“They knew how to make human food?” Jordan asked. “Or did they feed the astronauts machine oil?”
Brandon frowned at his brother. “So, during the dinner, one of the robots gets up and says, ‘We’ve shown you the factory where we make more robots. How do you make more humans?’”
“Oh-oh,” said Elyse.
Brandon plowed on. “Well, the astronauts are embarrassed. They’re rocket jockeys, not scientists. So they try to explain, stammering a lot, how humans make more humans.”
“And?”
“And all the robots bust into uproarious laughter! The astronauts are stunned. They didn’t expect laughter.”
Brandon waited for a suspenseful moment, then went on, “One of the robots apologizes to the astronauts. ‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t be laughing. But you see, what you just described—that’s the way we make automobiles.’”
The table fell silent. All eyes turned to Aditi. Brandon’s expression morphed from expectant to troubled. Jordan seethed. Of all the insensitive oafs …
And then Aditi broke into laughter. Delighted, tinkling laughter, like wind chimes at a mountaintop monastery Jordan had once visited.
“You make automobiles in factories,” Aditi giggled, “the way the robots make robots.”
“It’s an old joke,” Brandon said weakly.
“But it’s still funny,” said Elyse. “A little.”
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” Brandon said to Aditi.
“No, no,” she replied. “I’m not offended.”
Jordan thought that if she was hurt by Brandon’s joke, she was being very gracious about it. More gracious than I’d be.
Hollow Progress
The days rolled by. Brandon shuttled back and forth from the city to the base camp. Elyse spent most of her time at the astronomical observatory. Thornberry and Meek seemed quite contented with what they were learning. Delighted, even.
“The way they can manipulate force fields,” Thornberry enthused one morning, as Jordan visited the laboratory where he spent most of his time, “it’s incredible, it is. Simply incredible.”
Half a dozen young physicists and engineers were in the lab, looking happy that the human roboticist was so impressed with their work.
Pointing to the disassembled components of an energy shield generator scattered across a lab table, Thornberry said, “They tap into dark energy as easily as you or I plug in an electrical appliance, they do.”
“What you call dark energy,” said one of the young men, “is merely another fundamental force, like the strong nuclear force.”
Thornberry nodded impatiently. “Yes, so it is. But the energy shield you create with it absorbs not only charged particles, but neutral electromagnetic energy, as well. Hit it with a burst of gamma rays powerful enough to fry a rhinoceros and it merely soaks ’em up. It actually uses the incoming radiation to power itself!”
“It’s pretty fundamental,” said the physicist.
“To you it’s fundamental,” Thornberry said. “To me, it’s a bit of black magic.”
Jordan felt impressed, although he didn’t fully understand the principles Thornberry was talking about.
Even Meek seemed pleased with what he was learning. His suspicions were melting away—slowly—in the light of newfound knowledge.
“The things they can do with biology,” he said over lunch one afternoon. “Not only do they manipulate DNA to produce new species, they can control genetic expression and suppress aging!”
Longyear, de Falla, Yamaguchi, and Verishkova visited the city in turn, each of them brimming with enthusiasm about what they were learning. Hazzard and the others aboard Gaia came down from time to time and got swept up in the new knowledge Adri’s people were sharing so freely.
Jordan was pleased, very pleased. Especially since he and Aditi were living together now. He spent his days checking with the others, strictly informally, and talking with Adri about how well everyone was getting along. He spent his nights with Aditi.
“It’s uncanny,” Longyear told Jordan one afternoon. “Parallel evolution was just a far-out concept that nobody really expected to be real, but here’s a whole planet full of parallel species.”
The biologist’s earlier suspicions seemed to be washed away by the new discoveries he was making.
Only de Falla remained puzzled. “Either my basic geology program is screwed up, or this planet doesn’t make sense.”
He was having dinner with Jordan, Brandon, Elyse, and Aditi, in the city’s main dining hall. The spacious, high-ceilinged room was filled with whistling conversations and clattering dinnerware. Jordan heard laughter drifting from several tables. He saw Thornberry and Verishkova sitting at a long table with a dozen alien scientists. And Meek sitting amiably with Adri and a pair of other aliens. Meek! Jordan shook his head in wonder.
“What’s wrong with your program?” Brandon asked the geologist.
De Falla’s round, beard-trimmed face looked troubled. “It’s giving me ridiculous results.”
Brandon prompted, “Such as?”
“Well, you know that Adri’s people have been feeding me all the geological data I’ve asked for. And Hazzard’s been dropping seismological probes all across the planet.”
Jordan nodded.
“When I feed the data to the computer for a geological profile I get impossible results,” de Falla complained.
“What do you mean?” Elyse asked.
Looking almost embarrassed, de Falla said, “The model of the planet’s interior that the program draws up shows that this planet is hollow.”
Jordan blurted, “Hollow?”
De Falla nodded morosely. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“How could a planet be hollow?” Jordan asked.
Brandon laughed. “Maybe your computer was programmed by one of the Hollow Earth kooks back home.”
“It’s not funny,” said de Falla. “I’ve gone over the damned program six ways from Sunday and I can’t find the glitch in it.”
“The planet can’t be hollow,” Jordan said. But he turned to his brother and added, “Could it?”
“No way,” said Brandon, wagging his head. “If it were hollow it wouldn’t have the mass to produce the gravity we experience.”
“But the computer keeps saying it’s hollow,” de Falla insisted.
“Your program’s got to be wrong,” said Brandon. “Why don’t you get Thornberry to take a look at it?”
“I already have. He and Tanya went over everything. They couldn’t find the glitch either.”
Brandon made a sour face. “Well, something’s screwed up someplace. Hollow planets don’t exist.”
“Trouble is,” de Falla went on, “the computer’s model is so damned specific. It shows a shell a couple of hundred kilometers thick, and inside it—nothing. It’s hollow.”
“Can’t be,” said Brandon.
“I know,” de Falla agreed. “But there it is.”
Jordan said, “What can you do about it?”
De Falla broke into a sheepish grin. “What would any geologist do in a situation like this? Dig.”
“Dig?”
“Get more evidence. Dig some deep cores and sample what they bring up.”
“That sounds difficult,” said Jordan.
With a shrug, de Falla replied, “It beats staring at a computer screen and wondering why the program’s gone crazy.”
“How many cores?” Jordan asked. “Where?”
“I’ve mapped out six locations, spread around the planet. I can show you, in my lab.”
Brandon said, “Let’s adjourn to your lab, then.”
Field Trip