence of Builder activity in the vicinity of Gargantua?”

“No. The nearest artifact to Gargantua is the Umbilical, connecting Quake and Opal.” The voice was Steven Graves’s. “And it is the only one reported in the Mandel stellar system.”

“Thank you. That is what my own data banks show, but I wondered if there might be inadequacies, as there have been in other areas.” Tally reached out and tapped the screen, where Gargantua filled the screen. “Would you please examine this and offer your opinion?”

His index finger was squarely on an orange-and-umber spot below Gargantua’s equator.

“The bright oval?” Graves asked. He looked for only a moment, then turned his attention to the other screen, where the sensors were set for analysis of a volume of space surrounding Glister. “I’m sorry. I have no information about that.”

But to his own great amazement, Birdie did. He finally knew something that Graves did not! “It’s called the Eye of Gargantua,” he burst out. “It’s a great big whirlpool of gases, a permanent hurricane about forty thousand kilometers across.” He pointed to the screen. “You can even see the vortices on the image, trailing away from it on both sides.”

“I can see them. Do you know for how long the Eye of Gargantua has existed?”

“Not really. But it’s been around for as long as the Dobelle system has been colonized. Thousands of years. When people came out here exploring for minerals, ages ago, the survey teams all took pictures of it. Every kids’ book talks about it and has a drawing of it. It’s a famous bit of the stellar system, one of the ‘natural wonders’ you learn about in school.”

“You are speaking metaphorically. I learned nothing in school, for I did not attend it.” E. C. Tally frowned. He had been experimenting with that expression as a way of indicating a paradox or dichotomy of choice, and he felt the look had reached a satisfactory level of performance. “But knowledge is not the issue. The Eye of Gargantua should not be described to children as one of the natural wonders of the stellar system. For a good reason: it is not one.”

“Not one what?” Birdie cursed himself. He should have known better than to have jumped into a conversation with Tally.

“The Eye of Gargantua is not a natural wonder of the stellar system. Because it is not natural.”

“Then what the blazes is it?”

“I do not know.” Tally attempted another human gesture, a shrug of the shoulders. “But I know what it is not. I have been calculating continuously for the past fifteen hours, with all plausible boundary conditions. The system that we see is not a stable solution of the time-dependent, three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation for gaseous motion. It should have dissipated itself, in weeks or months. In order for the Eye of Gargantua to exist, some large additional source of atmospheric circulation must be present right there.” He touched the screen. “At the center of the eye, where you can see the vortex—”

“Phages!” Julius Graves broke in excitedly. “They’re there all right. We’re getting an image of fragments around Glister, but it’s not like the one that Rebka and Lang sent back from their first sighting. The cloud around it extends all the way down to the surface. If those are all Phages…”

“Can we fly down through them, as did Captain Rebka and Professor Lang?” Tally addressed Birdie Kelly, as the most experienced pilot. “They reached the surface safely.”

“Fly down there — in this scumbucket?” Birdie glared around at the controls and fittings of the ore freighter. “We sure as hell can’t. Take a look at us. The drive don’t work at more than half power, there’s no weapons to pop Phages with, and we’re about as mobile as a Dowser. If those are all Phages down there, and they’re half as nippy as Captain Rebka says, we’ve got problems. Maybe if they get a good sniff of this ship before they start chewing, we’ll have a chance. I know Phages are supposed to eat anything, but there have to be limits.”

“A sniff—”

“I was joking, E.C. What I mean is, we’d better stay well out of the way.”

“But we don’t have to rely on the Incomparable to get us there,” Julius Graves said. “We can use the Summer Dreamboat. It took the others safely past the Phages, and Professor Lang said in her last message that she left it on remote control. We can call it up to us, and fly it down.”

“But what about Rebka and Lang and Kallik?” Birdie did not like the assumption that they were all going down to Glister, danger or no danger. “They’ll need a ship if they want to get out of there in a hurry.”

“They’ll have one — the Have-It-All. It’s still there if they need it. And we can surely borrow the Dreamboat for a few hours. We’ll have it back to them before they even know it’s gone. But it will take a while for the Dreamboat to get here. We ought to give the command at once. So if you will please proceed, Commissioner…”