“And where is the Earth?” David asked.
“In the center,” Dandin pointed out, “where else would it be.”
Dandin touched the door, and it slowly opened with such ease, as if it weighed nothing. The inside of the palace was as bright as the outside, but no windows were visible anywhere. Everyone walked slowly along the yellow floor, looking around the interior. Here and there, small creatures peeked out from around corners and immediately hid. Van swam proudly ahead, showing his kindred that he was leading the procession.
Debby and Yulia stopped near a huge sculpture of a beautiful woman. The sculpture was about four meters high, made of the same metal as everything else on this planet. The statue represented a female sovereign seated on a throne. Her face was beautiful, and her body was covered by a light cloth flowing like silk. The rest of the travelers walked forward, Jean-Pierre turned around when he realized that the girls had fallen behind the group.
“What happened?” he asked. “Let’s go!”
“Look,” Debby said, “there are women here after all,” she pointed at the sculpture.
“What?” said Jean-Pierre in surprise.
“Yes, that’s right,” David said, turning to Dandin. “You said there are no women here.”
“That’s correct,” Dandin answered, lowering his eyes so as not to see the sculpture. “There are no women here for a long time now, but there used to be one, an amazing woman – our lord’s wife.
“And what happened?” Debby wondered.
“She left the Master.”
“Are there divorces in paradise?” Jean-Pierre grinned.
Dandin left his comment unanswered and turned to move on.
“Let’s move on,” Jean-Pierre shouted to Debby and Yulia, “no time to wait.”
The screen in the conference room presented information on the Sun’s activity: figures and graphs showed the situation in real time. The room was buzzing with activity. It was now the command center for all nations at once. Presidents and generals, ministers and heads of intelligence agencies came here. In the next room, a space was set up for press conferences, where representatives of various departments reported to the major news agencies.
It was decided that the focus should be on information about the Sun and the anomaly on it. About Voyager, they were silent for the time being because no one could link the information about the signal to what was going on with the Sun. In half an hour, the head of the European Space Agency had a big press conference. The world needed information.