A Deepness in the Sky

There was at most a minute until the mystery came overhead. It should be well above the horizon now, gliding southward toward them. Nethering moved around the curved wall of the main dome, and stared into the north. From the equipment closet ahead of him, he heard Shepry struggling with the ten-inch, the little scope they showed the tourists. He should be helping the child, but there was really no time.

Familiar starfields extended crystal clear down to the horizon. That clarity was, for Obret Nethering, what made this little island truly paradise. There should be a fleck of reflected sunlight rising slowly across the sky. It would be very faint; the dead sun was such a pale thing. Nethering stared and stared, straining for the slightest motion-triggered gleam....Nothing. Maybe he should have stuck with the radar, maybe right now they were missing their one chance to get really good data. Shepry had the ten-inch out of the closet now. He was struggling to get it aligned. "Help me, sir!"

They both had guessed wrong. Serendipity might be an angel, but she was a fickle one. Obret turned back to Shepry, a little ashamed for ignoring him. Of course, he was still watching the sky, the swath just short of the zenith where there should be a tiny speck of light. A bite of blackness flickered across the glowing pile of the Robber's Cluster. A bite of blackness. Something...huge.

All dignity forgotten, Nethering fell on his side, brought the 4-ocular up to his lesser eyes. But tonight it was all he had....He turned slowly, tracking along his guess at a sky-path, praying he could recapture his target.

"Sir? What is it?"

"Shepry, look up...just look up."

The cobblie was silent for a second. "Oh!"

Obret Nethering wasn't listening. He had thething in the 4-ocs field and all his attention was on keeping up with it, on seeing and remembering. And what he saw was an absence of light, a silhouette that raced across the galactic swath of star clouds. It was almost a quarter of a degree across. In the gap between star clouds it was invisible again...and then he saw it for another second. Nethering almost had a sense of the shape of it: a squat cylinder, downward-pointing, with a hint of complexity sticking out amidships.

Amidships.

The rest of its track crossed lonely starfields down to the southern horizon. Nethering tried in vain to follow it all the way. If it hadn't been for its crossing the Robber's Cluster, he might not have latched on to it at all.Thank you, Serendipity!

He lowered the 4-ocs and stood. "We'll keep watch a few more minutes." What other junk might be flying along with the thing?

"Oh, please, let me go below and put this on the net!" said the cobblie. "More than ninety miles up, and so big I could see its shape. It must be half a mile long!"

"Okay. Go ahead."

Shepry disappeared down the stairs. Three minutes passed. Four. There was a glint sliding across the southern horizon, most likely a Low-Comm S satellite. Nethering pocketed his 4-ocs and climbed slowly down the stairs. This time, Air Defense would have to listen to him. A good part of Nethering's contract money came from Accord Intelligence; he knew about the floater satellites the Kindred had recently begun launching.This is not oneof ours, and not one of the Kindred's. And all our warfare is reduced to pettysquabbling by this arrival. The world had been so close to nuclear war. And now...what? He remembered how old Underhill had gone on about the "deepness in the sky." But angels should come from the good cold earth, never from the empty sky.

Shepry met him at the bottom of the stairs. "It's no good, sir. I can't—"

"The link to the mainland is down?"

"No. It's up. But Air Defense brushed me off just like they did on the first pass."

"Maybe they already know."

Shepry jerked his hands in agitation. "Maybe. But something perved is happening on the gossips, too. The last few days, crank postings have pounded the ceiling. You know, end-of-the-world claims, snow-troll sightings. It's been kind of a laugh; I even did some counter-crapping of my own. But tonight the cranks have totally pounced." Shepry paused, seemed to run out of jargon. Suddenly he looked very young and uncertain. "It's...it's not natural, sir. I found two postings that described just what we saw. That's about what you'd expect for something that just happened over midocean. But they're lost in all crazy crap."

Hmm. Nethering walked across the room, settled down on his old perch beside the control bays. Shepry fidgeted back and forth, waiting for some judgment.When I first came to the observatory, the controls covered threewalls, instruments and levers, almost all analog. Now most of the gear was tiny, digital, precise. Sometimes he joked with Shepry, asking him whether they should really trust anything they couldn't see the guts of. Shepry had never understood his lack of faith in computer automation. Until tonight.

"You know, Shepry, maybe we should make some phone calls."

FIFTY-ONE