PLANETESIMAL DAWN, by Tim Sullivan

It was the most dangerous place on the asteroid.

“Why don’t we just go back?” Wolverton asked.

“Because we can’t,” Nozaki said. “The sun’s coming up.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got insulated suits.”

“Not enough.”

This wasn’t the best day to be base camp security chief, Nozaki thought. They stood next to the rover, watching the searing dawn advance across the curved horizon. The rover had died on them, and Nozaki had worked on it as long as she could. The dawn was too close. They had to get moving.

“But we can’t go the other way,” Wolverton said. “It’s suicide.”

“It’s the only chance we’ve got. We’ll die for sure if we go back on foot through that hell.”

“What about the samples?” Wolverton asked, looking mournfully at the labeled rocks in the rover’s boot. He was a geo-areologist who’d just been assigned to base camp. He had been a loner since he got to LGC-1, and playing nursemaid to him on this field trip had made Nozaki understand why. “I spent all this time collecting them.”

“They’re not going anywhere, but we are.”

The red giant Gamma Crucis was burning up the landscape right in front of them. They’d been caught too far away from base camp at dawn, and now their only hope was to stay ahead of the sunlight.

“We can’t walk the entire surface and get back to base before the next dawn,” Wolverton said, despair in his voice.

“We’ve got to try,” Nozaki replied. “Maybe we better save our breath and walk.”

They turned and started moving away from the dawn.

Ahead of them was the asteroid’s dark, barren landscape. It curved abruptly into nowhere. Clustered stars seemed close enough to touch, but they provided no light on the surface. It was like stepping into the abyss.

“Why can’t we talk to base?” Wolverton said, ignoring Nozaki’s broad hint that he should shut up.

“The sun’s radiation is interfering, and we’re over the horizon,” Nozaki explained. “With the flyby down, there’s nothing to bounce the signal off.”

“There’s no chance they can hear us?”

“Maybe they’re picking us up intermittently, but we’re not getting anything from them, so I doubt it.”

“If they do hear us, they’ll send the flyby, won’t they?”

“I don’t think they can.” She was getting impatient with Wolverton. “I doubt they’ve got it fixed by now. The rover’s probably gone out for the same reason, an unusually large burst of radiation from GC’s hydrogen shell. We’re just going to have to hoof it.”

“Oh, God,” Wolverton moaned.

“Walk!” Nozaki said.

Her stern tone seemed to sober the panicky Wolverton. He glanced at her through his visor, but he didn’t say anything.

Nozaki quickened her pace so that Wolverton would do the same.

They had a long way to go. But with the light gravity, it was the equivalent of only a few kilometers, and they could make it if they were determined enough. Each stride took them ten to twelve meters. At first it had been a disorientating sensation, almost like flying. It had been fun. Tonight it was a survival necessity.

After half an hour or so, Nozaki ventured a look back at the encroaching sunrise. She saw that they were keeping ahead of it, maybe even gaining some ground. That was good, but they weren’t all that tired yet. They would have to run and leap for many more hours before they would reach base camp.

A little over two hours passed before they came to the mound.

“That’s not supposed to be here,” Wolverton said.

This time Nozaki didn’t shush him, because he was right. What was this thing they’d landed on with their last jump?

“It looks like gravel,” Nozaki said. She saw the mound’s shadow looming to cut off the star field.

“But this asteroid’s supposed to be as round and smooth as a ball bearing.”

“Yeah.” Nozaki took a breath and leaped forward, landing about halfway toward the top of the mound.

A moment later, Wolverton came down a few feet from her, his knees bending under the light impact of his landing. He was only a vague shadow in the dark, but Nozaki was glad to know he was keeping up with her.

It was shaped as if the ground had been dug up and banked.

“This is all we need,” Nozaki said. “Hills to slow us down.”

Wolverton didn’t comment. He jumped and landed on the mound’s rounded summit.

Nozaki followed. She didn’t get quite as far as Wolverton, and when she took a few steps forward, she was very pleased that she hadn’t gone farther.

“It’s not a mound,” she said.

It was a crater, and they were standing on the rim.

“It’s big,” said Wolverton. “Very big.”

He was right. It was impossible to see just how big, but the concave slope descended into darkness so steeply that Nozaki suspected it might be several kilometers in diameter.

“Now what?” Wolverton asked.

Nozaki looked behind her. She could see the merciless sunrise coming.

“Now we jump,” she said.

“Can’t we go around it?”

“There’s no time.”

Wolverton turned to see for himself.

“Well, I’m not going to lack for something to drink,” Wolverton said. “I just emptied my bladder.”

“Good,” Nozaki said. She did the same, counting on the liquid processor to distill her urine and extract the water for drinking later. If it failed, she would die of thirst. “You’re going to need it.”

“No sense standing around here,” Wolverton said.

He jumped into the crater. Nozaki was surprised that he’d had the nerve to go first. Wolverton was adapting pretty well after his initially fearful reaction.

She followed him, leaping into the crater. For a few seconds she could see starlight, but then she fell into the rim’s shadow.

There was no light at all. She seemed to be sailing in a void, and it felt as if she’d never come down. But at last she did, landing softly and rolling down the inside rim of the crater. She couldn’t see Wolverton but she could hear him grunting and panting.

It seemed as if she would roll down that slope forever.

But at last the incline graduated into a more level surface and she stopped. She lay on her side, trying to catch her breath for a moment. She wondered if she’d been hurt during the ascent, but she felt no pain.

“Wolverton?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

“I think so. You?”

“I’m fine.” She got to her knees and looked around. There was nothing but blackness. Only if she looked up could she see anything, and then only stars. She got to her feet.

“We can’t be very far from each other,” she said. “I don’t want to waste the batteries, but I’m going to turn on the beacon lamp on my helmet so you can see me. Stay alert now. Ready?”

“Uh, huh.”

She pressed the tab on her wrist console and a beam of light stabbed out from over her head to illuminate the scree on the crater floor.

“See the light?”

“I can’t see anything else.”

“Move in this direction then,” Nozaki said. “I’ll turn on the lamp every thirty seconds or so to make sure you don’t lose your way.”

“Right.”

She shut off the light and waited a little while before turning it on again. She couldn’t see Wolverton.

“I’m turning it on again,” she said. She made a quick sweep to see if she could pick Wolverton out of the landscape. Not yet. “Can you see me?”

“Yeah, getting closer,” Wolverton said, his breathing a bit labored as he moved toward her.

“Okay.” Nozaki shut the light off again and waited.

After a few seconds, she said, “Did you hear me that time, Wolverton?”

No answer.

“Wolverton?”

Still no answer.

Nozaki pressed the button and turned on the helmet beam again. She turned slowly, making a three hundred and sixty degree sweep of the crater bottom. Nothing but gravel.

“Wolverton?”

Silence.

“Wolverton, where are you?”

He couldn’t be gone. Either his radio was out or he was incapacitated in some way. She had to find him, and find him fast.

She turned around again, even more slowly, moving her head up and down to capture more of the crater bottom in her field of vision. There was nothing there but dirt, as far as she could see.

If she’d known which direction he was coming from in the first place, she might have known which way to turn. But she had no idea where Wolverton had landed, and she had no idea where she was in relation to the crater’s rim.

“Wait a minute,” she said, taking a deep breath.

She shut off the beam and turned around slowly once again. The crater rim was closer on one side. That must have been where they’d jumped from. Unless… No, it had to be. She hadn’t rolled up the opposing slope. It stood to reason that she was closer to the jumping-off point than the far rim. That narrowed her search field significantly. Wolverton couldn’t have rolled much farther than she had. It was possible that he hadn’t rolled as far. But he couldn’t be all that distant.

Then why couldn’t she see him?

She flashed the beam to her left and swiveled. Nothing.

Now she turned to her right and mirrored the same motion. Still nothing.

Wolverton had vanished.

But that was impossible. She shut off the light and stood alone in the dark, thinking. Was it impossible? This crater was impossible. LGC-1 had been thoroughly mapped from space before base camp had been built. There was no crater. This hole was too big to miss. And now Wolverton was gone. Just what was going on here?

She had to think this through. She had only so much time before the sun came over that rim. She could either search for Wolverton or head for the far rim before the heat baked her right through her pressure suit. She wished that it was made of refrigerated lead and that she had all the time she needed to find Wolverton, but that wasn’t how it was. She had to make a decision.

“Nozaki…?” It was Wolverton, his voice was faint, broken up by static, but it was there. “Nozaki…? Where…you…?”

“I’m here, Wolverton. Come to the light.”

She frantically stabbed the button at her wrist and the beam pierced the darkness once again. Where was he?

She turned this way and that, trying to find him. She didn’t see anything.

“Wait, wait,” she said to herself. Be methodical.

She forced herself to stand still and turn slowly in a circle once again.

“Wolverton?”

The radio crackled.

“Wolverton, do you see the light?”

“…No…Noza…”

Was he saying that he didn’t see it, or was he just calling her name?

“Wolverton?”

No answer.

“Wolverton, where are you?” She kept turning, but there was no one there.

She called out to him a few more times, but he didn’t answer. At last she turned off the beam.

She stood at the bottom of the crater, the stars overhead. She was frightened. Nozaki had been well trained, and she had been through a lot since her training, but this was something she didn’t understand, something that seemed to be completely illogical.

She told herself to get moving, to leap across the crater bottom and make her way up the opposite rim and run ahead of the sunrise. It was the only way to survive.

But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t leave Wolverton to die.

For all she knew, he was already dead.

“…No…aki.… No…”

“Wolverton?”

A crackle of static, and then silence once again.

She listened very carefully, so carefully that she could hear her own breathing, hear her heart beating. But she didn’t hear Wolverton’s heart, or his breath, or his voice. He was gone.

It couldn’t be.

She leaned back and looked up at the stars. They seemed to mock her with an unfeeling brightness, intense sparks that illuminated nothing.

At least she knew which way to go in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and jumped toward the far rim. She was already in the air, sailing through space when she heard Wolverton’s voice.

“No…” Static followed.

He was still there. She had fooled herself into thinking he wasn’t so she could go, so she could save herself.

She couldn’t leave him. But if she didn’t, she would die.

“Wolverton,” she said, almost involuntarily. “I’m here.”

She heard the static once more, very briefly, and then silence.

“You’re not leaving him,” she said, “because he’s already gone.” She stared longingly at the crater’s far rim. Why couldn’t she make herself move? Why did she feel as if she were murdering Wolverton by saving herself?

“Do it,” she said, but she still waited a few seconds to make sure there was no further word from Wolverton.

Hearing nothing, she leaped forward into the darkness.

While she was still in the air, light suffused the crater. Had she accidentally turned on her helmet beam? No, this light was flickering. It was like chain lightning, and it showed the entire crater for a fraction of a second at a time with a strobing effect, like a scene from an old film. It revealed all.

At the center of the crater was something big and glittering. It emerged from a hole at the lowest point and flailed out with long appendages in all directions. There must have been hundreds of these whiplike things. They were too thin and inflexible to be tentacles, but their sharp tips made themselves into loops and picked up loose stones and deposited them in slots that constantly opened and closed on the central shell where the light was coming from. Nozaki was heading toward it, unable to stop herself until she came down to the surface again.

One of the whips formed a lariat and snatched her in midflight.

She groaned, her torso bent backward at the waist by the force of the lariat. If the asteroid’s gravity had been stronger, her back would have been broken. The lariat slipped under her armpits and loosened its grip slightly as it pulled her toward it.

“Help!” Nozaki cried out, but there was no one there to help her, or even to hear her. She decided in that instant that she would at least take whatever was coming with dignity.

Headfirst, she was plunged toward the glittering shell. It was heart-stopping, and for a moment she thought the thing had miscalculated, and that she would be smashed on its surface. At the last possible moment a slot opened in the shell and she was stuffed inside. The noose untied itself and quickly slithered away. She was upside down, resting on her shoulders, looking out. She could see the stars through the slot. It shut itself and she was stranded in even more darkness than before.

She tried to stretch her legs and found that she barely had room to move at all. She reached out a gloved hand and felt a pitted wall. Her neck was bent in an uncomfortable position, not helped by the bulk of her pressure suit and helmet. By pressing her palms against the floor, she managed to straighten herself out, even though she was still up-ended.

The tiny compartment shook with the movements of the shell and the whips. This went on for several minutes, until Nozaki felt the sensation of descending, as if she were riding a lift heading down to the basement.

They hadn’t expected to find life of any kind on this tiny asteroid, let alone such complex machinery…if it was machinery.

Well, what else could it be? This thing couldn’t be alive, could it?

The floor dropped out from under her, and she landed on her belly in a blue gel. There was light, and she could see that there were lots of rocks that had fallen from other compartments. The chamber she was in seemed to be quite broad, a few hundred meters across.

“Welcome to my world.” The familiar voice startled her.

Nozaki got onto her knees and looked around. Wolverton was standing not three meters away, looking down at her, the gel spattered on his legs, arms akimbo. It was hard to be sure, but she thought he looked pleased, even a little smug.

“Your world?” she said, getting to her feet.

A boulder dropped between them into the blue gunk. Nozaki looked up to see a compartment closing.

“Gotta be careful where you stand,” Wolverton said.

“I can see that.”

“Just stay where you are and you’ll be fine,” Wolverton said. “It won’t drop anything where you landed.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I’ve been here a while.”

“Huh? We just jumped into the crater a few minutes ago.”

“No, you jumped a few minutes ago.”

“What are you saying, Wolverton?”

“I already told you. I’ve been here a lot longer than you have.”

She could see his face pretty clearly. He didn’t seem to be kidding. And there was thick stubble on his jaw, even though he’d been clean-shaven when they left base camp.

“Wolverton,” Nozaki said, “would you mind explaining that?”

“I can’t.” He waited for a moment, until the sensation of descending came to an end. “But if you want to, I’ll show you around my world.”

“Around your world?”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe I should just try to climb back up through that compartment.”

“I wouldn’t,” Wolverton said. “Once we stop descending, there’s going to be a flood coming through those vents.” He pointed to a series of notches on the walls, each two or three meters in length. “It’s the first step in the refining process.”

Being careful to look up every few seconds, she followed Wolverton as he slogged through the gel between the fallen rocks. A wall curved in front of them, reflecting blue at its base. Wolverton led the way to an archway and went through it. Taking one last look up to make sure nothing could fall on her, Nozaki followed him.

“This thing is big,” Nozaki said.

“Very big,” Wolverton replied, leading her through a tunnel.

“What is it? Some kind of ore processing plant?”

“That’s right. It’s been mining LGC-1 for a long time.”

“But how could our sensors have missed it when the computer mapped the asteroid?”

“We didn’t miss it,” Wolverton said, as if it were the most obvious thing imaginable. “It wasn’t here.”

“But you just said it’s been here for years!”

“That’s right.” Wolverton chuckled.

“I think I’m beginning to get it,” Nozaki said. “There’s a time anomaly here.”

“Yes, we’ve fallen into some kind of temporal displacement bubble.”

They emerged from the tunnel. How did the poem go? Where Alph, the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. That was Nozaki’s impression as they came out into the vast interior hollowed out of the asteroid’s guts. An azure river carried lumps of ore through a vast stone vault.

“The whole asteroid is hollowed out?” Nozaki said.

“Almost,” Wolverton replied.

The scale was breathtaking. In the distance, Nozaki could see things moving, although she couldn’t tell exactly what they were from here.

“You said something about a time displacement bubble,” she said.

“Yeah, we’ve slipped into one,” Wolverton said.

“In which case it’s going to be hard to get back.”

“We can’t go back.”

“We’ll die here as soon as we run out of air.”

“No, we won’t.”

“What are we going to breathe? Are you telling me there’s an atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen in here?”

“We’re not swimming in it, but it’s here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The miners left good supplies of all the gases we’ll need.”

Wolverton pointed to dozens of pale orange globes lined up along the cavern wall to their right.

“So these aliens were like us?”

“Some of them,” said Wolverton. “I’ve found evidence that several different species have worked LGC-1.”

He jumped toward the globes. Nozaki followed.

“How do we get the air out of these things?” she asked as she landed lightly on her feet halfway to the globes.

“It’s easy,” Wolverton replied. He made a second leap and landed in front of a globe.

Nozaki was right behind him. Now that she was so close to them, she saw that the globes were twenty meters high or more. They were not quite spherical, she noted, but slightly ovoid, and they protruded from the wall.

“Watch this,” Wolverton said. He passed his gloved hand through the globe’s skin as if it didn’t exist. It jiggled a bit, but that was all.

“Whoa!”

“There’s enough here to keep us breathing forever.”

“Forever?”

“Yes, it’s constantly manufacturing gases. There’s a food factory over there.” He gestured at yellow tanks to the right. “It analyzes the subject’s metabolism and digestive system and uses raw materials to make food.”

The subject? “And it’s still working?”

“Yes, I’ve already eaten. And see those green tubes over there?”

“Uh, huh.”

“Water, all we could ever want.”

“How’s that possible?”

“This mining operation can break things down to quark level, so extracting hydrogen and oxygen atoms is no trouble at all.”

This was getting a little too cozy. Was Nozaki really going through this, or was she lying on the crater floor hallucinating, her air supply running out? She preferred to believe it was the former.

“We’ve gone through a temporal dysjunction,” Wolverton said. “That must be why I got here so many hours before you did in subjective time.”

“We could have ended up in separate bubbles,” Nozaki said.

“How do you know we didn’t? There could be other versions of us in other bubbles,” Wolverton said.

“Don’t complicate this any more than you have to. We’re both here, aren’t we?”

“Apparently, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t somewhere else at the same time.”

“Well, I’m willing to let any other version of me fend for herself, wherever she is.”

Wolverton shrugged.

“Right now the best thing we can do is stock up on food, water, and oxygen, and try to get back.”

Wolverton laughed most unpleasantly. “Get back? Haven’t you been paying attention, Nozaki? There’s no getting back.”

“How do you know that?”

“What are the chances? We don’t even know where or when we slipped into this bubble.”

“It must have been somewhere between the dawn and the crater,” Nozaki reasoned, “because the crater didn’t exist in our own…bubble.”

“Face it, Nozaki, this is our bubble now. Our world.”

She thought he seemed a little too eager to accept this fate. But then she remembered that he had made no friends since coming to base camp. He had said it himself: he believed that this was his world. But now he wanted her to share it with him.

“What if they come back?” Nozaki said.

“Who?”

“Whoever made this thing.”

Nozaki saw by Wolverton’s wrinkled brow that he hadn’t given that possibility much thought. She thought it wise to press him on it before he got too comfortable. “They wouldn’t set up this mine without checking on it from time to time, would they?”

“You can see for yourself that there’s nobody here,” Wolverton said.

“Where did they go?”

Wolverton turned away from her. She was getting to him.

“They might have been scattered through the same bubble we fell into. Some of them could even come into our bubble, see?”

Wolverton said nothing.

“We’ve got to go back, Wolverton,” Nozaki said. “We can’t stay here.”

“I think we can stay here forever, maybe even longer than forever.”

She had to make him understand. “The only way we stay here forever is if we die here.”

He spun to face her, the sudden motion lifting him a few inches off his feet. “We may already be dead in our old bubble, Nozaki. Have you thought of that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing, it’s just a…feeling I have.”

“A feeling?”

“Never mind. Why don’t we get you some food and water? The food’s ready, because it made a lot for me.”

“Oh, that’s great,” she said dubiously, wondering what it would taste like. “But how do we eat without taking off our helmets?”

She needn’t have worried, as it turned out. Wolverton went back to one of the globes and scooped a portion out. It bobbed in his hand like an orange balloon. He passed it to Nozaki and scooped another portion away.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Here,” Wolverton said, handing her the second balloon. “Stick those two together.”

“Huh?”

“Like this.” He scooped off another couple of balloons and slapped them into each other. They made one larger balloon.

“Oh.” Nozaki did the same thing.

A few more scoops and they each had balloons a meter or so in diameter in their hands. Wolverton pushed his down over his helmet until it completely covered his head and shoulders. He scooped out another couple of handfuls for good measure and slapped them on to enlarge the balloon. Then he removed his helmet. He inhaled the pure oxygen, grinning and showing his big teeth. “It’s making me a little dizzy,” he said. “Go ahead, Nozaki. You’ll like it.”

She made a larger bubble and pulled it over her head. It was like slow-motion orange water sliding down in front of her visor. She took off her helmet and breathed in the oxygen. It made her giddy, too.

Wolverton led her to the food, giggling. “Next time, we’ll add nitrogen so we won’t be like this all the time.”

All the time? He really did plan to stay here. To him it was paradise. It made him happy to be able to show her all that he had discovered before she arrived.

“Wolverton,” Nozaki said, “You haven’t been listening to me.”

He frowned, but said nothing.

“I’m not staying,” Nozaki said. “And I can’t let you stay, either.”

“I can stay if I want to,” Wolverton said, like a petulant child.

“No, you can’t. You’re obliged by your contract to come with me.”

“Not if you’re going to get me killed.”

“Have I gotten you killed so far?”

“You couldn’t start the rover.”

“Could you?”

“Okay.” Wolverton looked down. “I guess you’re right.”

“Right or wrong, I outrank you. I didn’t interfere with your collection of mineral samples, and you don’t interfere with me while I’m doing my job.”

“What is your job?”

“Right now it’s keeping you alive so you can collect more rocks. Let’s get moving.”

The first thing to do was find out if there was another way to the surface besides riding up in the ore collector, as Nozaki now thought of it. There could be some tunnels that led to the surface. If they failed to find one, then she would consider going back up in the collector.

While they were underground, they could use the manufactured oxygen, saving what they had in their tanks for the long walk back through the bubble and on to base camp. Nozaki didn’t want to think about what they would do if base camp was not there.

But as she walked around the perimeter of the vast cavern, she had to consider that possibility. If they passed into another temporal bubble, it was very likely that it would not be the one from which they came. And it was entirely possible that they would not be able to return to this one after they left it. In either case, they would soon be dead. She hated to admit it, but Wolverton had a point when he said that he would prefer to stay in the cavern.

But she had signed an oath when she joined the service that she would not shirk her duty and that she would follow orders. Her orders were to take Wolverton out to get mineral samples and bring him back. She intended to do everything she could to carry out those orders.

“Gather all the food and oxygen we can carry,” she said, after a brief rest, “while I look for a way out.”

She discovered that the balloons turned a deeper orange when the oxygen began to get stale. She took all she could with her. Juggling oxygen balloons in one hand and carrying her helmet with the other, she examined every notch she could find on the walls, until she found an opening big enough to crawl into.

“Let’s give it a shot,” she said. The opening was about four meters above her head. She jumped and her gloved hand caught the edge of it. She propelled herself inside with ease, and crouched in the dark for a moment, trying to acclimatize her vision, rather than wasting the batteries by turning on her head lamp.

She soon saw that the tunnel angled upward, and that there were ridges every meter or so that she could use to plant her boots on. She just hoped that the blue gel would not flush down through this tunnel while she was inside it. While she climbed, it occurred to her that she and Wolverton might be able to make their way around LGC-1 by way of interior tunnnels such as this one. That way they could avoid the daylight and go out only in the dark to search for the camp.

But how could they know they’d be in the right time bubble? Now that she was alone in the dark, climbing up the incline, Nozaki allowed herself to feel a little of the fear that Wolverton had displayed without shame when this whole mess had started.

But there was no time for that. Something was coming down the incline toward her. Her breath caught in her throat and her heart pounded.

She couldn’t avoid it.

Spidery legs churned along the curved tunnel’s sides. Whatever it was, it was not alone. Nozaki counted three, no four, of them. They came at her so quickly that she could not avoid them.

Their long, multi-jointed legs touched her pressure suit, but then they quickly moved past her and entered the cavern. Were these the miners, or more of their utilitarian creations? If they were the latter, she could not imagine what their function might be.

“Wolverton,” she called, but it was no good. He would never be able to hear her from here. She thought of putting on her helmet and contacting him, but he wouldn’t be wearing his helmet. She had told him to cut off his recycling tank and breathe from the oxygen balloons, just as she was doing.

Well, the things had not harmed her, so they probably would not harm Wolverton either. The movements she had noticed from a distance were probably these spidery things. Perhaps they were designed or programmed to stay out of the way.

She realized she had stopped moving when she had first seen them coming, and so she forced herself to keep climbing upward. It soon became so dark that she wanted very badly to turn on the head lamp.

At last she saw dim light reflected on the curvature ahead. It was not a red light, reflected from the hydrogen shell of Gamma Crucis, but a yellowish glow. She was in no danger of being broiled by such faint illumination.

Now she realized that the light came from two side tunnels, intersecting with the passageway she was in. Her best guess was that it was powered by piezoelectricity, its current derived from pressure on a quartz deposit.

“Now we’re getting some place,” she said.

A minute or two later she was at the intersection. First she looked to her right, into a perpendicular tunnel leading off into the darkness. Then she turned to her left, seeing a mirror image. She could not tell where the light came from, but it suffused both corridors.

“You’ve got three choices,” she said, breathing a bit heavily from the long climb. “Pick one.”

She opted to keep going straight up the incline toward the asteroid’s surface. It had taken only a few minutes for the mining machine to bring her down, so she reasoned it should not take much longer to reach her destination. If she saw the red glow of the sun, she would know to duck back inside the tunnel. If not, she could go out and see what she could find in the dark.

She came to another juncture, and there the tunnel ended. There was really nothing to do except follow one of the perpendicular tunnels and hope that it led to a surface opening. It was either that or climb back down to the cavern and look for another way.

She decided to go for it, choosing the left tunnel.

It was a little harder to make her way inside it, because she had to crawl on all fours. But after a few minutes the tunnel debouched into a larger space.

As she emerged, Nozaki noticed dozens of stringy objects hanging from the walls of this chamber, which had a floor and a domed roof. Upon closer inspection, she realized that these were the same spidery things that she had encountered in the angled tunnel on the way up. Apparently this was a storage space for them.

The room was about ten meters in diameter, and she saw another tunnel mouth on the far side of it. She took a good look at the inanimate spiders, and still was unsure if they were machine or animal. They could have just been hanging here to sleep, like bats in a cave, or they might have needed charging. She had no way of knowing which, or if they hung here for some other reason altogether.

“Now what?” she said aloud. Should she continue on in through the next tunnel leg? It did not seem likely that she could get lost, so why not?

Nozaki crawled inside the tunnel and went forward for a few minutes. The amber light became very dim, and she was thinking about backing up when she perceived a red glow. Was it an opening to the surface?

There was only one way to find out.

She crawled as far as she could without exposing herself to the sunlight, using the tunnel’s shadow for protection. She saw an astonishing sight.

A cavern, almost as large as the one she had left Wolverton in, opened in front of her. It was festooned with the stringy spiders, and they basked in the red glow of Gamma Crucis. There was a large opening just above, letting in the crimson radiation. The spiders were everywhere---clinging to the walls, on the cavern floor, and crawling up the sides.

She caught her breath as one suddenly came over the lip of the tunnel, its legs brushing against her as it made its way down the tunnel in the direction from which she had just come. She could not turn around in the narrow tunnel, so she waited until the side of the canyon was in shadow before venturing to the edge to turn around.

That gave her some time to observe the spiders. She was pretty sure they were built for some specific purpose, or genetically engineered. Their disinterest in her indicated that they were indeed designed to stay out of the way of living, organic beings.

They certainly couldn’t have developed naturally on this asteroid.

“What are they here for?” she asked herself.

They did not appear to be able to dig or carry heavy weights, not with such spindly limbs. Were they simply here to make sure that everything was functioning properly?

The shadow covered the near wall in a few minutes, and Nozaki crept to the tunnel mouth to take a closer look. As the vault’s near side was plunged into shadow, more and more of the spiders came to life. The largest of them climbed up the wall and stationed themselves much as those in the storage room, hanging from the bare rock. Others joined them and hung on their dangling legs, and still others joined them. Each wave was comprised of smaller spiders than the previous wave. They formed an arachnoidal daisy chain. Now others were doing the same thing all around the circular vault. Before long, thousands of them had gathered on the walls, dangling one from the other all the way to the floor. A blast of heat coming from below wafted them upward and those at the ends of the daisy chain locked legs, forming a vast net stretching from one side of the cavern to the other.

What were they doing?

And then she noticed the vents opening on the far side of the vault, about thirty meters below her tunnel. They ringed the vault. The blue gel washed through them, soaking the web and depositing lumps of ore. The interlocked spiders sagged on the impact, but then bounced back. Those anchoring the web jerked their limbs upward and the ore lumps were flung out through the crater mouth into space.

“Wow!” So this was what they did with the ore. But what happened then? There must have been something set up to catch all those millions of flying rocks. Nozaki watched the spiders repeat the process over and over again, seeing the blue gel drain from the floor below, probably to be recycled for the next round of spiderweb slingshot.

Between slings, she pulled herself out to the tunnel mouth and looked up. There was no pathway or steps, and she saw no tunnels higher than this one, located perhaps twenty meters below the opening.

She was that close to the surface, and yet there was no way to get there. She carefully turned herself around, her legs dangling for a moment outside the tunnel, and then pulled herself back in. She would go back and tell Wolverton what she had seen and find out if he had any ideas.

She met a few spiders coming through the tunnel, but they were going toward the vault instead of the cavern. She passed through the storage room and was soon back at the inclined tunnel.

She was getting very hungry and wished she had brought some food with her. She had never expected to be gone this long, but at least she had seen something that could turn out be helpful to them. She was beginning to form a plan.

When she dropped down from the tunnel mouth, she almost landed on a spider, but it scuttled out of the way and gave her room. Instead of following the cavern wall around, she walked straight across the floor and was dismayed that she did not see Wolverton near the food or oxygen globes.

Then she saw him. He wasn’t near the globes. He was inside one.

“Wolverton!” she shouted at his shadowy orange form. “Come on out of there. I’ve got something to tell you.”

Wolverton didn’t seem to hear her at first. She moved closer to the oxygen balloon, reached in, and pulled him out by the arm. Smaller balloons clung to his arms and legs as he staggered onto the cavern floor.

“What did you do that for?” he asked.

“You were in there getting stoned, weren’t you?”

“What if I was?” Wolverton stooped to pick the balloons off his legs and slapped them over his face.

“Never mind that. I think I’ve found a way out.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t sound so ecstatic.”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Nozaki. I’d rather stay here.”

“Well, you’re not going to.”

“That’s fine for you to say. You talk to people easily, and you know how to get along. You don’t know what it’s like not to have any friends. I thought it would be different out here on the frontier, but it isn’t.”

“We’ll work on that when we get back.”

“You can’t make me go back.”

“Want to bet?”

That question seemed to sober him up a little. He was bigger than Nozaki, but she was trained to fight and he wasn’t. “How are we gonna get out?”

“I’ll show you,” she said. “Have you been packing as much food and air as you can?”

Wolverton looked away.

“Wolverton.…”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I don’t see this the way you do. We’re in another continuum than the one we came from. Even if we find our way back, base camp isn’t going to be there.”

“We came through one bubble into another, so we can find our way back.”

“You say that, but you don’t even know if the bubble’s still there.”

“A little more optimism would be appreciated, Wolverton.”

“Look around you,” Wolverton said. “We could be king and queen here.”

“Yeah, for as long as this place lasts.”

“I think it will outlast us.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“I don’t care. This is a safe haven, and there’s nobody here to tell me what to do.”

“Wolverton, how old are you?”

“Thirty-one. Why?”

“Because you sound more like a thirteen-year-old. You’re not a king anymore than I’m a queen. Who would be our subjects? A bunch of mechanical spiders?”

“Yeah, I saw them. Aren’t they cool?”

“Not only are they cool, but they showed me how we’re going to get out of here.”

“They did?”

“Yes, they did.”

That caught his interest, so she explained what she had seen and told him about the escape plan she had formulated on the way back. The more she told him, the more he gaped.

“So, what do you think?” she asked him.

“I think you’re crazy,” he said.

“You want to stay here and suck pure oxygen and eat God-knows-what until you die of old age,” Nozaki said, losing her temper, “ruling over a bunch of synthetic spiders, and you call me crazy?”

Wolverton got the message. He was soon gathering up all the food and water he could carry. The water was conveyed in balloons whose skins were a bit more solid than the oxygen balloons.

By the time they had reached the storage room, Nozaki had long since told Wolverton everything. He was quite fascinated and stared at the hanging spiders as if they were goldfish in a bowl.

“But I still don’t understand how you figure we can get out,” he said.

“You will in a few minutes,” Nozaki said. “It’s time to put your helmet on and turn on your oxygen supply.”

They crawled the last few meters until they emerged at the shadowy edge of the vault.

“I can’t see anything,” Wolverton complained.

“There’s nothing to see,” Nozaki told him. “We’re on the dark side of LGC-1 now.”

She lay on her back to look up at the stars. After a few seconds she saw thousands of dark stones fly up against the stars and out of sight, like a hailstorm in reverse.

“Okay, here’s what I’m going to do,” she said. “After a few minutes, I’ll shine my head lamp on the vents. As soon as the rocks are poured down in the gel and are thrown back up, we jump.”

“Jump? Are you out of your mind?”

“Maybe, but that’s what we’re going to do. My guess is the spiders will toss us out as if we were rocks. We’re not going to fall to our deaths in any case.”

“How do you know that?”

“If they can support all those rocks, they can support us. If they don’t throw us, we’ll climb down to the bottom and look for a tunnel or vent to climb through.”

“And if they do throw us?”

“Then we’ll be tossed into space, and we’ll either be snatched by whatever’s catching the ore or we’ll be thrown free of this crater, and we’ll be well on our way around the dark side before we come down.”

“What if it throws us into the sunlight?”

“No, I’ve worked out the time. We’ll go into the dark. The only real danger is that we’ll be thrown so far from the surface that we’ll be exposed to the sunlight, but that might be for only a few seconds. I think we can make it.”

“It seems too risky to me,” Wolverton said.

“Maybe so, but it’s the only chance we’ve got. Now get ready. When I jump, you come right after me.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Wolverton, you’ll follow me, right?”

“Right.”

She turned on her head lamp and the beam lanced across the vault. She played the light down on the web, making sure that it was still intact. It looked the same, the spiderlegs tightly meshed as if waiting for another flush. Nozaki slowly turned her head to illuminate one of the vents.

“Here it comes!”

The blue gel began to spurt from the vent, and then it gushed out forcefully. A quick glance showed that the other vents were doing the same.

“Are you ready, Wolverton?”

“Yes, I am.”

Nozaki waited until the blue gel stopped cascading and the rocks were trapped in the web. As the web sagged and gathered force, she watched the rocks soar past her and then turned out the head lamp.

“Let’s go!”

She flung herself head first out into the void, somersaulting and descending so slowly she felt as if she were floating. Exhilarated, she went down and down. At last she hit the web and felt it give way beneath her weight. It sagged a few meters, and then shot her upward with terrific force.

She flew up toward the starry sky.

“Goodbye, Nozaki,” she heard Wolverton say over her radio.

“Jump, Woverton!”

“No, I’m staying here, just like I told you.”

Nozaki sailed over the crater’s rim into space, alone. She tumbled head over heels, seeing the stars blacked out by LGC-1 again and again. A crimson corona surrounded the tiny world, and she was afraid that she had been thrown too far, that she would go all the way around LGC-1 and end up facing the sun’s fatal hydrogen shell.

She felt another force drawing her. Her body stopped tumbling and she was pulled headfirst toward something. She looked up to see nothing but darkness.

She had expected a glittering, strobing machine like the one that pulled her down under the asteroid’s surface, but that thing must have been designed to illuminate the surface on the dark side so that the lariats could pick out ore samples. This was a snare set at a point in space and needed no lighting.

The last thing she saw before darkness enveloped her was the last load of rocks that had been tossed up just before she jumped. They were being sucked into something she couldn’t see.

Then she was inside the snare. She prayed that whatever was inside it would show the same deference to organic life that the spiders did. Otherwise, she might very well be crushed along with the ore samples. It occurred to her that it would be best to move her limbs, so that whatever was there could more easily detect her as an animate lifeform.

She waved her arms and legs as much as she could. Something grasped her around the waist and turned her over. She got one last glimpse of LGC-1, and then the darkness irised shut.

She was towed through utter blackness into a compartment similar to the ore collector’s. This was more spacious, and its other end opened almost immediately to let her out into a lit space.

She could tell that this place was built by the same people who had made the ore-collector and hollowed out much of LGC-1. The same economy of interior space, lighting, and storage globes were here, the latter in comfortingly large portions. She went to the nearest orange globe and stuck her head inside it, shutting off her tank and removing her helmet to suck in the intoxicating, pure oxygen.

She laughed, the sound echoing in her ears, but then she thought of Wolverton. She should have made him go first and pushed him out the tunnel. She could do nothing for him now. He was stuck there for the rest of his life.

“Of course, I might be stuck here for the rest of my life, too,” she said, stepping out of the globe with a balloon clinging to her head. She did not intend to waste time. She was going to find out everything she could about this place to see if there was anything here that could help her get back to base camp.

She leaped through the space station, floating and tumbling toward a red glow. Soon she found that there was an opening in one wall that admitted Gamma Crucis’s light. It was covered by something transparent that filtered the red glare. She walked up and touched it. There was a bit of give and then the clear covering sprang back. She looked out at the sun, LGC-1, and a funnel that spat out ore chunks.

It was easy to see the funnel against the red giant’s hydrogen shell. The rocks shot out to a certain point and then they were gone.

“The bubble!”

It had to be. Either the bubble extended from the asteroid’s surface out into space, or it moved around some point in space. She favored the latter hypothesis, because the miners would not have built this station if they could have done the same thing on the surface. But why were they shooting ore through a temporal bubble? Were the miners using it to build something in another bubble? If so, what were they building? This asteroid was rich in metals, and that was likely the reason the miners had chosen it. But what were they using it for?

She would have to go through the bubble and find out for herself. Otherwise, she might just as well jump back down to the surface and spend the rest of her life in Wolverton’s world.

She had no idea how to get out to the bubble, unless she allowed herself to be shot out with the ore chunks, in which case she was quite likely to be smashed to a pulp. She was very tired, and she wanted to eat and bathe before she slept. Then she would think about how to get back.

She went to sleep inside an oxygen balloon with her helmet off, drifting off quickly after what she had been through in the past few hours.

A visitor woke her.

At first she didn’t notice it. She had opened her eyes and was thinking about having some more food. She would have to figure out how to do that, she realized, because she had not been there when Wolverton had produced the food in the cavern, although he said there was nothing to it. From what he had said, she gathered that it would pretty much take care of itself once it had analyzed her metabolism. She wasn’t sure how that worked, exactly, but she would deal with it. Ah, for a tasteless meal with the consistency of toothpaste.

She was about to shut her eyes and go back to sleep again, when a shadow flitted past the orange transparency.

“Wolverton?” she said.

There was no reply. She was wide awake in a heartbeat. She leaped out of the balloon, holding enough of it around her head to continue breathing.

It wasn’t Wolverton.

“Hello,” Nozaki said to it. It was hard to tell exactly what part of it to look at while she addressed it.

It made a sound. At least she knew it could hear her, because it was responsive. Its five limbs seemed to flow into one another, but it made no threatening move.

“I’m sorry to have come here uninvited,” she said, “but it was the only way I could get off the asteroid.”

The alien made a cooing sound, followed by a gurgle. She felt silly talking to it, but even if it didn’t understand what she was saying, it seemed to realize that she was being communicative.

It made more cooing and gurgling noises, and she let it go on talking while she took a good look at it.

Its skin was blue shot with pink blood vessels, and its five eyes were about where a human’s mouth would be, set in a semi-circle, as if it were smiling through the eyes. Its head emerged on a slender neck from the belly, and its fluid limbs parted to show its mouth at crotch level. It was naked.

At last it stopped speaking, and its eyes regarded Nozaki.

“There’s someone else trapped down there,” she said, pointing her finger straight at the floor. “Inside the asteroid.”

An arm extended from between its swaybacked shoulders. It mimicked her gesture, and she saw that its fingers were either multi-jointed or tentacular. They moved about like worms, but one of them pointed at the floor.

“You’re smart, at least,” she said. And then she realized how silly that sounded. This being was from one of the races that had built this space station, the ore processer, and the spiders-sling; they had hollowed out an asteroid and extracted valuable metals with remarkable efficiency, and they didn’t even have to be present to be sure it all worked. Smart? They were very advanced.…

Even if this guy did resemble a cartoon character.

“You probably think I look pretty funny, too,” she said, smiling.

The expression the alien made with its mouth was unsettling, but she assumed that it was an imitation of her smile. There was something about the the thing’s manner that told her it was trying to be friendly. The mine and the space station appeared to have been designed to accommodate quite a few races, so perhaps it was more used to her shape than she was to its.

It wasn’t naked, after all, she saw, but completely enveloped in a clear balloon from shoulders to its starfish feet. It could not breathe the gases in this environment any more than she could. Perhaps this was a neutral environment, and yet it was comfortable enough. The temperature was moderate to human sensibilities, and everything she needed was readily available. She was in her balloon and the alien was in its balloon. She wondered what it smelled like.

“Maybe you’re a stranger here, too,” she said.

Its serpentine fingers coiled and uncoiled, and its head swung to one side. It turned and lumbered away from her. After a few paces it hesitated and looked back at her, waving as if to tell her to come along.

“What have I got to lose?”

Nozaki followed the alien through the station, until they came to a corridor leading into the darkness.

“Is this the way out?” she asked.

The alien belched something at her in its language and waved her on into the tunnel. She was concerned that the oxygen in the balloon over her head might wear out, so she clutched her helmet tightly, ready to put it on and access her air tank at the first hint of darkening orange.

She needn’t have worried. When they emerged from the tunnel, the first thing she saw was a reassuring cluster of orange globes. These were squeezed into a corner of a very compact chamber, in which everything seemed to have a special place. She recognized this as a prerequisite of a spacecraft’s interior.

“We’re in your ship, aren’t we?”

The mouth in the alien’s crotch smiled at her.

“Proud of it, huh?” She looked around. “I don’t blame you. It’s very sophisticated…and very tidy.”

Some of the ship’s features were identifiable as correlatives of human design, and some she could only guess at. The rest were so strange that she hadn’t a clue about their functions.

“So, where are we going?”

The alien gurgled and coughed a reply. It gesticulated toward a big balloon in front of a console.

“Cockpit, I bet.” Nozaki settled into the balloon.

The alien used a coil to connect the balloon to an oxygen globe. Soon Nozaki felt free to luxuriate inside it while her host made preparations to depart the station.

“This should be interesting.”

And it was.

The cockpit darkened and a starry panorama expanded all around them. The alien manipulated some peculiarly lumpy-looking controls, and the ship freed itself from the tethering tunnel. Nozaki looked to her left to see the station, a clamshell limned in red from Gamma Crucis’s light. The tether curled up like one of the alien’s fingers and fitted itself neatly into the clamshell’s underbelly.

Below them was LGC-1, a cratered sphere, much different from the little world she had been living and working on for the past six months.

Behind them was the sun, its vast hydrogen shell a crimson orb that enveloped what had once been a solar system. Now only asteroids and the outer planets remained, the system having been slowly eaten up as GC expanded. It was a chilling thought that the same thing would happen to Sol in a few billion years, and Earth would be burned away.

When she finally turned to face forward, she understood where they were going, and why the alien had been able to suddenly appear at the station while she was asleep. The ship was headed for the bubble. Nozaki could see the last of an ore shipment vanishing into it.

“Well, join the service and see the multiverse,” she said.

The alien burbled something in reply and goosed the ship’s engines.

They flew straight into the bubble.

“Whoa!” Nozaki shouted as they sailed through it.

A moment later everything was different. The positions of the stars had changed; the light from the sun was white and much dimmer. The alien banked its ship and they came around until Nozaki saw that Gamma Crucis had been replaced by a protostar.

They were in a universe billions of years before her time, and the ore that spewed out of the bubble was spinning in a vast accretion disc. The aliens were manufacturing a planetesimal.

They weren’t just mining asteroids. They were going into the past and creating worlds!

Was this sun Gamma Crucis in an early stage, or some other sun?

It made sense, in a way. Planets, moons, and asteroids about to be consumed by red giants would make the perfect fodder for new planets. By firing enough rocks at specific points in space while the proto-star was developing, the miners could build as many worlds as they liked.

“But why?”

The alien gurgled, but she had no idea what it was saying. Was its species part of a confederacy dedicated to making new solar systems? For what purpose? As a future home for themselves or other species whose home planets had been destroyed by Red Giants? Unless she learned how to talk to this guy, she would never know.

“Maybe we’ll have a long time to get to knew one another,” she said.

But the alien said nothing. It was intent on piloting the ship, and it looked to Nozaki as if they were headed right back into the bubble. The alien skimmed its craft past a hail of rocks that spewed out of the darkness.

When they came out the other side the red giant was back. Or rather, they were back.

Just below was LGC-1, looking just the way Nozaki remembered it the first time she had seen it from space. No craters, no mines, just a metallic ball baking under a crimson sun.

The ship banked again, and the alien took them down toward the asteroid’s dark side. The drastically curving landscape was partly lit by the sun’s red albedo, but soon they flew over a dark expanse.

The ship slowed, and Nozaki saw the lights of base camp as they approached.

“You brought me back!” she cried in amazement, tears coming to her eyes. “How did you know where to bring me?”

But the alien was silent as it landed the ship on the hard surface of LGC-1. They drifted to the ground and settled like a butterfly. The engines were still hissing as it turned to her and gestured with its snaky fingers around its head.

“Huh?” Nozaki said. “Oh, you want me to put my helmet on?”

She did so, and turned on her air supply.

A round hatch funneled open next to her. It was well lit, and she could see the ground below. The funnel took an elbow turn. She assumed she was supposed to jump out.

“Thank you, my friend,” she said.

The alien cooed a response, but then gesticulated again, as if telling her to hurry.

“Okay,” she said, standing at the edge of the hatch. She took one last look at the ungainly creature, thinking for the first time that it was beautiful. “Thanks.”

She dropped down and slid through the funnel. Landing lightly on her feet, she moved quickly away from the ship, wary of its engines. She bounded two steps and came down, knees bent, twenty or so meters away.

The ship went straight up until it had gained an altitude of a kilometer or so. She waved at its occupant just it shot forward and rode the curve of the horizon back toward the bubble.

“If I’m dreaming all this,” she said, “I don’t want to wake up.”

She leaped joyously over the metallic surface toward base camp. The low buildings came into sight under floodlights, and there was one of her colleagues manipulating a wieldo, putting together another structure.

“Hey!” she called.

The wieldos stopped moving and the pressure-suited figure turned toward her. She saw that it was Labutunu, a friendly sort who had been on LCG-1 longer than she. He was one of the construction crew, in fact.

“Hi, Nozaki,” he said. “Back so soon?”

“Soon? You won’t believe all I’ve been through.”

“Oh, yeah? Was that the flyby that just went over?”

“No.”

She moved closer, and saw the puzzlement in his eyes. And then she realized that the building he was putting up had been there for weeks.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” Labutunu asked.

“There are more bubbles around here than I ever dreamed of,” she said.

“Bubbles?”

“I wonder if I’m going to show up soon,” she said, “on the double…”

“What are you talking about, Nozaki?” Labutunu asked.

“I’ll tell you everything, but right now I just want to get inside.”

“Yeah, the sun will be up soon.” He turned off the wieldo’s power and withdrew his arms from the mechanism.

Nozaki stumbled, and he caught her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yeah, just a little tired.”

“Well, you’ll be able to rest soon,” Labutunu said.

“Rest,” she said. “Poor Wolverton…”

“Poor who?”

“Wolverton. He’s the new geo-areologist.”

“Oh, yeah. I think he’ll be here in a couple days,” Labutunu said as they bounded toward base camp. “Have you met him before?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I didn’t think anybody here knew him.”

They were about to go inside. The airlock opened to admit them, and as she stepped through the door, Nozaki was so grateful to be back that she couldn’t control herself. She broke down and wept as she took off her helmet.

Labutunu seemed confused and embarrassed.

“That was the trouble,” she said, wiping tears off on the back of a glove. “Nobody knew him.”

“Well, up here we’ll all get acquainted.”

“I hope so,” Nozaki said.

This time, she intended to be Wolverton’s friend from the moment he arrived.