My companions share my concern, although they are distracted by life and death issues. I'm scared too. But I'd still like to get a look at the Football. What is that thing? Incidentally, I should record here that I'm glad we have Hutchins along. She is something of a jerk. But I know she'll pull us out of this. If it can be done.
— Margaret Tufu's Journals, dated March 29, 2203
Published posthumously by
Hartley & Co., London (2219)
(Edited and annotated by Janet Allegri)
19
On board NCA Winckelmann. Tuesday, March 29; 1218 hours
"We're going to have to come up with something else."
Ship's temperature had dropped to -30 °C. Electronics systems had begun to fail. Water lines had long since frozen. Hutch, concerned that a hatch somewhere might freeze and cut them off from other parts of the ship, left everything open.
Janet found an auto-kitchen on C deck and carried it back to Alpha. It was capable of making sandwiches, coffee, and snacks. They also commandeered a refrigerator.
The day after the bad news had come from Nok, Wink's lights went out. Hutch thought she could restore them, but saw no point in making the effort. So they huddled in their warm, illuminated cocoon, in the belly of the dark ship.
And they worried about the air supply. They were still breathing from the ship's tanks, and tapping the snip's power. But the loss of the lights had shown them the future. Any time now, the voltage that drove the recyclers would fail, or the pumps would freeze, or any other of a dozen misfortunes would shut down the oxygen supply. Then they would have to switch to the onboard tanks, and from that time they would have one week left. Plus roughly twenty-four hours with the Flickinger belts. The Ashley Tee was due, at best, in thirteen days. Which meant that if the ship's air supply failed any time within the next five days, they would not make it.
A green light glowed on her status board, confirming the flow of air from the Wink into the shuttle. If it stopped, when it stopped, the lamp would blink off and an alarm would sound.
She looked out into the darkness. Illumination from the shuttle windows etched the decks. "Not much fun, is it?" asked George, breaking a long silence.
She shook her head. "Not much."
"We'll be okay." He squeezed her shoulder. "It's always hard when you can't do anything except sit and wait."
Several minutes later, the remaining convector quietly died.
The Football was no longer easy to see at zero mag. It was a small patch of night with indefinite boundaries, an empty place among the stars. A well in a city of light. Its radio pulse played across a monitor that Maggie had set up. Carson sat watching it intently. A second screen displayed telemetry. He was absentmindedly scooping cereal out of a bowl in his lap. Beside him, Maggie dozed.
Hutch and George played chess, the board balanced on a water container. Janet was dividing her attention between a book and the game. (She would play the winner.) George munched a chocolate cookie. They had adjusted reasonably well to the lack of amenities. The shuttle had almost come to feel like home.
Exercise was of course feasible only outside in the bay. They could still walk through the ship protected by the Flickinger energy fields, but that would stop when they lost the external air hookup, because it would then become impossible to refill the breathers without draining the shuttle's supply.
They didn't talk much about the dangers of the situation. But in the pointedly irrelevant conversations that had become the order of the day, Hutch noted a tendency to lower the voice and speak in hushed tones, the way one does in church. The fiction that escape was only a matter of time was maintained.
And they continued to speculate about the Football. They had tracked the signal source to the center of the object.
"It has to be an antenna," said George, stabbing the air with a rook. "And a standard radio transmission would have to be intended for someone in this system." He set the piece down to support the queen's bishop pawn, which was under pressure. It was early yet, but the game was turning against him already. As usual. "I wonder whether anyone's listening?"
"Someone must be," said Janet. "Somebody would have to come out here once in a while to do the maintenance."
"Maybe it doesn't need maintenance," said Hutch. She sailed into a line of pawns with a black bishop. Sacrifice. George could not see the point. "Don't underestimate an unknown technology," she continued.
Carson picked up the cereal bowl and tilted it so that it lay at the same angle as the Football. "Hutch," he said. "Was there a blip of any kind when we went through the object? Did it seem to notice we were there?"
"Don't know. I wasn't recording the signal. I couldn't see any reason to at the time."
Janet grinned politely at George, and shook her head. "Resign," she said.
"Why is it so big?" asked Hutch.
"Maybe it's more than a relay," George suggested.
"What else could it be?"
"A telescope, maybe. Something like the Tindle. But bigger."
"A lot bigger," said Carson. "With a telescope that size, you could see someone strike a match across the Void."
"Your move," said Hutch, smiling.
George pushed back from the board, shrugged, and pushed over his king.
"If it were a telescope," said Janet, "it would have to be solid, right? We were doing, what? Fifty thousand klicks? We'd have disintegrated."
"Depends," said Carson, "on how it's made."
Janet set up the pieces, and turned the board to give Hutch black. "Something else," she said. "Assume you had a bowl that big. How would you turn it?"
"What?"
"If it's a telescope, how would you turn it? I would think that any attempt to move it would wreck it."
"Maybe you don't turn it," said George. "Maybe it was preset to observe something that doesn't move much. Very little apparent motion."
"I can't imagine how the thing would hold together." The voice was Maggie's.
"I thought you were asleep." Carson's smile was almost paternal. "// it's a telescope, and if it's permanently aimed, what do vou suooose it's looking at?" He cleared his screen.
and directed the question to the computer.
Maggie got up and stretched.
Janet, who was a decent match for Hutch, opened as she always did, with c4, the English Game. Hutch wondered how it happened that a woman who was so aggressive, so careless of her own safety, would become enamored of an opening that was deliberate, methodical, and cautious.
"Nothing," said Carson. "There's nothing at all in its line of sight."
"It's been there a long time," said Maggie. "Back it up to about 10,000 B.C. and take a look."
George picked up Janet's book. It was a historical novel, set immediately after the collapse of the U.S. He paged through.
Carson got a result, and smiled. "The Lesser Magellanic Cloud. That's interesting."
"Why?" asked George.
"Closest extragalactic object," said Hutch.
"Hard to believe," said Janet, "that anyone would build that kind of monster to look at one astronomical target. It seems like overkill."
George frowned. "I thought the nearest galaxy was Andromeda."
"Andromeda's the nearest big one," said Hutch. "It's two million light-years out. But the Magellanic Clouds—there are two of them—are only about a tenth as far."
Maggie rubbed her eyes. "I'm more interested in what's at this end. You said there's an oxygen world in the biozone. What does it look like?"
"We don't have much detail," said Hutch. "The sensors are pretty badly skewed. Temperatures are earthlike. There are water oceans. It's got life. But it's putting out no ECM. And that's about all we know for certain."