About the same time Chairman Hughes was ordering Mars evacuated, Jeff Calan was Breaking the story of the Argus to Russ Carlin.  Russell was a strong man but Jeff knew this could destroy him.  “We just lost contact with the Argus, Russell,” Jeff began.


    “Are we behind Charon already,” he asked his commander.


    “No Russ, the Argus is gone, destroyed.”


    “What!” said Russell, “Debra’s aboard.”


    “No” Jeff said, “she was in hopper number three.”


    “And she’s safe?” Russell’s eyes filled with hopeful tears.


    “We don’t know” Jeff replied, “the hoppers were inside the sphere, before the attack on Argus.”


    “Then their marooned out there, waiting for us?” Russell asked.


    “No Russ they’re still inside it, trapped, the hatch they cut closed itself and seemed to be welding itself back in to place when the AV relay died.”


    “So she could still be in there, and alive?” asked Russell.


    “Or dead” answered Jeff.


    “Then we’re not going to help them?” asked Russell, with vacant eyes.


    “No” said Jeff, “it’s coming to us.”  Jeff showed Carlin the trajectory of the sphere, and played the final scenes from Argus’ telemetry.  “It was so fast, they had no chance to get away.” Jeff said, “no traces were left of Argus, either.”


    The last scene of the hatch closing up, glowing at its edges then the static burst as the AV relay melted along with it.  “Who ever they are they have it all over us in technology, Jeff.” Russell said at last.


    “It would appear so.” Jeff agreed.


    “The hopper launched two AV relays didn’t it Jeff?” Russell asked pointedly.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    “Yes, yes it did,” answered Jeff.


    “Then we saw the outside posted one go out,” said Russell, “our receivers could lock on the remaining on if they find it again, commander.  We could at least hear enough to know if they’re alive.”


    “True, if the inside AV relay is working, Russell, but meanwhile the UW science and security councils are meeting in an emergency joint session.  Before we do anything about this, they want the core samples we’re carrying on Terra immediately.”  Russell looked stricken, that his rescue of Debra would have to wait.  However, he said, “let me call up all the physical parameters we’ve got on the sphere, Jeff I’m sure there’s a way to get them out other then how they entered, and maybe we can find a way to keep it off Mars too.”


    Jeff smiled; his friend had been dealt a hard blow, but was still fighting not fleeing.  As Terra Twin accelerated toward Earth, Russel Carlin dug into the most difficult engineering problem of his life.  As he ran and re-ran the telemetry scenes and recorded data he began to see a pattern and as Russell had always felt patterns were made to be broken.  The sphere drank in energy like a sponge, but not all energy.  Thirty percent of visible light was not absorbed but reflected away from the shell.  Russell reasoned that a strong laser beam in the reflected spectrum would slice the sphere like a knife.  According to the light spectrograph data from Argus telemetry and recordings by the Twin while still pacing the sphere, the green band of visible light, bordered between yellow and blue was the most reflected wavelength.  Therefore, his ‘sphere cutter’ would have to emit visible green light in a concentrated beam.  Much more intrepid thinking was needed to figure how to get the hoppers out of the sphere.  Mass and the gravity pull of the sphere had never coincided with calculations or maps.  Therefore more of the sphere’s structure had to be hollow and either empty or filled with light elements; gases or vapors perhaps.  Russell re-ran and re-ran the echo recordings made by Chuck and himself.  Finally, he thought of the resonance patterns all being the same in the shell and its support columns.  If the so called support columns were hollow the mass to gravity equations worked, almost, but not quite.  One column was found to resonate as a solid object, the column immediately under the dish structure.  This was obviously the sphere’s cannon was designed to obliterate any vessel which could threaten it seriously.  The survey room on Terra Twin had its own spectrometer.  Russell used this to identify the sphere’s light beam that destroyed the Argus, from the AV relay recording.  All colors of visible light except green were present in the beam.  Since the sphere was only visible in greenish light and no green was present in its light weapon, Russell deduced that green may well be outside their visual spectrum, in effect invisible.  Just as infrared and ultra violet rays were invisible to humans.  This information also brought out another observation.  The aliens home system must have contained a blue-white or red-white star only, because a yellow-blue light had to be produced by the same sun to produce green.