Time's Eye by Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter Page A

the bucket, and revealed the floating sphere, the Evil Eye, with water running off its surface; Abdi made sure he caught every drop. The tent containing the two “man-apes” had been set up a few dozen yards away, with some kind of pole at its center.
    Casey snickered. “He’s been dunking that damn thing for half an hour already.”
    “Why, Abdi?”
    “I’m measuring its volume,” Abdikadir murmured. “And I’m repeating it for accuracy. It’s called science. Thanks for your support.” And he lifted the bucket up around the sphere again.
    Bisesa said to Casey, “I thought the Surgeon-Captain said you shouldn’t get out of bed.”
    Casey blew a raspberry, and thrust his heavily bandaged leg out in front of him. “Ah, bull. It was a clean break and they set it well.” Though without anesthetic, Bisesa knew. “I don’t like sitting around with my thumb up my ass.”
    “And you, Mr. de Morgan,” Bisesa said. “What’s your interest in this?”
    The factor spread his hands. “I am a businessman, ma’am. That’s why I’m here in the first place. And I am constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. Naturally I am intrigued by your downed flying machine! I accept that both you and Captain Grove want to keep that particular item under wraps. But
this
, this floating orb of perfection, is neither yours nor Grove’s—and, in these days of strangeness, how strange it remains, though we have quickly become accustomed to it! There it floats, supported by nothing we can see. No matter how hard you hit it—even with bullets, and that’s been tried, somewhat perilously given the ricochets—you can neither knock a chip out of its perfect surface, nor even move it from its station by so much as a fraction of an inch. Who made it? What holds it up? What lies inside it?”
    “And how much is it worth?” Casey growled.
    De Morgan laughed easily. “You can’t blame a man for trying.”
    Josh had told Bisesa something of de Morgan’s background. His family were failed aristocracy, who could trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror’s first assault on England, more than eight hundred years before, and who had carved a rich estate out of the defeated Saxon kingdoms. In the intervening centuries a “trait of greed and foolishness that transcends the generations,” in de Morgan’s own disarming words, had left the family penniless, though still with a kind of race memory of wealth and power. Ruddy said that in his experience the Raj was plagued by “chancers” like de Morgan. As far as Bisesa was concerned there was nothing to be trusted in de Morgan’s slicked-back black hair, and his darting, questing eyes.
    Abdikadir clambered down from his stool. Dark, serious, focused, he switched his watch to calculator mode, and punched in the numbers he had recorded.
    “So, Brainiac,” Casey called mockingly, “tell us what you’ve learned.”
    Abdikadir settled to the dirt before Bisesa. “The Eye resists our probing, but there are things to measure nonetheless. First of all, the Eye is surrounded by a magnetic anomaly. I checked that with a compass from my survival kit.”
    Casey grunted. “My compass has been haywire since we hit the dirt.”
    Abdikadir shook his head. “It’s true you can’t find magnetic north; something peculiar seems to be happening to Earth’s magnetic field. But there’s nothing wrong with our compasses themselves.” He glanced up at the Eye. “The flux lines around that thing are packed together. A diagram of it would look like a knot in a piece of wood.”
    “How come?”
    “I’ve no idea.”
    Bisesa leaned forward. “What else, Abdi?”
    “I’ve been doing some high school geometry.” He grinned. “Dipping the thing in water was the only way I could think of to measure its volume—seeing how the water level in the bucket goes up and down.”
    “Eureka!”
de Morgan cried playfully. “Sir, you are the Archimedes
de nos jours . . .
”
    Abdikadir ignored