Chapter Thirty-Six

 

The tuberider was on automatic pilot and all four of them slept in the cabin.

Heineman had limited the tuberider's speed to nine kilometers per second. Something in the tuberider's construction caused a violent shudder beyond that.

Lanier lay awake, restless, strapped to his reclined seat and staring up at the softly glowing orange light overhead. Heineman was breathing steadily across the aisle from him; the women slept behind a curtain Carrolson had rigged across the middle of the cabin. Carrolson snored faintly. From Farley he heard nothing.

Sexual passion had seldom dominated Lanier; his drives were normal enough, but he had always been able to ignore them, or control them in inappropriate situations. His two-year celibacy on the Stone had been less a hardship for him than it might have been for others. Nevertheless, he had never been hornier in his life than he was at this peaceful moment.

Despite the advantages, he had always felt faintly shamed of his lack of masculine anguish, as if it made him some sort of cold fish. Now the passion was upon him with a vengeance. It was all he could do to keep from stealing back through the curtain and fondling Farley. The desire was both funny and agonizing. He felt like a pubescent teenager, sweaty with need and unsure what to do about it.

The psychiatrists in his head worked overtime. Death, said the Freudian, only strengthens our desire to procreate—

So he lay sleepless, erect, unable to think clearly and refusing to masturbate. The very idea was ridiculous. He hadn't masturbated in well over a year, and never except in complete privacy.

Did the others feel this way? Heineman certainly never let on. Not once, in fact, had Lanier ever heard Heineman make a sexual comment except in the most isolated and theoretical sort of joking.

Did Farley feel this way?

Just as a test, one hand reached up to pull aside the thin thermal blanket covering him. He forced the hand to pull it back. Madness.

Finally, after an eternity, he slept.

 

At 100,000 kilometers, the V/STOL's forward-looking radar reported a massive obstruction ahead in the corridor. Heineman searched the corridor bore-hole science records for any echoes from such a distance and found none. "Looks like the physics people just shot a radar beam along the singularity," he said. "And what we're looking at now is a circular wall with a gap in the middle."

The wall obstructed passage to a height of twenty-one kilometers, leaving a hole in the middle about eight kilometers across. The plasma tube and singularity were not interrupted.

"Let's pass through and see what's on the other side," Lanier suggested. "Then we'll decide where we want to come down."

At a mere six thousand kilometers per hour, Heineman eased the tuberider down the singularity. The wall was a dirty bronze color, smooth and featureless. As they approached the hole, Carrolson trained a telescope on the wall's upper surface—with some difficulty.

"It's only a meter thick at the top," she said. "Judging by the color, I'd guess it's made out of the same stuff as the wells and the corridor."

"That is, nothing," Farley said. "Patricia's spatial building blocks."

Heineman reduced speed to a few hundred kilometers an hour and they glided through the hole. On the opposite side, the view of the corridor floor was crystal clear, unobstructed by atmosphere. The floor was a chaotic mess of hundred-kilometer-long gouges, black marks and broad strips of revealed bronze corridor surface. The instruments confirmed their suspicions.

"No atmosphere," Farley said. "The wall's a plug." Heineman decelerated until they came to a stop two thousand kilometers past the wall, now reduced in size to a tiny patch in the corridor's merciless perspective. "What'll it be?" he asked.

"We slide back and find a well circuit," Lanier said, "just like we planned. We check that out, then we proceed—and we don't waste time. Research is really secondary."

"Yessir," Heineman said. He swung the V/STOL around on the tuberider to face the opposite direction. "Hang on; full reverse coming up."

Four hundred kilometers south of the wall, they located a circuit of wells and slowed to prepare the V/STOL for its descent. All loose objects were made fast while Heineman unlocked the aircraft from the tuberider. With a gentle nudge of the attitude jets, they eased away from the singularity. Heineman oriented the craft with its nose toward the corridor floor.

Unlike in the asteroid chambers, where some sort of push was required to move away from the axis, the V/STOL began a slow, accelerating descent immediately, repelled by the singularity—or attracted by the floor, whichever way they cared to think of it. After falling four kilometers, Heineman kicked in the rocket engine for three short bursts and pointed the plane's nose north. "I wouldn't land this way in a chamber," he said, "but it's the best tactic in the corridor. We won't hit the atmosphere on a spiral course here. So I'm going to take advantage of a long glide down. Garry, take hold of your controls and get the feel of what I'm doing."

Lanier gripped the wheel and felt Heineman's motions as he pulled the nose up. A rippling series of shudders announced atmospheric buffeting; outside the walls a whimpering whine began to decrease in pitch and increase in loudness. Heineman brought down flaps to decrease their airspeed and gently swung the V/STOL to the right, lowering the nose and deploying the prop blades from their receptacles in the engine nacelles. The smooth, beautiful roar of the twin turboprops made him smile like a little boy. "Ladies and gents," he said, "we are now an airplane. Garry, like to take it down?"

"My pleasure," Lanier said. "Passengers will please keep their seatbelts on."

"Aye-aye," Carrolson said.

"That was fun. Let's do it again," Farley called forward.

"Terrain looks smooth enough, but we'll fly over and decide whether we want a short landing or a vertical touchdown," Heineman said.

Lanier banked the aircraft and circled around a well, then flew over the cupola at about fifty meters, slowing by angling the props up. Heineman peered at the prospective landing sights and signaled thumbs-up. "Short roll; it's smooth sand down there."

Lanier brought the V/STOL down on the corridor floor at fifty kilometers an hour, gently and easily, nose pointed at the dimple and cupola of the well. He then reduced the pitch on the props and taxied, nose bobbing, to the edge of the dimple, pivoting the plane until it was tangent to the well's outer circle. The engines' roar dropped rapidly to silence.

"Bravo," Heineman said.

"God, that was great," Lanier said. "I haven't flow in six years. . . and I've never flown like that. Jesus, you look at the ground and it seems like you're always going to fly right into it."

"If you two flyboys will give us a hand," Carrolson interrupted, "we'll get out work done faster."

Carrolson took photographs and Farley made instrument readings as they skirted the dimple. The well was open—that much was obvious even from a distance. Ten or eleven meters from the floating cupola was a platform cradling two irregular red-and-black-checked spheres, each three meters in diameter and sporting a pair of waldos front and back.

They descended the slope of the dimple and inspected the platform. Heineman climbed a ladder built into one side of the platform and walked along a scaffold passing above the checked spheres. "Spacesuits," he said. "Tough ones, too."

"Here's a message," Farley called out. She pointed to a bronze-colored plaque mounted on a pedestal near the mouth of the well. The alphabet was Latinesque, with discernible A's, G's and E's, but none of them could decipher the words. "It's not Greek, and it's not Cyrillic," Carrolson said. "It must be Stoner. Some new language." She photographed it from three sides and beneath.

"I never encountered anything like it in the libraries," Lanier said. He stepped beyond the plaque and felt a sudden, molasses-like resistance around the lip of the well.

"WARNING," a deep, forbidding masculine voice announced out of nowhere. "WARNING to be heeded by speakers of twentieth-century English. Do not attempt to enter any gate in this region without proper environmental protection. Conditions of high gravitation and corrosive atmosphere prevail beyond the gate entrance. Suits are provided for your protection. WARNING."

Carrolson touched the plaque and whistled. "Look," she said. The letters of the plaque had reformed into Roman alphabet English and repeated what the voice had said aloud. "Now that's service."

Heineman ran his hands along the upper surface of one of the spheres and found a depression in a black square. He pressed it cautiously; nothing happened.

"Excuse me," Farley said to no one in particular. Lanier turned toward her and she smiled, embarrassed, and held up her hand. She then addressed the underside of the cupola. "Excuse me, but if we wish to enter the well—the gate—how do we use the suits, the. . . pathoscapes—"

"Bathyscaphes," Carrolson corrected.

"Yes. . . how do we use whatever they are?"

"Vehicles respond to vocal commands and can be adjusted to your language. Do you have proper authorization for a gate excursion?"

"What sort of authorization?" Farley asked.

"Authorization from the Nexus. All gates are controlled by the Nexus. Please present authorization within thirty seconds or this band of gates will be locked against tampering."

They stared back and forth at each other as the time passed. "No authorization," the voice announced without inflection. "These gates are now closed until a survey team investigates and corrects the situation."

Lanier pulled back from the invisible barrier. The twenty-meter-wide opening at the center irised in silently and formed a smooth bronze bulge. On the scaffold, Heineman yelped and jumped clear as the spheres and cradle slowly sank into the surface of the dimple, vanishing without trace.

Farley swore in melodious Chinese.

"Oh, well," Carrolson said, sighing. "We didn't have time to be tourists anyway."

The bland landscape around the well consisted of flat stretches of sand without any sign of life. The air was dry and soon their noses and throats were parched; it was with some relief that they boarded the V/STOL, sealed the hatch and prepared to return to the tuberider.

"This is fun," Heineman said. "She works like a charm." He lifted the V/STOL from the ground and increased their speed by inclining the engine nacelles forward. They climbed steadily, until they were within a kilometer of the plasma tube and the upper limits of the atmosphere. "Abracadabra," Heineman said, withdrawing the blades into the nacelles and activating the tail rocket.

With a sharp surge forward, they punched through the atmosphere barrier and plasma tube and entered the vacuum surrounding the singularity. Heineman guided the V/STOL with little pushes from the attitude jets, bringing it up beneath the tuberider and completing the linkup under direction of the plane's computers.

"She's a beauty, isn't she?" he enthused, then shook his head and let out a puffed whooo.