Then, as Bowman's eyes grew accustomed to the nacreous glow that filled the heavens, he became aware of another detail. The sky was not, as he had thought at first glance, completely empty. Dotted overhead, quite motionless and forming apparently random patterns, were myriads of tiny black specks.

They were difficult to see, for they were mere points of darkness, but once detected they were quite unmistakable. They reminded Bowman of something – something so familiar, yet so insane, that he refused to accept the parallel, until logic forced it upon him.

Those black holes in the white sky were stars; he might have been looking at a photographic negative of the Milky Way.

Where in God's name am I? Bowman asked himself; and even as he posed the question, he felt certain that he could never know the answer. It seemed that space had been turned inside out: this was not a place for man. Though the capsule was comfortably warm, he felt suddenly cold, and was afflicted by an almost uncontrollable trembling. He wanted to close his eyes, and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him; but that was the act of a coward, and he would not yield to it.

The pierced and faceted planet slowly rolled beneath him, without any real change of scenery. He guessed that he was about ten miles above the surface, and should be able to see any signs of life with ease.

But this whole world was deserted; intelligence had come here, worked its will upon it, and gone its way again. Then he noticed, bumped above the flat plain perhaps twenty miles away, a roughly cylindrical pile of debris that could only be the carcass of a gigantic ship. It was too distant for him to see any details, and it passed out of sight within a few seconds, but he could make out broken ribs and dully gleaming sheets of metal that had been partly peeled off like the skin of an orange. He wondered how many thousands of years the wreck had lain here on this deserted checkerboard – and what manner of creatures had sailed it between the stars.

Then he forgot the derelict, for something was coming up over the horizon.

At first it looked like a flat disk, but that was because it was heading almost directly toward him. As it approached and passed beneath, he saw that it was spindle-shaped, and several hundred feet long. Though there were faintly visible bands here and there along its length, it was hard to focus upon them; the object appeared to be vibrating, or perhaps spinning, at a very rapid rate.

It tapered to a point at either end, and there was no sign of propulsion. Only one thing about it was familiar to human eyes, and that was its color. If it was indeed a solid artifact, and not an optical phantom, then its makers perhaps shared some of the emotions of men.

But they certainly did not share their limitations, for the spindle appeared to be made of gold.

Bowman moved his head to the rear-view system to watch the thing drop behind. It had ignored him completely, and now he saw that it was falling out of the sky down toward one of those thousands of great slots. A few seconds later it disappeared in a final flash of gold as it dived into the planet. He was alone again, beneath that sinister sky, and the sense of isolation and remoteness was more overwhelming than ever.

Then he saw that he also was sinking down toward the mottled surface of the giant world, and that another of the rectangular chasms yawned immediately below. The empty sky closed above him, the clock crawled to rest, and once again his pod was falling between infinite ebon walls, toward another distant patch of stars. But now he was sure that he was not returning to the Solar System, and in a flash of insight that might have been wholly spurious, he knew what this thing must surely be.

It was some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy.

42 – The Alien Sky

Far ahead, the walls of the slot were becoming dimly visible once more, in the faint light diffusing downward from some still hidden source. And then the darkness was abruptly whipped away, as the tiny space pod hurtled upward into a sky ablaze with stars.

He was back in space as he knew it, but a single glance told him that he was light-centuries from Earth.

He did not even attempt to find any of the familiar constellations that since the beginning of history had been the friends of man; perhaps none of the stars that now blazed around him had ever been seen by the unaided human eye.

Most of them were concentrated in a glowing belt, broken here and there with dark bands of obscuring cosmic dust, which completely circled the sky. It was like the Milky Way, but scores of times brighter; Bowman wondered if this was indeed his own galaxy, seen from a point much closer to its brilliant, crowded center.

He hoped that it was; then he would not be so far from home. But this, he realized at once, was a childish thought. He was so inconceivably remote from the Solar System that it made little difference whether he was in his own galaxy or the most distant one that any telescope had ever glimpsed.

He looked back to see the thing from which he was rising, and had another shock. Here was no giant, multifaceted world, nor any duplicate of Japetus. There was nothing – except an inky shadow against the stars, like a doorway opening from a darkened room into a still darker night. Even as he watched, that doorway closed.

It did not recede from him; it slowly filled with stars, as if a rent in the fabric of space had been repaired. Then he was alone beneath the alien sky.

The space pod was slowly turning, and as it did so it brought fresh wonders into view. First there was a perfectly spherical swarm of stars, becoming more and more closely packed toward the center until its heart was a continuous glow of light. Its outer edges were ill-defined – a slowly thinning halo of suns that merged imperceptibly into the background of more distant stars.

This glorious apparition, Bowman knew, was a globular cluster. He was looking upon something that no human eye had ever seen, save as a smudge of light in the field of a telescope. He could not remember the distance to the nearest known cluster, but he was sure that there were none within a thousand light-years of the Solar System.

The pod continued its slow rotation, to disclose an even stranger sight – a huge red sun, many times larger than the Moon as seen from Earth. Bowman could look straight into its face without discomfort; judging by its color, it was no hotter than a glowing coal. Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow – incandescent Amazons, meandering for thousands of miles before they lost themselves in the deserts of this dying sun.

Dying? No – that was a wholly false impression, born of human experience and the emotions aroused by the hues of sunset, or the glow of fading embers. This was a star that had left behind the fiery extravagances of its youth, had raced through the violets and blues and greens of the spectrum in a few fleeting billions of years, and now had settled down to a peaceful maturity of unimaginable length. All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.

The pod had ceased to roll; the great red sun lay straight ahead. Though there was no sense of motion, Bowman knew that he was still gripped by whatever controlling force had brought him here from Saturn.

All the science and engineering skill of Earth seemed hopelessly primitive now, against the powers that were carrying him to some unimaginable fate.

He stared into the sky ahead, trying to pick out the goal toward which be was being taken – perhaps some planet circling this great sun. But there was nothing that showed any visible disk or exceptional brightness; if there were planets orbiting here he could not distinguish them from the stellar background.