The tuberider slid slowly past the second wall. On the opposite side, beginning about a kilometer from the wall and paralleling it around the circumference of the corridor, a series of dark brick-colored structures squatted on the bare bronze floor. Each sat on a square base about two hundred meters on a side, rising in a series of steps, each step-level twisted slightly, creating a rounded, half-spiral pyramid.
“Bingo,” Heineman said, pointing down the throat of the corridor. The floor was alive with moving lights channeled into lanes, the lanes piled many layers deep like a super-dense freeway system. ”We are not alone.”
“How far have we come?” Carrolson asked.
“Seven hundred and seventy thousand kilometers, give or take two,” Heineman said. ”Garry, could you pilot for a bit? I’m going to run more tests.”
“We’ll just keep moving ahead slow, ninety or a hundred kilometers an hour,” Lanier said.
“That’s about right. I don’t feel very easy about meeting the inhabitants, whatever they may be,” Heineman said, shaking his head as he climbed out of the seat. They were weightless again, moving at a steady velocity.
“Why would we worry, I mean, besides the obvious reasons?” Farley asked.
“The obvious reason would be bad enough, but frankly, I’m not happy about coming along the singularity. It’s just occurred to me whoever’s down there might not like people traveling this way. Maybe here are other vehicles—authorized vehicles. Maybe there’s something else. Whatever, if we were to come zipping along at eight or nine klicks a second, anything we hit would be in serious trouble. That’s enough to get us a moving violation, wouldn’t you say?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Lanier said, settling into the pilot’s seat.
“Yes, well, now that your head is more clear ...”
Heineman glanced at him sternly and then patted him on the shoulder.
“Girls, let’s find out what all the fuss is.”
They replaced various instruments in ports along the floor of the aircraft and installed new sensors in ports so far unoccupied.
Lanier stared overhead at the corridor floor, fascinated by the procession of lights. Even with binoculars, he couldn’t make the lights resolve into anything but bright spots, contrasting against the black of the lanes.
Something large and gray covered his field of view in the binoculars and he pulled them down. A disk at least half a kilometer wide floated slowly above the lanes, moving south.
Another disk followed a similar course twenty or thirty degrees to the west.
“Absolutely no coherent radio signals,” Heineman said. “Waste microwaves and heat and a little X- and gamma-ray activity and that’s it. Radar—the repeater back here shows something substantial about a quarter of a million kilometers ahead—surface area of at least fifteen square kilometers, right on the axis dead center.”
“I see it,” Lanier said, looking at the primary display. “Objects moving around it, and all along the wall of the corridor.”
“Don’t ask me what they are,” Heineman said, peering through the windscreen at the gray disks. He squinted in, puzzled anxiety. ”And don’t ask me how long we’re going to stay up here unmolested.”
“At least we’re small,” Farley said. ”Maybe they won’t notice us.”
“That big thing up ahead, whatever it is, will notice us,” Heineman said. ”Ten to one it’s riding the singularity, too.”
Five hundred kilometers past the wall, four large brick-red twisted pyramids rose above the tangle of lanes. From their spacing—equidistant around the circumference, at the quadratic points—Lanier surmised they were built over wells.
From this distance, they appeared the size of a commemorative postage stamp held at arm’s length—which made them perhaps two kilometers on a side, and a kilometer high. Kilometer-wide clear lanes extended straight north from each structure, for as far as he could see.
“I think we’re in over our head,” Lanier murmured.
Farley put her hand on his shoulder and pulled herself into the copilot’s seat. ”We’ve been over our heads for years, haven’t we?”
“I’d always assumed the corridor was empty—I don’t know why. Perhaps because I couldn’t have imagined this.”
Heineman floated between them and gripped a bar on the instrument panel to steady himself while he programmed a flight plan. ”We’re going to accelerate to ten thousand klicks an hour, get as close as we can to that big object on the singularity—slowing down on the approach, so they won’t think we’re going to ram them then reverse and hightail for home. That is, of course, if you approve.” He raised an eyebrow in Lanier’s direction.
Lanier weighed the risks and realized he had no idea what they were.
“If we reverse now, what can we tell the folks back home?”
Heineman persisted. ”It’s obvious this place is important. But we have no idea what is it, or what it means to us once we’re back on the Stone.”
“You’re stating the obvious, Larry,” Lanier said. ”Now tell me whether we’ll survive or not.”
“I don’t know,” Heineman said. ”But I’m having the time of my life. What about the rest of you?”
Carrolson laughed. ”You’re crazy,” she told him. ”Crazy jock pilot engineer.”
Heineman wagged his head back and forth and proudly lifted the breast pockets of his jumpsuit out with his thumbs.
“Garry?”
“We have to find out somehow,” he admitted. ”Let’s go, then.”
Heineman began the sequence on the computer pilot and the tuherider bore down on the singularity, once again putting a sense of direction into the V/STOL cabin.
When the acceleration stopped and the tuberider coasted at ten thousand kilometers an hour, Heineman distributed supper—sandwiches in foil packets and bulbs of hot tea. They ate in silence, Carrolson and Heineman strapped to the bulkhead behind the cockpit. The corridor’s passage was steady and easily perceptible.
Another circuit of rectangular structures passed, and several minutes later, yet another wall connected by the four straight clear lanes and the crowded tangled lanes of lights.
Lanier vacated the seat to Carrolson and took a nap while Heineman trained the women in the fine points of tuberider control. He dropped in and out of a dream about flying a light plane over jungle and tangled rivers. Somehow, that segued into a track meet. He awoke with the aftertaste of tea in his mouth and undid the seatbelts, pulling himself forward. Farley was adjusting instruments in their ports and replacing memory blocks on the slates collecting and collating the data. She dropped full blocks into a plastic sorting tray and slipped it into a file box. Then she held up one of the auxiliary multi-meters built by engineering before the Death, pointing out the display for Lanier’s inspection.
“Yes?” he asked, looking down at the flickering numbers.
“It s kaput,” she said. “Putting out nonsense. So are most of our instruments. We’ll be lucky to interpret half the data we’ve gathered.”
“Reasons?”
She shook her head. “Wild guesses, and that’s the best I can do. Other electrical systems seem to be working. It’s probable we’re passing through control fields like those that electively damp inertia on the Stone. These fields damp other effects ... distorted geometry’s effect on activity in the nucleus, changes in slash aitch ... Or the equipment may be crapping out all at once. Warranty expires today—surprise!”
“The equipment’s fine,” Heineman called out from the copilot’s seat. “Don’t blame my machines.”
“The man’s so proprietary,” Farley marveled. ”He gumbles everytime I question quality control.”
“Grumbles, not ‘gumbles’,” Lanier said.
“Whatever.”
“Your turn,” Lanier told Heineman, indicating the rear of the plane with his thumb. ”Naptime. We’ll all need to be bright and cheerful.”
Heineman adjusted the tuberider’s roll and floated past Lanier.
“Wait,” Carolson said. ”What’s that?”
The singularity ahead of the tuberider was no longer a shiny cylindrical surface. In intermittent pulses, it glowed orange and then white, like a hot steel wire.
“No rest for the wicked,” Heineman said, replacing Lanier in the pilot’s seat. He applied the tuberider clamps to the singularity to brake. The craft suddenly bucked and rolled violently, tossing Lanier and Farley against the storage rack and pinning them there until Heineman released the clamps.
“We’re accelerating,” Heineman shouted over the roaring shudder of the tuberider and airplane. “I’m not in control anymore.”
Lanier slid toward the rear of the cabin, banging into seats with his arms and legs as he tried to grab hold of something.
Farley clung to a seat tenaciously and struggled to swing around and sit in it.
The singularity now drew a long, steady red line down the middle of the plasma tube. Lanier snapped himself into a seat and reached across to help Farley climb into hers. Equipment bounced and fell to the rear, striking storage racks, bulkheads and other equipment.
“Can you reverse us?” Lanier shouted over the tumult.
“No way,” Heineman answered. ”If I clamp down, we start bucking. Thirty thousand and still accelerating.” The tuberider rolled again and Lanier and Farley shielded themselves against another onslaught of rebounding memory block racks, test kits and coiled light cables.
“Forty,” Heineman said a few moments later. ”Fifty.”
The radio crackled and chuffed and a genderless melodic voice began in mid-phrase: “—violation of the Law of the Way. Your craft is in violation of the Law of the Way. Do not resist or your craft will be destroyed. You are under the direction of the Hexamon Nexus and will be removed from the flaw in six minutes. Do not attempt to either accelerate or decelerate.”
The message ended with a soft burst of white noise.