Patricia lay on the air mattress, keeping still so the synthetic fiber sheets wouldn’t squeak against the vinyl.
Surrounded by darkness, she was clean, warm, well fed—the cafeteria food had been more than palatable—and now that she wasn’t walking around, not nearly so breathless. Tired but unable to sleep. Her memory kept tossing up visions: The thirty-kilometer-wide chamber floor, a mottled gray-and-brown valley landscape, capped at each end by impassive rock and natural metal walls, run through by the glowing plasma tube.
The peculiar perspective as she stood outside the valley level zero elevator entrance, facing the immensity, the landscape for kilometers around looking flat and normal, a desert on a bright cloudy day. Off to either side, however—spinwise and counter-spinwise the curve became more pronounced.
She seemed to stand under a vast arching bridge with the plasma tube a bright milky river flowing overhead. Directly north, the land rose to curve in snug conformity with the circular cap. Looking up, everything distorted as if seen through a fish-eye lens, the cap accepted the embrace of the opposite side of the chamber, completing the circle behind the plasma tube.
The Stone was still active, even though these chambers had been deserted centuries before.
Lanier hadn’t answered many questions, telling her it was “the process” to let her see and experience the Stone, step by step.
“Otherwise,” he had said, “why should you believe what we tell you?”
That made sense, but she was still frustrated. What was so mysterious?
The Stone was magnificent and startling, but not—so far as she could tell—anything to arouse her professional interest. Straightforward physics, however advanced.
It was simple, really. Take one large asteroid, rock with a core of nickel-iron—your average billennia-old chunk of primordial planet-stuff—and push it into an orbit around your planet. Hollow out seven chambers, each connected by an axial bore hole, then worm-hole some of the remaining volume with tunnels, accessways, storage depots and elevators.
Bring up supplementary carbonaceous and ice-volatiles asteroids and begin transferring their material into the chambers. Send it on a journey into deepest space, and voila!
The Stone.
She had learned a few key facts so far. Each chamber floor was connected by tunnels dug through the intervening asteroid material.
Many of the tunnels were part of an extensive train transport system.
There were no trains in the first chamber because it had served as a reserve and storage area and had been infrequently visited in the time when the Stone was populated. The seventh chamber had apparently served a similar purpose, which made sense—the outermost chambers doing double duty as buffers, against damage to the comparatively thin ends of the asteroid. The wall between the first chamber cap and space was only a few kilometers thick in places.
But there was something peculiar about the seventh chamber.
She had felt it in Lanier’s voice and seen it in the expressions of those she had met in the cafeteria. And there had been the rumors on Earth ...
Somehow, the seventh chamber was different, important.
She had met five team scientists so far, three in the cafeteria: Robert Smith, tall and bird-boned with red hair and down-angled eyes that made him seem sad, an expert on asteroid formation; Hua Ling, the slender and intense senior member of the Chinese team and a plasma physicist who spent most of his time at the south polar bore hole; and Lenore Carrolson, a round-faced woman of fifty with gray-blond hair and a permanently friendly, sensual expression, heavy-lidded eyes surrounded by smile lines.
Carrolson had greeted Patricia with motherly solicitude. It had taken Patricia several minutes to realize that this was the Lenore Carrolson, Nobel laureate, the astrophysicist who had discovered and partly explained gemstars eight years before.
Carrolson had taken Lanier’s hint that it was her duty to show Patricia the women’s quarters in the compound. They were in a long, fiberwall barracks on the north end of the quadrangle. The rooms were small and spare but comfortable in their own ingenious ways, everything lightweight and compact. In the building’s’ lounge, Carrolson had introduced her to two other astronomers, Janice Polk and Beryl Wallace, both from the Abell Array in Nevada. They sprawled on couches that looked as if they had been assembled out of scrap metal in a high school shop class. Polk resembled a fashion model more than Patricia’s image of an astronomer. Even in a jumpsuit, her dark beauty was elegant and distant, her expression not so much disapproving as skeptical. Wallace was attractive enough, but about twenty pounds overweight.
She seemed perturbed about something.
Carrolson had pointed out the social roster located near the main door. ”There are thirty women here on the science team, and sixty men. Two married couples, four committeds—”
“Five,” Patricia had added.
“And six married but spouses back on Earth. I’m one of those. That means slim pickings for the single men. But committed or not, you’re fair game if you put your name on the roster. There’s an old saying that has to be bent a bit here: ‘Don’t dip your pen in the office ink.’ Since office ink is all there is, some pen dipping is inevitable. But nobody has to take abuse.” Carrolson glanced at Polk and Wallace. ”Right, girls?”
“Paradise,” Polk said flatly, looking up from her slate and widening her eyes. ”Better than university.”
“Any trouble,” Carrolson said, “and you just tell me. I’m senior female here, in age at least.”
“I’ll do fine,” Patricia had replied.
She had never been a social butterfly, tending to fall hard and fast—and usually without reciprocation. Still, with Paul to think of, that was the least of her concerns here. Although—and she smiled in the darkness—Lanier was a pretty fellow. So worried, though.
Patricia wondered if she would look just as worried when she had the whole picture.
Without knowing she had slept, she heard the chiming alarm on her comline. Beside her bed, a pleasant amber light switched on with the signal. She blinked at the bare, off-white walls and had no trouble remembering where she was. She felt right at home, in fact, and a little excited. She swung her feet over the edge of the bed.
Patricia had never been adventurous. Hiking and camping had not been missing from her life, but she had never felt inclined toward outdoor activities other than bicycling. Every six to eight months, she became an avid bicyclist, spending two hours each day riding around the campus. The urge would pass after several weeks and her sedentary habits would return.
There had always been too much to do in her mind or on paper. The mind work could be done almost anywhere, but not while climbing precarious trails or being dead tired after a long march.
But here ...
Sometime in the night, she had made the Stone her meat and drink.
She was familiar with the feeling, having approached math problems with similar zeal. She was exhilarated, her pulse was up and she colored like a young girl.
When Lanier knocked, she had dressed and combed her hair. She opened the door with eyes wide.
Carrolson stood behind him. ”Breakfast?” Lanier asked.
Wearing the standard zipper-and-button blue jumpsuit of the science team, she looked more practical, he thought.
The clear pale light of the plasma tube never varied and cast only the vaguest of shadows beneath their feet as they walked.
The cafeteria, adjacent to an experimental agricultural station, was feeding breakfast to the 1500-2400 shift. ”Night” for Patricia had been from six in the “morning” to two in the “afternoon.” Lanier said he slept irregularly; Carrolson was just finishing her shift.
About twenty of the science team clustered around a video screen at one end of the cafeteria. Lanier joined them briefly, then came back while Carrolson and Patricia sat down with dinner and breakfast.
An automatic chef produced trays of food, each segment at the proper temperature, each dish surprisingly tasty. A taplar the unit carried a sign announcing, “Genuine STONE water—an experience not to be missed. H20 from the stars!” The water was flat but not unpleasant.
Lanier gestured at the group around the screen. ”Football,” he explained. ”Hunt and Thanh have patched into the bore-hole microwave and the outside array. Some commercial outfit is relaying a scrambled game to subscribers and we happen to be in the same section of the .sky as the satellite. They’ve unscrambled the signal.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” Patricia asked casually, sorting out the bites on her tray.
“Height hath its privileges,” Carrolson said. ”Nobody will ever prosecute.” Fresh orange juice was available. Citrus trees prospered under the tubelight. The maple syrup on her pancakes was also genuine, but not homegrown. Lanier noticed her expression of surprise.
“What we can’t grow in the Stone, we might as well ask for the best from Earthside. It’s so expensive to ship up anyway, quality only hikes it a fraction of a percentage point—and we have them convinced we should be fed at least as well as submariners and lunar settlers. Eat hearty—that’s a two-hundred-dollar breakfast.”
Carrolson chatted amiably through the meal, talking about her husband’s work on. He was a mathematician employed by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology.
Lanier said little. Patricia was also quiet, taking her cues from him, watching him from the corner of her eye whenever she thought no one would notice. His Indian features attracted her, but the dark circles under his eyes made him look as if he hadn’t slept in weeks.
“—really good for you,” Carrolson was saying.
Patricia regarded her blankly.
“The tubelight, you know,” Carrolson reiterated. ”Has everything we need, and nothing harmful. You could lie out under it for days and not be burned, but you’d get your share of vitamin D.”
“Oh,” Patricia said.
Carrolson sighed. ”Garry, you’re having that effect again.”
Lanier seemed puzzled. ”What effect?”
“Look at the girl.” Carrolson drummed her fingers on the lightweight metal table, rigged out of OTV tank baffles, as was so much furniture in the compound. ”Watch out for him, Patricia. He’s a heartbreaker.”
Patricia glanced between them, mouth open. ”What?”
“I’m going off shift now,” Carrolson said, picking up her tray. “Just keep it in mind. Every woman on the team has had their letch for Garry. But he’s responsible to someone back home—someone very important.” She smiled mysteriously and walked toward the dishwasher unit.
Lanier sipped his cup of coffee. ”I’m not sure she’s reading you correctly.”
“She most certainly is not.”
“She means I’m responsible to the Advisor—to Judith Hoffman.”
“I met her,” Patricia said.
“And I’m not on the social roster because there’s too much work to do here and not nearly enough time. Besides, there’s rank to consider.”
He finished the cup and set it down.
“You’d think with so many intelligent people around, rank wouldn’t be that much of a factor,” Patricia said. She felt naive the instant the last word was out of her mouth.
Lanier folded his hands on the table and looked at her directly until she glanced away.
“Patricia, you’re young, and this might seem very romantic to you, but it’s deadly serious. We’re working under agreements which took years to iron out—if they’re ironed out even yet. We’re an international team of scientists, engineers and security forces, and whatever information we find is not necessarily going to be available to every person on the globe, not for some time yet. Since you’ll have access to almost everything, you must be particularly responsible—as responsible as I am. Please don’t waste your time concerning yourself with ... Well, I suggest you stay off the social roster. Another time, another place, sure, romance and adventure. But not on the Stone.”
She sat stiffly, hands knotted in her lap. ”I have no intention of going on the roster,” she said. She hadn’t been called on the carpet, exactly, but she was still upset.
“Good. Let’s get your green badge and take a ride across the valley.”
They deposited their trays in the scrubber and left the cafeteria.
Lanier walked a few steps ahead of her, eyes on the ground as they approached a small building near the northern side of the ramparts. A stocky broad-shouldered woman in a black jumpsuit, with a green belt and red sergeant’s stripes on her sleeve, opened the door for them, then sat behind a desk made of more baffle metal to fill out forms.
When they were done, she opened a locked box and pulled out a green badge with an outline of the Stone printed in one corner, surrounded by a silver circle.
“Our security is tight here, Miss Vasquez,” she said. “Make sure you know the rules. A green badge is a great responsibility.”
Patricia took the indelible pen and signed the badge, then pressed her fingers onto an ID scan plate for storage in the security system computers. The woman clipped the badge to her breast pocket. “Pleased to have you with us. I’m Doreen Cunningham, head of security for First Chamber Science Compound One. Any questions or problems, feel free to visit.”
“Thank you,” Patricia said. Lanier led the way out of the guardhouse and up the rampart steps.
“If you like to exercise, we have a running path around the inner perimeter of the compound, with an extension that takes you to the second compound. There’s a gym pit not far from here. I recommend pretty strenuous exercise whenever possible. The low-g is a bit easy on us. I tend to get flabby if I don’t maintain. And exercise will acclimate you more quickly to the air pressure.”
“I think the low-g is pleasant,” she said as they walked to the front of a wide plastic-sheet quonset hut. ”Buoyant.”
Inside the hut were two vehicles resembling large snow-cats, mounted on six rubber-tired band-steel-spoke wheels instead of treads.
Patricia bent down to look beneath, then straightened. ”Very rugged,” she said.
“Our trucks. Easy to drive—you’ll learn soon. But today, you’re just going along for the ride. Keep your eyes peeled.”
He unlocked a door and helped her up the high step into the shotgun seat. He paused before closing the door. “I’m sorry I came down on you so hard. I’m sure you understand how important you could be here, and—”
“I don’t understand,” Patricia said. ”I haven’t the faintest idea what use I’ll be.”
Lanier nodded and smiled.
“But you were right, anyway. If I’m so important, then I need to keep my nose to the grindstone.”
“Looks like the Stoned work ethic will come natural to you,” Lanier said. He climbed into the driver’s seat and reached into his pocket, pulling out a slate. He offered it to her. ”Slipped my mind. You’ll probably want to make notes at some point or other. Government issue.”
He switched on the electric motor and drove the truck out of the shed.
“We’re going into the second chamber now, into the first city. We’ll spend a few hours there, then take you on the Thirtieth Century Limited.”
“One of the trains?”
He nodded. ”We’ll skip the third chamber today—too much, too soon. It could overload you. We’ll stop at the fourth chamber security compound for a break and lunch, and then go right through to the sixth chamber.”
The truck approached a chain link fence stretching for several kilometers east and west.
“Would it be premature to ask questions now?”
“We have to start somewhere,” Lanier said.
“That’s real dirt outside. You could grow things in it.”
“It’s moderately fertile.” Lanier said. ”We have several farming projects under way, mostly in the fourth chamber. Most of the dirt is straight carbonaceous asteroid material, with supplements.”
“Men.” She mined to survey the scrub and the low plume of dust behind them. ”Is the Stone still powered-up, I mean, can it leave?”
“It’s still powered-up,” Lanier said. ”We don’t know whether it can leave or not.”
“I was wondering ... if we could be trapped inside, if it decided to leave. Then we would need to farm, wouldn’t we?”
“That’s not why we’re farming,” Lanier said. She waited for him to elaborate, but he stared straight ahead, slowing the truck as they approached the gate in the wire fence.
“The motors are very old. Some of the engineers think they’re worn out,” he said, as if he had half listened to her and half followed his own chain of thought. He removed an electronic key from his pocket, dialed a number and opened the gate with a radio signal. ”We don’t understand the drive yet. The motors’ last effective act was to slow the Stone down for insertion into the present orbit. They used chunks of mass removed by robots from the outside of the Stone—mostly in the deep bands. Mass-drivers lobbed the chunks towards a point just above the northern crater. That end is sealed off—you’ll soon discover a second reason why. What happened to the chunks at that point, we don’t know; the documentation is difficult.”
“I should imagine.”
The truck hummed through the gate and across a track marked by tire ruts and an absence of scrub.
“All that chain link,” Patricia said. ”Once you prescreened everyone coming up here, you’d think that would be enough security. Must have cost a lot to have all that stuff shipped up here. Could have shipped up science, instead.”
“The chain link wasn’t shipped here. We found it.”
“Chain link fence?
“And figurines,” Lanier said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Humans built the Stone, Patricia. People from Earth.”
She stared at him, then tried to grin.
“Built it twelve hundred years ago. At least, it’s about twelve hundred years old.”
“Oh,” she said. ”Pull the other one.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“I don’t expect to be made fun of,” she said quietly, straightening in her seat.
“I’m not making fun. Do you think we’d ship eight or nine kilometers of chain link?”
“I’ll believe that before I believe Charlemagne or whoever had the Stone made to order.”
“I didn’t say it came from our past. Before this goes any farther—please, Patricia, be patient. Wait and see.”
She nodded, but inside she was furious. This was some sort of initiation. Take the young woman out on a ride, terrorize her, stick her hand into a spaghetti-worm mystery, bring her back and have a good laugh. She’s now a true Stoner. Great.
She had never stood for that sort of treatment, even as a thirteen-year-old whiz-kid at UCLA.
“Look at the scrub,” Lanier said. ”It’s grass. We didn’t bring it with us.”
“It looks like grass,” she acknowledged.
The ride across the valley took thirty minutes. They approached the slate-gray cap. A silvery metal arch stood before the entrance to the tunnel, which was about twenty meters wide. A ramp rose from the dirt to the entrance. Lanier accelerated up the ramp.
“How is the air maintained?” she asked. The silence made her uncomfortable. Lanier switched the truck lights on.
“The middle three chambers have large ponds buried beneath them. The ponds are shallow and filled with several varieties of duckweed, water hyacinth and algae. Plus some other plants we’re still identifying. The biggest pond is shaped like a doughnut and circles the fourth chamber. There are ventilation ducts in the gaps at about three kilometers—you can see them with binoculars, or if you have sharp enough eyes—and the Stone is honeycombed with other shafts and ducts.”
Patricia nodded, avoiding his eyes. She’s going to be Stoned soon, Lanier thought. Resentment was the first sign. Resentment and disbelief were much easier than acceptance. And the most careful introductions to the Stone didn’t prevent the cycle. Here, everyone came from Missouri. Everyone had to be shown first. All other learning and refinement came later.
Six minutes after entering the tunnel, they came to a heavy chain link hurricane fence completely covering the tunnel mouth.
Lanier opened another gate with his key, and they emerged in the second chamber.
The ramp leading down from the tunnel had been fortified on each side with masonry walls. More fence had been strung between the walls, and a guardhouse stood to one side of the next gate. Three marines in black jumpsuits came to attention by the guardhouse as the truck rolled toward them, its tires grumbling on the ramp paving. Lanier braked the vehicle and shut it off, then swung down from his seat. Patricia remained where she was, staring at the vista before her.
Beyond the ramp was a two-kilometer-deep shelf of parkland, irregularly spotted by copses of trees and numerous broad, flat white concrete structures, resembling thick building foundations. Beyond the parkland, a narrow lake or river about a kilometer across ran east and west completely around the chamber. A suspension bridge with tall, slender, curved towers crossed the water, set between massive concrete anchors.
The bridge pointed toward a city.
It could have been Los Angeles on a very clear day, or any other modern terrestrial city, except for the surreal exaggeration. It was bigger, more ambitious and ordered, more architecturally mature. And scattered throughout the city, like bumpers on a pinball board, were the biggest structures she had ever seen in her life. Easily four kilometers tall, they resembled upright chandeliers made of concrete, glass and shining steel. Each facet of the nearest chandelier-structure was as large as entire buildings in between. The chandelier resemblance increased as she looked up and saw them suspended from the chamber floor overhead. Across the two layers of atmosphere, fifty kilometers away, the city became beautifully unreal, like a model behind dusty glass in a museum.
Her eyes swept to either side, head swinging as if she were watching a slow tennis match between progressively taller players.
“Good morning, Mr. Lanier,” said the senior officer, approaching to inspect his badge. ”She’s new?”
Lanier nodded. ”Patricia Vasquez. Unlimited access.”
“Yes, sir. General Gerhardt passed the word yesterday to expect you.”
“Any activity?” Lanier asked.
“Mitchell’s survey squad is going through the K mega now, at thirty degrees and six klicks.”
Lanier leaned back into the cab. ”The ‘megas’ are the big buildings,” he explained. She shielded her eyes against the plasma tube, trying to see the opposite side of the chamber more clearly. She could make out parks and small lakes, systems of streets—laid out in alternating concentric circles and square blocks.
She was as far from the opposite wall as Long Beach was from Los Angeles. Despite its scale, the city was definitely human-built.
Lanier stepped up on the running board and asked if she would like to stretch her legs before they continued.
“What do you call it?” Patricia asked.
“Its name is Alexandria.”
“You named it?”
Lanier shook his head. ”No.”
“We’re going all the way to the seventh chamber today?”
“If you’re up to it.”
“How long do we stay here?”
“A few hours at most. I want you to get a look at the library before we continue.”
“A library?”
“Indeed,” Lanier replied. ”One of the highlights.”
She settled back in her seat, eyes wide. ”Is the city deserted?”
“Most of us think it is. We’ve had scattered reports, but I put it up to nerves. Boojums, the security team calls them. Ghosts. We’ve never found a live Stoner.”
“You’ve found dead ones?”
“Quite a number. There are mausoleums in this chamber, and in the fourth chamber. The main cemetery in Alexandria is at two-six degrees and ten kilometers. Do you understand the coordinate system?”
“I think so,” Patricia said. ”Measure from the axis for angle, then distance from the cap. But what’s zero, and which cap?”
“This is the zero bridge, and we measure from the south cap.”
“This isn’t an initiation, then; you weren’t telling me a story. Humans built the Stone.”
“They did,” Lanier said.
“Where did they go?”
Lanier smiled and waggled a finger.
“I know,” Patricia said, sighing. ”Wait and see for myself.” She stepped down from the track and stretched, then rubbed her eyes. ”I’m impressed.”
“The first time I saw Alexandria, I felt kind of at home,” Lanier said. “I was raised in New York, moved to LA when I was fifteen-lived in big cities all my life, practically. But this really impressed me, even so. We could move twenty million people into just this chamber and still not be crowded.”
“Is that why the Stone is important—as real estate?”
“No,” Lanier said. ”We don’t plan on selling condos. We have fifteen archaeologists on the team, and they’d kill anyone who even suggested it. They hold briefings every few days—I’m sure you’ll attend several soon. They’re working around the clock, and have been since we brought them up here three years ago. They haven’t let us touch anything since that time, except when one of the security team commanders or myself has overruled them. And even then, we needed damned good excuses.”
Patricia nodded to the three guards, who returned the greeting cordially, one tipping the visor on his cap. A radio in the guard house beeped and crackled. The senior officer answered. Patricia couldn’t catch the guttural message, but the guard replied in what sounded like Russian.
“I could have sworn they were all clean-cut American soldiers,” Patricia said.
“They are. There are Russians working with Hua Ling in the southern cap bore hole.”
“The marines speak Russian?”
“This one does, obviously. And three or four other languages. Cream of the crop.”
“Is there anybody up here who isn’t brilliant?”
“No common grunts, if that’s what you mean. We can’t afford them. Everyone has to do double and triple duty.” He sat in the driver’s seat again. ”When you’re ready, we’ll cross the bridge and drive to the library.”
“Anytime,” Patricia said, resuming her seat.
Lanier advanced the tractor and the gates swung wide for them, then closed after.
They crossed the four-lane bridge, tires chattering and whanging on the asphalt. Patricia reached into her pants pocket to pull out the slate.
Using its ten-key shorthand board, she typed: Weather—or rather, the absence of it. Sky is quite clear. Perspective really startling. Land appears flat nearby, then just above the horizon (looking north) seems to curve, the curve getting more radical up the side of the valley. The chamber overhead has lots of detail, visible through slight haze.
She played back what she had keyed in, hunting for errors.
She had learned to type on a slate in high school, but that had been many years ago, and she preferred writing by hand.
Paper, however, was obviously an expensive commodity on the Stone, to be used sparingly.
She continued to type as they passed down a broad thoroughfare.
Street about fifty meters wide, divided down the middle by what might have been grass at one time, and trees. Two lanes each side. None of the plants look healthy.
Gardening systems deteriorating—not working at all? Shop windows on street level, nearly all broken. Lobbies of businesses, agencies, open to the air. One window—humanoid mannequin.
Long-necked. Poised, but nude.
She spotted a sign above what might have once been a jewelry store.
“Kesar’s,” she read. Latin alphabet—and on the other side of the sign, as they moved on, she saw that the same name had been spelled out in Cyrillic. Some shops had Oriental ideograms—Chinese and Japanese.
Others were in Laotian and the modified Vietnamese-Roman alphabet.
“Lord,” she breathed. ”I could be back in LA.”
There was something peculiar about the shops, the designs, even a few window displays. She squinted, trying to resolve the discrepancies.
“Wait a minute,” she said. Lanier slowed the truck.
“This is all supposed to be quaint, isn’t it? I mean, like back home, where we have shopping malls built to make us think we’re in Old England. This is supposed to be old-fashioned.”
“As good an observation as any I’ve heard,” Lanier said, shrugging. “I’ve never really paid this area much attention.”
“Garry, I’m very confused, if the Stone was built a thousand years ago, how does all this fit in?”
Lanier swung around a gentle curve and brought the truck to a stop in the middle of the street. He pointed to a large, umber-toned building on the northern edge of the greenspace. ”That’s one of the libraries—one of two we’re investigating now. All the others are closed off.”
Patricia clutched her lower lip between her teeth. ”Should I be nervous?” she asked.
“Probably. I would be.”
“I mean, it’s as if—” She shook her head. ”Why should I go in there? I’m a mathematician. I’m not an engineer or a historian.”
“Believe me, nobody enters the libraries on whim. You’re uniquely qualified. You’ve been working in an area with no practical value—until now.”
“I’m going to stop asking questions,” Patricia said, sighing. ”I don’t even know the right questions to ask.”
Electronic sensors had been placed around the building.
Chain link fences topped by wicked-looking razor-wire curls enforced the gentle suggestions of sensors and cameras. Four guards stood before the entrance, carrying Apples antipersonnel lasers—and looking very serious. As Lanier and Vasquez approached, an amplified voice boomed out, “Mr. Lanier. Stop and allow scan. Who’s that with you?”
“Patricia Vasquez,” he said. ”Index under science team, reference memo from General Gerhardt.”
“Yessir. Advance and present ID.”
They left the truck and walked to the gate. ”We brought the razor wire and sensors up from Earth two years ago,” Lanier told her. ”When we began to realize what we had, in there.”
They presented their IDs and laid their hands on a plate carried by a woman in black and gray. After being cleared, they entered the enclosure.
The ground-floor windows had been broken here, as well.
No signs or maps were evident within, but it had the definite feel of a library—though once again, it seemed artificially quaint. The interior was dark and deserted.
“The outside guards can’t enter the library, only special security—black-and-gray uniforms. There’s one person on duty inside at all times, with a video monitor.”
“Very fancy,” Patricia said.
“Necessary.”
A strip of fluorescent lighting hanging from the ceiling on a bolted track flashed on. More strips glowed in sequence, making a path of light across the ground floor and up a flight of steps near the center of the building.
“We have portable generators at four locations in Alexandria,’’ Lanier said as they walked down the path. The floor was bare and dusty, with a few well-cleared tracks in the dust.
“Most of the city’s power nets aren’t functioning. We haven’t tracked down the power supplies yet, but they’re probably not discrete plants. The Stone itself seems to carry a reserve of power, with concentrations in supercooled batteries.”
Patricia’s brow wrinkled. ”Batteries?”
“Like the hundred-meter cells in Arizona and the Greater African Conservatory.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t much on practical physics, but she didn’t want Lanier to know that.
“The electrical system is pretty conventional, otherwise. Control and information channels are optical, more so than back on Earth. The buildings are dark because most of the circuit breakers—or whatever served that function—have been tripped, and nobody’s going to reset them until we know more about fire hazards.”
“Why are the windows broken?” Patricia asked as they continued climbing.
“Glass gets brittle with age, slumps. Pressure surges in the atmosphere crack the windows.”
“Weather?”
“Of a sort. There are high- and low-pressure systems in the chambers, updrafts and coriolis, downdrafts near the caps. Even storms. Snow in some of the chambers, infrequently. Most of it seems controlled, but we don’t know whether the controls are built-in, static, or whether machines are still hard at work someplace.”
In the shadowy halls beyond the light strips on the second floor, she saw man-sized metallic cylinders arranged in rows, marching off into obscurity.
“We’ve been pulling data out of these storage banks for a year,” Lanier said. ”The programming languages weren’t familiar to us, so we’ve only had success producing readable copy and useful images for about six months. As it turns out, the library in the next chamber is even larger, so we’re concentrating on it, now. But ... I still prefer this. There’s an extensive hard-copy center on the fourth floor. That’s where I did my early research, and where you’ll be doing some of yours.”
“I feel like I’m on the Mary Celeste.”
“The comparison’s been made,” Lanier said. ”At any rate, here or anywhere else, the rule is, don’t disturb anything you can’t put back exactly the way it was. The archaeologists are just finishing their gross surveys and they’re still touchy. We have to break the rule now and then—repairing necessary equipment, tinkering with the computers—but no excess meddling is allowed. If the Stone is a Mary Celeste, we can’t afford not to know why.”
On the fourth floor, they entered a large room filled with reading cubicles, each with a viewer and a flat gray panel mounted in a small desk. One of the desks had been equipped with a recently imported Tensor lamp connected to the new power supply. Lanier pulled out a chair for her. She sat.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said. He walked to the opposite side of the room, passed through a door and left her alone. She fingered the viewer on the desk—was it for video, microfilm? ’She couldn’t tell.
The screen was flat and black as ebony, no more than a quarter of an inch thick.
There was something unusual about the chair. A small cylinder was mounted horizontally in the middle of the seat, fitting with some discomfort between her buttocks. There might have been cushions at one time, covering the cylinder—or perhaps the chair created its own cushion when powered up.
Patricia glanced nervously at the rows of empty cubicles, trying to imagine those who had last used them. When Lanier returned, she was very glad to see him. Her hands were trembling.
“Spooky,” she said, smiling weakly.
He held out a small book bound in milky plastic. She thumbed through the pages. The paper was thin and tough.
The language was English, though the typeface was unusual—too many serifs. She opened to the title page.
“Tom Sawyer,” she read, “by Samuel Langhome Clemens, Mark Twain.”
The publication date was 2110. She closed the book and put it down, swallowing hard.
“Well?” Lanier asked softly.
She looked up at him, frowning. Then a kind of understanding passed between them. She opened her mouth to speak and shut it again.
“You’ve wondered why I’m so tired looking,” Lanier said. “Do you understand, now?”
“Because of this ... library.”
“Partly,” he said.
“It’s from the future. The Stone is from our future.”
“We’re not certain of that,” he said.
“But that’s why I’m here ... to help you figure out how.”
“There are other puzzles, equally mystifying, and perhaps they all tie together.”
She opened the book again. ”Published by Greater Georgia General, in cooperation with Harpers of the Pacific.”
He reached down and took the book from her hands.
“That’s enough for now. We’ll go outside. You can rest for a bit, or we can spend a couple of hours at the security base.”
“No,” she said. ”I want to go on.” She closed her eyes for a few seconds. He left to reshelve the book, then returned and walked ahead of her to the ground floor.
“The subway entrance is two blocks from here,” he said. “We can walk it. Exercise clears the head.”
She followed him across one corner of the park, looking at without really seeing the buildings and their signs in the various languages of Earth, knowing she was past the point of assimilation.
They passed beneath a half-moon arch and walked down a double-back incline into the subway station.
“You said the Stone wasn’t from the future,” Patricia commented.
“From our future,” Lanier corrected. ”It may not be from our universe.”
Her skin felt warm. She blinked rapidly, not sure whether she was going to cry or laugh. ”Damn.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
They stood on a broad platform, near a wall ornamented with large, flat, rose-colored crystals arranged in irregular tesselations.
Direction signs hung from the ceiling, letters scabbed and peeling: “Nexus Central, Line 5 This side for 54 Alexandria ... San Juan Ortega, Line 6, 20 minutes.” More of the ebony-black flat display screens hung near the signs, all blank.
Patricia felt a small tremor of dizziness. Was she really where she was, or suffering through a work-induced dream? ”You’re getting Stoned,” Lanier said. ”Watch yourself.”
“I am. Yeah. Watching myself getting Stoned.”
“Depression is usually the next step. Disorientation, fantasies, depression. That’s what I went through.”
“Oh?”
She looked down at the white tiles beneath her feet. ”Should be a train coming in the next five, ten minutes,” Lanier said. He put his hands in his pockets and joined her in regarding the floor.
“I’m doing fine,” Patricia said. She didn’t believe herself, but on the other hand, she had felt worse before exams than she did now.
She’d hold up. She had to. “I’m just wondering if there are better ways to indoctrinate newcomers. This seems pretty haphazard.”
“We tried other ways.”
“Didn’t work?”
“No better, some worse.”
A puff of air advanced out of the train tunnel. Patricia thought to peer over the edge of the platform to see what kind of mechanism the subway cars rode on. The floor of the channel was featureless, no rails or guides of any sort.
Out of the tunnel hissed a giant aluminum millipede, its nose windowless and crossed by a radiance of green lines.
It stopped with neck-jarring suddenness and hummed softly as its doors slid open. A marine guard stood in the lead car, bolstered pistol and laser rifle prominent.
“Mr. Lanier,” he greeted, saluting smartly.
“Charlie, this is Patricia Vasquez. Another green badge. Patricia, this is Corporal Charles Wurtz. You’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other. Charlie is our main man on the zero.”
“Keep all the boojums from bumming a lift,” Charlie said, grinning and shaking Patricia’s hand.
Lanier beckoned for her to enter first. The interior, examined for basics, was like any reasonably new rapid transit system vehicle. The plastic seats and metal fixtures were in good repair.
The cars had obviously not been designed for crowding—no handstraps or rails for standing passengers—and the arrangements were spacious, with lots of leg room.
And no advertising. Indeed, within the car there were no signs at all.
“Like an old BART in San Francisco,” Patricia said. She hadn’t ridden on the BART or the LA Metro in years.
They settled back in their seats. There was no sensation of motion until she looked out the large round windows spaced at irregular intervals along the sides of the car. The station was a passing blur.
Then there was only darkness relieved by flashing white vertical bars.
“It just doesn’t look that much like the future,” she said.
“It’s recognizable. I always thought the future would be so different, it wouldn’t be recognizable. Particularly a thousand years in the future. But there are buildings, subways. I mean, why not matter transmitters?”
“Alexandria and this rail system are a lot older than other parts of the Stone. When you get around and see things in more detail, you’ll notice big differences between our technology and this. Besides ...” He paused. ”There’s history to consider. Delays. Handicaps. And holdovers.”
“Which I’ll know about soon enough.”
“Right,” Lanier said. ”Did you feel any motion just now? Acceleration?”
She frowned. ”No. But maybe we started out slowly—”
“The trains accelerate at four g’s.”
“Wait.” She turned to a window and looked at the passing bars of white, then frowned. ”Alexandria ... I mean, it wasn’t designed right.”
Lanier regarded her patiently. She was supposed to be brilliant, but in many ways she was so young. Struggling to maintain her decorum as if she were a schoolgirl.
“The Stone has to accelerate and decelerate, right? Just like this train. But I don’t feel any motion now, and ... the chambers should have angled floors, to compensate for the thrust, for the wash of water in the lakes and ponds—higher walls on one side. Acceleration slosh. Angled walkways to compensate.”
“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, the 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.