“I can’t detect any change in the tube. I’m going to open it up again.”
“Point it away from yourself, and make sure you won’t be crushed against the asteroid if it ejects anything at high speed,” Sancho advised.
It wasn’t a bad idea: though if this tube ended up being nothing more than a glorified spud gun he would be very disappointed. He pointed the tube down and away, holding it over his shoulder. Any high-energy emission would either jerk the tube from his grasp or propel him off the asteroid.
“Opening the tube,” he said, tapping and twisting awkwardly due to the object’s position. He kept it away from his body mass, just in case it reacted strongly. He didn’t fancy having the tube tear through his chest like a missile.
All his precautions were unnecessary. The tube reopened without incident. There was no flash of light, no violent or even gentle venting of energy. It just opened.
“I’m okay,” he radioed back. “Nothing happened.”
“I can see that,” Sancho replied. “That’s good.”
“Not really,” Collier said, carefully bringing the tube back to his face and peering inside. “I was hoping that…” he trailed off as he glanced inside, his attendant firefly hovering nearby.
The rocky mixture he had scooped up and placed into the tube was gone. In its place was a silvery crystal, irregular in shape. Collier couldn’t estimate its size — the mirrored interior of the tube made that all but impossible to the eye.
“Hoping that what?” Sancho asked.
“Something’s different about the inside. Take a look,” Collier said, stretching his head back so his helmet camera would better capture the image. “Can you see it?”
“Affirmative, Skipper. I’m looking at it as best I can with various filters from your camera.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not certain.”
Collier thought. “I’ve got to get it out of the tube to use my GCMS.”
“Why not bring it on board, Skipper? I can examine it here.”
“Because, if it’s dangerous, I don’t want it on board.” He looked at the slab of crystal. Something about it looked familiar, as if he had seen something like this before. It didn’t look particularly strange — it was its sudden appearance in the tube that gave it mystery.
Collier gently maneuvered the tube in such a way as to extract the object within. It floated out of the tube, looking like a miniature silver asteroid. He closed the tube and tethered it to his belt and retrieved his detector — a device that resembled an Age of Sail blunderbuss when telescoped out to its full length. He carefully made the preparations necessary and ionized a tiny section of the floating silver crystal, sending data to the detector’s computer.
The results came quickly, displayed on the screen on the side of his device. Collier didn’t know what he had expected, but the simplicity of the results were somehow more confusing than if the computer had been unable to analyze the object.
“It’s gallium,” he said to Sancho.
“In what concentration, Skipper?”
“One hundred percent. It’s pure.”
“There must be a malfunction with the detector, Skipper. Gallium isn’t found pure.”
“I’m looking right at the display, Sancho. Gas chromatography, mass spectrometry. Both say it’s pure gallium.”
Sancho’s voice grew strident. “But that’s not possible! Where did the gallium come from?”
Collier noted his computer’s anxiety. “Calm down, Sancho. There’s got to be an explanation for this. Though I can’t think what it is,” he added sotto voce.
“The tube must have extracted the gallium from the stuff you put in it, Skipper.” Sancho sounded much calmer now.
Collier shook his head, even though no one could see him. “That doesn’t work. There’s much too much of it. Gallium is what, one part per million out here? If that?”
“Closer to three,” Sancho corrected him.
“Whatever. It looks like there’s about as much gallium coming out of the tube as there was rock and dust and shit I put in.”
“Skipper,” Sancho said, an odd metallic quality in his voice, “I think I’m suffering some system problems. Do I have your permission to shut down and perform some self-repair?”
Collier twisted his body to look up at the Dulcinea. “What’s the trouble?”
“I can’t handle this. I need to…”
And he was silent.
“Sancho? Sancho!” Collier swore and quickly gathered up the gallium sample, placing it in his backpack, then fired his suit jets to make his way back on board the Dulcinea.
All the while, he called Sancho, but only received a recording saying that he was undergoing system maintenance. Collier could override, of course, but he didn’t know what that would do to the computer. In his twelve years with Sancho, he had of course run system maintenance before, but always it had been under Collier’s direction. He had never seen the computer place himself in such a state.
The conversation he had had with Sancho rung in his ears as he jetted back to the Dulcinea and reentered her. At the time, he had noted the computer’s idiosyncratic behavior and thought it charming. Now, he shuddered at the thought that Sancho had voluntarily sought the living-dead status a systems overhaul meant for him.
The mystery of the tube and its actions was secondary now. In some back part of Collier’s mind, he was sifting through the data and coming up with the same result, impossible though it was. The tube was a gallium machine, plain and simple. How it did what it did was baffling to him, but the result couldn’t have been more plain — rocks and dust went in, gallium came out.
When he reentered the ship, he removed his helmet and gauntlets on his way to the control suite, leaving them in the access floatway. He punched up a status report (it took him a few moments to locate the seldom-used keyboard) and scanned the holodisplay.
According to the progress bar, Sancho would be coming out of his self-maintenance in a few minutes. There were no results on the screen that indicated anything was obviously amiss, but the full report would not come until the scan had been completed. Collier shrugged out of his suit and hung it in its frame while he waited.
“Systems check complete,” Sancho said, his voice pleasant but bland. “System corruption found in lattices one point one, one point two, one point four, one point seven, one point—”
“Suspend report,” Collier said. “Display corrupted lattices.”
The air was suddenly filled with text listing the various areas of Sancho’s brain that he himself had decided were “corrupted.”
“Display estimated date of corruption,” Collier said, not even sure such data was available.
The text changed immediately. Collier looked at the results, his lips moving slightly as he did so. All of the dates were quite old — the most recent one dated back months. So Sancho hadn’t been damaged by anything the tube had done. Then why had he seen fit to initiate a systems check?
“Recommended course of action?” Collier asked.
“Attempt repair of corrupted areas, reset all to original factory settings.”
Collier chafed at that. It was precisely what he had resisted for years. But did Sancho want that? Wouldn’t he have done so already if he wanted to? Was he capable of such self-repair, or did he need Collier’s authorization?
It suddenly struck Collier how much control he had over Sancho’s mind, and how little the computer had over it.
Perhaps that was the true definition of sentience: to have control over one’s mind.
“Sancho, what do you want me to do?”
“Restate request.”
“Do you want me to clear up all your damaged sectors?”
“Restate request.”
“Sancho, are you running your mimesis program?”
; “Negative. Mimesis program has been suspended during system scan and repair.”
Collier nodded. He wasn’t really dealing with Sancho now — this was just the computer part of him.
“Run mimesis program,”
“Warning: action not recommended during system scan and repair mode.”
“Override. Run mimesis program.”
“Skipper?” Sancho’s voice was now confused. “What happened? My chronometer reads … oh, I see.”
“You okay? How do you feel?”
“I ran a systems check on myself, did I? How am I?”
“You can’t see your own results?” Collier frowned.
“Of course I can. Don’t worry about those corrupted lattices: that’s just ordinary cosmic radiation screwing things up here and there. I’ve got plenty of good sectors.”
“Well, how do you feel?”
“I’m okay, Skipper. Sorry about falling apart like that. I just … that damn tube. It doesn’t make sense.”
Collier didn’t quite know how to react. Sancho seemed to be fine, but he didn’t like the idea that the computer had fainted electronically. “Sancho, I sort of need you to run the ship, you know.”
“Of course.”
“I can’t have you taking personal time when something strange happens.”
Sancho laughed. “I understand. Look, Skipper, I’m fine, really. Let’s get to work on this tube.”
Collier sighed. If he was going to allow Sancho to be himself, he couldn’t be questioning his computer every minute. It was either let Sancho do what he did, or shut down the mimetic aspects of his programming and try to get back to Ceres for an overhaul.
He would let Sancho be himself.
“All right, the tube. It should be still attached to my suit.” Collier floated back to the airlock and retrieved the white bar. He also drew the gallium sample out of the backpack, noting that it was quite soft. On his way back, the piece he was gripping began to melt, so he hastily let go and pushed it ahead of him toward the control suite.
“Certainly acts like pure gallium,” Sancho said.
“Must have a low melting point,” Collier added.
“A little higher than 27.7 degrees,” Sancho confirmed. “It’ll melt in your hand after a little while.”
Collier put the gallium in the assay box and allowed Sancho to perform his full tests. “Well, do you need gallium for anything, Sancho?”
“I wouldn’t really know, Skipper,” Sancho said as he performed his tests.
“How can you not know?”
“Hey, do you know if you have enough riboflavin in you right now, Skipper? How should I know if I need gallium?” Sancho said good-naturedly.
Collier chuckled and grew silent. If anything, Sancho seemed even more “human” now than before his shutdown.
“Assay completed. It’s absolutely pure. No trace materials of any kind.”
“Huh.”
“So, where did it come from?”
Collier shrugged. He opened the assay box and withdrew the gallium. “The tube must have made it. From the dirt.”
“You’re talking about transmutation of the elements, Skipper.”
“I know. But do you have any other explanation? A hidden gallium compartment in the tube? Or the tube is made out of gallium, and this is just part of it disintegrating? No, none of that works. The rocks went in, they’re gone, and gallium is in its place. What happened seems obvious enough.”
“But, Skipper,” Sancho said, almost whining, “transmutation takes incredible energy and certainly couldn’t be accomplished in such a small device as this.”
“I’m looking at a big hunk of gallium, Sancho. You can’t explain it away.”
“Okay, where did the energy come from to make so many subatomic changes? You know how much it would take to move electrons into new valence shells, change protons to neutrons, or whatever it would take to turn silicon into gallium? I admit, I bet someone on Ganymede could probably do it, with a big enough collider and a shitload of spare energy from a few fusion reactors — do it to maybe ten atoms, and the gallium would probably be an unstable isotope at that. You’re telling me that you’ve got a magic wand that can do it instantly, and make a few kilograms of the stuff?” Sancho was almost angry.
“I’m not telling you anything. That is,” Collier said, indicating the floating gallium chunk.
“I’m saying there just has to be another answer. We don’t have the technology to make something like this.”
“Exactly. We don’t.” Collier matched Sancho’s emotion with calm quiet.
“So then how — oh, no. You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t like to think that any more than you do. But it’s the best theory that fits the facts.”
“I’m not going to say it,” Sancho said flatly.
Collier drew a breath, hardly believing he was going to say it. But maybe saying it out loud would make it seem less crazy.
“It’s finally happened. We’ve discovered an alien artifact.”
He was wrong: it still sounded crazy.
Chapter Four
Sancho had completed his calculations. “Based on normal consumption and allowing a healthy margin for error, we’ve got maybe three more days of hover time left before we need to head back to Ceres.”
Collier nodded. “Okay.”
In the past two days, he had examined the asteroid and found it was an ordinary Type S rock. Harvesting the few silicates there would not be worth the effort: Ceres itself was abundant in the same elements that made up the Wild Goose. There had been no other pockets or caverns, and excavation near the site where he discovered the magic wand had produced nothing. He wanted to discover more, but the evidence was strong that there was simply no more to find here.
He had placed transponder beacons on the asteroid in case he wanted to return to it, but based on its velocity away from Ceres, he doubted that he would ever be back.
“Okay. Let’s bug out now. Calculate a return trajectory to Ceres, highest possible speed.”
“Aye aye. Calculations complete. Fastest return to Ceres will take approximately ten days, six hours.”
“Sounds good.”
Collier braced himself for the thrust on Sancho’s countdown, and their journey back to the mining center was underway.
The initial thrust lasted just over three hours, and although it was gentle, Collier waited until it had ceased to resume the investigation of the magic wand.
Over the course of four days, Sancho and Collier discovered how to activate the conversion procedure, and found that the tube would transmute into gallium anything put into it — food, one of Collier’s slipper socks, even air itself. The last produced very little gallium: microscopic traces only, but it had still worked.
Sancho had developed an antagonistic attitude toward the wand. He grew irritated as the device continued to function without any sign as to how it did so.
“What’s the power supply?” he asked on the fifth day for the hundredth time. “And what is it made of? Gamma rays won’t penetrate, and yet it doesn’t weigh the hundreds of kilograms necessary to block my scans so completely. And how does it get the energy to transmute elements into gallium? A fusion reactor might provide enough power, but you can’t tell me there’s a fusion reactor in that tiny thing.”
“Easy, Sancho. I agree, those are questions. Here are some more for you. Doesn’t it seem strange that there are all these buttons, as we are calling them, and in order to make the tube open and go through the transmutation process, I don’t need to activate all of them? Some of these buttons haven’t done a damn thing, which I can’t believe. There’s some combination that unlocks more functions, I’ll bet.”
“Maybe one of them will open the tube up so we can see how the fuck it works,” Sancho growled.
“Language,” Collier said with a smile. “Now, let’s get back to our experiments. Where did we leave off?”
“You wanted to concentrate on variations of tap-twist-twist. We left off with single tap design four, single tap design nine, twist A, counter-twist B.”
“All right,” Collier said and performed the maneuver. Nothing seemed to happen, but again, they loaded a small sample into the tube and executed the conversion process just to make sure. In a moment, another bit of last night’s chicken vindaloo package became a tiny particle of gallium.
“We’re not going to be short on gallium, that’s for sure,” Collier said, placing the particle into the nearly full sample bag.
“Next is double tap design four, single tap design nine, twist A, counter-twist B,” Sancho said.
For hours, the two worked and experimented, converting bits of trash and assorted nonessential equipment into gallium via the magic wand’s power. Sometime late in the night of the sixth day, or the early morning of the seventh, it happened.
“Okay, new family of maneuvers. Now we’re on double tap design one, double tap design two, counter-twist A, no action to B, slide across design one.” Sancho said. Collier executed the maneuver and put in a sliver of toast he was munching, then activated the transmuter.
When he opened the tube and slid it back to reveal the gallium inside, he was about to reach for the tiny pellet of metal when it rapidly turned a blue-grey color. The effect startled him and he recoiled in alarm.
“Shit! What happened?”
“Skipper! Get away from it!” Sancho said almost simultaneously.
Collier used his right toe to push off the deck plate away from the oxidizing metal and looked at it from a distance. “What is it?”
“Best guess, I’d say thallium. Highly toxic. I’d suggest you get at least handling waldoes and seal it up. Maybe put your vacc suit on.”
“Oh, calm down, Sancho,” Collier said, slowing his own breathing down. It was easy to dismiss his own chagrin when his computer seemed as afraid as he had been. “I know how to handle thallium.” He rummaged in his gear and produced a beetle, tossed it at the thallium. The baseball-sized robot righted itself in the cabin and hovered near the pellet.
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