22
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread….
—George Santayana, “Sonnet III”
Arky was adamant: “Nobody else goes across into this wilderness world until we’re sure it’s safe.”
April was ready to explode. “Damn it, Arky. We’ll never be sure it’s safe. Not absolutely.”
“Then maybe we ought to write everything off. Take the best price we can get for the Roundhouse and let somebody else worry about the lawsuits.”
“What lawsuits?”
“The lawsuits that will be filed as soon as one of your pie-in-the-sky academics gets eaten.”
“Nobody’s going to get eaten.”
“How do you know that? Can you guarantee it?”
“Of course I can’t.”
“Then maybe we better think about it.” He took a deep breath. “We need to ask ourselves whether we really want all these people blundering around over there.”
“They aren’t blundering.” April took a moment to steady her voice. “These are trained people. Anyhow, we can’t keep all this to ourselves. We have to let as many people get a look at it as we can.”
“Then let me ask you again: What happens if one of them gets killed?”
“There are no large predators,” she said.
“You haven’t seen any large predators, April. There’s a world of difference. How about diseases? Any exotic bugs?”
“If there are, it’s too late. Max and I have been there and back.”
“I know.” Arky looked sternly at her. “I didn’t care much for that, either. Look, until now this has been a shoot-from-the-hip operation. It’s time we got a handle on things. Before we get burned. First off, I want you and Max to get full physicals. Complete workups. Meantime, we’re going to stop the tours until Adam certifies it’s safe. Okay? I don’t want anyone going over there until that happens. Not even you.”
“Arky,” she protested, “we can’t just lock the door and tell people it’s unsafe.”
“We just did,” he said.
Adam put together his team. They included Jack Swiftfoot, Andrea Hawk, John Little Ghost, and two more April did not know. He parceled out M—15’s, grenades, and pistols. “You look as if you expect to run into dinosaurs,” she said.
He shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.” He signaled his people onto the grid, pressed the arrow icon, and joined them. “See you tonight,” he told April. He was slipping an ammunition clip onto his belt when they began to fade.
Max walked in carrying a couple of yellow balloons and his minicam. “I wouldn’t mind,” April told him, “but this sets a bad precedent. What do we have to do now? Send a SWAT team in before we can look at any of these other places?”
“Assuming there are other places,” said Max. “I don’t know. But I’m not sure it’s a bad idea.”
She grumbled but said nothing.
“Do you think,” Max asked, “whoever built the system is still out there somewhere?”
Her eyes lost their focus. “It’s been ten thousand years,” she said. “That’s a long time.”
“Maybe not for these people.”
“Maybe not. But the Roundhouse was abandoned a long time ago. And there’s no evidence of recent usage in Eden, either. What does that tell you?”
Through the wraparound window, Max could see tourists taking pictures. “I wonder where the network ends,” he said.
Her eyes brightened. “I’m looking forward to finding out.”
The outside door opened. They heard footsteps in the passageway, and Arky Redfern appeared. He waved, peeled off his jacket, and laid it on the back of a chair. “There’s some talk,” he said, “of making you two honorary tribal members.”
“I’d like that,” said April.
The only other person Max could think of who had been so honored by a tribe was Sam Houston. Not bad company. “Me too,” he said.
“So what’s next?” asked Arky, gazing pointedly at the balloons.
“We want to see what else we have.”
The balloons sported the legend Fort Moxie and a picture of the Roundhouse. Two long strings dangled from each. Max, enjoying center stage, pulled over two chairs and set them on either side of the grid, outside the perimeter. He tied one of the balloons to the chairs so that the balloon itself floated directly over the grid.
“What are you trying to do?” Arky asked.
“We don’t want to clog the system,” said April. “If we send a chair and nobody moves it off the receiving grid, that’s the ball game. We lose that channel. We need to send something that won’t stay put.”
Arky nodded. “Good,” he said.
“Ready?” asked April, who was now standing beside the icons.
Max focused on the balloon and started the videotape. “Running,” he said.
April pressed the rings icon.
Max counted twenty-three seconds and watched the balloon disappear. Two severed pieces of string, one on either side of the grid, dropped to the floor.
“I’ve got a question,” said Arky. “What happens if somebody isn’t all the way on when the thing activates? Does half of you get left here?”
April looked like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “That’s a good question, counselor,” she said.
They repeated the process with the final icon, the G clef, and returned to the control module to see the results.
The rings had implied, to Max, an artificial environment. Here, at last, they might come face to face with someone.
And perhaps they would. There was a secondary exposure, a ghost in the photo. The ghost was a wall with a window. The wall was plain, and suggested perhaps a vessel or military installation. The window was long, longer than the image. And it seemed to be night on the other side.
“Indoors, I think,” said April.
Arky was sitting on the work table. He leaned forward, trying to see more clearly. “How do we respond if someone’s there?” he asked.
“Say hello and smile,” said Max.
The lawyer frowned. “I think we need to be serious about this. Listen, this station, terminal, whatever, has been out of business for a long time. But it doesn’t mean the entire system is down. We need to decide how we’re going to respond if someone shows up.” He looked reluctant to continue. “For example, should we be armed?”
April shook her head slowly. “Seems to me,” she said, “the last thing we’d want to do is start a fight with whoever put this thing together.”
“He’s right, though,” said Max. “We should be careful.”
Arky slipped into a chair. “Why don’t we take a look at the other one?”
The G clef. Max let the videotape run ahead to the second sequence.
Again they watched the balloon fade. This time the background image appeared to be a carpeted room. The walls might have been paneled, but they were bare. No furniture was visible. “Light coming from somewhere,” said April.
“What do you think?” asked Max.
“It might be just another Roundhouse.”
April was ready to go. “Only one way to find out.”
Max hesitated. “I think we should leave it alone,” he said. “If someone really is over there, we are going to screw it up. Let’s use that committee of yours to figure out how to do this stuff.”
“That’s six days away,” said April. “The more information we can get for them, the better able they’ll be to do their work. Anyway, what kind of experts would you want for a project like this? I mean, it’s not as if anyone has any experience.”
“I can see where this is leading,” said Max.
“Nevertheless, I agree,” said Arky. “No one is equipped for this kind of meeting. If anyone goes, it might as well be us.” Max noticed the pronoun.
April did, too. “Arky,” she said, “no offense, but we don’t need a lawyer along. Let us try it first.”
He got visibly taller. “I don’t think so,” he said. “The tribe should have representation.”
“You’re kidding,” said Max.
Arky smiled. “I never kid.”
Max assembled a travel kit, which included a generator, a tool box, two flashlights, two quarts of water, and the now-standard writing pad with black markers.
Dale Tree (who was acting security chief while Adam was leading the survey of Eden) handed a.38 to Arky.
“How about me?” said Max.
“You qualified?” asked Dale.
“Not really.” Max had never fired a weapon in his life.
“Then forget it,” said Arky. “You’ll be more dangerous than anything we might meet.” He glanced at April.
“Me, neither,” she said.
Dale looked concerned. “I think you should let me go along,” he said.
“We’ll be fine,” said Arky.
April looked disgusted. “This is probably somebody’s living room. I don’t think we’re likely to need a lot of firepower.”
Max set his travel kit in the middle of the grid and laid a spade beside it. “When we get there,” he told Dale, “I’ll try to send the spade back. Give me a half-hour or so, in case we have to repair something. If nothing happens by then, send sandwiches.”
“We’ll put up a message if we get stuck,” said April. “Nobody comes after us unless we ask them to.” She glanced at her companions. “Right?”
Arky nodded. Max did, too, but less decisively.
They walked onto the grid. Dale stood by the icons. “Are we ready?” he asked.
April said yes.
The room smelled of musk. The walls were covered with a light green fabric, decorated with representations of flowers and vines. A pallid illumination radiated from no particular place, much in the style of the Roundhouse.
They did not move for a few moments, other than to glance around the large, bare chamber in which they found themselves. Max could hear no sound anywhere. The grid on which they stood was of different design but of the same dimensions as the other two. He stepped down onto a red carpet and pulled his foot back in surprise when it sank beneath him.
“What the hell kind of floor is this?” said April.
He tried again. It supported him, but the walking was going to be difficult. Who, he wondered, would be comfortable here?
In front of him, the light brightened.
The room was L-shaped, half as long on one side as on the other. There were two exits, located at either end of the stem, both opening into shadowy passageways. On the wall behind the grid, Max saw the by now familiar set of icons. They were located in an angled panel. There were nine this time, motifs set inside disks that were inserted smoothly in the wood. One of them was the stag’s head. None of the others duplicated anything Max had seen before, either in the Roundhouse or on Eden.
April stood a long time, examining them. “World without end,” she said.
Max nodded. He put the spade on the grid and tried the stag’s head. The icon glowed warmly.
The spade vanished in a swirl of light that was green rather than gold. “Matches the decor,” April said, impressed.
“Well,” said Arky, “it’s good to know we can get out of here in a hurry if we have to.”
The ceiling was high, and sections of it were lost in shadow behind a network of beams. “The balloon’s not here,” Arky said. But a look of surprise had appeared on his features, and Max followed his gaze. There was a rectangular hole in the ceiling, through which they could see into another room.
Lights were on, but they were no brighter than in this chamber.
“I don’t think anyone’s up there,” said April.
The opening in the ceiling was rectangular, maybe six by eight feet. There was no staircase. “The balloon,” Max said, “probably floated into the upper room.”
It was a few degrees cooler here than in the Roundhouse. Max zipped his jacket and turned back to remove his equipment from the grid. “I feel light,” he said.
“I think you’re right,” said April. “Gravity again.”
“Not on Earth?” asked Arky.
She shook her head.
The lawyer kept switching his gaze from one doorway to the other. He was not showing a weapon, but his right hand was inside the pocket of his jacket.
No window opened into the room. April unslung her camera and took some pictures. Max and Arky looked into the passageways. The light brightened before them as they moved, and darkened again behind. The carpet remained spongy.
One corridor dead-ended in a large chamber shaped like a rhombus. The other passed additional empty rooms before it turned a corner. There were still no windows. And no furniture.
They went into a huddle. “I don’t like a place where we can’t see very far,” said Arky. “I suggest we go back.”
“Without knowing where we are?” April sighed loudly and looked at Max. “What do you say, Max?”
Max agreed with Arky. But he wasn’t going to say so in April’s presence. “Why don’t we go a little farther?” he said.
April smiled. “Two out of three.”
“I wasn’t aware,” said the lawyer, “we were running a democracy here.” Ahead, the passageway made a ninety-degree right turn. “Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Let’s try it.”
They turned the corner. More rooms. And another opening in the ceiling.
Still no windows. And no indication of recent occupancy.
“This place doesn’t look abandoned,” said April. “There’s no dust. It just looks empty.”
They made a left turn, and Max started a map.
“Where,” asked Arky, “are the windows?”
Max’s ankles were starting to hurt. Walking on a floor that sank with every step was not easy.
They passed into a long, narrow room. Max, who was busy with his map, put a foot down. The floor wasn’t there, and he fell forward; suddenly he was looking down two stories! April grabbed his jacket and held on for the instant required for Arky to get an arm around Max’s shoulder. They dragged him back, and Max knelt on the soft floor waiting for his stomach to settle.
The hole was several feet wide and extended the length of the room. On the other side, the floor continued and a doorway opened onto another passageway.
After satisfying herself that Max was not hurt, April knelt down by the edge. “This isn’t damage,” she said. “This is designed this way. It’s a shaft.”
“In the middle of the floor?” said Arky. “Who the hell is the architect?”
There was no way around it, so they reversed course and took another turn. They found other areas where their passage was blocked by missing floor, and to a degree their route was determined by these curious phenomena.
They looked in all the chambers along their passage. Gradually it struck them that these weren’t rooms at all in the standard sense. They were rather spaces in an endless variety of shapes. Some were too narrow to have been comfortable for human occupancy. Others, like the room they had arrived in, were neither square nor rectangular, but had walls that came in at odd angles or that destroyed the symmetry of the space.
There was no furniture. And no sign of a staircase or any other rational means of getting from one floor to another. The color and texture of carpets and walls changed from place to place. And, perhaps strangest of all, they never found a window, leading to the inevitable suggestion that they were underground.
Max was ready to clear out the moment his companions dragged him out of the shaft, and he only waited for someone else to make the suggestion. Meantime, he busied himself with his map, although he was very cautious where he walked.
Lights continued to brighten before them and to fade behind. This effect created the mildly unnerving impression that there was always something moving just outside their field of vision. Max began to pretend he was working on the map while he watched out of the corner of his eye for some untoward movement. Eventually he saw it.
“Where?” asked Arky. “I don’t see anything.”
“Right there.” Max pointed at a turn in the corridor, which they had just rounded only a minute earlier.
“I saw it, too,” said April.
“Saw what?” The.38 appeared in Arky’s hand.
“The light changed,” said Max. “Look—there’s a bright patch back there.”
Air currents stirred.
The pool of light matched their own. Then, as they watched, it shifted toward them. The effect was that of being stalked.
“There’s nothing there,” said Arky, trying for a steady voice. “It’s just the lights.”
But they backed away, and the light flowed forward. April’s eyes widened. “Max,” she said, “can you get us back to the grid?”
Max was already consulting his map. “I don’t think so. The only way I know of is back the way we came.” He looked toward the approaching light.
“That’s not going to work,” said Arky. They set off again in the direction they’d been traveling. The lawyer took a position in the rear. “Try to find a way around,” he said.
They went left at the first cross-passageway, hoping to find another place to turn again and get behind the thing in the corridor. (For Max had now begun to think of it as a thing. Every horror movie and vampire book he’d ever digested bubbled up in his psyche.)
“You know,” said April, “I keep thinking that everything connected with the ports seems to be laid out for visitors. Tourists. People riding a boat around a lake. The Horsehead. They’re vacation stops. Maybe this place is, too.”
“Is what?” asked Max. “A maze?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a funhouse.” They were moving at a quick walking gait. The change in illumination behind them was keeping pace. Finally April slowed and turned around, letting Arky draw abreast. “Hello,” she said with nervous cheerfulness. “Is anyone there?”
Max was behind April, watching the thing advance, backpedaling, fighting down an urge to run, when his vision blurred. Suddenly he was looking at her from the front. She blinked on and off, like an electronic image, and his head swam. His stomach turned over and he went down on one knee, fighting faintness. He closed his eyes, tried to shake it off, and saw her face, saw her lips moving, hands outstretched, eyes riveted. He was looking down from near the ceiling.
“Come on, Max,” said Arky. “Get in the game.” He pulled Max to his feet, then caught April by the shoulder and drew her back. Now they were in full retreat.
They ran through a wedge-shaped room into another passageway and turned left and then right. Max’s head cleared quickly, probably from the adrenaline he was pumping.
“I think we lost it,” said Arky.
They were retreating across a wide chamber and around a shaft. They paused at the exit on the far side. When the lights didn’t change, Max tried to put his thoughts in order.
The way he did that was to assign the distorted perspective he’d experienced to his momentary weakness and to concentrate instead on getting them back to the grid. He’d always been proud of his directional sense. Even in this labyrinth, he was confident he knew which way they had to go. He showed them on the map. “We’re here,” he said. “And we’ve got to get here.” Roughly a mile away.
He took them out through the exit and into the passageway. A moment later they turned left and walked into the room with the grid.
A chill ran through Max’s stomach. “This can’t be right,” he said.
But Arky looked immensely relieved. “Max,” he said, “you’re a genius.”
Max was shaking his head. “Not possible. It can’t be the same room.”
They crossed the chamber, anxiously eyeing the other entrance, which was the one by which they’d left. Max looked at the triggers. They looked like the same set he’d seen earlier. The room looked identical.
April waved it away. “We’ll figure it out later. What bothers me is that this isn’t the way to handle first contact.” But she kept her voice down. “Running home is not going to look good when they write the history books.”
“To hell with the history books,” said Max. “The history books will only know what we tell them. Let’s go.”
“You really want to stay?” Arky asked her in a tone that challenged her to do it if she meant it. Otherwise, don’t waste our time.
“We’re going to have to come back,” she said. But she stepped onto the grid.
“Next time we’ll write.” Max punched the stag’s head and joined them.
The countdown was interminable. Max remembered having visited an empty house once as a boy and being frightened out by noises in the attic. It was like that, and when the light folded over them and the Roundhouse formed, he recalled how it had felt to escape back into the sunshine.