Missile Gap

The astronomer pauses to pour himself a glass of water, then glances round the table. "To put it in perspective, gentlemen, this world is so big that, if one in every hundred stars had an earth-like planet, this single structure could support the population of our entire home galaxy. As for the mass — this structure is as massive as fifty thousand suns. It is, quite bluntly, impossible: as-yet unknown physical forces must be at work to keep it from rapidly collapsing in on itself and creating a black hole. The repulsive force, whatever it is, is strong enough to hold the weight of fifty thousand suns: think about that for a moment, gentlemen."

At that point Sagan looks around and notices the blank stares. He chuckles ruefully.

"What I mean to say is, this structure is not permitted by the laws of physics as we understand them. Because it clearly does exist, we can draw some conclusions, starting with the fact that our understanding of physics is incomplete. Well, that isn't news: we know we don't have a unified theory of everything. Einstein spent thirty years looking for one, and didn't come up with it.

But, secondly." He looks tired for a moment, aged beyond his years. "We used to think that any extraterrestrial beings we might communicate with would be fundamentally comprehensible: folks like us, albeit with better technology. I think that's the frame of mind you're still working in. Back in sixty-one we had a brainstorming session at a conference, trying to work out just how big an engineering project a spacefaring civilization might come up with. Freeman Dyson, from Princeton, came up with about the biggest thing any of us could imagine: something that required us to imagine dismantling Jupiter and turning it into habitable real estate.

"This disk is about a hundred million times bigger than Dyson's sphere. And that's before we take into account the time factor."

"Time?" Echoes Fox from Langley, sounding confused.

"Time." Sagan smiles in a vaguely disconnected way. "We're nowhere near our original galactic neighborhood and whoever moved us here, they didn't bend the laws of physics far enough to violate the speed limit. It takes light about 160,000 years to cross the distance between where we used to live, and our new stellar neighborhood, the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Which we have fixed, incidentally, by measuring the distance to known Cepheid variables, once we were able to take into account the measurable red shift of infalling light and the fact that some of them were changing frequency slowly and seem to have changed rather a lot. Our best estimate is eight hundred thousand years, plus or minus two hundred thousand. That's about four times as long as our species has existed, gentlemen. We're fossils, an archaeology experiment or something. Our relevance to our abductors is not as equals, but as subjects in some kind of vast experiment. And what the purpose of the experiment is, I can't tell you. I've got some guesses, but…"

Sagan shrugs, then lapses into silence. Gregor catches Brundle's eye and Brundle shakes his head, very slightly. Don't spill the beans. Gregor nods. Sagan may realize he's in a room with a CIA spook and an East German defector, but he doesn't need to know about the Alienation Service yet.

"Well that's as may be," says Fox, dropping words like stones into the hollow silence at the table. "But it begs the question, what are we going to tell the DCI?"

"I suggest," says Gregor, "that we start by reviewing COLLECTION RUBY." He nods at Sagan. "Then, maybe when we're all up to speed on that, we'll have a better idea of whether there's anything useful we can tell the DCI.

Chapter Five: Cannon-Fodder

Madeleine and Robert Holbright are among the last of the immigrants to disembark on the new world. As she glances back at the brilliant white side of the liner, the horizon seems to roll around her head, settling into a strange new stasis that feels unnatural after almost six months at sea.

New Iowa isn't flat and it isn't new: rampart cliffs loom to either side of the unnaturally deep harbor (gouged out of bedrock courtesy of General Atomics). A cog-driven funicular railway hauls Maddy and Robert and their four shipping trunks up the thousand-foot climb to the plateau and the port city of Fort Eisenhower — and then to the arrival and orientation camp.

Maddy is quiet and withdrawn, but Bob, oblivious, natters constantly about opportunities and jobs and grabbing a plot of land to build a house on. "It's the new world," he says at one point: "why aren't you excited?"