This glorious apparition, Bowman knew, was a globular cluster. He was looking upon something that no human eye had ever seen, save as a smudge of light in the field of a telescope. He could not remember the distance to the nearest known cluster, but he was sure that there were none within a thousand light-years of the Solar System.
The pod continued its slow rotation, to disclose an even stranger sight – a huge red sun, many times larger than the Moon as seen from Earth. Bowman could look straight into its face without discomfort; judging by its color, it was no hotter than a glowing coal. Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow – incandescent Amazons, meandering for thousands of miles before they lost themselves in the deserts of this dying sun.
Dying? No – that was a wholly false impression, born of human experience and the emotions aroused by the hues of sunset, or the glow of fading embers. This was a star that had left behind the fiery extravagances of its youth, had raced through the violets and blues and greens of the spectrum in a few fleeting billions of years, and now had settled down to a peaceful maturity of unimaginable length. All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.
The pod had ceased to roll; the great red sun lay straight ahead. Though there was no sense of motion, Bowman knew that he was still gripped by whatever controlling force had brought him here from Saturn.
All the science and engineering skill of Earth seemed hopelessly primitive now, against the powers that were carrying him to some unimaginable fate.
He stared into the sky ahead, trying to pick out the goal toward which be was being taken – perhaps some planet circling this great sun. But there was nothing that showed any visible disk or exceptional brightness; if there were planets orbiting here he could not distinguish them from the stellar background.
Then he noticed that something strange was happening on the very edge of the sun's crimson disk. A white glow had appeared there, and was rapidly waxing in brilliance; he wondered if he was seeing one of those sudden eruptions, or flares, that trouble most stars from time to time.
The light became brighter and bluer; it began to spread along the edge of the sun, whose blood-red hues paled swiftly by comparison. It was almost, Bowman told himself, smiling at the absurdity of the thought, as if be were watching sunrise – on a sun.
And so indeed he was. Above the burning horizon lifted something no larger than a star, but so brilliant that the eye could not bear to look upon it. A mere point of blue-white radiance, like an electric arc, was moving at unbelievable speed across the face of the great sun. It must be very close to its giant companion; for immediately below it, drawn upward by its gravitational pull, was a column of flame thousands of miles high. It was as if a tidal wave of fire was marching forever along the equator of this star, in vain pursuit of the searing apparition in its sky.
That pinpoint of incandescence must be a White Dwarf – one of those strange, fierce little stars, no larger than the Earth, yet containing a million times its mass. Such ill-matched stellar couples were not uncommon; but Bowman had never dreamed that one day he would see such a pair with his own eyes.
The White Dwarf had transited almost half the disk of its companion – it must take only minutes to make a complete orbit – when Bowman was at last certain that he too was moving. Ahead of him, one of the stars was becoming rapidly brighter, and was beginning to drift against its background. It must be some small, close body – perhaps the world toward which he was traveling.
It was upon him with unexpected speed; and he saw that it was not a world at all.
A dully gleaming cobweb or latticework of metal, hundreds of miles in extent, grew out of nowhere until it filled the sky. Scattered across its continent-wide surface were structures that must have been as large as cities, but which appeared to be machines. Around many of these were assembled scores of smaller objects, ranged in neat rows and columns. Bowman had passed several such groups before he realized that they were fleets of spaceships; he was flying over a gigantic orbital parking lot.
Because there were no familiar objects by which he could judge the scale of the scene flashing by below, it was almost impossible to estimate the size of the vessels hanging there in space. But they were certainly enormous; some must have been miles in length. They were of many different designs – spheres, faceted crystals, slim pencils, ovoids, disks. This must be one of the meeting places for the commerce of the stars.
Or it had been – perhaps a million years ago. For nowhere could Bowman see any sign of activity; this sprawling spaceport was as dead as the Moon.
He knew it not only by the absence of all movement, but by such unmistakable signs as great gaps torn in the metal cobweb by the wasplike blunderings of asteroids that must have smashed through it, eons ago. This was no longer a parking lot: it was a cosmic junk heap.
He had missed its builders by ages, and with that realization Bowman felt a sudden sinking of his heart. Though he had not known what to expect, at least he had hoped to meet some intelligence from the stars.
Now, it seemed, he was too late. He had been caught in an ancient, automatic trap, set for some unknown purpose, and still operating when its makers had long since passed away. It had swept him across the galaxy, and dumped him (with how many others?) in this celestial Sargasso, doomed soon to die when his air was exhausted.
Well, it was unreasonable to expect more. Already he had seen wonders for which many men would have sacrificed their lives. He thought of his dead companions; he had no cause for complaint.
Then he saw that the derelict spaceport was still sliding past him with undiminished speed. He was sweeping over its outlying suburbs; its ragged edge went by, and no longer partially eclipsed the stars. In a few more minutes, it had fallen behind.
His fate did not lie here – but far ahead, in the huge, crimson sun toward which the space pod was now unmistakably falling.
43 – Inferno
Now there was only the red sun, filling the sky from side to side. He was so close that its surface was no longer frozen into immobility by sheer scale. There were luminous nodules moving to and fro, cyclones of ascending and descending gas, prominences slowly rocketing toward the heavens. Slowly? They must be rising at a million miles an hour for their movement to be visible to his eye.
He did not even attempt to grasp the scale of the inferno toward which he was descending. The immensities of Saturn and Jupiter bad defeated him, during Discovery's fly-by in that solar system now unknown gigamiles away. But everything he saw here was a hundred times larger still; he could do nothing but accept the images that were flooding into his mind, without attempting to interpret them.
As that sea of fire expanded beneath him, Bowman should have known fear – but, curiously enough, he now felt only a mild apprehension. It was not that his mind was benumbed with wonders; logic told him that he must surely be under the protection of some controlling and almost omnipotent intelligence. He was now so close to the red sun that he would have been burned up in a moment if its radiation had not been held at bay by some invisible screen. And during his voyage he had been subjected to accelerations that should have crushed him instantly – yet he had felt nothing. If so much trouble had been taken to preserve him, there was still cause for hope.