“Defense mechanism. Killed Roselyn when she came in. I got it with a scrambler.”
Nigel noticed that some of the panels were spattered with drying brown flecks. The Watcher was exacting a price for each of its secrets.
He sighed and pointed. “And that?”
The crewman shrugged.
A pattern came and went, as though it was a huge ocean wreck seen deep beneath the shifting waves.
It was first a line, then an ellipse, and now a circle. Its surface piped and worked with tenuous detail. Somehow the walls seemed to contain it as an embedded image, persistent against the passing shower of lesser facts. Nigel frowned. An unsettling, alien way to display information. If that’s what it was.
Again came the sequence. Line, oval, circle, oval, line. Then it struck him. “It’s the galaxy.”
“What?” Nikka had just arrived. “What is all this?”
“Watch.” He pointed. “See the broad line of tiny lights? That’s the galaxy as it looks from the side. That’s the way we see it from Earth, a plane seen edge-on. Now watch.” His lined hands carved the air.
The line thickened, winking with a cascade of lights. It swelled into an oval as other data sped across the image, like clouds rushing over the face of a slumbering continent. Fires lit in the oval. Traceries shot through it. It grew into a circle. Strands within it flexed and spilled with light.
Nigel said, “Catch the spiral arms? There. Faint out-lines against those bright points.”
“Well …” she looked doubtful. “Maybe.”
“See those blue points?” Dabs of blue light stood out against the other tiny glows. Evidently they were all stars. But … “I wonder what those stand for?”
“Other Watchers?” Nikka asked.
“Could be. But think. This is a map of the whole damn galaxy.” He said it quietly but it had an effect on the others now crowding into the cramped room. “Seen from every angle. Which means somebody—some-thing—has done that. Sailed far up above the whole disk and looked down on it. Charted the inlets of gas and dust and old dead suns. Seen it all.”
In the silence of the strange room they watched the galaxy spin. It moved with stately slowness. Grave and ghostly movements changed it. Sparks came and vanished. Dim gray presences passed across its face. Lingered. Were gone.
Then a specialist Nigel knew slightly, a wiry astronomer, said, “I think I recognize some of the pattern.”
“Where?” Nigel asked.
“See that quadrant? I think it’s ours.”
A segment of the galaxy did seem to Nigel, now that the astronomer pointed it out, slightly more crowded and luminous that the rest. He frowned as thin mists seemed to spill liquidly through the pie-slice segment. “You recognize stars?”
“In a way,” the astronomer said with a certain prim precision. “Not optical stars, no. Pulsars.”
“Where?”
“See the deep blue ones?”
“Yes, I was wondering—”
“They’re where pulsars should be.”
Nigel remembered vaguely that rapidly spinning neutron stars accounted for the pulsar phenomenon. As the compacted cores of these dense stars spun, they released streams of plasma. These luminous swarms flapped like flags as they left the star. They emitted gouts of radio noise. As a star spun, it directed these beams of radio emission outward, like a lighthouse sweeping its lamp across a distant ship. When the beam chanced to intersect the Earth, astronomers saw it, measured its frequency of sweep.
The astronomer went on, “They’re so prominent in this map. Far more luminous than they are in reality.”
“Perhaps they are important?” Nikka asked.
“Umm.” The astronomer frowned. His face was lined with fatigue but the fascination of this place washed away the past. Even amid tragedy, curiosity was an itch that needed scratching. “Could be. As navigation beacons, maybe?”
Nigel thought of his lighthouse analogy. Beeping signals across the blind abyss?
But there were easier ways to find your way among the stars. He pointed again. “Why is there that big blue patch at the center, then?”
The astronomer looked more puzzled. “There aren’t any pulsars at the galactic center.”
Nikka asked, “What is there? Just stars?”
“Well, it’s got a lot of gas, turbulent motions, maybe a black hole. It’s the most active region of the whole galaxy, sure, but …”
Nikka asked, “Could it be that the galactic center and pulsars have something in common?”
The astronomer pursed his lips, as if he disliked making such leaps. “Well … there’s a lot of plasma.”
Nigel asked slowly, “What kind?”
“All kinds,” the astronomer said with a touch of condescension. “Hot gas made still hotter. Until the electrons separate from the ions and the whole system becomes electrically active.”
Nigel shook his head, not knowing himself where he was headed. You just skated, and went where the ice took you. “Not around pulsars. I remember that much.”
The astronomer blinked. In his concentration the weight of the last few days slipped from him and his face smoothed. “Oh. Oh, you’re right. Pulsars put out really relativistic plasma. The stuff comes whipping off the neutron star surface close to the speed of light.”
