Twenty-five kilometers below the axis, the Stone’s spin produced a force of six-tenths of a g. Garry Lanier took daily advantage of that to perform gymnastic feats difficult or impossible for him on Earth. He swung back and forth, blowing out his breath forcefully and grunting, holding his legs straight together and propelling himself high over the parallel bars and the pit of fine white sand. It was easy to twist and reverse his position. Almost as easy was swinging his legs into the air, spinning and doing a reverse that way.
The exercise cleared his mind of everything else—for a few minutes, at least—and took him back to his days as a college gymnast.
The Stone’s first chamber, viewed in cross section, resembled a squat cylinder, fifty kilometers in diameter and thirty across the floor.
Since each of the Stone’s first six chambers were wider in diameter than in length, they resembled deep valleys, and that’s what they were sometimes called.
Lanier paused for a second with toes pointed together and stared up at the plasma tube. Rings of light passed through ionized gas only slightly denser than the near-vacuum around them, sweeping along the axis from the bore hole to the opposite side of the chamber with such speed that the eye interpreted their passage as a continuous hollow shaft or tube.
The plasma tube—and extensions in the other chambers—provided all the light for the Stone’s interior and had been doing so for some twelve centuries.
He dropped to the sandy bed and rubbed his hands on his sweatpants. He worked out for an hour—no more—whenever his schedule allowed, which wasn’t often. His muscles were feeling the lack of Earth gravity. At least he was acclimated to the thin air.
He ran his hand through his short black hair, face expressionless, pumping his legs slowly to cool them down.
Soon, back to the small office in the administration bungalow, back to signing slates allocating materiel to the various experiments, looking over the science team shifts in the five cramped labs, ‘scheduling equipment and central processor time ... back to the memory blocks and the information coming out of the second and third chambers And to the security squabbles, the Russian team’s constant complaints about limited access.
He closed his eyes. Those things he could handle. Hoffman had once called him a born administrator, and he didn’t deny it—handling people, especially brilliant, capable people, was his meat and drink.
But he would also go back to the tiny figurine in the top drawer of his desk. For him, the figurine symbolized everything peculiar about the Stone.
“It was a lifelike three-dimensional image of a man, encased in a block of crystal. On the base of the block, which stood just under twelve centimeters high, a name had been engraved in neat round letters: KONRAD KORZENOWSKI.
Korzenowski had been the main engineer on the Stone, six hundred years ago.
That was where it began. The Library Beast, he thought of it, threatening to consume him—the knowledge that had every day taken a bit of his humanity and rubbed it thin, pushing him closer to some sort of personal crisis. There was no way—yet—to deal with what he knew—he and only ten other people. Soon, an eleventh would arrive.
He felt sorry for her.
The gymnastics pit was half a kilometer from the science team compound, midway between the compound and the barbed wire fence that marked the boundary beyond which no one could go, unescorted, without a green badge.
The valley floor was covered with a soft, sandy layer of soil, not dusty though dry. A few scrubby patches of grass grew out of the soil, but for the most part the first chamber was arid.
The compound itself, one of two in the first chamber, resembled an old Roman encampment, with an earthworks rampart and a shallow, dry moat surrounding the buildings.
The rampart was topped with electronic sensors mounted on stakes every five meters. All these precautions dated back to the days when it was reasonable to suspect there might still be Stoners in the chambers and that they might present some danger. Out of force of habit—and because the possibility had never been completely ruled out—the precautions were maintained.
Lanier crossed the sturdy wooden bridge spanning the moat and climbed a set of steps on the rampart, waving his card at a reader mounted on one of the stakes.
He passed the men’s and women’s barracks and entered the administration bungalow, tapping his finger on Ann Blakely’s desk and waving as he walked past. Ann had served him as secretary and general assistant for over a year. She swiveled on her chair and reached for the memo slate.
He shook his head without looking at her and continued on up the stairs. ”Five more minutes,” he said.
On the second floor, he slipped his card into the verification lock on his office door, pressed his thumbs onto the small plate and entered.
The door swung shut automatically behind him.
He removed his sweatpants and shirt, substituting the blue science team jumpsuit.
The office was neatly organized but still looked cluttered. A small desk manufactured from OTV tank baffles was flanked by chromium bins filled with rolls of paper. A narrow shelf of real books hung next to racks of memory blocks sealed behind tough, alarm-equipped plastic panels. Maps and diagrams were taped to the walls.
A broad window looked out over the compound buildings.
North across the valley’s barren floor of dirt, sand and scrub loomed the massive gray presence of the far chamber cap.
He sat on a lightweight director’s chair and propped his feet on the window frame. His dark eyes, underscored by fatigue lines, focused on a distant point at one o’clock high where the plasma tube butted up against the cap. Through the tube’s diffuse glow, it was difficult to make out the hundred-meter-wide bore hole that pushed through the cap into the second chamber. The bore hole opened five kilometers above the atmosphere in the chamber.
In two minutes, his private time would be over. He organized his slates and processors, looking over the day’s schedule, preparing himself mentally to be a mover-and-shaker.
There was dirt beneath one fingernail. He removed it with another fingernail.
If he could only explain the simple things the figurine, the barbed wire used to string up the fence, the crate wood used to make the bridge over the moat—it would all fall into place.
The Stone would explain itself.
The only explanations he had now were much too incredible to be sane.
His comline hummed.
“Yes, Ann.”
“Are you on duty now, Garry?”
“That I am.”
“Transmission down the hole. OTV approach.”
“Our savior?”
“I presume.”
Hoffman had said this young woman was important, and the Advisor’s word was one of the few things Lanier felt he could count on. In the four years since that night at the party, he had learned a great deal about politics in and out of world capitals, and how nations handled crises.
He had come to realize how truly extraordinary Hoffman was.
Capable, and with uncanny intuition.
But at that party, she had been dead wrong about one thing.
The Stone’s appearance did not signal the arrival of aliens, not in the strict sense of the word.
He picked up two slates and a processor. ”Anything else?” he asked, standing by Blakely’s desk.
“In and out,” she said and handed him a cube of messages.
There was always a mild, cool breeze flowing down the almost vertical slope of the cap. Sometimes snow fell, piling up in drifts against the nickel-iron wall. The elevator entrance, a perfect semicircular arch, had been blasted out of asteroid material, as had all the tunnels, serviceways and bore holes of the Stone, by a fusion torch of extremely high power and efficiency. The sides of the short hall had been polished smooth and etched with acid by the Stoners to reveal the beautiful triangular Widmanstiitten patterns, veined with rocky troilite intrusions.
The elevator was cylindrical, ten meters in diameter and five meters high, and was used for both personnel and freight.
There were handgrips along the perimeter and tie-downs dimpled the floor. It followed a sloping tunnel to the staging areas surrounding the external bore hole. As the elevator climbed, its angular velocity declined, weakening the centrifugal force of the Stone’s rotation. By the time it reached the vicinity of the bore hole, the spin produced only one-tenth of one percent g.
The trip took ten minutes. The elevator decelerated smoothly and stopped, its opposite hatch flush with a pressurized runnel leading to the staging areas.
Taking an electric miner’s cart, one of the two dozen or so brought up from Earth, Lanier rose most of the remaining distance along a magnetic rail.
The cart whined to a stop and Lanier drifted the rest of the way, pulling himself along guide ropes.
The first landings in the bore hole had been tricky. There had been no power to the rotating docks at that time, and very little illumination.
The OTV pilots had proved their skill again and again.
The first spacesuited explorers had shown great courage in leaving their craft and approaching the bore-hole walls, which rotated at about three-quarters of a meter per second.
Now that the dock and staging area equipment had been refurbished and brought back into operation, the transfer process was much easier.
The three docks were simple, massive and efficient.
Cylinders within the hole rotated to compensate for the Stone’s spin, each accelerated like the rotor in a giant electric motor.
One engineer in a booth below the prime dock controlled all of the docks, opening and closing hatches, coordinating cargo and passenger unloading.
The staging areas themselves had been thoroughly customized by the engineering team, outfitted with near-freefall workshops and machine shops. Here was where bulky cargoes were checked out, repackaged and either shipped down the elevators to the valley floor or flown along the axis to the next hole and chamber down the line.
The director of the engineering team, Lawrence Heineman, was talking to a slight, dark-haired young woman in the prime dock staging area as Lanier pulled himself in. They stood in a broad oval of light, hands on guide ropes, watching as large vacuum doors slid across to reveal the OTV’s cocoon cargo resting on joists. The cargo dwarfed them.
Heineman, a short, crew-cut, muscular aerospace technician from Florida, smiled broadly and waved his hands, explaining something to the young woman. As Lanier approached, Heineman turned, held out the palm of one hand and bowed slightly in his direction.
“Patricia, this is Garry Lanier, the closest thing to a civilian boss we have. Garry, Miss Patricia Luisa Vasquez.”
He shook his head and blew his breath out with an enthusiastic “Whoo!” Lanier shook Vasquez’s hand. She was small and pretty in a fragile way. Round face, silky dark brown hair, thin wrists, narrow legs, broad hips for her size: an altogether unpractical-looking woman, he thought. Beneath wide square eyes as black as his own, and a small, sharp nose, she had drawn her mouth into a tight line. She looked scared.
“My pleasure,” Lanier said. ”Larry, what have you told her so far?”
Heineman parried the question with a sidelong glance.
“Patricia, I’m only a blue-badge for now—and I hear you’re going to get a green. Garry is worried I might pass along some of the ignorant suppositions of an axis-hugger. I’ve only been telling her about this level of operations, I swear.” He held up his right hand and clapped his left to his chest. ”Garry, I’ve read some of this lady’s papers in a half-dozen math and physics journals. She’s fantastic.”
There was a question on his face, however, which Lanier had no trouble interpreting. What in hell is she doing here?
“So I’ve heard.” He pointed at the cocoon. ”What’s that?”
“My ticket to a green badge, finally,” Heineman said. “Packing slips say it’s the tuberider. And the V/STOL is coming in on the next OTV, a few hours from now.”
“Then let’s get it unwrapped and see what sort of modifications we’ll have to make.”
“Right. Pleased to meet you, Patricia.” Heineman started to leave, then stopped and turned back slowly with a puzzled expression.
“What you write about, it’s really more a hobby for me, way beyond my expertise.” He raised his eyebrows hopefully. ”Maybe we can talk more later, though, when I get my green badge?”
Patricia smiled and nodded. Teams of men and women in gray jumpsuits were already gathering around the cocoon like ants tending a queen.
Heineman joined them, calling out orders.
“Miss Vasquez—” Lanier began.
“Patricia’s fine, really. I’m not very formal.”
“Neither am I, if I can help it. I’m the science team coordinator.”
“So Mr. Heineman told me. I have so many questions ... Mr. Lanier, Garry, is this really a spaceship, a starship, the whole thing?” She swung her arm wide, her feet lifting from the deck momentarily.
“It is,” he said, feeling the familiar, peculiar pleasure.
Even though the Stone had nearly driven him crazy in the past few years, with its endless layers of surprise and shock, he was still more than a little in love with it.
“Where did it come from?”
Lanier held up his hands and shook his head. Vasquez suddenly noticed how exhausted he appeared, and that subdued her excitement some.
“First, I’m sure you’ll want to rest and get cleaned up. Our facilities in the valley—the chamber floor—are quite nice. Then you can visit our cafeteria, meet a few of the team scientists, take it from there. One step at a time.”
Vasquez examined him intently. Her eyes made the inspection seem less than sympathetic, even aggressive. ”Is something wrong?”
Lanier raised his brows and glanced to one side. ”We have a name for what this place does to you. We call it getting Stoned. I’m just a little Stoned, is all.”
She looked around the staging area and experimented with the centrifugal force, pushing herself up a few centimeters with a nudge of her toe. ”It looks so familiar,” she said. ”I expected an alien artifact to be mysterious, but I can identify almost everything, like it was built on Earth, by us.”
“Well,” said Lanier, “Heineman and his people have been busy up here. But keep an open mind. If you’ll follow me, we’ll descend to the floor of the first chamber. Use the ropes.
And if Larry hasn’t already said it, allow me to welcome you to the Stone.”