So Grove began to send out scouting patrols, particularly using his sowars, his Indian cavalry troopers, who seemed able to cover impressive distances quickly. They reached Peshawar, where the local army cantonment and military command center should have been foundbut Peshawar was gone. There was no evidence of destruction, not even of the hideous erasing of a nuclear blast that Bisesa had trained the British to recognize. There was only bare rock, a river bank, scrubby vegetation and the spoor of creatures that might have been lions: it was as if Peshawar had never existed at all. It was a similar story, the sowar scouts reported, when they went out to find Clavius, Bisesas UN encampment. Not a trace, not even of destruction.
So Grove determined to explore further: down the valley of the Indus, deep into Indiaand to the north.
Meanwhile Casey, still pretty much immobilized, likewise took on the challenge of making contact with the rest of the world. With the help of a couple of privates from a signal corps assigned by Grove, he scavenged comms gear from the fallen Bird, and improvised a sending and receiving station in a small room in the fort. But no matter how long he spent calling into the dark, there was no reply.
Abdikadir, meanwhile, had his own projects, which concerned the peculiar floating sphere. Bisesa was envious that both Casey and Abdi quickly found useful work to occupy their time, as if they somehow fit in better than she did.
On the fourth morning, Bisesa emerged from the fort to find Abdikadir standing on a stool, holding a battered tin bucket up in the air. Casey and Cecil de Morgan sat on fold-out camp chairs, their faces bathed in the morning sun as they watched the show. Casey waved at Bisesa. Hey, Bis! Come see the cabaret. Though de Morgan immediately offered her his chair, Bisesa sat in the dirt beside Casey. She didnt like de Morgan, and she wasnt about to give him any kind of leverage over her, however trivial.
Abdikadirs bucket was full of water, so it must have been heavy. Nevertheless he propped it on his shoulder one-handed, and marked the waters level with a grease pencil. Then he lowered the bucket, and revealed the floating sphere, the Evil Eye, with water running off its surface; Abdi made sure he caught every drop. The tent containing the two man-apes had been set up a few dozen yards away, with some kind of pole at its center.
Casey snickered. Hes been dunking that damn thing for half an hour already.
Why, Abdi?
Im measuring its volume, Abdikadir murmured. And Im repeating it for accuracy. Its called science. Thanks for your support. And he lifted the bucket up around the sphere again.
Bisesa said to Casey, I thought the Surgeon-Captain said you shouldnt get out of bed.
Casey blew a raspberry, and thrust his heavily bandaged leg out in front of him. Ah, bull. It was a clean break and they set it well. Though without anesthetic, Bisesa knew. I dont like sitting around with my thumb up my ass.
And you, Mr. de Morgan, Bisesa said. Whats your interest in this?
The factor spread his hands. I am a businessman, maam. Thats why Im here in the first place. And I am constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. Naturally I am intrigued by your downed flying machine! I accept that both you and Captain Grove want to keep that particular item under wraps. But this, this floating orb of perfection, is neither yours nor Grovesand, in these days of strangeness, how strange it remains, though we have quickly become accustomed to it! There it floats, supported by nothing we can see. No matter how hard you hit iteven with bullets, and thats been tried, somewhat perilously given the ricochetsyou can neither knock a chip out of its perfect surface, nor even move it from its station by so much as a fraction of an inch. Who made it? What holds it up? What lies inside it?
And how much is it worth? Casey growled.
De Morgan laughed easily. You cant blame a man for trying.
Josh had told Bisesa something of de Morgans background. His family were failed aristocracy, who could trace their ancestry back to William the Conquerors first assault on England, more than eight hundred years before, and who had carved a rich estate out of the defeated Saxon kingdoms. In the intervening centuries a trait of greed and foolishness that transcends the generations, in de Morgans own disarming words, had left the family penniless, though still with a kind of race memory of wealth and power. Ruddy said that in his experience the Raj was plagued by chancers like de Morgan. As far as Bisesa was concerned there was nothing to be trusted in de Morgans slicked-back black hair, and his darting, questing eyes.
Abdikadir clambered down from his stool. Dark, serious, focused, he switched his watch to calculator mode, and punched in the numbers he had recorded.
So, Brainiac, Casey called mockingly, tell us what youve learned.
Abdikadir settled to the dirt before Bisesa. The Eye resists our probing, but there are things to measure nonetheless. First of all, the Eye is surrounded by a magnetic anomaly. I checked that with a compass from my survival kit.
Casey grunted. My compass has been haywire since we hit the dirt.
Abdikadir shook his head. Its true you cant find magnetic north; something peculiar seems to be happening to Earths magnetic field. But theres nothing wrong with our compasses themselves. He glanced up at the Eye. The flux lines around that thing are packed together. A diagram of it would look like a knot in a piece of wood.
How come?
Ive no idea.
Bisesa leaned forward. What else, Abdi?
Ive been doing some high school geometry. He grinned. Dipping the thing in water was the only way I could think of to measure its volumeseeing how the water level in the bucket goes up and down.
Eureka! de Morgan cried playfully. Sir, you are the Archimedes de nos jours
Abdikadir ignored him. I took a dozen measurements, hoping to drive down the errors, but it still wont be too hot. I cant think of a way of getting the surface area at all. But my measurements of the radius and circumference are pretty good, I think. He held up a jury-rigged set of calipers. I adapted a laser sight from the chopper
I dont get it, said Casey. Its just a sphere. If you know the radius you can work out the rest from all those formulae. The surface area is, what, four times pi times the radius squared
You can work that out if you make the assumption that this sphere is like every other sphere youve encountered before, Abdi said mildly. But here it is floating in the air, like nothing Ive ever seen. I didnt want to make any assumptions about it; I wanted to check everything I could.
Bisesa nodded. And you found
For a start, it is a perfect sphere. He glanced up again. And I mean perfect, within the tolerances even of my laser measurements, in every axis I tried. Even in 2037 we couldnt shape any material to such a fantastic degree of precision.
De Morgan nodded soberly. An almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection.
Yes. But thats just the start. Abdikadir held up his watch so Bisesa could see its tiny screen. Your high school geometry, Casey. The ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter is ?
Pi, rumbled Casey. Even a jock Christian knows that much.
Well, not in this case. The ratio for the Eye is three. Not about three, or a bit more than threethree, to laser precision. My error bars are so small its quite impossible that the ratio is actually pi, as it ought to be. Your formulae dont work after all, you see, Casey. I get the same number for pi from the volume. Although of course my reliability is way down; you cant compare a laser with a bucket of dusty water