Keaflyn returned to his own ship a few hours later and continued toward Lumon's Star alone. His Neg did not make its presence felt during the remainder of the trip. Perhaps, he surmised, it was recuperating from the punishment it had received aboard the Calcutta.
But when he broke warp one hundred million miles away from Lumon's Star, the now-familiar ache settled once more in his body, bringing with it a sense of despair. He laughed, and that action hurt his chest. Nevertheless, he pitched into his investigative program, trying to ignore the Neg's effort to bring him to a discouraged halt before he ever began. Perhaps, he mused, his pleasure-impress would be of some help to him now. It seemed to clear a mental area around it from the Neg's influence.
"Kelly," he said to the ship, "launch the Lumon probe."
"Okay, Mark . . . it's on its way."
"Good." Keaflyn was gazing at the magnified image of Lumon's Star on the main viewscreen. It was a white star of approximately the same luminosity as Sol. A planet circling it at Keaflyn's distance could have enjoyed an Earth-type climate, but it had no planets.
Also, it had no sunspots, and thus no sunspot cycle. It was not, so far as the most sensitive instruments could detect, variable. This made it unique among all stars humanity had observed with any closeness.
Lumon's Star was visible from Terra. It was one of the myriad points of light that had filled telescopic photoplates as far back as the twentieth century, when Earth astronomers aimed their big instruments into the glow of the Milky Way. Among so many companions, it had gone unnoticed and untamed.
But just under two light-years away from it was the system of Clevlulex, where humanity in catlike bodies had watched their strange neighbor with intelligent, more-or-less objective eyes for the equivalent of eight thousand terrestrial years. Astrology was an ancient and honored study of the Cl'exians, far more central to their culture than it ever had become among the erect humans of Earth. The learned cats of Clevlulex had observed, recorded, and wondered at the never-changing aspect of the bright star in their northern skies, and had named it for a steadfast mythological character, Lumon.
Only after the exploratory teams from Earth began to arrive was the star's uniqueness in the explored area of the galaxy fully appreciated. Then it was added to the short list of phenomena called stabilities because they showed no signs of being influenced by the processes of change that were at work on everything else within human experience.
There had been some argument about putting Lumon's Star on the list. How could a body that was producing and pouring out a constant flood of energy be a stability? the opponents demanded. Nuclear fusion was going on inside the star, transmuting its elements and therefore changing it. By definition, it could not be a stability.
But Cl'exian records were definite. So far as appearance was concerned, Lumon's Star had acted like a stability for eight thousand years. How could a radiating star be a stability? How could anything be a stability? Lumon's proponents retorted. Entropy was doing its work on all normal objects, merely more visibly and spectacularly so in a star than in a cold chunk of stone. Thus, when the arguments were over, the star was on the list. But the fact that Lumon's Star did radiate, Keaflyn mused, had a lot to do with his decision to start his investigation with it. An active process of energy-production was easier to study than inert matter that insisted on remaining inert.
"All detectors on full, Kelly?" he asked.
"Yes, Mark. The probe is now in the lower corona."
"Report on redundancy?"
"Still one hundred percent for all systems, Mark."
"Good. If hyper-redundancy works as I think it will, that star's going to start giving up some secrets in a very few minutes now."
Stellar probes, resistant against the extreme energies and pressures inside stars, were standard items of astrophysical research. The probes had failed, however, when sent into Lumon's Star. Why they failed nobody knew. They simply quit reporting shortly after entering the star proper, in what was presumed to be an upper layer of turbulent convection.
Keaflyn's probe was not standard. All of its systems featured hyper-redundant circuitry—not two or three duplications of means to handle each necessary function, but on the order of twenty thousand duplications. Each component was in actuality an array of similar minicomponents, any one of which was sufficient to keep the component's function going. And the arrays were joined to each other through in-service-seeking circuitry blocks, so that even if only one of the minicomponents remained operational at each step, the circuitry would seek these out, link them together, and the probe would continue to do its work.
"The probe is now subsurface, Mark," the ship reported.
"Okay." Keaflyn felt a surge of excitement that nullified much of his physical pain and vanquished what lingered of his feeling of despair. He had been working toward this moment, this actual test of a stability, for a long time. This was the payoff, and his emotional response to it was too strong and too positive for his Neg to override.
He studied the readouts with a face-splitting grin, but depended on the Kelkontar's summation circuits for interpretation of what he was seeing. "Trace instabilities?" he asked.
"No significant indications," the ship replied. "All turbulence patterns are standing."
He nodded. Standard probes had lasted long enough inside Lumon's Star to report that, in the upper layer, energy was being carried outward by swirling flows of matter. But, unlike the comparable layer of normal stars, these flows seemed permanent, unshifting, unchanging. Unturbulent turbulence, he thought with a chuckle.
"Redundancy?"
"Ninety-eight point two percent," the ship replied.
"Any pattern in the loss there?"
A pause. "Perhaps . . . yes, Mark, it's more definite now. A definite statistical indication that the destructive agent has a small cross section."
Keaflyn blinked. "You mean our probe is being pinpricked to death?"
"Yes, in a manner of speaking. Redundancy now eighty-six percent. The destructive cross sections are approximately atomic in size."
"I can't imagine an atom smashing its way through the probe's defenses," said Mark. "But of course a stabilitytype atom . . . The probe's kinetic sensor is picking up the bombardment, isn't it?"
"No. There is no indication of internal atomic bombardment, Mark. Redundancy now seventy-two percent, with probe entering the radiative flow zone."
"Contramatter atoms," Keaflyn hazarded hurriedly, very conscious of the speeded decline of the probe's redundancy. "What energy level inside the probe now?"
"Twelve percent above normal, Mark."
"I must have contramatter on the brain," he muttered.
"It can't be that or the probe would be plasma by now." He cast about frantically for some other possible answer, something to check on while the probe was still operational. "Is anything reading unexplainably?" he demanded, hoping he was not asking the question in a manner the ship's computer could not interpret.
"Yes, Mark. The AV shield is drawing decreasing power but is remaining intact. Redundancy thirty-eight percent."
The AV shield? That was a modified warpfield. It could draw less power only if its area were reduced. And that just didn't happen, except when warpfields overlapped each other, as when two ships in warpflight came together for docking or . . .
"Kelly," he snapped, "could those pinpoints be tiny warps of some kind?"
"I don't know, Mark. Warps require power supplies and formulators. Redundancy, nineteen percent."
"Our warps do," said Keaflyn, "but tiny, atom-sized warps seem to fit what's destroying the probe. Warpicles! Particle warps! We've used the warp phenomenon for centuries, but have never quantized it! Does that fit what's happening?"
After a hesitation the Kelkontar replied, "So far as our probe is equipped to detect events, Mark, that could be the answer."
"Let's try to pin it down," Keaflyn said hurriedly. "Signal the probe to modify by switching the trace-increment monitor into the AV power link."
"I can't, Mark. Redundancy is now zero."
The ache moved back into Keaflyn's body. "The probe's dead?"
"Yes."
"Well . . . maybe when we analyze all the data we did get . . . Did our probe have any detectable effect on the star's behavior?"
"No."
Keaflyn shrugged. That was par for the course. Any ordinary star would show at least a detectable pimple of reaction to the heavy-element content of a probe. Lumon's Star never did.
Which could be important, it occurred to him.
"Kelly, how could a star ignore a cold chunk of heavy elements the size of a probe?" he asked.
"I don't know, Mark."
"It could ignore it by warping a tiny hole through it every time a particle of the star's mass needed to travel through the area occupied by the probe. The particle is preceded by a warp to clear it a path. The more dense the population of particles, the more warpicles there are slashing through the probe, and the faster the probe loses its redundancy."
The ache was easing as Keaflyn exuberantly fitted the pattern together.
"That could even explain how a star can be a stability," he chortled happily. "The main part of the job would be keeping the same balance between hydrogen and helium. It's the change of the H-He ratio that moves a star along its evolutionary track. If a superfluous helium atom is warped away . . . somewhere . . . the instant it is created, and hydrogen atoms are warped in to replace it, the star could go on forever without changing. Right?"
"What you propose seems sound, Mark, granting the existence of the warpicles." After a pause the ship added, "Also, you assume the warpicles are characteristically selective of the kinds of atoms they remove from and bring into the star."
Keaflyn nodded. "I have a notion they would be. A big warp isn't selective, but a warp quantum . . . well, take a light quantum for example. It has a particular wave length, a particular energy level. Ordinary light combines the whole spectrum, from high-energy violet to lowenergy red quanta. Or you can produce monochromatic light—all quanta of about the same wavelength. I think we've found the analog of that here . . . warpicles of the right energy to drop hydrogen but pick up any heavier element. I'll have to do some higher-math chicken-tracks to pin it down, of course. And after that . . . "
He hesitated, his forehead frowning while his lips kept their tight smile.
Time! So much, suddenly, to try to do in one lifetime! He had planned to investigate the stabilities at a leisurely pace, taking a couple of centuries, perhaps. Now he might well be limited to less than half a century. Under other circumstances his present body's useful span could be stretched considerably longer than that, but he had to expect physical inroads from the pleasure-impress and from the impinging Neg. Such traumas caused physiological imbalances that speeded the aging process. So . . . fifty years at the most.
"We'd better go to Locus by way of Bensor," he muttered, "so I can get an instrument shop started on putting together a second Lumon probe designed to provide warpicle data. Then, after I finish with Locus we can come back here."
"Are you instructing me to warp for Bensor, Mark?" the ship asked.
Keaflyn hesitated. Was there nothing he could improvise, right now, with which to investigate warpicles? Something that would enable him to save some time? Not likely, he had to admit. That job was going to require a highly precise, thoroughly specialized, very tough piece of equipment. Something well planned, not something thrown together on the spur of the moment. He shrugged. "I suppose so, Kelly. Set warp for—"
"Planetary body detected, Mark," the ship interrupted him.
"What?"
"A planetary body," the ship repeated, "orbiting Lumon's Star at ninety million miles. You may observe it on the screen if you like."
Keaflyn turned to stare at the image. "This star has no planets, Kelly," he said reprovingly while reading detector indicators stating that the object was 47.6 million miles from the ship, was of 1.142 Earth-mass, and had an albedo of .493. He chuckled. "That planet isn't there. And why didn't you tell me it was there before now?"
"Because I did not detect it until now, Mark. Presumably, it was not there previous to detection."
"Kelly, I marvel at your incapacity for astonishment," Keaflyn laughed. "A whole planet suddenly turns up out of nowhere and you tell me about it as routinely as if you were notifying me of lunchtime. Planets don't jump about like warping spaceships. Or do they?"
"Not to my knowledge, Mark. Energies required for the establishment of a planetary warp are fourteen orders of magnitude greater than that released by a Sol-type star. The highest energy level usefully harnessed by humanity is only—"
"Hey! Mark Keaflyn!"
"Huh? Who said that?"
"It was a call from the planetary body, Mark," the ship reported. "It overrode my vocal circuits and—"
"Hi, Mark! Come on down!"
Keaflyn blinked. "Who's calling, and from where?" he demanded, slightly miffed by the speaker's poor comm etiquette.
"You can call me Lafe. As for where I am"—the voice paused for a chuckle—"this place is rivaled only by God in the number of its names. Avalon will do. Tell your ship to bring you down, Mark."
"The . . . the legendary world of Avalon?" Keaflyn stumbled, recalling tales of early spacemen who had claimed inexplicable visits to an elusive world of that name. And even older legends . . .
"This is the place," the voice replied. "Also called Valhalla by some, Paradise by quite a few, and the State of Nirvana by many mystics with an inkling of the truth. Look, are you coming down or aren't you?"
"Sure. Why not?" giggled Keaflyn, his hysteria mounting. "On the other hand, why? I'm a busy man, Lafe."
"If you're interested in stabilities, you ought to look this place over," the voice replied. "Also, we want to take a look at you."
"You mean Avalon's a stability?"
"What else?"
"All right. I'm on my way." To his ship he said, "Head for the planet, Kelly."
Well, why not an Avalon? he mused as he watched the planetary image swell on the viewscreen. Why not a heaven? Earthmen had encountered stranger—and far less anticipated—things than that since achieving interstellar flight. And it made sense that heaven would be a stability, perhaps the key stability as far as his investigation was concerned. Filled with angels who were themselves stabilities, no doubt, and who could answer questions about themselves as phenomena . . .
"Hey, Lafe," he called.
"Yeah?" the voice came back.
"Am I dead?"
"Certainly not! You're just visiting, not staying."
"Good. Suddenly I wasn't sure. Where do I land my ship?"
"Don't worry about that. We'll put an appropriate site under you."
Keaflyn shrugged. "Land anywhere, Kelly," he instructed the ship.