Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

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.”

“Well, not in this case. The ratio for the Eye is three. Not about three, or a bit more than three—three, to laser precision. My error bars are so small it’s quite impossible that the ratio is actually pi, as it ought to be. Your formulae don’t work after all, you see, Casey. I get the same number for ‘pi’ from the volume. Although of course my reliability is way down; you can’t compare a laser with a bucket of dusty water …”

Bisesa stood and walked around the Eye, peering up at it. She continued to have an uneasy sense about it. “That’s impossible. Pi is pi. The number is embedded in the structure of our universe.”

“ Our universe, yes,” Abdikadir said.

“What do you mean?”

Abdikadir shrugged. “It seems that this sphere—though it is evidently here— is not quite of our universe. We seem to have stumbled into anomalies in time, Bisesa. Perhaps this is an anomaly in space.”

“If that’s so,” Casey rumbled, “who or what caused it? And what are we supposed to do about it?”

There was, of course, no answer.

Captain Grove came bustling up. “Sorry to trouble you, Lieutenant,” he said to Bisesa. “You’ll remember the scouting patrols I’ve been sending out—one of the sowars has reported something rather odd, to the north of here.”

“ ‘Odd,’ ” Casey said. “God love your British understatement!”

Grove was unperturbed. “You might be able to make more of it than any of my chaps … I wondered if you fancied a short excursion?”

“Hey, asshole, I need the john.” That was Sable, of course, yelling up from the descent compartment, welcoming Kolya to another day.

He had been dreaming of home, of Nadia and the boys. Hanging in his sleeping bag like a bat from a fruit tree, with only the dim red glow of low-power emergency lights around him, it took him a few moments to realize where he was. Oh. I am still here. Still in this half-derelict spacecraft, endlessly circling an unresponsive Earth. For a moment he floated, clinging to the last remnants of sleep.

He was in the living compartment, along with their spacesuits and other unnecessary gear, and surrounded by the junk from the Station that they still carried with them—they could hardly open the hatch to throw it out. His sleeping up here gave them all a little more space, or, to put it another way, stopped three stir-crazy cosmonauts from killing each other. But it was scarcely comfortable. He could still smell the rotting discarded underwear, the “Cossack jockstraps,” as Sable had put it.

He groaned, squirmed and pulled himself out of his sleeping bag. He made his way to the little toilet, opened it out from the wall, and activated the pumps that would draw his waste out into the emptiness of space. When they had realized they were going to be stuck on orbit, they had had to dig out this lavatory from under the heaps of garbage; their journey home had been meant to last only a few hours, and toilet breaks hadn’t been scheduled. This morning it took him a while to finish. He was dehydrated, and his urine was thick, almost painfully acidic, as if reluctant to leave his body.

Wearing only his longjohn underwear he found himself shivering. To maximize the Soyuz ’s endurance Musa had ordered that only essential systems should be run, at minimum power. So the ship had become progressively cold and damp. Black mildew was growing over the walls. The air, increasingly foul, was thick with dust, flaked-off skin, shaved-off bristle, and food debris, none of which, of course, settled out in the absence of gravity. Their eyes were gritty, and they all sneezed, all the time; yesterday Kolya had timed himself, and found he suffered twenty sneezes in a single hour.

The tenth day, he thought. Today they would complete another sixteen pointless orbits of the Earth, bringing their grand total, since the Station had winked out of existence, to perhaps a hundred and sixty.

He fixed his braslets to the tops of his legs. These elastic straps, a guard against fluid imbalances caused by microgravity, were adjusted to be tight enough to restrict the flow of fluids out of his legs, without being so tight that they stopped the flow in. Kolya pulled on his jumpsuit—actually another discard he had found in the trash piles in the living compartment.

Then he clambered down through the open hatch and into the descent compartment. Neither Musa nor Sable met his eyes; they were sick of the sight of each other. He swiveled in the air and slid into his left-side couch with a practiced ease. As soon as he was out of the way Sable pushed herself up through the hatch, and Kolya heard her banging around.

“Breakfast.” Musa pushed a tray through the air toward Kolya. On it were taped tubes and cans of food, already opened, half-eaten. They had long since finished up the small stash of food aboard the Soyuz, and had broken into the emergency rations meant to sustain them after they landed: tins of meat and fish, squeeze tubes of creamed vegetables and cheese, even a few boiled sweets. But it was hardly filling. Kolya ran his finger over every empty tin, and sucked stray crumbs out of the air.