When Sam returned to work, Friday invited Sam into his office.
"Me?" Sam said. "I actually get to see the office?"
Friday laughed. "It's only an office, young man."
This was true. There was a cluttered desk, some equally cluttered bookshelves and stacks of books in two corners. The other half of the room was a small bed, underneath a mess of blankets and pillows, a mini-fridge, microwave oven, and a closet stuffed with clothes. An adjacent room had a small bathroom and shower.
"This is even smaller than my flat," Sam said.
"I've had a change of heart," Friday said, sitting on the bed. Sam awkwardly sat at the desk chair.
"We're going to continue studying the comet?"
"No. But I will tell what we're looking for."
Sam leaned forward in the chair. Friday took a deep breath, let it out, and continued.
"It's a star," he said.
"A star? So why all this time spent studying the Oort cloud?"
"It was theorized that the star might appear in Oort cloud."
"Appear? Do I really have to remind you that stars are gigantic, and bright, and hot, and their gravity is..."
"Of course this is no ordinary star."
"OK, I'll play along. What kind of star is it?"
"It's, well, it's a miniature star."
"You mean a white dwarf? Because even that would be visible from..."
"No, no, no. Miniature. Small. Tiny."
Friday held his arms out in front of him with palms facing each other about a foot apart.
"It's about this big," he said. "The size of a football. Or soccer ball, as you say."
"What?"
"It has all the properties and consistency of a star roughly the size of the Earth's sun," Friday said. "Except that it's small enough to hold in your hands. If you had some of means of withstanding the heat and gravity, that is."
Sam laughed. "You're nuts. No star could be that small. Nothing in all of space is that small. We deal with AUs, not feet and inches. If what you're describing is true, it'd be the most intense singularity ever recorded, it would devour the entire Milky Way."
"I don't know how it's possible," Friday said. "And I'm well aware that it goes against the face of every known law of physics and astronomy, but it's real. I've seen it."
"You're loony tunes."
"It was, God, twenty-five years ago. I was surveying the asteroid field, when the 'roids all started shifting around for seemingly no reason."
"Impossible."
"It happened. The asteroids were being thrown off their gravitational path by something. Something incredibly powerful. There it was, for only a fraction of a second. A brilliant burst of fire, lighting up all of space. And then it was gone."
"Assuming you really did see something, which I doubt, it could have been anything."
"The 3-D spectro-imager was on at the time. I got an image of it."
Friday got up and walked over the desk. With a few mouse clicks, an image came up on his computer.
"It's a sun, all right," Sam said. "Funny how this could be an long-range image of any sun."
"It's been magnified by hundreds of millions," Friday said. "New technologies had to be developed just to enhance this image."
"I don't even know where to begin," Sam said. "First, like I said, this object can't possibly exist. Second, it wouldn't blink in an out of the asteroid field for no reason. Third, even one second would be all it needed to a sun to throw the entire solar system out of whack with its gravity. Fourth, if something even close to any of this happened, every astronomer in the world would have known about it."
Friday stood and walked in a little circle around the room.
"What if..." he said, "what if, despite all of our advances, we're still only seeing the world as flat? What if there's... something... out there, just beyond the reach of our knowledge, that would change what we know about space, about science, about everything we know."
"I'm not the first person you've given this speech to, am I?"
"Hence my need for secrecy. The men from your government and the Chinese all had top scientists go over my research. Most had the same perfectly understandable reaction you did. A select few saw possibilities in my discovery. So I got the funding and was able to establish my own observatory, here in London of all places."
"What possibilities?"
"Just imagine it. All the heat, gravity and raw power of a sun, contained in a football-sized sphere. If that power could be harnessed, we'd never need another power source again."
"I see where this is going," Sam said. "I've seen Wrath of Khan. That much power could also become a weapon the likes of which humanity has never seen – as Shatner might say."
"Him or Tom Baker," Friday said, his mischievous smile making a return. "Now you know why all the secrecy."
"Why tell me now?"
"Thank the Ergosphere. I told him about our little spat yesterday, and he convinced me to trust you. He has good instincts for that sort of thing."
"That Ergosphere guy again. Who is he?"
"A friend, and he's helping me find the star, in his own way. He's no one you need worry about."
"But..."
"What say you, young man? Are you willing to help a silly old fool look for his small star, in defiance of all logic and reasonable thought?"
Sam smiled. "I get to live in London and look at the stars all night. And you're hardly the first scientist to get money to research a completely stupid idea, so why not?"
They shook hands. Instead of working that night, Friday invited Sam to join him at a pub just off nearby Trafalgar Square. It was technically closed, but Friday, impressively, knew the manager, who let them in for some illegal after-hours hanging out while the cleaning staff did their thing. Sam had his usual Guinness while Friday downed several glasses of Strongbow Cider. The two of them talked about space and their love of the stars until deep into the night.
Later, home and in bed, Sam dreamt about walking against a wind sopowerful he could barely stand up.
# # # #
Next: Crisis.