The Dig

  "How's that for an 'active function?" Robbins was trying to run, float, and aim her camera backward at the same time. She would have fallen behind had not Low taken a firm grip on one of her suit straps and jerked her along. So bright had the light issuing from the plates and the mound become that his faceplate darkened automatically every time he glanced back over a shoulder. Nor did the incrementally intensifying display give any indication of slowing down.

  Silent flowerings of light began to spew from the base of the mound and explode past the retreating humans. His suit gauges were going crazy, though the critical radiation meter remained well within tolerable limits. Around them the chamber was responding with flares and flashes and electrical eruptions of its own. Walls bulged and twisted, the ceiling rippled like beach sand, and the floor underfoot ran through a dizzying series of patterns, like a morphing squid gone berserk. Within the chamber only the three fleeing humans remained untouched.

  Trapped within a psychotic rainbow, he thought tensely. Or an engineer's schematic of an exploding battery. Neither image was particularly reassuring.

  All about them, the chamber was coming alive, and they were trapped in its heaving gut.

  "The shaft! Use full power on your thrusters!" As he gave the order, he ran his own fingers over the relevant controls and felt himself beginning to rise. The suit propulsion unit possessed just enough thrust to counter the feeble artificial gravity. As they rose higher, the gravity weakened and the strain on the suit motor gradually decreased. Robbins performed admirably, letting Low tow her while she continued to operate her camera. He would have complimented her but didn't feel he could spare the time.

  All of his attention was concentrated on the opening above, the exit to fissure, surface, space, and shuttle. Four simple steps to security, four different landscapes to traverse.

  A bolt of red lightning blew past him. It seemed to wink as it passed, a parade of semidomesticated charged particles.

  "It's beautiful!" Robbins shouted over her communicator.

  "You can describe it to me later."

  "Damn, would you look at that." Eyes wide and unblinking, Borden leaned forward in his chair.

  "Man oh man." Having left her station, Miles hung in the air between the two piloting stations.

  There were no words for what they were seeing, no facile way to describe that which had never previously been witnessed, or even imagined.

  Scintillating beams of light were erupting from the surface of the asteroid, or rather, from depths unseen. Their source was invisible, buried somewhere deep beneath the rocks. Though intensely bright, they did not lase. Depressions and small craters spat silent thunderbolts and fireballs, which raced off into space or arced back to smash afresh into the agitated surface.

  "What's happening?" she found herself whispering. "What the hell's happening?"

  "Maybe that's it. Maybe Hell's happening." A grim-faced Borden was trying to interpret readouts as fast as he could scan them. "More important is, why is it happening?" He shouted without looking up, knowing that the omnidirectional pickup would snatch his words out of the cabin's atmosphere. "Boston? Come back, Boz! What's going on down there? Where are you guys?"

  "... lights...," a familiar and heavily distorted voice replied. "On our way out. Artifacts activated ... device. We are—" Overpowering electrical interference stifled the rest of the words.

  "Boston, Boston, say again!" With an effort, Borden fought down the urge to pound his fist against the speaker grid. Instead, he looked up at the mission payload specialist. "Did he say 'device'?"

  She nodded. "Sounded like it to me."

  "What kind of device, Boz? What did you do, dammit?"

  "He said they were on their way out." Miles was icily calm, professional. "I imagine they're bringing explanations with them."

  "Damn well better be." The copilot was angry, frustrated and afraid all at once.

  Using handgrips, Miles turned on her axis. "We'd better be ready to pick them up."

  "And to get out of here as soon as they're back aboard." Like Miles, Borden lapsed into silence as each of them attended to individual preparations. Neither bothered to acknowledge or respond to the increasingly strident calls that were being issued by ground control.

  "Borden, Commander Low—what's going on up there?" The voice was by turns anxious and agitated. "We're getting all kinds of abnormal readings in your vicinity. Visual claims they're seeing flashes of light. Bright flashes."

  "If this gets any brighter, viewers on the nightside will be able to see it with the naked eye." Miles was running post-EVA stats at three times the usual speed. "The spin-control boys are going to love that."

  Borden was still railing at the pickup. "Boston, damn you, talk to me! Call me names, impugn my ancestry, but talk to me!"

  Even if he'd been able to hear his friend imploring, Low was too busy to respond. They had another problem to deal with.

  Gravity was increasing.

  Despite the best efforts of their suit thrusters, they were drifting not up toward the entrance to the shaft but down, back toward the lambent, electrified floor.

  "This is fascinating." Brink kept his hand on his suit thruster controls, to no avail. "Not only are we witness to a technology that can generate artificial gravity, it is also capable of varying it at will. One might call it cavorting gravity, in homage to a speculative predecessor."

  "Let's hope the builders of this place didn't find Jovian conditions to their liking, or we'll have to call it something less whimsical." Low did his best to coax more thrust from his pack, to no avail. He was falling floorward as swiftly as his companions.

  They came down not far from the tower, surrounded by anarchic bursts of light. Since they hadn't been fried, electrocuted, or microwaved by now, Low decided, it was possible they might live to contemplate future dilemmas. Whatever the cause and purpose of all the acrobatic energy dancing around them, it did not seem to be designed to kill.

  The display had been sparked, as it were, by the insertion of the four plates into the tower. If even one of those plates could be removed, it was conceivable the circus of light would cease and conditions would return to what they had been earlier. Quiet would return and gravity would once more fall to a level they could escape.

  Brink agreed readily with the Commander's analysis as they touched down. If the gravity continued to increase, they would be reduced to crawling about in their heavy suits. That made it imperative for them to disable the tower as quickly as possible.

  Low got there first and reached for the nearest plate, trying not to think about the voltage of the sparks that by this time nearly obscured the inscribed surface. Remembering how Brink had done it, he hooked his fingers into the deepest inscription. Immediately the plate began to move.

  Away from him.

  Jerking his hands back in surprise, he watched as the plates sank into the solid matter of the tower, falling in and down as if they were sinking through gelatin. When he tentatively reached for the plate a second time, his fingers contacted what felt like solid material. With every passing moment, the plates sank deeper and deeper into the base of the mound.

  Their descent halted about a yard above floor level, whereupon they began to move toward one another. As they touched, they began to change shape, flowing and melting to form a single, malleable non-Euclidian construct. To Low's astonished eyes the result resembled a child's toy jack more than anything else, except that the angles of the spikes were all wrong.

  The conclusion of the process was marked by a burst of intense crimson light, which expanded outward from the tower's center like a ring of fire and which nearly defeated the lens-darkening response time of their faceplates. As it was, all three of them threw up their arms reflexively to shield their eyes. They felt nothing, no heat or shock wave.

  When Low had at last blinked away enough lingering stars to see clearly once more, he saw that the spiked shape at the center of the mound had been replaced by a coldly burning b
all no bigger than his fist.

  "Well," he muttered tersely, "so much for removing the plates." He looked up and back, to where the bottom of the shaft now seemed impossibly far overhead. An experimental step turned into a respectable stride. Fluctuate the gravity might, but it was still less than Earth-normal. Maybe if he and Brink gave Robbins, who weighed less in proportion to her gear than anyone else, a running boost or shove, she might achieve escape velocity.

  A murmured command into his helmet pickup returned nothing but static, hardly surprising in view of the amount of free energy that continued to crackle and flare around them. It had lessened somewhat since the melding of the four plates into the single ball but was still too intense and dominating to permit communication with the shuttle. For the same reason, Borden and Miles's frantic attempts to reach them were falling equally flat.

  "Atlantis," the desperate voice from Houston insisted, "something's happening up there."

  "Now, there's an understatement." Having finished her preparations for EVA recovery, Miles had disengaged and drifted back to rejoin Borden. Both of them stared out the port.

  The asteroid was changing. Before their eyes its shape and appearance were being altered by silent, unimaginable forces. It would have been easy to think of it as the work of a clever computer program, Borden mused silently, if not for the fact that three people were trapped somewhere within. Was the interior changing as well, and if so, what effect was it having on Low and the others? Were they being crushed, ignored, or treated to a fun-house ride the likes of which no human had ever experienced? With all channels of communication silent, there was no way of knowing.

  It was absurd, preposterous, it made no sense. Mile-long asteroids did not surge and flow like modeling clay, did not trade in familiar, crater-pocked surfaces for sleek curves of glassy gray-white. A rock-collecting friend of the copilot's had once shown him a polished ovoid of rutilated quartz. Lit from within and turned semiopaque, it might be a twin to the object he now found himself gazing at in wonderment. The asteroid had now become something that, like many politicians, you could only see into a little ways before it defeated your best attempts at further perception.

  Whatever the object really was, it was no asteroid.

  Shafts of tinted lightning as broad in diameter as the shuttle coursed over and through its surface like skittish fish confined in a too-small aquarium. The shuttle's main instrument console began to vibrate discreetly beneath his fingers, and he jerked them back as if burnt.

  "What now?" Miles grabbed for a hold with both hands.

  "I don't—" Borden's reply was interrupted by the most dreaded sound in space: the hiss of escaping atmosphere. Twisting in midair, Miles located the source and shut it down. It was crazy, of course. In the absence of air, there was no reason for the shuttle to be subject to vibration, but vibrating it was.

  Nor was it only the shuttle. Borden thought he could feel every cell in his body quivering, the corpuscles in his blood banging off the arterial walls. It was a sustained harmonic. He would have clapped his hands to his ears if the vibration had taken the form of audible noise.

  The explosions of light that now covered the surface of the object were intensifying. Soon they reached the point where they completely obscured the polished surface. Even as he found himself praying for the shuttle's hull to remain intact, he thought of calling out one more time to his absent friend and colleague.

  Then it happened. Not to the alien object, but around it. The starfield in his line of sight seemed to twist like candy sprinkles cast into molten licorice. His brain tried to adjust, and failed. The object lurched ten yards to its right, blew off light like a bursting bulb and vanished.

  Within the shuttle the steady and inexplicable vibration abruptly ceased. Not bothering to wipe away the sweat that was pouring off him, he barked back at Miles.

  "Hull integrity!"

  "The one small leak. I got it sealed." She was pouring over readouts, calling out numbers and names that would have been meaningless to anyone less highly skilled than the copilot. When she finished, it was apparent that by any standard the ship had remained mercifully intact.

  The voices of ground control had gone from restive to anxious to desperate and now to imploring. "Atlantis, this is Houston. Do you read? Atlantis, this is Houston, do you read?" It was a mournful mantra that deserved to be acknowledged.

  Borden's eyes hadn't left the place where the asteroid had been. A part of him continued to listen to the plaintive voices of Earth.

  "Atlantis, we're registering an anomaly down here." A new voice, as curious as it was concerned. "Can you enlighten?"

  "Sure," Borden heard himself replying. "We can explain. The asteroid is gone. Oh, and it wasn't an asteroid."

  Silence from far below, from a place of reality and familiar surroundings, so different from the dark emptiness where the shuttle floated. Then, very tentatively, "Atlantis, say again?"

  "I told you: It's gone. It changed shape, morphed, whatever you want to call it. It was an asteroid, and then it became ... something else. And now it's gone."

  A shorter silence this time. "That's what it shows here. But that's impossible. Asteroids don't suddenly pick up and move. Your position has remained constant."

  "That's us humans for you." Miles took over from Borden. "Constant. Ken told you. It wasn't an asteroid. Whatever it was did move." She swallowed. "Real fast. As in instantaneous."

  "Borden, can you confirm?"

  He waited until the query was repeated. "Yeah. Yeah, I can confirm. It went poof. Just like the genie of the lamp."

  More silence before, "Commander Low? Specialist Brink and Ms. Robbins?"

  "I expect they went poof, too, since they were inside the object when it vanished." He exhaled slowly, suddenly very tired. "They found artifacts. Inscribed metal plates of some kind. Then they found a shaft, or tunnel, leading inside. So they went in. And now... they've gone away. That's the concise version. I'll try to be more illuminating later."

  "Inside?" queried Mission Control. "Artifacts?"

  "That's right. Nothing exceptional about finding artifacts on an artifact. Once they were inside, communications became intermittent. There was a lot of free energy running through the object and coming off it. Cold energy." He giggled, caught himself quickly. "Cold confusion. It skipped a little to one side, flashed a good-bye, and vanished."

  "What you're telling us makes no sense, Mr. Borden."

  The copilot responded without hesitation. "Thank you for confirming our hypothesis, Houston. We are awaiting orders." He could envision many very confused experts caucusing aimlessly.

  "All right." A new, no-nonsense voice had wrested control of the transmission. "If they are no longer there, then where did they go?"

  Borden and Miles exchanged a glance before Cora Miles— daughter of a janitor, international chess champion, NCAA women's runner-up on the three-meter board, summa cum laude MIT, responded in her best congresswoman-to-be tone.

  "Honey, don't ask us, but if you find out, we'd sure like to know. Because I'm telling you, they're not onboard, they're not in the lock, they're not within range of any of our instruments. They're gone, man."

  Borden pushed back against his chair. "Wherever they've gone, I hope there are green trees, and morning fog, and the cry of gulls, or Boz is going to be pissed. But somehow I don't think there will be."

  His eyes dropped to a gauge that monitored the shuttle's ground speed. Next to it was one that had been calibrated to do the same for the asteroid. It was frozen, showing only a long line of zeros.

  Which happened to represent with unexpected scientific accuracy the sum total of their current knowledge as to the asteroid's makeup, purpose and present whereabouts.

  CHAPTER 8

  Adrift amid oceans of preternatural calm, there were continents. Each wore a reddish-pink halo of algal bloom in which fan-tailed sievers of bloated mien held court, arcing and diving like pale prima donnas in a perpetual alien pax de deux.
Swifter of pace but lesser in bulk, other creatures inhabiting the sea frolicked around these masters of biomass conversion. The land held concourse with pacific denizens, while in the pale-blue sky thin-winged supplicants gesticulated alternately to clouds and mountaintop.

  The three humans onboard the unasteroid saw none of this as their transport winked into the world at a predetermined boundary between soil and space. They were still confined to a tiny, circumscribed world of light and slippery surfaces, wondering what had happened to them but so surrounded by marvels that they had little time in which to bemoan possible fates.

  The device circled thrice around the peaceful planet before commencing its descent. Those within felt no cessation of motion, just as they had felt none of the incredible acceleration. Robbins was preoccupied with the condition of her suit, into which she had, during an awkward moment, thrown up. She was as much embarrassed as she was discomfited.

  No one knew what had happened to them or what was going on in the outside world. Nor did they have a clue that that same outside world no longer, to all intents and purposes, actively existed. They had known only intense light, subtle vibration, stomach-churning disorientation, and a complete lack of communication with their colleagues back aboard the Atlantis. Decision was on hold, life on automatic, thinking processes on maintenance. They would remain so until one of them succeeded in figuring out what the hell was going on.

  In the south-central part of one rosy-tinged ocean, out of sight of the nearest continent, a rocky, bowl-shaped island surrounded by a handful of smaller islets thrust out of the sea from a stabilized volcanic bed. The unasteroid appeared above them, descending through a twilit sky. Slowing, it hovered for long moments while instruments within communicated with instruments situated below. Then and only then did it gently lower itself into a waiting, lined depression in the rock. Other instruments located on the outer islands observed silently without offering comment.