The Mote in God's Eye

“Yes, sir.”

“Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you’ve got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked.” Cargill smiled at Staley’s puzzled look. “Let me tell you about the one I got in the Book…”

For a midshipman it was always school time. Staley would hold higher ranks than this one, if he had the ability, and if he lived.

Cargill finished his story and looked at the time. “Get some sleep, Staley. You’ll have the con after turnover.”

From a distance the asteroid looked dark, rough, and porous. It rotated once in thirty-one hours; oddly slow, according to Buckman. There was no sign of activity: no motion, no radiation, no anomalous neutrino flux. Horst Staley searched for temperature variations but there were none.

“I think that confirms it,” he reported. “The place must be empty. A life form that evolved on Mote Prime would need heat, wouldn’t it, sir?”

“Yes.”

The cutter moved in. Stippling which had made the rock look porous at a distance became pocks, then gaping holes of random size. Meteors, obviously. But so many?

“I told you the Trojan points were crowded,” Buckman said happily. “Probably the asteroid passes through the thick of the Trojan cluster regularly… only, give me a close-up of that big pock there, Cargill.”

Two powers higher, and the screen was half filled by a black pit. Smaller pits showed around it.

“No sign of a crater rim,” Cargill said.

“Noticed that, did you? Damn thing’s hollow. That’s why the density is so low. Well, it’s not inhabited now, but it must have been once. They even went to the trouble of giving it a comfortable rotation.” Buckman turned. “Cargill, we’ll want to search through that thing.”

“Yes, but not you. A Navy crew will board the rock.”

“This is my field of competence, damn it!”

“Your safety’s mine, Doctor. Lafferty, take us around the rock.”

The back of the asteroid was one enormous cup-shaped crater.

“Pocked with little craters… but they are craters. Not holes,” said Cargill. “Doctor, what do you make of that?”

“I can’t imagine. Not if it’s a natural formation—”

“It was moved!” Staley exclaimed.

“Oddly enough, just what I was thinking,” Cargill said. “The asteroid was moved using thermonuclear devices, exploding the bombs progressively in the same crater to channel the blast. It’s been done before. Get me a radiation reading, Midshipman.”

“Aye aye, sir.” He left, and returned in a minute. “Nothing, sir. It’s cold.”

“Really?” Cargill went to check that for himself. When he finished he looked at his instruments and frowned. “Cold as a pirate’s heart. If they used bombs, they must have been goddamn clean. That shouldn’t surprise me.”

The cutter circled farther around the flying mountain.

“That could be an air lock. There.” Staley pointed at a raised cap of stone surrounded by an archery target in faded orange paint.

“Right, but I doubt if we’d get it open. We’ll go in through one of the meteor holes. Still… we’ll look it over. Lafferty, take us in.”

In their reports they called it Beehive Asteroid. The rock was all many-sided chambers without floors linked by channels too small for men, all choked with dried asymmetrical mummies. Whatever miracles the builders had made, artificial gravity was not one of them. The corridors went in all directions; the larger chambers and storage rooms were studded everywhere with knobs for hand holds, anchor points for lines, storage niches.

The mummies floated everywhere, thin and dried, with gaping mouths. They varied from a meter to a meter and a half in height. Staley chose several and sent them back to the cutter.

There was machinery too, all incomprehensible to Staley and his men, all frozen fast by vacuum cementing. Staley had one of the smaller machines torn from the wall. He chose it for strangeness, not potential use; none of the machines was complete. “No metal,” Staley reported. “Stone flywheels and things that look like they might be integrated circuits—ceramics with impurities, that kind of thing. But very little metal, sir.”

They moved on at random. Eventually they reached a central chamber. It was gigantic, and so was the machine that dominated it. Cables that might have been power superconductors led from the wreck, convincing Staley that this was the asteroid’s power source; but it showed no trace of radiation.

They worked through narrow passages between incomprehensible blocks of stone, and found a large metallic box.

“Cut into that,” Staley ordered.

Lafferty used his cutting laser. They stool around watching the narrow green beam do nothing to the silvery casing. Staley wondered: where was the energy going? Could they be pumping power into it, somehow? Warmth on his face hinted at the answer.

He took a thermometer reading. The casing was just less than red-hot, all over. When Lafferty turned off the laser the casing cooled rapidly; but it maintained the same temperature at every point.