Starplex

Jag’s office had the same floor plan as Rissa’s, but he’d decorated it—if that was the word—in Waldahud mud-art. He had three different models of polychairs in front of the desk. Waldahudin disliked anything that was mass-produced; by having different models he could at least give the appearance that each was one of a kind. Rissa sat in the polychair in the middle and looked across Jag’s wide, painfully neat desk at him. “So,” she said. “You’ve presumably analyzed the samples we collected yesterday. What are the spheres made of?”

The Waldahud shrugged all four shoulders. “I don’t know. A small percentage of the sample material is just the regular flotsam of space-carbon grains, hydrogen atoms, and so on. But the principal material is eluding all standard tests. It doesn’t combust in oxygen or any other gas, for instance, and as far as I can tell it has no electrical charge at all. Regardless of what I try, I can’t knock electrons off it to get positively charged nuclei. Delacorte up in the chemistry lab is having a look at a sample now.”

“And what about the gravel from between the spheres?” Rissa asked.

Jag’s bark had an unusual quality. “I’ll show you,” he said. They left his office, went down a corridor, and entered an isolation room. “Those are the samples,” he said, gesturing with a medial arm at a glass-fronted cubic chamber measuring a meter on a side.

Rissa looked through the window and frowned. “That big one—does it have a flat bottom?”

Jag peered through the window. “Gods—”

The large egg-shaped piece of material had sunk about halfway into the bottom of the chamber, so that only a domelike part stuck up. Peering more closely, Jag could see that some of the smaller gravel pieces were sinking, too. He pointed with his upper-left first finger as he counted the fragments. Six were gone, presumably sunk beneath the surface of the chamber’s bottom. But no holes had been left in their wake.

“It’s dropping right through the floor,” said Jag. He looked at the ceiling. “Central Computer!”

“Yes?” said PHANTOM.

“I want zero-g inside that sample chamber now!”

“Doing so.”

“Good— no, wait. Change that! I want five standard gees in there, but— I want them coming from the chamber’s ceiling, not its floor. Got that? I want gravity in there to pull objects up toward the roof.”

“Doing so,” said PHANTOM.

Rissa and Jag watched, fascinated, as the egg-shaped piece of material started to rise out of the bottom of the chamber. Before it was all the way out, pieces of gravel welled up from beneath the solid floor and fell up toward the ceiling, hitting it not with the ricochet bounce one would expect but more like pebbles falling into tar and beginning to sink.

“Computer, oscillate the gravity until all the objects are free from the floor and ceiling, then shift to zero-g, with the objects floating in the chamber.”

“Doing so.”

“My word, that’s incredible,” said Rissa. “The stuff can pass right through other matter.”

Jag grunted. “The original samples we tried to collect must have leaked through the probes’ walls, pushed out by the force of their acceleration toward Starplex.”

By bouncing the apparent source of gravity inside the chamber between the top and the bottom, PHANTOM eventually got all the gravel pieces to float freely. But Jag’s fur danced when he saw the results of two pieces moving together. He’d expected to see them hit, then bounce off. Instead, when they got to just a few millimeters apart they deflected away from each other.

“Magnetic,” said Rissa.

Jag moved his lower shoulders. “No, there’s no magnetism at work here—there are no charges present.”

There were four articulated arms ending in tractor-beam emitters inside the chamber, and Jag operated all of them in unison, controlling one with each hand. He used one beam to lock onto a piece of translucent gravel a centimeter in diameter, and used a second beam to grab another piece of equal size. He then operated the controls to move the two pieces together. Everything went fine until the chunks were within a very short distance of each other, but then no matter how much power he fed into the tractor beams, he was unable to bring them any closer. “Amazing,” said Jag. “There’s some sort of force repelling them—a nonmagnetic repulsive force. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“That must be what keeps the haze of gravel from coalescing,” said Rissa.

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “I suppose. The net effect is that the material in the haze between the spheres is bound together gravitationally, but it won’t ever coalesce more than it already has.”

“But then what keeps these pebbles together? Why doesn’t that repulsive force blast them apart?”

“They must be locked chemically. I suspect they were originally formed under great pressure—pressure that defeated the repulsion we’re observing. Now that their constituent atoms are bonded, they stay together, but it would take great effort to combine the pebbles into bigger groupings.”

“Oh, hell,” said Rissa. “You know what I’m thinking…”