Starplex

Keith nodded, and Glass took an odd step, sort of sideways, and disappeared. Doubtless he’d gone through a door hidden by the forest simulation filling the docking hay—the only direct visual evidence Keith had had that he wasn’t actually back on Earth. Well, if there was a door, Keith wanted to find it. He patted the air in the spot that Glass had disappeared from, but there was nothing. There had to be a wall somewhere around, though. The bay wasn’t that big. Keith began to walk, figuring he was bound to hit a wall eventually. He continued on for perhaps five hundred meters without encountering any obstruction.

Of course, if his—he started to think the word “captor,” again, but fought it down and substituted “host” instead—if his host were being clever, he could have manipulated the images to make Keith think he was walking in a straight line when he was really going in a circle.

Keith decided to rest. As much as he tried to find time to work out in Starplex’s Earth gym, which had gravity set to a full standard gee, he’d lost some muscle tone because of all the time he spent in the lighter Wald-standard gravity used in the ship’s common elements. He really should take Thor Magnor up on his offer of playing handball; Keith and Saul had played the game regularly, but he’d given it up when Saul had died.

Keith lowered himself to the ground again, which, at this spot, was covered with clover. Keith found it quite comfortable to sit on. He ran his hand through the clover, enjoying the feel of it against his skin, and looked around. It was a remarkable simulation, he thought. So relaxing, so beautiful. He watched some birds moving high overhead, but they were too far away for him to identify the species.

Keith plucked a piece of clover and brought it up to look at. Maybe this was his lucky day; maybe he’d find a four-leaf clover…

What luck. He did.

He plucked a few more pieces, and his jaw dropped.

He pressed his face to the ground, and examined plant after plant.

They were all four-leaf clovers.

He brought one up to his face, held between thumb and index finger, and scrutinized it. It seemed like normal clover in almost every way. It even bled a little green plant juice from its severed stem. But each of these clovers had four leaves. Keith remembered from undergraduate botany that the genus name for clover was Trifolium—three leaves. By definition, clover had three leaves, except in the odd mutant individual. But these plants all had four distinct oval leaves.

Keith looked at the white and pink flowers growing from some of the plants. Definitely clover—but four-leaf clover. He shook his head. How could Glass have gotten all the other details right, but have made a mistake such as this? It didn’t make any sense.

He looked around again, searching for any other discrepancies. Most of the deciduous trees did indeed seem to be maple—sugar maple, in fact, if he wasn’t mistaken. And those conifers were jack pine, and the big one a little farther along was a blue spruce. And—And what kind of bird was that? Sitting in that blue spruce? Surely not a cardinal or a jay. Oh, it had the tufted head crest, but it was emerald green, and its bill was flat and spatulate, unlike that of most songbirds.

It was Earth; no doubt about it. That was Earth’s moon, still sitting high in the daytime sky. And yet, it wasn’t quite Earth—some of the details weren’t right.

Keith chewed at his lower lip, puzzled…

Chapter VII

Jag and Rissa took an elevator up to the bridge, and soon the Waldahud was standing in front of the two rows of workstations, telling his colleagues of the fantastic discovery. “There’s a metaphor that’s been carried by the current for years,” he barked, “that visible matter is just froth on an inky ocean of dark matter. We knew the dark matter was there because of its gravitational effects, but we’ve never seen it until now. Those spheres out there, and the gravel fog between them, are made out of dark matter.”

Lianne let out a low whistle. Keith raised an eyebrow. He knew a bit about dark matter, of course. CalTech astronomer Fritz Zwicky had deduced its existence back in 1933, through observations of the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. Those galaxies were rotating around each other so quickly that if the visible stars were the only major source of mass present, the whole thing should have flung apart long ago. Subsequent studies showed that almost every large structure in the universe—including our Milky Way galaxy—behave as if there were far more mass present than could be accounted for by the suns and any reasonable number of attendant planets. Some previously undetected matter, dubbed “dark matter” because it was apparently neither luminous nor highly reflective, accounted for over 90 percent of the gravity in the universe.