"Do it," Krake agreed. And the screen changed. The tiny distant wisps of galaxies reappeared. The red disk was gone. Nothing was left of it at all, except a sort of shadow that blotted out some of those distant cloudy spirals.
"There's still no visible light at all," Marco reported with satisfaction. "This star radiates only in the infrared; that's why we're not seeing anything."
"That is not a star," rapped Chief Thunderbird positively.
Krake looked at him curiously. The Turtle was drumming his claws apprehensively across his belly, and Lidun was twitching nervously beside him. "Do you know something we don't?" Krake asked the Turtles.
"One knows only that that cannot be a star," said Chief Thunderbird, and Litlun chimed in:
"Such things no longer exist."
"What do you mean, 'no longer'? And what is it, if not a star?"
But it was Marco Ramos who answered. "Francis, I think it's an artifact."
There was a squawk from the Turdes, and Daisy Fay put in, suddenly excited: "Hey, yes! I know what you mean. There was something about that on one of those old chips!"
"That's right, Daisy Fay," Marco said, the face on the belly screen nodding eagerly. "It was just a quick mention but I remember it, because it was pretty nearly the only thing those professors ever said that I thought I really understood. What one of them said was that a really high-tech civilization would want to have a lot of energy to keep itself going, and the best way for them to get it would be to capture all the energy from a star!"
"Capture it how?" Krake demanded.
"By building a kind of wall around the star!" Marco cried. "Closing it in, not letting one bit of its energy escape to be wasted in space. The only thing that would get through the wall would be the low-level radiation left over—just heat!— after they'd used the high-level stuff for—well, for whatever they wanted to do with it."
Krake stared up at that ominous black shadow. "You mean that thing's a hollow shell? With a star inside it?"
Marco shrugged. "What else could it be?" he asked.
"And there are all those others just like this one," Daisy Fay put in eagerly. "Remember how many of them we saw on the screens? Millions of them, Captain, maybe billions! A whole galaxy—or a billion galaxies!—that have been inhabited, and tamed, and every star in every one of them turned into a living machine for—for someone, Captain."
Krake shook his head, pointing to the wisps outside the obscuring disk. "But what about those other galaxies?"
Marco waved a tentacle, like a shrug. "I don't know that, Captain. Maybe they haven't been colonized yet—I'd say that's unlikely, though. Maybe they're just so far away that the light from them just shows the way they were before these— people—got around to colonizing them."
Sue-ling was beginning to feel a vertigo worse than the shift into wave-drive. "Excuse me, Marco," she began. "Does that mean—are you talking about a whole universe inhabited by a single highly advanced civilization?"
"Why not?" Marco demanded, his tentacles fluttering in excitement. "Oh, Captain! We've discovered something won-Unfitly
And even Sue-ling began to share the rising excitement— almost as though everyone were beginning to have hope again. The Turtles croaked at each other for a few moments, then Chief Thunderbird engaged his transposer. "One should exercise great caution in dealing with advanced beings," he said, and Sue-ling noticed wonderingly that the Turde seemed nervous.
"But what if they could help us get home?" Moon put in. "Maybe even help you with—with your problem."
More jabber between them. Then the big Turtle said, "One insists, however, on caution."
"All we want to do is see if we can talk to them," Krake said reassuringly—"if, that is, they exist at all."
"Right!" cried Marco Ramos, and others echoed it—until Kiri Quintero's voice rose above the rest.
"Hold it," he said sharply. "There's one more thing I want to talk to the Turtles about first."
Krake stopped on the point of giving the order to try communicating. This from Kiri) Who never raised his voice, who almost never spoke at all? There was a puzzled silence from everyone, until Daisy Fay broke it. "What's that, Kiri?"
Kiri turned to glare up at Chief Thunderbird. "My brother wanted to ask you something before his accident. Since he can't do it, it's up to me. What I want to know—before we go any farther—is, did you mean what you said?"
Chief Thunderbird paused, eyestalks firmly on Kiri. "One always means what one has spoken," he said stiffly. "What particular statement do you mean?"
"You said," Kiri persisted, "that you Turtles were wrong in discouraging Earth science. Was that just talk, or will you do something about it? If we get out of this, will you do better?"
The great Turtle hesitated, then turned to Litlun. There was a raucous, unintelligible squawking between them, with much waving of limbs, until Chief Thunderbird turned on his transposer again.
"Such questions are not for one Brother to decide. Such decisions belong to the entire Brotherhood," he said.
Litlun echoed him. "This is true. All must agree."
"But," said Chief Thunderbird, "if we were to succeed at last and find a new Mother—"
They looked at each other speculatively. "Then," said Lidun, "one of us might well become the new consort, I think. That would make a difference, for the Mother's consort always has much to say."
"But only one of us," said Chief Thunderbird, both eye-stalks fixed on Litlun.
Kiri grinned at them. "Good enough," he said. "Or good enough for now. All right. Go ahead, Captain Krake."
Krake opened his mouth to ask a question, then shrugged. "All right," he said. "We're all agreed, then? We have to find some way of contacting these people—if there are any—in these star shells?"
"I don't think that will be necessary," said Marco Ramos.
Krake scowled at this new voice in the discussion. "Why not?"
Marco shrugged. "If they're as high-tech as they have to be, they'll have some kind of instruments keeping tabs on the space around them, won't they? And they are not likely to miss the phase shift of a ship coming out of wave-drive. No," he said comfortably, "I think we've already advertised our presence."
"Then why haven't they responded?"
Marco spread his hands. "Time, Francis," he said. "Time for the signal to reach them. After all, we're probably a couple of hundred million kilometers from that object—how long is that in light-travel time? Maybe ten minutes? So it would take them at least that long to discover us—about as long," he finished, grinning sunnily around at them, "as we've been here."
Krake reined himself in. "Then," he said, managing to be civil, "you think we should just sit here and wait for them to come to us?"
Marco didn't answer. He only shrugged again, and was silent.
There was a sudden bellow from the Taur. He clutched his horns, suddenly burning bright, rocking the great head back and forth as though in agony. Moon cried, "Thrayl's hearing something! Something bad\n
And on the screen there was a sudden bright eruption of green light—another—then another, and more. All at once there were a dozen of them suddenly winking out at the periphery of the great dark shell.
"I think they've found us," Daisy Fay remarked composedly. "Isn't that the signal of a wave-drive ship?"
And then there was a scream of mortal terror from Chief Thunderbird. "One has made a terrible error!" he squawked, his tone hysterical. Then he snatched the transposer off and dived toward the control board, shoving Marco violendy away, as his stubby claws poked at the keys.
On the screen, the green flares developed red circles around them that pulsed angrily, like a warning sign. And both Turdes at once were screeching in horror. "Use your damned transposers!" roared Krake, but even before they did Sue-ling had recognized one word, repeated over and over again by the frantic Turdes: