by Janet Morris
Talking to South was like talking to some creature from another world. She told herself it didn't matter. He was useful on the Ball project, and now on the Earth junket if it came off, precisely because he was so different.
She didn't need to complicate her life.
But there wasn't another soul on Threshold who moved like that, or looked at her like that, or had seen or done the things that Joe South had seen and done.
He was a peculiarly invaluable asset right now, when they had an alien artifact in their midst and Richard the Second breathing down their necks.
She was damned if she was going to lose South to ConSec, or SpaceCom, or even to Mickey Croft's Secretariat.
She'd made that clear to Remson. Now all she had to do was make it clear to the man who made her body remember that they were both descended from animals, both made of flesh and blood.
You didn't think much about animal heritage up here. Perhaps that was what South brought with him: a sense of racial continuity, of physical being, of humanness.
Whatever that sphere was out at Spacedock Seven, there wasn't anything human about it at all.
South's classified reports of a long-forgotten exploratory mission talked about spheres and aliens. Nobody had missed the significance of the similarity between the sphere out at Spacedock Seven and the things South had described.
But then the pilot was clearly crazy, or had been, from sponge travel via primitive technologies. Everyone was agreed on that.
Maybe therapy was what South really needed. To ever qualify for ConSpaceCom, or to take a test pilot's exam, he had to have a clean bill of health. What Riva Lowe needed she wasn't going to get today, not from South. Not a real understanding of what it was like to be looking at her world through his eyes. Or what it would be like to be intimate with such a person.
So she settled for a shower instead. Some things couldn't be simulated. When you had the simulator access that Riva Lowe did, you learned that. She'd modeled Joe South once in the General Secretary's psychometric modeler, but the model hadn't been any more informative than the real South.
South, whatever else he was, was real.
Whether his reports of X-3 were real or not, she and South would have plenty of time to find out.
If the Earth trip came off, at least Cummings the Second would be distracted from asking too many embarrassing questions about the sphere.
Those questions had to be avoided. At any cost. Until the Threshold government knew the answers. Until Cummings's missing son and his girlfriend were found. Until the correlation among Joe South's reports, the Scavenger's demented musings, and that damnable Ball out at Spacedock Seven could be assessed.
Somehow, in the face of incontrovertible evidence of an alien civilization, Riva Lowe wanted more than anything else to make a physical liaison with South, a living piece of humanity's path.
Maybe she needed therapy herself. But she wasn't going to get it. There was barely time for her shower before her next scheduled meeting to discuss the continued detention of the Scavenger.
From what she'd heard, the Scavenger had gone raving mad.
All of which, she supposed, meant that, by contrast, the rest of them were sane. Even Joe South.
CHAPTER 6
Premonition
In the psych ward observation cell, there was no way to hurt yourself. Micah Keebler knew for certain. He'd run full-tilt against the padded door. He'd bounced back, repelled from the dusky pink quilting as if by an anti-fifth-force generator.
Then he'd tried strangling himself in his bedding, but they'd thought of that, too. Keebler didn't want to hurt himself. He wanted to make somebody come in here. He wanted to demand his rights. He wanted to talk to somebody.
Anybody. He had a right to an attorney. He had a right to due counsel. He had the rights of a member of the Salvagers' Guild. He paid a goddamned fortune in dues every year to make sure he had those rights.
And now that he needed them, what did he get? Nothing, that was what. Keebler climbed onto his bunk and threw himself off it, trying to hit the floor as if it were the surface of a pool—headfirst.
If he hurt himself, they couldn't keep him in here.
But Keebler couldn't help protecting his head with his arms. And the floor was only two feet lower than the bed. So he couldn't hurt himself that way.
He decided he'd smother himself under his blanket, but that didn't work either: the blanket had holes in it, little honeycomb holes, because it was never too hot and never too cold in a space habitat. You had blankets because people don't like to sleep without a covering.
The covering on his body was carefully designed to be useless to someone intent on suicide: it was a johnny with head and arm holes, made of slippery stuff that gave but wouldn't knot. And worst of all it was pink, too.
"G'damn 'em all," Keebler muttered to himself, and stalked over to the farthest wall from the door to try a running start. He'd just keep running at that door until somebody came.
They were watching him, you could be sure. Watching his every move. Recording him, too. Whatever he did, whatever he said. So he didn't say much out loud that they could edit however they wanted and use against him later. He didn't want to say anything without a live witness there, a human, to make sure that what he said got heard the way he meant it.
Keebler hated bureaucracies with an all-consuming passion. You didn't become a beachcomber on the shores of eternity if you liked company. Keebler had combed many a beach, and fished many a white hole. But he'd never fished a hole like the white hole that had spat out the silver sphere. In theory—well, in one theory—everything that ever was, is, or will be ought to come out of a white hole eventually. But that didn't mean it had to come in a recognizable form.
Keebler had been fishing this particularly rich hole for two years before he woke up one morning and there was the sphere, glimmering in the white hole's light.
Hot damn, what a moment that was. Keebler had fished some rare elements out of this hole in the past—some palladium, some real interesting blue diamonds the size of basketballs, even an itsy-bitsy pellet of super-dense material that he sold to a collector who wanted to feed his obstreperous relatives to it—or at least threaten to.
But nothing like the sphere.
Keebler remembered it as if it were yesterday. The sphere had gleamed at him, welcomed him, spun before him. . . .
Suddenly the pale blue eyes of the Scavenger widened. His large-pored skin, ruddy and wrinkled from years of exposure to transient radiation, began to sweat. His hands, gnarled and strong, began to shake.
He balled his fists. He jammed shut his eyes. Behind his closed lids he saw memories he'd never remembered before. He saw the sphere, opening wide. He saw the inside of it.
He saw—
Blackness.
The Scavenger dropped to the floor, limp as a dead man. His eyes rolled up in his head. His mind, behind his eyes, shied away from what he'd remembered.
Sad-eyed aliens, whispering to him. A way to tow the sphere to Threshold; a need to tow the sphere to civilization. Not his need.
Their need.
He forgot. He remembered. He forgot again. And remembered again.
The old man's heart beat slowly, then double-time. His hands opened and closed. His mouth moved, articulating growls of fear and misery.
He swam slowly toward consciousness, as if he were deep under the sea. He could see a shimmery light, like the surface of an ocean far above. And in the light hands beckoned.
Those hands weren't human hands.
The Scavenger dove again, to the deeps of unconsciousness. Forget whispered voices. Forget deep, dark eyes with no white. Forget bringing the sphere to civilization's heart.
Mankind had never encountered a superior intelligence, anywhere among its three hundred colonies spread throughout the stars. Mankind had never even encountered the relics of a spacefaring civilization.
The sphere wasn't anything threatening. The sphere was going to make Keebler rich
and famous.
He'd been holding that thought for so long. He'd articulated it a hundred times. The litany was like a rope by which, hand over hand, he pulled himself from the depths of his soul toward consciousness.
Toward the light. Toward realization. Toward memory. Toward understanding. Toward revelation.
Keebler's eyes snapped open. His tongue wet his cracked, scaly lips. He jumped bolt upright and ran to the padded door of his cell, screaming, "The aliens are coming! The aliens are coming!"
Nobody came. For far too long, nobody came to his cell.
So Keebler just kept beating the door with his fists and screaming, "The aliens are coming! Let me out. I gotta get out of here! I gotta get to the Ball! The aliens are coming! Don't you understand?"
But of course they didn't. How could they? He hadn't, and he'd been the one who'd found the sphere and towed it in, from the edges of the universe to humanity's home system.
"The aliens are coming!" Keebler screamed until he was hoarse, and then whispered, and then sobbed, as he sank to the padded floor by the padded door of his padded cell, images of sad-eyed aliens dancing in his head.
CHAPTER 7
Trapdoor
Back out at Spacedock Seven, Reice glared at the Ball glimmering on the science station's realtime monitors as if he could will it away.
But a second glare proved it was still there. If it weren't for the Ball, Reice wouldn't be stuck out here overseeing an evidence search.
He had four officers scouring every bit of the science station for proof of what any fool damn well knew had happened here.
Keebler had taken three hostages and held off all comers until Reice and South had talked their way in here. That was goddamned history. But was that good enough for Mickey Croft, the Secretary General, or for Remson, his mother-hen assistant?
Hell, no.
Now five ConSec officers were scouring every surface on the science station for fingerprints, downloading every log for relevant voice and data entries, and generally acting like a bunch of anal-retentive cleaning women.
Waste of the Trust Territory's time and money, if anybody asked Reice.
"Be goddamned careful with that dump to supplementary!" he snarled at one of his techs, who was backing up a realtime log's timeslated entries and now had to stop to change storage cards. "If a second of the transcript is missing, Keebler's lawyers will accuse us of editing the record."
The beleaguered tech muttered, "Don't you think I know that?"
Reice took a half step toward the technician. "What?"
The fellow said, "Yes, sir. We're getting every bit."
Reice let it go. These days, he was letting lots of things go. If this had been any other criminal act, you could have dumped the data to Threshold ConSec Control remotely. You wouldn't have to send humans out here to port the data onto copycards by hand.
But this wasn't any other criminal. This was the Man Who Found The Sphere. The Sphere was bringing normal life on Threshold and its surrounds to a halt, as if it were spewing some sticky substance in which more and more of them were inextricably stuck.
It loomed in the realtime viewscreen, fat and smug and shiny. There was nothing inimical about the Ball, nothing threatening, nothing intimidating.
It was beautiful. Peaceful, even. Perfect and smooth and seamless and warm against the dark of night, as if it were a product of nature, of natural evolution, of the ordering of more and more complex systems. . .
But it wasn't. There was nothing natural about it.
It was metallic. But it wasn't any metal or alloy or composite anyone had ever spectroanalyzed before. It was hollow inside. At least, so far as crateology scanners could determine. It was neutral to sensoring packages that measured electronic emanations or radiation in any bandwidth. But whenever it wanted to, it coruscated through displays of color that made the inside of your mind itch.
Reice really was beginning to hate the Ball.
He was beginning to think that the Ball hated him back.
The four techs were grumbling at each other, as cranky as Reice felt. They were all nervous, out here with that thing. It got to you. You started wondering what it was.
You wondered who made it, because you were sure the Ball wasn't a living thing.
Then you wondered why you were sure it wasn't a living thing. Lots of living things were spherical, weren't they?
Then you wondered if it was some kind of intelligence. You got the sense that it knew you were there. That it was watching you. That it was spying on you. That it was judging your performance.
Then you really started to sweat.
Keebler had towed this thing in from the edge of nowhere, with just regular electromagnetic grapples. But the thing wasn't responsive to magnetic fields—anymore.
If it ever had been.
One of the techs swore feelingly.
Reice clanked over to the man hunching over one of the station's consoles. This science station was government spec, built by the lowest bidder, and its comfort zone was minimal: the fifth-force generators in here had glitches. They failed intermittently, and you found yourself floating in microgravity.
Nobody had been able to figure out why, so far. The fifth-force generators had been failing for short intervals ever since the science station was bolted onto the scaffolding around the Ball. It only bothered you when, as now, your computer-assisted magnetic boot soles kicked in to compensate for the missing gravity.
Everything loose in here was now weightless.
Including the tech who'd been bitching at his console. The tech swore again.
"What?" Reice demanded.
"Just before we lost the grav, I had a spike." The tech swiveled in his chair, holding on to the bumper with one hand. "All my data was gone for a second—wiped, even the operating system, according to the error code—then it all came back."
Impossible.
"Systems failure? Self-correcting? More likely you screwed something up, or a backup rebooted when the power fluctuated." The power would have fluctuated when the fifth-force generator failed.
Wouldn't it?
The tech stamped with his boot to make its magnetics kick in, then let go of the bumper. He stood up, nose-to-nose with Reice, and said, "I don't make those kinds of mistakes." His voice was challenging, harsh. His pale face was quivering, as if the whole station were vibrating very fast.
"Back off, sergeant," Reice said, with a quick look at the man's ID patch. His own voice was harsh. Too harsh.
Everybody else stopped what they were doing and looked at Reice and the sergeant, nose-to-nose.
Reice purposefully turned his back on the angry man, snarling, "You all done, girls? Everybody finished and ready to go home? Because if you aren't, there's no reason for you to be standing around gawking."
And that wasn't like him. He was cooler than that.
The other three techs exchanged glances and went back to work, muttering.
Reice forced himself to move away from the sergeant behind him without looking back, as if he were certain he'd settled the dispute and that order was prevailing here. He wasn't. Every muscle in his back was crawling, as if he expected the sergeant to jump on him from behind any minute.
They'd been at this too long, was all. It was spooky out here, was all. It was that damned Ball, that was what it was.
Reice knew it, but couldn't have proved it if his life had depended on it.
He walked over to the MMU bay and got his helmet and gloves from the rack. Without a backward look he said, "I'll be outside, examining the exterior for any unusual evidence. You've got another hour here before we leave. Make sure that there's nothing left undone when that hour's up."
And he clamped his helmet down over his head, half turning it viciously to seal off anything anyone might have said.
Any retort. Any wisecrack. What the hell was happening to discipline up here? What was happening to Reice's leadership abilities, that he was worried about controlling four lower-
echelon types who made their living inside yellow-tape barriers that said consec investigation—do not cross?
This team should have been running perfectly. They worked together all the time. Yet they were an hour behind schedule, and Reice knew it. And they were all as prickly as he was.
What was the goddamned problem, anyhow?
He mated his gloves in the lock while it cycled. Sloppy procedure. Dangerous. If the lock depressurized before the suit and gloves were sealed, Reice would be sorry.
He beat the red light by a couple of heartbeats, and the lock slid open. At first he could see only the stars, and the steady light that was Threshold in the distance.
You could always find home. It was comforting. He pulled the joystick pad of his MMU down into his palm and tested it before he stepped off onto the scaffolding. No use taking a single unnecessary chance.
Belatedly, he went through the rest of his security procedures: checking his life-support, his coms, making sure he had a link to the Blue Tick and to his men, still inside.
What the hell was I thinking of, storming out here without running standard systems checks?
He was really losing his grip. He stepped out of the lock so that it could close and slid a step, free-flying, before his computer-assisted boot soles found the right intensity and his trajectory brought him close enough that his soles and the scaffolding made contact.
Sloppy. He knew better than to walk in space the way he walked in gravity. He knew better than to come bounding out of a fifth-force well, as if he didn't expect microgravity on the far side.
His stomach flipped, and settled when he was firmly standing on the strutwork. He had his MMU. He could have jetted back, safe and sound, from any error.
He started to rub his eyes and hit himself in the faceplate. Damn, I'm disoriented. He ought to go back to the Tick and wait, carefully and quietly, for the rest of his team to come aboard.
Before he hurt himself. Before he screwed up where somebody else could see.