Eon

  “There aren’t any provisions for acceleration in the chambers,’’ Lanier said.

  “So they accelerated slowly?”

  He shook his head.

  “They had some way to compensate?”

  “The sixth chamber,” Lanier said. ”But that’s part of the big picture, too.”

  “You’re making me sort everything out for myself.”

  “Whenever possible.”

  “As a test.”

  “No,” Lanier said emphatically. ”The Advisor said you can help us. I don’t doubt that. But if this were a test, you’d be doing just fine.”

  Though he had reservations.

  The tunnel walls passed behind them and the train rushed into light.

  They passed over water, doing at least two or three hundred kilometers an hour. ”In the elevated stretches, there are three rails under the cars, magnetic induction,” Lanier said.

  “Oh.” She turned her attention to the sea, a uniform expanse of rippling blue-gray, stretching north to a bank of fog against the cap.

  Above gray expanse she could see the chamber’s arch, and to the northwest and northeast the distant edges of the fog bank, and a shoreline at three o’clock high.

  About seven kilometers from the wain, its lower extremity hidden in white mist, was the hexagonal top of an upright tower, perhaps fifty meters tall and half as broad. Another tower appeared only a kilometer or so distant, fully visible and mounted on a slender round pylon.

  The fog rushed up to meet them, and suddenly, they were over land.

  Rich pine forest blurred beneath, appearing healthy if slightly blue—in the tubelight.

  “Fourth chamber was a recreation center, as near as we can tell,” Lanier said. ”And of course, a reservoir and air-purification system. There are four distinct islands here, each with a different habitat. There were underwater habitats, too—coral gardens, freshwater ponds and river systems. Resort, wildlife preserve, fish farm—it’s all returned to an untended state, a bit wild but prospering.”

  The train slowed and slid with a faint humming noise over an elevated platform. Two men in black jumpsuits ran next to the cars as they came to a stop. Lanier stood and she followed him to the door.

  It opened as silently as before.

  Forest, water, dirt—all in one glorious sniff.

  “Later, Charlie,” Lanier said. Charlie saluted smartly and took a stance in the doorway behind them.

  A platform guard stepped up to examine Patricia’s badge.

  “Welcome to summer camp, Miss Vasquez,” he said. She looked down from the platform railing. They were six meters above the ground. The platform was surrounded by a compound much like the one in the first chamber, with fiberboard buildings and earthen ramparts, but a much larger greenhouse-agriculture laboratory.

  Everyone in the compound wore black, in combinations of black and khaki, black and green, and one black and gray.

  “Security forces?” she asked. Lanier nodded as they descended the platform stairs.

  “We keep a small science group here, and we let people take their vacations or liberty here, when there’s time for such things, which isn’t often. This chamber is strategic. It divides the relatively livable parts of the Stone from the business end.”

  “The propulsion system?”

  “That, and the seventh chamber. Anyway, you’ll have a chance to stretch your legs, assimilate what you’ve seen so far.”

  “I doubt it,” Patricia said.

  Lanier guided her to the compound cafeteria.

  In most respects, the cafeteria was little different from the one in the first chamber. They sat at a table with British and West German soldiers. Lanier introduced her to the German commanding officer, Colonel Heinrich Berenson. ”He’ll assume command of the seventh chamber security forces a week from now. You’ll be working together quite a bit.”

  Berenson was a colonel in the West German Space Force, sandy-haired and freckle-faced, as tall as Lanier but more obviously muscular. He appeared more Irish than German; with his non-German name and sophisticated manner, he seemed truly international to Patricia.

  His manner was friendly but slightly distant.

  She ordered a salad—fresh greens from the agrilab—and looked at the faces of the men and women around her. Not all of them had green badges.

  “How does the badge system work?” she asked Lanier.

  Berenson smiled and shook his head, as if this was a sore point.

  “Red badges are confined to the bore hole in the first chamber,” Lanier said. ”Mostly engineering support. Blue can go anywhere in the Stone except the sixth and seventh chambers, but in all chambers but the first, must be escorted and must be performing specific duties. Green badges can go to any of the chambers but are always subject to security.”

  “I am here more than three years,” Berenson said, “and I only get a green three months’ ago.” He glanced down at her badge and nodded meaningfully. “Fortunately, I found a loophole. I can be considered to have escorted myself.”

  Lanier grinned. ”Let’s just be thankful things are going as smoothly as they have been.”

  “Amen,” Berenson said. ”I would hate to see true confusion.”

  “For green badges, there are three levels of clearance. Level one is lowest—no access to designated secret areas. Level two is limited access for duty purposes—the special security guards have level two green badges. Level three is the clearance we share.”

  “I will be level two,” Berenson said.

  As they returned to the train, Patricia asked, “Being level two means he won’t know exactly what the Stone is?”

  “When you get to the seventh chamber, you have to know a lot.”

  “But not about what’s in the libraries.”

  “No,” Lanier said.

  That sobered her. Berenson was morose, and he didn’t even know about the libraries.

  The four space-suited soldiers ran in long, graceful leaps across the lunar surface with only the stars and a quarter-Earth to light their way. Mirsky watched them from the top of a boulder, only his white helmet showing. In his right hand, he held an electric torch, pointed back toward his team comrades waiting in a gully carved by a rolling rock millions of years before. When the four were in the proper position, he flashed the light on and off three times.

  The objective—a mock-up of a lunar settlement bunker—lay a hundred meters beyond the boulder. The four defenders were now by the airlock.

  Mirsky raised his AKV-297—automatic vacuum-adapted Kalashnikov projectile rifle—and pointed it at the airlock hatch.

  The hatch opened and Mirsky raised the rifle slightly, centering it on a cross-barred target near the hatchway signal lights. With one gloved finger, he depressed the side-mounted trigger and felt the rifle kick three times. A thin line of burning gunpowder discharge from the barrel glowed briefly in the darkness. The target blew out in tatters of plastic as the door opened.

  Mirsky heard the exercise supervisor read off the numbers of the four space-suited defenders and order them to assume a reclining posture.

  “Your airlock is also incapacitated,” the supervisor added laconically. “Fine work, Lieutenant Colonel ... You may proceed.”

  Mirsky and his three comrades advanced toward the mock-up.

  The defenders lay on the lunar soil outside the open hatchway, motionless except for the advancing numbers of their backpack life support displays. Mirsky leaned over and winked at one of them through his visor. The defender glared back at him, not in the least amused.

  “Look over your shoulder at two o’clock, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel,” one of his men advised. Mirsky turned around and followed the line of the corporal’s thickly protected arm and gloved finger.

  The Potato, a sharp point of light with a clearly discernible oblong shape, had just risen above the Moon’s horizon.

  It seemed that all his life, people had been pointing it out to him—Yefremova three years before, t
he first among them.

  “Yes, I see,” Mirsky acknowledged.

  “That is why we train, is it not, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel?”

  Mirsky didn’t answer. The supervisor cut in and demanded they stop the useless chatter.

  “The stars have ears, Corporal,” Mirsky advised the soldier.

  “Let’s take our objective and get home in time for more political lessons.” The corporal met Mirsky’s glance and grimaced but said nothing more.

  In their own bunker, four hours later, the exercise supervisor walked down the aisle between the sleeping slings of the victorious team, shaking hands and congratulating them warmly, and then handing out letters from home. All the men received letters, if only from party cell coordinators in some outlying village. The supervisor stopped by Mirsky’s sling last.

  “Only one letter for you, Comrade ... Colonel,” he said, handing Mirsky a thick and carefully sealed and taped envelope, Mirsky took the envelope and stared at it, then at the supervisor.

  “Open it.”

  He carefully tore off the end and took out five folded sheets of paper.

  “A promotion,” he said, unwilling to be very emotional about the whole thing.

  “And your orders, Comrade,” the supervisor said. ”Gentlemen, are we interested in discovering where our new Colonel Pavel Mirsky is going?”

  “Where?” several asked.

  “Back to Earth,” Mirsky said.

  “Back to Earth!” the supervisor echoed. ”This is, what—your fourth training tour on the Moon in two years? And now back to Earth.”

  The men watched him carefully, grinning.

  “To the Indian Ocean,” Mirsky said. ”For final training as battalion commander.”

  “To the Indian Ocean!” the supervisor shouted, pointing one finger at the floor—symbolically indicating the Earth and then raising both his hands, looking upward and nodding at the ceiling.

  The men cheered and broke into applause.

  “Now, you will have the stars you have always wanted, Colonel,” the supervisor said, shaking his hand firmly.

  Chapter Four

  The rest of the fourth chamber slipped by the train windows quickly, a blur of hilly terrain, small lakes and outcroppings of what looked like granite.

  “The line ends at the sixth chamber. We’ll be met by Joseph Rimskaya and some of the Chinese team at the terminal Annex.”

  “Rimskaya? I had a teacher with that name at UCLA.”

  “Rimskaya is why you’re here. He recommended you.”

  “But he left the university to join the Bureau of Math and Statistics.”

  “And he met the Advisor while working in Washington,” Lanier added.

  Rimskaya had been her professor in a special math seminar.

  She hadn’t liked him much; he was a tall, blocky man with a wiry red heard, loud and assertive, a political science professor and expert in statistics and information theory. A rigorous mathematician but not, in her opinion, in possession of the insight necessary for truly valuable research, Rimskaya had always seemed the perfect academician to her: rigid, demanding, an unimaginative taskmaster.

  “Why is he here?”

  “Because the Advisor finds him useful.”

  “His specialty was statistical theories of population behavior. He belongs in sociology.”

  “That’s right,” Lanier said.

  “How—”

  Lanier appeared irritated. ”Think, Patricia. Where did the Stoners go? Why did they go there, how did they get there?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered quietly.

  “We don’t know, either. Not yet. Rimskaya is head of the sociology group. They might be able to tell us.”

  “This is such an ass-backwards way of teaching.”

  “I’ll be patient if you will,” Lanier said.

  Patricia was silent for a moment. ”No guarantees,” she said. ”I wish you’d stop seeming so peeved at me when I just ask straightforward questions.”

  Lanier raised his eyebrows and nodded. ”Please don’t take it personally.”

  So he’s under strain, she thought. Well, so am I. Only he’s had time to get used to it. If you can ever get used to something like the library ... or the Stone itself. Then again, there’s almost certainly more...

  She had the sudden vision of a maze of chalkboards waiting for her in the seventh chamber, filled with wandering mathematicians working on some grand, unified problem. Over them all, on a huge video screen, the Advisor watched patiently, like God. Lanier was her avatar.

  “Rimskaya’s half Russian,’ Lanier continued. ”His grandmother was a widower and an immigrant and her name was applied on the U.S. entry papers to her son, as well. He speaks Russian like a native. Sometimes he acts as interpreter between the Russians and us.”

  The train’s hum increased in pitch and they plunged into the fourth chamber’s northern cap.

  The fifth chamber was darker than the previous sections she had visited. A canopy of flat gray clouds painted the cylinder’s upper atmosphere, cutting out half the robe light. Beneath the clouds was a Wagnerian landscape of barren mountains, resembling ragged lumps of anthracite mixed with dark-rainbowed hematite. Between the mountains were rusty abyssal valleys, cut by waterfalls feeding into quicksilver rivers. The mountains toward the middle of the chamber floor were startling in their contortions—arches, giant rugged cubes, broken-tipped pyramids and causeways of irregular slab steps.

  “What in hell was this?” she asked.

  “A kind of open pit mine, we think. Our two geologist's—you met Robert Smith, he’s one—speculate that when the chambers were hollowed out, the fifth wasn’t finished off. They left it for raw material. And the Stoners used it. These are the scars.”

  “Perfect for fans of old horror movies,” Patricia said. “Can’t you just see Castle Dracula here?”

  They said nothing throughout the short trip down the next tunnel into the sixth chamber. As the train’s hum decreased in pitch and the tunnel dark brightened, Lanier stood and said, “End of the line.”

  The lower terminal was a cavernous construct of unpainted slabs of reddish concrete and mottled gray-and-black asteroid rock. The platform was marked with faint lines, as though long winding queues had once formed there.

  “This was a worker’s station once,” Lanier said. ”When they modified the sixth chamber, this served as a debarkation point. Six hundred years ago, perhaps.”

  “How long has the Stone been deserted?”

  “Five centuries.”

  They walked up a ramp into a building constructed mostly of thick transparent panels, giving an excellent view of the sixth chamber.

  The valley floor was layered with gigantic inert mechanical forms, cylinders and cubes and stacks of circular plates laid on edge, resembling a monstrous circuit board. Just outside the terminal building, a row of spherical tanks marched off to a distant wall. The wall was at least a hundred meters high, and the tanks half that in diameter. Below this level of the terminal, between the spheres and a parallel row of cylinders resting on their sides, was an immense gully filled with glistening water. The channel was lined with pipe ends and cyclopian pumping apparatus. Over it all, thick black clouds floated in clumps, dropping curtains of rain and flurries of show. Somewhere was a constant pulsing, less heard then felt, like the infra-sound beats of moving mountains or the grinding of distant sea bottoms.

  Looking up at an angle, between decks of clouds, she could dimly see the opposite floor of the chamber, bumped and ridged with a carpet of mysterious mechanism.

  “No moving parts in the whole chamber except for large pumps, and not many of those,” Lanier said. ”The builders relied upon a built-in weather cycle. Rain falls, picks up heat, flows down channels into shallow ponds, evaporates, carries heat up, and the atmospheric maintenance systems drain it off, we’re still not sure how.”

  “What does it all do?”

  “When the Stone was first designed, the si
xth chamber was going to be another city, but the builders had specified that the Stone could only accelerate at three percent g. Just before the Stone was outfitted—and before the completion of the major excavation—they found a way to allow the Stone to accelerate to the limit of its power. The method was complex and expensive, but it gave the Stone a versatility the builders couldn’t pass up. So the sixth chamber was equipped with selective inertial damping machinery, which makes up a small fraction of what is here now.” He nodded at the vista through the glass. ”That’s why none of the chamber floors are inclined, and none of the ponds or rivers are equipped with slop barriers. They don’t need them. The sixth chamber can selectively damp the effects of inertia on any object in the Stone. On a large scale, it overcomes acceleration and deceleration of the entire ship. On a small scale, it prevents inertial effects in the trains. It’s self-regulating, though we haven’t found any ‘brain’ yet.”

  The rain hit the transparent roof and ran down the forty-five degree slope over the stairwell. Lanier paused to look at the heads and rivulets of water.

  “Since that time, the machinery has been modified and expanded. It once covered about three square kilometers, and the rest of the sixth chamber was used for industry and research, things that couldn’t be done in the cities. Now, it maintains the seventh chamber as well.”

  Four people, all clad in yellow rain gear, marched along the edge of the channel beyond the terminal. They had parked their track a few meters away, on a raised roadbed.

  “Our reception committee,” Lanier said. They walked to the head of the staircase. Cold air pooled in the stairwell, and Patricia shivered as an outside gust blew some of it over them.

  Rain sang softly overhead. Between the rivulets on the glass, through a trench-like break in the clouds, Patricia saw the opposite northern cap. All the other caps had been virtually blank, featureless. This one was furrowed by a row of rectangular boxes, spaced at equal intervals like a steep flight of stairs, on the face of each box was an elliptical design. The boxes, she estimated, were at least a kilometer wide, and the ellipses half that along their major axis.