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

him. “I took a dozen measurements, hoping to drive down the errors, but it still won’t be too hot. I can’t think of a way of getting the surface area at all. But my measurements of the radius and circumference are pretty good, I think.” He held up a jury-rigged set of calipers. “I adapted a laser sight from the chopper . . .”
    “I don’t get it,” said Casey. “It’s just a sphere. If you know the radius you can work out the rest from all those formulae. The surface area is, what, four times pi times the radius squared . . .”
    “You can work that out if you make the assumption that this sphere is like every other sphere you’ve encountered before,” Abdi said mildly. “But here it is floating in the air, like nothing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t want to make any assumptions about it; I wanted to check everything I could.”
    Bisesa nodded. “And you found—”
    “For a start, it is a perfect sphere.” He glanced up again. “And I mean
perfect
, within the tolerances even of my laser measurements, in every axis I tried. Even in 2037 we couldn’t shape any material to such a fantastic degree of precision.”
    De Morgan nodded soberly. “An almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection.”
    “Yes. But that’s just the start.” Abdikadir held up his watch so Bisesa could see its tiny screen. “Your high school geometry, Casey. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is . . . ?”
    “Pi,” rumbled Casey. “Even a jock Christian knows that much.”
    “Well, not in this case. The ratio for the Eye is
three.
Not about three, or a bit more than three—three, to laser precision. My error bars are so small it’s quite impossible that the ratio is actually pi, as it ought to be. Your formulae don’t work after all, you see, Casey. I get the same number for ‘pi’ from the volume. Although of course my reliability is way down; you can’t compare a laser with a bucket of dusty water . . .”
    Bisesa stood and walked around the Eye, peering up at it. She continued to have an uneasy sense about it. “That’s impossible. Pi is pi. The number is embedded in the structure of our universe.”
    “
Our
universe, yes,” Abdikadir said.
    “What do you mean?”
    Abdikadir shrugged. “It seems that this sphere—though it is evidently
here—
is not quite of our universe. We seem to have stumbled into anomalies in time, Bisesa. Perhaps this is an anomaly in space.”
    “If that’s so,” Casey rumbled, “who or what caused it? And what are we supposed to do about it?”
    There was, of course, no answer.
    Captain Grove came bustling up. “Sorry to trouble you, Lieutenant,” he said to Bisesa. “You’ll remember the scouting patrols I’ve been sending out—one of the
sowars
has reported something rather odd, to the north of here.”
    “ ‘Odd,’ ” Casey said. “God love your British understatement!”
    Grove was unperturbed. “You might be able to make more of it than any of my chaps . . . I wondered if you fancied a short excursion?”

11: STRANDED IN SPACE
    “Hey, asshole, I need the john.” That was Sable, of course, yelling up from the descent compartment, welcoming Kolya to another day.
    He had been dreaming of home, of Nadia and the boys. Hanging in his sleeping bag like a bat from a fruit tree, with only the dim red glow of low-power emergency lights around him, it took him a few moments to realize where he was.
Oh. I am still here.
Still in this half-derelict spacecraft, endlessly circling an unresponsive Earth. For a moment he floated, clinging to the last remnants of sleep.
    He was in the living compartment, along with their spacesuits and other unnecessary gear, and surrounded by the junk from the Station that they still carried with them—they could hardly open the hatch to throw it out. His sleeping up here gave them all a little more space, or, to put it another way, stopped three stir-crazy cosmonauts from killing each other. But it was scarcely