Harry Sale was only five hundred feet from the peak of Tartan’s Crag. There was urgency in his gait. Instead of the sneakers he had worn the last time he was here, he was wearing climber’s boots. He carried a rucksack filled with climbing gear and a huge coil of rope hung from his shoulder. When his Beowulf cluster had connected to Little Moe, it was almost as though a beacon had rung out, calling him back here.
Approaching the cave where it all began, he felt his resolve intensify. His need to discover what had happened to him drove aside any other considerations. Just before the entrance to the cave, he unclipped a large flashlight from his belt and flicked it on. The yellow-white light lit up his stony path.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he approached the lip of the chasm and shone the light down the vertical shaft. Its depths disturbed him. He could not see the bottom. It seemed to narrow down into infinity, causing him to swallow hard and reconsider the wisdom of his plan.
His ears pricked up when he heard a humming sound. The noise drifted up from miles below, the faint, mechanical murmur of a machine clicking on. Moments later, Harry felt a sudden draft of air on his face. Something from below was ascending toward him. Panic flooded him and he backed away from the edge of the pit. But his resolve quickly returned. He un-slung the rucksack and the coil of rope and stood ready, flashlight in one hand and a mountaineer’s pick in the other. He stood poised like a cat ready to spring.
After several minutes, Harry could see something rising rapidly toward him. Even from a distance he could tell that that the form was nonthreatening. When it reached the top, he saw that it was a small circular platform with a raised guardrail. The platform almost reminded him of a rubber raft, though its tubular sections were metallic.
At first nothing happened, but then a section of the containing rail dropped open, an obvious invitation to climb aboard. For an instant, Harry thought about retreating, but he was not one to turn his back on a question that needed answering. He stepped cautiously onto the platform. Once he stood in the middle, the containing rail snapped back into place and the descent began.
At first the descent was slow, but after several minutes of gradual acceleration it felt like he was plunging down the biggest loop of the Coney Island roller coaster. His heart was in his throat and his ears were popping. He gripped the guard rail so tightly that his knuckles ached. And still its speed increased. It seemed that the machine had lost control and that he was plummeting in a deadfall. The blackness that surrounded him and the chilling blast of subterranean air added to his feeling of jeopardy. He deliberately pictured his father. If he was indeed falling to his death, he wanted his last thoughts to be of him.
But just at the moment he gave up hope of surviving the freefall, the platform began to slow. It was floating, as though gravity itself had been suspended. When it stopped, he found himself in a dank, eerily lit tunnel. A pulsing light, which seemed to have no source, illuminated the narrow passage with a diffused green sheen. It was sufficient to illuminate the way through the tunnel, but not enough to reveal details.
As he followed the natural path through the cave, he realized his mouth was completely dry. He should have brought the rucksack, he realized. He had descended the shaft totally unprepared, without so much as a drop of water. But there was nothing he could do about it now.
Several minutes later, he reached the end of the cave and found himself caught in a cul-de-sac. A feeling of claustrophobia began to creep over him, but before he could even consider the implications of being trapped thousands of feet below Tartan’s Crag, the light in the cave grew suddenly brighter and he saw deep grooves in the side of the wall. Inside them was a conveyance of some kind. It looked almost like a bobsled, with a single seat placed in the middle. Harry examined it, taking in every element of its design. The seat looked as though it had been custom built for a man exactly his size.
What am I getting myself into? he thought, climbing into the seat. He saw a cushioned bar to his right that was obviously designed to swing down in front of him as a safety guard. He pulled down on it. When the bar was locked into place, he could feel the sled begin to move.
His ride on the sled paralleled his ride on the platform. At first the acceleration was gradual, but soon the mass of his body was pressed back against the seat. In the total darkness of the narrow tunnel, it was impossible to judge exactly how fast he was going. But the increased weight of his own body against the back of the seat convinced him that he was traveling hundreds of miles an hour. He began to count the seconds off in his mind, so that he could at least make a guess of how far the conveyance was taking him.
He gave up counting when he passed five hundred. A sudden lurch of acceleration pressed against him, like a large hand jamming into his chest. It almost knocked the wind out of him. For an instant he thought something had gone wrong with the sled and that it had spun out of control. But before his panic grew, the sled began to slow. Inside half a minute it almost seemed to be floating, as though there was no resistance whatsoever.
When the sled finally came to rest, Harry was in total darkness. He held his hand up to his face but could not see it, even when it brushed against his nose. He took a deep breath and then sighed. What should he do next?
Harry became aware that an ambient light was glowing around him. It was decidedly odd, for it did not seem to originate from any special source. It was truly ambient. The entire subterranean atmosphere, collectively and point by point, seemed to be generating light, as though energy were being produced out of thin air to create a shimmering haze of soft, white illumination. He climbed out of the sled and looked upward at the brightening haze. Even as he watched, its eerie radiance grew, changing from a dusky half-light to a dazzling brightness. He could see now that he was facing the grooved tracks of the conveyance that had brought him here. Slowly, he turned around to see what was behind him and found that he was standing at the end of a small ancillary passageway that connected to a vast underground arcade. Its vaulted ceiling stood hundreds of feet high and its gray metallic floor was as smooth as glass. It extended for miles and miles, as far as he could see.
Machinery of every conceivable size and shape dotted the landscape in all directions. At least, he thought it was machinery. It was unlike anything he had seen in his life: huge ceramic pods surrounded by halos of light and machine-tooled shapes of intricate complexity. Some had moving parts that whirled about so fast they seemed almost invisible. Harry instinctively moved away from them. They reminded him too much of the spinning blades of a helicopter.
On the center strip of this gigantic arcade, row upon row of black crystalline slabs stretched as far as he could see. Strange patterns danced across their surfaces, like phosphorescent creatures of the deep suddenly surfacing and then disappearing again.
Harry walked onto the center strip of the arcade, which formed a clear pathway directly through the center of the crystalline slabs.
The sounds of his footsteps were disconcerting. They were muted, as though a dampening field had swallowed up their sound. He stopped for a moment and realized that he could not even hear himself breathing. All ambient sound was either absorbed or neutralized.
After he had walked for more than twenty minutes, the arcade ended in a cul-de-sac. The two parallel lines of the black slabs converged at a huge, quasi-geodesic dome. Its tetrahedral elements were asymmetrical, as though portions of them had somehow been folded in on themselves. The structure was opaque, its surface color vaguely similar to the crystalline slabs. In front of it was a bench that seemed to be made of the same obsidian material. But when he seated himself upon it, he found that the surface was soft and yielding and instantly conformed to his contours like memory foam.
Harry felt a tingling and heard a series of tones that were dissonant yet oddly musical. As he listened to the tones, their frequency grew higher and higher until they seemed to fade into the ether. For a brief moment, Harry felt he was no longer on the obsidian bench and that he had been transported to some unknown place. It was an ecstatic sensation, as though he were floating through space. There was also a sense of incredible spaciousness, of limitless possibility.
Suddenly it was as though his mind had disconnected from his body. The ringing in his ears ceased and he found himself floating just above the horizon of an immense world. The most amazing vistas swept by below him and he could swear he was on the edge of something, a new kind of understanding. It was as if his very consciousness had been re-minted and cast anew. It was at that moment that Harry lost consciousness.