“No atmosphere,” Farley said. ”The wall’s a plug.”
Heineman decelerated until they came to a stop two thousand kilometers past the wall, now reduced in size to a tiny patch in the corridor’s merciless perspective. ”What’ll it be?” he asked.
“We slide back and find a well circuit,” Lanier said, “just like we planned. We check that out, then we proceed—and we don’t waste time. Research is really secondary.”
“Yessir,” Heineman said. He swung the V/STOL around on the tuberider to face the opposite direction. ”Hang on; full reverse coming up.”
Four hundred kilometers south of the wall, they located a circuit of wells and slowed to prepare the V/STOL for its descent. All loose objects were made fast while Heineman unlocked the aircraft from.the tuberider. With a gentle nudge of the attitude jets, they eased away from the singularity.
Heineman oriented the craft with its nose toward the corridor floor.
Unlike in the asteroid chambers, where some sort of push was required to move away from the axis, the V/STOL began a slow, accelerating descent immediately, repelled by the singularity—or attracted by the floor, whichever way they cared to think of it. After falling four kilometers, Heineman kicked in the rocket engine for three short bursts and pointed the plane’s’ nose north. ”I wouldn’t land this way in a chamber,” he said, “but it’s the best tactic in the corridor. We won’t hit the atmosphere on a spiral course here. So I’m going to take advantage of a long glide down. Garry, take hold of your controls and get the feel of what I’m doing.”
Lanier gripped the wheel and felt Heineman’s motions as he pulled the nose up. A rippling series of shudders announced atmospheric buffeting; outside the walls a whimpering whine began to decrease in pitch and increase in loudness. Heineman brought down flaps to decrease their airspeed and gently swung the V/STOL to the right, lowering the nose and deploying the prop blades from their receptacles in the engine nacelles. The smooth, beautiful roar of the twin turboprops made him smile like a little boy. ”Ladies and gents,” he said, “we are now an airplane. Garry, like to take it down?”
“My pleasure,” Lanier said. ”Passengers will please keep their seatbelts on.”
“Aye-aye,” Carrolson said.
“That was fun. Let’s do it again,” Farley called forward.
“Terrain looks smooth enough, but we’ll fly over and decide whether we want a short landing or a vertical touchdown,” Heineman said.
Lanier banked the aircraft and circled around a well, then flew over the cupola at about fifty meters, slowing by angling the props up.
Heineman peered at the prospective landing sights and signaled thumbs-up. ”Short roll; it’s smooth sand down there.”
Lanier brought the V/STOL down on the corridor floor at fifty kilometers an hour, gently and easily, nose pointed at the dimple and cupola of the well. He then reduced the pitch on the props and taxied, nose bobbing, to the edge of the dimple, pivoting the plane until it was tangent to the well’s outer circle.
The engines’ roar dropped rapidly to silence.
“Bravo,” Heineman said.
“God, that was great,” Lanier said. ”I haven’t flown in six years ... and I’ve never flown like that. Jesus, you look at the ground and it seems like you’re always going to fly right into it.”
“If you two flyboys will give us a hand,” Carrolson interrupted, “we’ll get our work done faster.”
Carrolson took photographs and Farley made instrument readings as they skirted the dimple. The well was open—that much was obvious even from a distance. Ten or eleven meters from the floating cupola was a platform cradling two irregular red-and-black-checked spheres, each three meters in diameter and sporting a pair of waldoes front and back.
They descended the slope of the dimple and inspected the platform.
Heineman climbed a ladder built into one side of the platform and walked along a scaffold passing above the checked spheres.
“Spacesuits,” he said. ”Tough ones, too.”
“Here’s a message,” Farley called out. She pointed to a bronze-colored plaque mounted on a pedestal near the mouth of the well.
The alphabet was Latinesque, with discernible A’s, G’s and E’s, but none of them could decipher the words. ”It’s not Greek, and it’s not Cyrillic,” Carrolson said. ”It must be Stoner. Some new language.” She photographed it from three angles.
“I never encountered anything like it in the libraries,” Lanier said. He stepped beyond the plaque and felt a sudden, molasses-liker, resistance around the lip of the well.
“WARNING,” a deep, forbidding masculine voice announced out of nowhere.
“WARNING to be heeded by speakers of twentieth-century English. Do not attempt to enter any gate in this region without proper environmental protection. Conditions of high gravitation and corrosive atmosphere prevail beyond the gate entrance. Suits are provided for your convenience.”
Carrolson touched the plaque and whistled. ”Look,” she said. The letters of the plaque had reformed into Roman alphabet English and repeated what the voice had said aloud. “Now that’s service.”
Heineman ran his hands along the upper surface of one of the spheres and found a depression in a black square. He pressed it cautiously; nothing happened.
“Excuse me,” Farley said to no one in particular. Lanier turned toward her and she smiled, embarrassed, and held up her hand. She then addressed the underside of the cupola.
“Excuse me, but if we wish to enter the well—the gate—how do we use the suits, the ... pathoscapes—”
“Bathyscaphes,” Carrolson corrected.
“Yes ... how do we use whatever they are?”
“Vehicles respond to vocal commands and can be adjusted to your language. Do you have proper authorization for a gate excursion?”
“What sort of authorization?” Farley asked.
“Authorization from the Nexus. All gates are controlled by the Nexus. Please present authorization within thirty seconds or this band of gates will be locked against tampering.”
They stared back and forth at each other as the time passed.
“No authorization,” the voice announced without inflection. “These gates are now closed until a survey team investigates and corrects the situation.”
Lanier pulled back from the invisible barrier. The twenty-meter-wide opening at the center irised in silently and formed a smooth bronze bulge. On the scaffold, Heineman yelped and jumped clear as the spheres and cradle slowly sank into the surface of the dimple, vanishing without trace.
Farley swore in melodious Chinese.
“Oh, well,” Carrolson said, sighing. ”We didn’t have time to be tourists anyway.”
The bland landscape around the well consisted of flat stretches of sand without any sign of life. The air was dry and soon their noses and throats were parched; it was with some relief that they boarded the V/STOL, sealed the hatch and prepared to return to the tuberider.
“This is fun,” Heineman said. ”She works like a charm.”
He lifted the V/STOL from the ground and increased their speed by inclining the engine nacelles forward. They climbed steadily, until they were within a kilometer of the plasma tube and the upper limits of the atmosphere. ”Abracadabra,” Heineman said, withdrawing the blades into the nacelles and activating the tail rocket.
With a sharp surge forward, they punched through the atmosphere barrier and plasma tube and entered the vacuum surrounding the singularity.
Heineman guided the V/STOL with little pushes from the attitude jets, bringing it up beneath the tuberider and completing the linkup under direction of the plane’s computers.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” he enthused, then shook his head and let out a puffed whooo.
Chapter Thirty-seven
“We’re not going to get a disarmament agreement out of them any time soon,” Gerhardt said as he preceded Hoffman down the platform steps into the fourth chamber compound.
br />
“They’re more afraid of each other than they are of us, right now, and nobody’s going to hand in their weapons until the situation is settled.”
“Who do you think will come out on top?”
Gerhardt shrugged. ”No bets. They’re all tough sons of bitches; my hopes are for Mirsky.”
“He’s been in the third chamber library more often than any of us,” Hoffman said.
“He has more to catch up on,” Gerhardt said. ”Russians don’t want soldiers with a liberal education.”
“I suppose we should be happy with a cease fire and separate camps.”
Gerhardt opened the mess door for her and she passed through into the cafeteria. Four agricultural scientists—one man and three women—waited for her with charts and slates.
She shook hands with all of them and took a seat. Gerhardt received a meager lunch from the vendor and sat at the next table; this was not his direct concern.
“Food programs,” Hoffman said. ”Fanning and subsistence. Okay. Show me what we have to do.”
Push came to shove barely eighteen hours after the conference in the bungalow. The first chamber storm settled even more quickly than it started; the winds suddenly stopped, the clouds unleashed a few more drops and then dissipated. The tubelight brightened and the air felt warmer.
Belozersky ordered a platoon to surround the bungalow and capture Mirsky. The ostensive reason was Mirsky’s lack of dedication to the cause of socialism; but all three Zampolits felt the Lieutenant General was weak and would soon make concessions to Hoffman that the Soviets could ill afford.
The platoon moved in quickly and surrounded the command center, bringing their AKVs to bear on the twenty guards. The guards surrendered without resistance and Belozersky approached the bungalow door to place Mirsky under arrest.
Three burly troopers kicked in the door and poked their rifles through, keeping their heads and bodies back.
“Comrade General!” Belozersky shouted, his voice breaking. “You have violated the confidence of your men. In the name of the newly reconstituted Supreme Soviet, you are under arrest!” The troopers swung around the door frame and into the bungalow. Pletnev sat up on a bunk, blinking sleepily.
“General Mirsky’s not here,” he said thickly. ”Is there anything I can do for you?”
Vielgorsky had napped briefly after the conference with Mirsky, then taken advantage of the weakening storm to move three trucks with fifty soldiers out of the first chamber, and to ride the ninety tube train—reserved exclusively for Russian use—into the fourth chamber.
The plan was to have him out of the way when Belozersky arrested Mirsky, just in case something went wrong. For a few hours, then, he could enjoy the fourth chamber woods. He especially enjoyed the sight of soldiers in the Development Detail bringing down trees and hauling them to the water.
Stories of the conquest of the east and the building of the trans-Siberian railway had enchanted him as a boy; now he visualized something similar in the Potato, a series of Soviet settlements linked by roads, clearing fields for farms and building cabins. Something good might come out of this fiasco after all, he thought—a purer, less corrupt and more tightly controlled socialist community, which could eventually take over the asteroid and return to Earth to complete the task Lenin had begun eighty-years before.
Things were moving with astonishing speed already; only nine days ago, they had made their landing, and now they had been ceded territory in the most attractive of the Potato’s seven chambers. If this didn’t demonstrate the weakness of their opponents, what possible could?
Three SSTs approached him. The lead trooper carried a few papers, no doubt for him to sign in his capacity as director of fourth chamber exploitation.
“Colonel,” the first soldier said, pulling a pistol from behind the papers. He pointed the pistol at Vielgorsky and tipped his cap higher.
“Mirsky,” Vielgorsky said, losing none of his control.
The other two soldiers were Pogodin and the scientist Pritikin. Each carried an AKV slung over his shoulder. Mirsky took Vielgorsky’s arm and poked the pistol into his side, near the kidneys. ”Not a word, please.”
“What are you doing?” Vielgorsky whispered harshly.
Mirsky thrust the pistol forward with more force.
“Quiet. Your rat is gnawing a hole in my bungalow.”
They walked with measured steps to a truck waiting by the lakeshore.
Pogodin unceremoniously pushed Vielgorsky into the back and threw a tarp over him, climbing in after and lightly tapping the barrel of the AKV on the bulge his head made.
Mirsky climbed behind the steering column and looked across the dark sand to the soldiers in the woods. Another group was playing lapta—a kind of baseball—with branches and pinecones; none seemed concerned with the truck or its occupants.
“Where are we going, General?” Vielgorsky asked from the rear, voice muffled by the tarp.
“Quiet, sir,” Pogodin said, prodding him again with the rifle.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The chaotic and scarred section of the corridor stretched for half a million kilometers, airless and barren. Plans for a second sortie to the floor were abandoned; without an atmosphere, ascent and descent would use an exorbitant amount of fuel. If the barren segment continued past their million kilometer turnaround point, they would abandon the mission and reverse course, Lanier decided.
“Do you think all of it’s like this?” Farley asked, sitting next to him. ”From here on?”
Lanier shook his head. ”They took Patricia somewhere.”
“Have you thought about the wells? Perhaps they left the corridor, and we can’t follow.”
“I’ve thought of that—and I have a hunch they didn’t use a well.”
“Another wall!” Heineman announced.
They gathered in the cockpit, Carrolson sitting in the copilot’s seat and Farley and Lanier jammed into the hatchway. Lanier was all too aware of the press of Farley’s body.
The tuberider’s passage through the corridor was dizzying; it reminded Lanier of running through a drain pipe. The corridor fled past on all sides, purple and brown and black with its scars, the revealed corridor surface dirty bronze. The Forward-Looking Radar returned a steady beep at half-second intervals.
“Seats please,” Heineman said. ”We’re going to slow this sucker down. Reverse seats this time; I want to keep our FLR facing forward, and there’ll be about two-tenths of a g ... “ Carrolson strapped herself into the copilot’s seat with a pixie grin at Lanier.
“Backseat, boss,” she said. ”I was here first.”
Lanier and Farley crawled past the equipment boxes and sat next to each other. Lanier took a deep breath and closed his eyes; the urge was almost unbearable.
“Something wrong?” Farley asked.
“Not at all.” He touched her hand reassuringly with his own and drew it back.
“You feeling all right?”
He smiled unconvincingly and nodded.
“Something’s wrong, Garry. I’ve been around you long enough to know.”
“We’ll be there in an hour or so,” Heineman announced from the cockpit.
“So what is it?” Farley pursued.
He took a deep breath and his face reddened. ”I can’t help it, Karen. It’s crazy. I’ve been ... horny for the last twenty eight hours. It isn’t going away.”
She regarded him without expression, and then her eyes widened the merest fraction.
“You asked, dammit,” he said.
“Just in general?”
“No.”
“Someone in particular.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Who ... or is that asking too much?”
He raised a finger and pointed it at her, shaking with stifled laughter. His face was red as hamburger now and he sounded like he was choking.
“That’s funny?”
“No-oo-o,’ he said, finally controlling his laughter. ”It’s
crazy.”
“You’ve never been interested in me before?”
“No—I mean, yes, you’re attractive, obviously, but—”
“Then shut up.”
The deceleration had already started. She unbuckled her belt and fell slowly toward the cockpit, easing herself along with the handgrips on the side of the seats and storage racks overhead.
“Wait,” Lanier said, reaching for her and missing. He looked back over the neck rest. ”Karen!”
Farley hung in the cockpit hatchway. ”Wake us when we’re at the wall,” she said pointedly, sliding the partition shut with a decisive snick of the bolt. She pulled herself back along the aisle and braced one knee against his seat and the seat opposite.
“I’m sorry—” Lanier began.
“Not at all,” Farley said. She tugged at her jumpsuit zipper and pulled it down, revealing a T-shirt with the Chinese character on the front, signifying “whale,” the Chinese name for the Stone. She shimmied it off quickly and removed white cotton panties.
Lanier watched in shock.
“You should have said something sooner,” she admonished. “Anything that keeps you from thinking straight is a detriment to our mission.” She pulled the T-shirt over her head and stuffed all the clothes in a rear seat pouch.
He removed his jumpsuit, glancing nervously at the cockpit partition.
She lay on the rear of the two opposite seats; the tuberider’s deceleration provided an effective if skewed sense of direction. ”You never did put yourself on the social roster,” Farley said, taking his hand and pulling him toward her. ”Not because you were shy, surely.”
Lanier touched her breast, his heart hammering. He gently rubbed the knuckles and backs of his fingers along the line between her hips and stomach. “I’ve never needed anyone more in my life,” he said.
Carrolson ascended the ladder up the middle of the aisle.
Farley and Lanier had dressed and seated themselves opposite each other. ”Ten minutes and we’ll be there,” Carrolson said, deadpan. She looked at Farley and then turned her head toward Lanier, her eyes lingering for a moment on Farley’s face. ”It seems like the same sort of wall as the last one, but this one rises even higher above the level of the atmosphere with a narrower clearance no more than a hundred meters around the singularity. We should run the same tests we did before, though.”