To Touch a Star

To Touch a Star

By Ben Bova

Aleyn’s heart nearly stopped.

« That’s not a star! » he shouted.

« Scorpio 18881R2434, » said the comm screen, after a hesitation that was unnoticeable to human senses.

« It can’t be! »

« Navigation and tracking programs agree. Specturm matches. It is our destination srat, » the screen insisted.

Aleyn stared at the image a moment longer, then bolted to the hatch and down the short corridor that led to the ship’s bridge.

The bridge screens were larger. But they all showed the same thing. Optical, infrared, radar, high-energy, and neutrino sensors all displayed a gigantic, perfectly circular metal sphere.

Aleyn sagged into the only chair on the bridge, oblivious to the slight chill against his naked flesh until the chair adjusted its temperature.

« We thougt it was a star, » he murmured to no one. « We thought it was a star. » Aleyn Arif Belierophontes, son of the director of the Imperial Obseervatory and her consort and therefore distrusted by Admiral Kimon, the emperor’s chief of astroengineering; betrayed by Selwyn, his best friend; exiled to a solitary expedition to a dying star – Aleyn sat numb and uncomprhending, staring at a metal sphere the size of a star.

No. Bigger.

« What’s the radius of the object? »

To touch a star. Photo by Elena

Numbers sprang up on every screen, superimposed on the visual display, as the computer’s voice replied, « The hundred seventeen point zero nine eight million kilometers. »

«Two hundred million kilometers,” Aleyn echoed. Then he smiled. “A metal sphere four hundred million kilometers across.” He giggled. A sphere with the radius of a water-bearing planet’s orbit.” He laughed. “A Dyson sphere! I’ve found a Dyson sphere!”

His laughter became raucous, uncontrolled, hysterical. He roared with laughter. He banged his fists on the armrests of his chair and threw his head back and screamed with laughter. Tears flowed down his cheeks. His face grew red. His breath rasped in his throat. His lungs burned. He did not stop until the chair, reating to an override command from the computer’s medical program, sprayed him with a soporific and he lapsed into unconsciousness.

A thousand lightyears away, scientists and engineers of the Hundred Worlds labored heroically to save the Earth from doom. The original home planet of the Empire was in danger from its own Sun. A cycle of massive flares would soon erupt across the Sun’s normally placid face. Soon, that is, in terms of a star’s gigayear lifetime: ten thousand years, give or take a few millennia. Too feeble to be of consequence in the lifespan of the star itself, the flares nonetheless would casually boil away the air and oceans of Earth, leaving nothing behind except a blackened ball of rock