Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [0]
Tonight CAPTAIN Picard came back again to his mother’s old admonition: “Be careful what you wish for, Jean-Luc. You may get it.”
Sitting in his ready room, he again played the record of the Enterprise’s brief first passage through the Dyson Sphere. He had played it so many times now that his mind was numbed by it, numbed by what a later computer analysis of that scan had revealed. He had believed the Sphere’s interior to be completely lifeless, but a detailed examination of the data by newer and more advanced computers had shown a variety - a nearly infinite variety, Picard supposed-of plants and vegetation.
But what they had at first concluded remained true: The Dyson Sphere had seemingly been abandoned by whatever life forms had constructed it. The later analysis had revaeled no signs of higher life forms, of intelligent life.
Picard thought he knew every river, every stream, every wrinkle in the world’s topography, but he understood that the sphere’s size was as every bit as deceiving as it was overpowering, and that for all he thought he knew, there was infinitely more he did not know. The only objects the ships recorders and the later computer analysis might possibly have missed were a couple of twenty-mile long elephants. What had to be a braided stream was really a river wider that the earth and descending more than two hundred million kilometers from its head waters; gazing across whole light minutes of land and sea could draw even the most seasoned explorers into moments of madness.
Picard closed the record of the earlier passage through the Dyson Sphere and opened his captain’s log to review the most recent entry.
CAPTAIN’S LOG, STARSHIP
ENTERPRISE
Stardate: 47321.6
More than a year has passed since we found Montgomery Scott’s ship, the Jenolen, crashed on the outer hull of the Dyson Sphere. More than a year, during which bureaucratic procedure delayed my plans for a return to the Sphere.
We cannot go in until I have assembled my team of Federation-qualified archaeologists. I want scholars who are also efficient excavators-which means calling on the assistance of Hortas. They can move through rock as effortlessly as a man walks through air. Unfortunately, they are as stubborn as they are efficient-which has meant more bureaucratic delays.
Two science vessels met us at the end of our first encounter, met us near the Great Wall as we were departing, but the Federation had restricted their exploration of the Sphere entirely to surface mapping and long-range subspace scans. They were under orders not even to try entering Dyson.
Our previous method of entering and exiting the artifact had actually required the destruction of a vessel. The Jenolen held the door to Dyson open while we, in the Enterprise, just barely escaped, having no choice but to fire upon and destroy the vessel blocking our path. We found no obvious way of triggering the exit lock from the inside, and once triggered from outside, a vessel would be hauled in by automatic tractor beams, and the door would close.
Picard closed the log and rubbed at his forehead. He needed a break, a respite from Dyson’s vastness, even if it was only a few minutes’ escape to a cup of hot tea. Picard heard his mother’s voice in his mind once more: Be careful what you wish for, Jean-Luc. You may get it.
He smiled to himself as he realized be was a latter-day Spyridon Marinatos. The legendary archaeologist would have appreciated Yvette Picard’s warning, when during the summer of 1967 he tunneled into the lost city of Thera, making the discovery of his dreams, and realizing in that same instant that more than his entire lifetime would be required to excavate it. The city was buried under sixty meters of volcanic tephra, and it spread more than two kilometers wide.
Yet for all its overwhelming size, and for all of Spyridon Marinatos’s dismay, Thera could easily have been flung into a comer and never found again, had it been situated near one of the “little” doorways that led into Dyson.
The Sphere was dead, of course. Every analyst had