Chapter 38 The Watcher

There's been no reaction to my signals, and every time I fly over, I'm a bit further away from TMA-2. At the moment my closest approach is a hundred kilometres. That will increase slowly as Japetus turns beneath me, then it will drop back to zero. I'll pass directly over it in thirty days, but by that time it will be in darkness.

' So I'd like you to agree to this plan. I want to leave the ship in one of the space vehicles and take a close look. If it seems safe, I'll land beside it — or even on top of it.

' I'm sure this is the only thing to do. I've come more than a billion kilometres — I don't want to be stopped by the last hundred.'

For weeks the Star Gate had watched the approaching ship. Its makers had prepared it for many things, and this was one of them. It watched, then it listened to the ship's signals, but it did nothing.

There was a long pause, then it saw that something was falling down towards it. It searched its memory and made the decisions it was built to make.

Beneath the cold light of Saturn, the Star Gate woke its sleeping powers.

Chapter 39 Into the Eye

Discovery looked just as he had last seen her from space, floating in lunar orbit with the Moon taking up half the sky. Now he was leaving, perhaps for the last time, the metal world that had been his home for so many months. Even if he never returned, the ship would continue to send signals back to Earth, until finally its electrical systems failed. And if he did return? Well, he could stay alive for a few more months. But that was all, because the hibernation systems were useless with no computer to operate them. He could not possibly continue to live until Discovery II arrived in four or five years time.

He put these thoughts behind him as the black block of TMA-2 climbed above the horizon. He turned the vehicle right round and used the engines to slow his speed. He was still about eight kilometres high now, and heading straight for the enormous black object. It was as featureless as the flat surface below him, and until now he had not realized how enormous it really was. And as far as could be seen, its sizes had exactly the same 1 to 4 to 9 relationship as those of TMA-1.

'I'm only five kilometres away now. Still no sign of activity — nothing on any of the instruments. The sides and top seem absolutely smooth and polished. Now I'm directly over it, about a hundred and fifty metres up. I'm going to land. It's certainly solid enough.

'Just a minute — that's odd ..."

Bowman's voice died away. He was not frightened; he simply could not describe what he was seeing. He had been hanging above a black block, but now the top of it seemed to be moving away from him, down to the surface of Japetus, and then lower. It was exactly like looking at a drawing of a square box, where suddenly the near side can become the far side. Now it seemed he was looking straight down a black hole in the ground. And, even more strange, although its sides went down for a long way, they never seemed to get closer together.

David Bowman had time for just one broken sentence, which the scientists waiting in Mission Control, fourteen million kilometres away, never forgot:

' The thing's hollow — it goes on for ever — and — oh my God - it's full of stars!'