Time’s Eye

“I’m measuring its volume,” Abdikadir murmured. “And I’m repeating it for accuracy. It’s called science. Thanks for your support.” And he lifted the bucket up around the sphere again.

Bisesa said to Casey, “I thought the Surgeon-Captain said you shouldn’t get out of bed.”

Casey blew a raspberry, and thrust his heavily bandaged leg out in front of him. “Ah, bull. It was a clean break and they set it well.” Though without anesthetic, Bisesa knew. “I don’t like sitting around with my thumb up my ass.”

“And you, Mr. de Morgan,” Bisesa said. “What’s your interest in this?”

The factor spread his hands. “I am a businessman, ma’am. That’s why I’m here in the first place. And I am constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. Naturally I am intrigued by your downed flying machine! I accept that both you and Captain Grove want to keep that particular item under wraps. But this, this floating orb of perfection, is neither yours nor Grove’s—and, in these days of strangeness, how strange it remains, though we have quickly become accustomed to it! There it floats, supported by nothing we can see. No matter how hard you hit it—even with bullets, and that’s been tried, somewhat perilously given the ricochets—you can neither knock a chip out of its perfect surface, nor even move it from its station by so much as a fraction of an inch. Who made it? What holds it up? What lies inside it?”

“And how much is it worth?” Casey growled.

De Morgan laughed easily. “You can’t blame a man for trying.”

Josh had told Bisesa something of de Morgan’s background. His family were failed aristocracy, who could trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror’s first assault on England, more than eight hundred years before, and who had carved a rich estate out of the defeated Saxon kingdoms. In the intervening centuries a “trait of greed and foolishness that transcends the generations,” in de Morgan’s own disarming words, had left the family penniless, though still with a kind of race memory of wealth and power. Ruddy said that in his experience the Raj was plagued by “chancers” like de Morgan. As far as Bisesa was concerned there was nothing to be trusted in de Morgan’s slicked-back black hair, and his darting, questing eyes.

Abdikadir clambered down from his stool. Dark, serious, focused, he switched his watch to calculator mode, and punched in the numbers he had recorded.

“So, Brainiac,” Casey called mockingly, “tell us what you’ve learned.”

Abdikadir settled to the dirt before Bisesa. “The Eye resists our probing, but there are things to measure nonetheless. First of all, the Eye is surrounded by a magnetic anomaly. I checked that with a compass from my survival kit.”

Casey grunted. “My compass has been haywire since we hit the dirt.”

Abdikadir shook his head. “It’s true you can’t find magnetic north; something peculiar seems to be happening to Earth’s magnetic field. But there’s nothing wrong with our compasses themselves.” He glanced up at the Eye. “The flux lines around that thing are packed together. A diagram of it would look like a knot in a piece of wood.”

“How come?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Bisesa leaned forward. “What else, Abdi?”

“I’ve been doing some high school geometry.” He grinned. “Dipping the thing in water was the only way I could think of to measure its volume—seeing how the water level in the bucket goes up and down.”

“Eureka!” de Morgan cried playfully. “Sir, you are the Archimedes de nos jours … ”

Abdikadir ignored him. “I took a dozen measurements, hoping to drive down the errors, but it still won’t be too hot. I can’t think of a way of getting the surface area at all. But my measurements of the radius and circumference are pretty good, I think.” He held up a jury-rigged set of calipers. “I adapted a laser sight from the chopper …”

“I don’t get it,” said Casey. “It’s just a sphere. If you know the radius you can work out the rest from all those formulae. The surface area is, what, four times pi times the radius squared …”

“You can work that out if you make the assumption that this sphere is like every other sphere you’ve encountered before,” Abdi said mildly. “But here it is floating in the air, like nothing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t want to make any assumptions about it; I wanted to check everything I could.”

Bisesa nodded. “And you found—”

“For a start, it is a perfect sphere.” He glanced up again. “And I mean perfect, within the tolerances even of my laser measurements, in every axis I tried. Even in 2037 we couldn’t shape any material to such a fantastic degree of precision.”

De Morgan nodded soberly. “An almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection.”

“Yes. But that’s just the start.” Abdikadir held up his watch so Bisesa could see its tiny screen. “Your high school geometry, Casey. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is … ?”

“Pi,” rumbled Casey. “Even a jock Christian knows that much.”