To See the Stars

LAWRENCE SCHIMEL & MARK A. GARLAND

Can you believe how dark this is?" Jerina asked, holding her hand before her face and unable to

see it.

"Shh," Mitchell hissed back. He stared up at the stars displayed on the inside of the exhibit's domed ceiling, listening to the lecturer in his earphones. "... generally lasting anywhere from six to twelve hours in most places of old Earth, there were some spots in which night lasted for a full six months, followed by an equal period of daytime.

"As most of you are learning this week, our Dyson sphere was constructed to harness all the solar energy that was escaping out into space. This allowed us to stop using other, dangerous sources of energy, such as nuclear fusion. In the next room ..."

The lights switched on and the stars winked out. "I wish we could see them for real," Mitchell said aloud.

"No, you don't!" Jerina scolded. "That would be the last thing you'd ever see, and you know it. Besides, you'd freeze to death out in the darkness - because there wouldn't be any sunlight." She shivered at the thought. "Come on. I don't want to miss the nuclear exhibit. I hear the holographs of Chernobyl are spec­tacular."

Mitchell nodded. It was well known that if you went outside the Dyson sphere (which nobody could) and if you did find yourself face to face with the universe, the pull from the stars would drag you away. You would fall helplessly forever and ever.

So far as Mitchell knew, no one had been outside the Dyson sphere in two thousand years. No one who had lived to tell about it. For all of that, though, questions remained . ..

Jerina had never been on the tour before; he had practically grown up here. His father was the insti­tute's senior trustee. By secretly using his father's codes, Mitchell had found places he was certain no one was supposed to know about.

The tour included the space exhibits and a holo-video showing how all the planets, moons, rocks, dust, and countless comets had been combined to make the Dyson sphere's thin shell of solar panels, like a giant egg with the sun as its yolk. A strip around the middle was thick enough to live on, an area many times the surface of old Earth.

"Were there ever any missions to other stars?" some­one asked.

"No," the guide replied. "We sent probes to all the neighboring stars and there is no life. Here is where the human race belongs, safe from foolishness and the cold, empty depths of space."

"Why weren't the people who built the sphere sucked away by the pull from the stars?" Mitchell asked, as he always did.

"Many were," the guide replied, frowning. "But the pull is much stronger now than it was then, thousands of years ago. No one could survive such an attempt today."

The tour proceeded to the artifacts room, where hundreds of antiques were kept, including tools and equipment used to build the sphere. There was even a mock-up of the living quarters on a space station. In one glass case in the corner hung a row of perfectly preserved pure white space suits. Mitchell was quite familiar with one of them ...

"Hey, come on!" Jerina called, waiting for him. "We'll

miss the rest!"

"Maybe not," Mitchell said.

"What do you mean?" Jerina asked.

He had thought about it for years; with his father's codes he could get into the institute any time he wanted. But he'd always been too young, too little, too scared. And he needed the right person to . . . help.

"I mean," Mitchell said, "we might be coming back."

At 22:00 his bedroom lights dimmed and the windows turned opaque, throwing the room into near darkness. Mitchell rolled on to his side and stared at the blank window. If I were living on old Earth, he thought, / would see stars when I looked outside. If he looked at the sky now, he would see only the bright sun shining down.

Mitchell had watched all the video-disks about sun­sets in the library, but he still couldn't imagine the possibility of no sun at all. In the videos the sun looked as if it fell out of the sky! He wanted to see the sun move through the sky, see twilight, when the sky was balanced between day and night. And the moon! Oh, to have a moon up in the sky! Parts of the Dyson sphere were made from pieces of the moon. Would living in one of those areas make him the man in the moon? According to the video-disks, people had thought the craters of the moon's surface looked like a face. And children believed the 

moon was made of cheese! Did they think it had been put out in orbit to keep it fresh, where space would act like a giant vacuum-sealed refrigerator?

They also called the moon blue sometimes, when it shone pearly white as always. Colors on old Earth had nothing to do with reality, it seemed. Or had they?

There was no way for him to know, just as there was no way to know what it was like to see the stars for real. You would first have to find a way out of the sphere, and everyone knew that all the spacelock exits had been sealed centuries ago. Then you would have to find a way to stay alive in space long enough to get a look around. And everyone knew that was impossi­ble, too .. .

But Mitchell had tried the space suit in the artifacts room, charging it with power and fluids and oxygen culled from his school lab supplies. He'd even con­structed a small receiver that operated on the suit's radio frequency.

And in one of the very secret places he had been to lately, he was pretty sure, he had found something else that still worked, too .. .

Mitchell needed just one more thing: help. He wasn't sure Jerina would go along with his plan, or if he could trust her, but as he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, he decided it was worth a try.

"You're crazy!" Jerina said. "You'll be sucked away by the pull. You want me to help you kill yourself!"

"The space suits protected them when they built the sphere," Mitchell argued. "And there aren't supposed to be any working spacelocks anymore, but I've found one!"

Jerina twisted her mouth, interested. "So?"

"So maybe what they say about the pull isn't quite true, either. Maybe it was just a story created to keep people from wanting to leave, only people have been saying it for so long everyone believes it. All I know is, I've got to find out. And I need you to help me."

Jerina looked scared, but the flicker in her eye was definitely getting brighter. "I don't have to go outside too, do I?"

"No," he said. "You just have to open the spacelock."

"The stars are going to suck you away," Jerina said quietly, "and then your father and my father are going to kill me."

"Maybe," Mitchell said. "But when he finds out I've been using his codes, mine's going to kill me anyway." Mitchell looked away. "So, will you help?"

"Okay," she told him, beginning to grin. "I'll do it."

 
The suit worked perfectly. Mitchell was too short for it, really, and barely strong enough to move the metal joints, but he could move his arms enough to operate the external controls, and he could see through the faceplate if he stood on tiptoe. He had hooked a steel cable to the suit, a tether line of designer carbon that he was sure must be a hundred times stronger than any­thing they had used back when the sphere was built.

"Start the sequence," he said over his suit radio. Jerina stood at the spacelock's control console, nerv­ously waiting. They'd left the room lights low, so that an increase in energy consumption would not be de­tected until the lock actually started to operate. After that, there wasn't much that anybody could do. Not until Mitchell came back inside, assuming he did . . .

Jerina touched the console and one entire wall of the little room slowly opened, revealing a long, empty corridor.

"Okay," Mitchell said. "I'm going in." He lumbered forward, teetering in the huge, bulky suit and fighting against its weight. "Now!" he cried. The door closed again and he was completely alone. "Can you still hear me?" he asked.

There was silence, then at last Jerina's voice said, "Yes." Mitchell looked down the dimly lit corridor and watched the outer door start to open, right to left.

"It's working," he panted, anxious now, shaking. He rushed toward the wall, groping for something to hook his tether onto. The wall was completely smooth. The outer door opened further, then disappeared altogether, a square of utter blackness and countless, genuine stars. Mitchell was floating, being pulled slowly out toward space, and there was nothing he could do to stop it!

As he drifted free of the Dyson sphere into the void, Mitchell twisted his head from side to side, desper­ately looking for a handhold. Rows of fist-sized metal rings lined the outer surface beside the opening. Mitchell reached out with the cable's hook, trying for the nearest ring, and missed. He tried again, straining, even though there was nothing to push against. This time the hook caught.

Through the edge of the suit's visor Mitchell watched as the line uncurled for forty meters, then went taut. He held his breath and braced himself, waiting for the line to give, for the stars to pull him away with a suction not even the strongest materials could with­stand.

He waited, suspended above infinity at the end of the line, and nothing happened.

"I'm okay," he told Jerina. "The line is holding." He could hear her heave a great sigh of relief as he turned his attention to the stars. Billions of them. Brilliant, filling the universe with fierce, sparkling white light. Then he felt the pull growing strong, stronger than anything he could have imagined. Strong enough, he knew now, to sever the finest tethers, to overcome the greatest obstacles, to ultimately break any bonds that a human might ever know or imagine . ..

"What are you mumbling about?" Jerina asked, the sound of panic in her voice. "What's happening?" Mitchell realized he had been thinking out loud.

"The pull," he explained, "it's real. But the stars aren't pulling on the outside of me, they're pulling on the inside, inside my mind, inside every part of me."

"You're sounding crazy now," Jerina said. "Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not," Mitchell said with a grin. "But it's nothing to worry about."

"Are you coming back inside?" Jerina urged him.

"Yes," Mitchell replied, "but only for a while. Jerina, I want you to try it."

He heard Jerina gasp. "You said I wouldn't have to!"

Mitchell smiled and started pulling himself back in.