Resurgence

Tally computed tenth roots for the first million integers and waited impatiently. He knew what was happening. Julian Graves had once been two separate entities, Julius Graves and an interior mnemonic twin. The twin had originally been intended as no more than a memory augment, housed in an added pair of cerebral hemispheres inside Julius Graves’s big-domed head. The emergence of a second personality, Steven Graves, had been a surprise to everyone. The two had slowly merged, to become Julian Graves, but for certain tasks it was still better to maintain separation.

Like now. Steven had the computational talent, and it was of an order that even Tally had learned to respect. At quiet moments in the past they had indulged in calculation face-offs, and sometimes—to Tally’s amazement—Steven Graves held his own. They had discussed it, and decided that although E.C. had better circuit speeds than human neurons by a factor of ten to the fifteenth, Steven compensated for that by the specialized pattern recognition hardware built into the human brain, and by computational parallelism which Tally could not match.

Now Steven must be performing his own analysis of the data. That deduction was verified when Julian Graves blinked his blue eyes, nodded, and said, “Indeed, the planetoid does not appear to rotate with respect to the most distant parts of the universe. But the observations you have provided, like all measurements, are accurate only to within certain confidence limits. We feel obliged to point out that rotational speeds of objects follow statistical distributions. Thus there is a finite probability that a given rotation speed, no matter how small, will be encountered. That is what we are seeing here.”

“May I speak?”

* * *

But speaking had done no good at all. He had been unable to persuade Julian Graves that the non-rotating planetoid was worthy of investigation. Tally had terminated the discussion before it could go on too long. He was learning the ways of humans. Better to stop talking, take the Tally-ho on its way, and offer direct proof to Julian Graves that Tally was right and Steven was wrong.

Unfortunately that might be no easy task. The ship was closing fast on the planetoid, and the observation chamber at the front of the Tally-ho offered a direct view of what even E.C. had to admit was an unpromising object.

Tally’s find was so small that although gravity could hold it together, it could not impose the spherical shape common to large bodies. From a distance it appeared as an uneven chip of dark rock, about seventy kilometers long and perhaps half that along each of the other main axes. Tally used a high-magnification scope and searched for any sign of the Phages that often swarmed near Builder artifacts. He saw nothing. He performed a routine laser scan of the surface, and read the reflected spectrum. Rock, rock, and more rock. Of course, since the body was not turning on any axis he could examine only one side of it, but when Tally calculated the odds not even he could hold out hope that the other side would be any different.

It was time to give up, accept that Steven Graves was right and E.C. was wrong, and move on to his official mission of seeking the edge of the dark zone and the planet of the Marglotta. Except that while he had been busy examining the reflected spectrum, the Tally-ho had continued to close on its target. The navigation equipment would not permit a collision—it was far too smart for that—but when E.C. raised his head and glanced again through the port of the observation chamber, the chip of rock had grown to a great uneven lump that filled the whole sky.

And it had changed. The whole surface, uniform from a distance, was marked by a regular pattern of studs. It looked to Tally as though a meticulous, gigantic, insane, and overactive riveter had been given a free hand on the planetoid. He rejected that hypothesis on the basis of its improbability, and upon giving the surface a closer inspection realized that he had confused bulges with indents. Those were not studs, they were holes. The body was riddled with them. He glanced at the range monitor, estimated the angle subtended by one of the holes, and at once knew its diameter: 2.7 meters. More than wide enough to admit a suited human, but not nearly enough to permit the Tally-ho to enter.

So what now?

He had agreed to keep Julian Graves informed as to anything he found, but a message sent to Graves would surely lead to an undesirable result. E.C. would be told to stay where he was until the survival team specialists came to offer assistance. It would do no good to point out that Tally’s brain, if not his body, could survive an acceleration of hundreds of gees and temperatures up to four thousand degrees. That was more than could be said for any human, no matter how well trained.