The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan Read Free Book Online

in a centrifuge and see what oozed out.
    “What kind of wavelengths are we talking about? What kind of sensitivity?”
    “Come and see for yourself.” Ivo led her deeper into the chemists’ domain, four hands shuttling him swiftly along the guide rope.
    As they moved down the center of the cylindrical chamber, Tamara watched his colleagues at work around them. Most were harnessed to benches fixed to the walls, or were attending to various spinning or vibrating contraptions, but one eight-armed chemist was blithely floating in mid-air as he snatched vials of reagents from a weightless cluster in front of him, mixing the contents in a dizzyingly rapid sequence that Tamara could only assume was essential to the success of the procedure. When his rear gaze fell on her she quickly averted her eyes, afraid she might distract him and end up turning the whole chamber into an inferno.
    Ivo switched to a cross-rope that took them to his own bench, where he slipped into the harness. A large lightproof box was attached to the bench-top; he swung up the lid to allow Tamara, still hanging on the cross-rope, to inspect the contents.
    “That’s just an ordinary lamp in there,” he explained, gesturing at a spherical hardstone enclosure. “Lens, prism… it’s all standard equipment.” Ivo pulled the prism out of its slot and passed it to her for approval, as if he feared she might suspect him of some sleight of hand. The prize she was offering wouldn’t be much use to a cheat: any attempt to visit the Object would be an awful anticlimax if they failed to calculate its distance correctly. But Tamara obliged her host out of courtesy, and held the prism up to the light of the nearest lamp. The shimmering sequence of colors that appeared in front of her as she rotated it around its axis was no different from that produced by any piece of clearstone similarly cut.
    She returned the prism to Ivo. He replaced it, then pointed out an unprepossessing piece of yellowish, resin-coated paper, positioned about a span from the light source. “This won’t make a permanent record itself; it will need to be supplemented with an ordinary camera. It doesn’t need any activating gas, but it only retains its potency for a few days after preparation.”
    “I see.” Tamara made a mental note to start factoring that into her plans, hoping it wouldn’t lead to the Gnat having to carry a lizard-press.
    Ivo tapped the lamp’s enclosure, shaking some liberator into contact with the firestone until the hot gas from the flames themselves started scattering the powder back onto the fuel. He closed the lid, then gestured to Tamara to peek through a slit in the box, opposite the lamp.
    She moved back along the rope so she could bring her head down closer, self-conscious for a moment at her contortions. When she was in place, the first thing she noticed was an ordinary spectrum, muted by the paper through which she was seeing it but no different in scale and orientation than she would have expected from the prism’s geometry.
    She closed all her eyes but one, ridding herself of distractions. Ivo said, “If you want to block the visible spectrum, there’s a lever on your right.” She found it, and slid an opaque screen across the band of colors. Then she waited while her vision adapted to whatever remained.
    Out of the grayness, a blurred vertical bar of shimmering yellow light appeared—far beyond the red end of the hidden spectrum.
    Tamara gauged the strength of the fluorescence. Assuming the effect scaled linearly, infrared light from the Object would produce far too weak a response in this lizard paper to see with the naked eye, but they could probably capture it with a camera and a long enough exposure.
    “What wavelength is this?” she asked Ivo, without moving away from the slit. She was prepared to take his word for it, and hoped he wouldn’t insist on her verifying his answer immediately with protractors and calibration curves.
    “About two