Napier appeared with two bulbs of coffee, one of which he handed to Garamond. “The weather section reports that the local average density of space is increasing according to their predictions. That means we should be able to pick up enough speed to reach the outer planet in not much more than a hundred hours.”

Garamond nodded his approval. “The probe torpedo should be fitted out by then.”

“Sammy Yamoto wants to lead a manned descent to the surface.”

“That could be dangerous — we’ll have to get a better report on the surface conditions before authorizing anything like that.” Garamond began to sip his coffee, then frowned. “Why should our Chief Astronomer want to risk his neck out there? I thought he was still wrapped up in his globular filigree of force fields.”

“He is, but he reckons he can deduce a few things about how Orbitsville was built by examining the outer planet.”

“Tell him to keep me posted.” Garamond looked at Napier over the mouthpiece of his coffee bulb and saw an uncharacteristic look of hesitancy on the big man’s face. “Anything else coming to the boil?”

“Shrapnel seems to have gone AWOL.”

“Shrapnel? The shuttle pilot?”

“That’s right.”

“So he took off. Isn’t that what we expected?”

“I expected him to do it once, but not twice. He disappeared for the best part of a day soon after the Starflight crowd got here. It was during the time he was on ground detachment so I decided he had gone back to Starflight with a hard luck story, and I wrote him off — but he was back on duty again that night.”

That surprised you?“

“It did, especially as he came back without the chip on his shoulder. His whole attitude seemed to have changed for the better, and since then he’s been working like a beaver.”

“Maybe he discovered he didn’t like the Starflight HQ staff.”

Napier looked unconvinced. “He didn’t object or try to cry off when orders were posted for this flight, but he isn’t on board.”

“I’d just forget about him.”

“I’m trying to,? Napier said, ”but the Bissendorf isn’t a sailing ship tied up in a harbour. A man who is able to come and go unofficially must have some organization behind him. It makes me think Shrapnel had contacts in Starflight.“

“Let’s have some whisky,” Garamond suggested. “We’re both getting too old for this type of work.”

Even before it was denied the light and heat of its own sun, the outer planet of the Pengelly’s Star system had been a bleak, sterile place.

Less than half the size of Earth, and completely devoid of atmosphere, it was a ball of rock and dust which patrolled a lonely orbit so far out that its parent sun appeared as little more than a bright star casting barely perceptible shadows in an inert landscape. And when that sun vanished it made very little difference to the planet. Its surface became a little colder and a little darker, but the cooling stresses were not great enough to cause anything as spectacular as movements of the crust. Nothing stirred in the blackness, except for infrequent puffs of dust from meteor strikes, and the uneventful millennia continued to drag by as they had always done.

Using its radar fans like the feelers of a giant insect, the Bissendorf groped its way into orbit around the invisible sphere which was the dead world.

The ship was in the form of three equal cylinders joined together, with the central one projecting forward from the other two by almost half its length. The command deck, administrative and technical levels, living quarters and workshops were contained in the central cylinder. This exposed position meant the inhabited regions of the vessel could have been subjected to an intense bombardment during high speed flight, when — due to the ship’s own velocity — even stationary motes of interstellar dust registered as fantastically energetic particles. The problem had been solved by using the same magnetic deflection techniques which guided the particles into the ramjet’s thermonuclear reactors. Both the Bissendorf’s flux pumps shaped their magnetic lines of force into the form of a protective shield around which the charged particles flowed harmlessly into the engines.

An inherent disadvantage of the system was that a starship could never coast at high speed — with the flux pumps closed down the crew would quickly have been fried in self-induced radiation. Communications with a ship which was under way were also precluded, and under these conditions even radar sensing could not be employed. The approach to the dark planet had been made at modest interplanetary speeds, however, and the Bissendorf was able to proceed by using its main drive in short bursts, between which it was possible to run position checks. Because it was designed for exploration work in unknown planetary systems, the vessel was further equipped with conventional nuclear thrusters and a limited amount of stored reaction mass which gave it extra capability for close manoeuvring. The task of slipping into stable orbit was therefore accomplished quickly and efficiently, even though the target planet remained invisible to the Bissendorf’s crew.

It took only one pass to enable the long-range sensors and recording banks to answer all of Garamond’s questions.

“This is pretty disappointing,” Sammy Yamoto said as he examined the glowing numerals and symbols of the preliminary analysis. “The planet has no atmosphere now and appears never to have had one at any time in its past. Its surface is completely barren. I was hoping for the remains of some kind of plant life which would have told us whether the radiation from the primary was cut off suddenly or over a period of years.”

Chief Science Officer O’Hagan said, “We can still do a lot with samples of dust and rock from the surface.”

Yamoto nodded without enthusiasm. “I guess so, but botanical evidence would have been so precise. So nice. With nothing but inorganic evidence we’re going to have margins of error of what? A thousand years or more?”

“On an astronomical timescale that’s not bad.”

“It’s not bad, but it’s not…”

“Is it the opinion of the group,” Garamond put in, “that a manned descent is still worth while?”

O’Hagan glanced around the other science officers who were anchored close to the information display, then shook his head. “At this stage it would be enough to drop a robolander and take three or four cores. Somebody can always come back if the cores prove to be of exceptional interest, but I don’t hold out much hope.”

“Right — it’s decided we send down one probe.” Garamond used his end-of-meeting voice. “Get it down there and back again as quickly as possible, and include flares and holorecording gear in the package — I want to be able to present certain people with visible evidence.”

Denise Serra, the physicist, raised her eyebrows. “I heard the Starflight Information Bureau was propagating some fantasy about a beautiful civilization being snuffed out in its prime, but I didn’t believe it. I mean, who would swallow an idea like that?”

“You’d be surprised,” Garamond told her ruefully. “I’ve been learning that there are different kinds of naivety. We’re subject to one kind — it’s an occupational hazard associated with spending half your life cut off from the big scene — but there are others just as dangerous.”

“That may be so, but to believe that the Clowns created Orbitsville!”

“Genuine belief isn’t required — the story is only a formula which allows certain manipulations to be carried out. We all know the square root of minus one is an unreal quantity, and yet we’ve all used it when it suited us to do so. Same thing.”

Denise’s eyes twinkled. “It isn’t the same.”

“I know, but my statement was an example of the general class of thing we were talking about.”