“What is it?” Isak asked. “What are you seeing?” “About seven-point-five on the sphincter scale. Get on your phone and tell my guys topside to kill the telescope computer at once. Kill it!”

Isak did so at once, and found one of Bishop’s engineers already on the line.

“Better make that nine-point-five,” Isak said. “Something’s alive up there, and it’s eating one of your robots.”

14

Voyage to the Edge of Creation

Anjin was as happy as a clam at high tide. His fusion ramjets were now fully operational, and even in the depths of the chromosphere, where the Sun’s horizon was obscured by a plasma fog that gave him the impression of flying through the inside of a neon light, it was still possible for him to see clearly. Probing magnetic field lines and invisible wavelengths, he had extended the ship’s sensory organs to a radius greater than the diameter of the Earth. No magnetic upheaval could give him less than twenty-six seconds of warning; and three seconds was all his machines needed.

No one aboard would ever forget the view from “high gate” pilot parlance for the approach phase of a runway landing. The “runway” here was islands of boiling hell, jammed side by side and spreading as far as the eye could see. Each was a bright spot with cool, dark edges, measuring 1500 kilometers from end to end. Even from the lofty heights of the solar corona—which had been familiar to Earthbound observers as a shimmering whiteveil seen around the Sun during total eclipses—the crew could see only a small fraction of the Sun’s surface; and more and more of that fraction had slipped behind the horizon and out of view as the comet rode down to the chromosphere. The diminishing radiative surface area to which Sargenti-Peterson was exposed contributed much to the curious and seemingly paradoxical drop in temperature as Anjin steered the ship-comet nearer the Sun’s surface.

“High gate” and “surface”: the words were misnomers here; and Anjin knew better, but his mind held on to the old planetary references. The Sun had no true surface, just electron-stripped gases that increased in density with decreasing altitude. What he called the surface, or “runway,” just below the chromosphere, was in fact a field of turbulent cloud tops rising dramatically from the core, radiating energy produced more than a million years ago, then sinking once again as they cooled—just like convection cells in a cup of coffee.

Anjin and Tam had agreed to keep the ship a safe distance above the cloud tops, in regions that were to the Sun what the stratosphere was to Earth. Even in the chromosphere, vast waves churning over the Sun’s surface produced dangerous disturbances; but Anjin was confident that he had mastered these, and was equally confident that, if necessary, he might even adapt the ship-comet to the environs below the cloud tops. Each day’s scans rendered the Sun more predictable. The new frontier held few surprises for him. The scanners told him so.