The first of the four to reach the top of the stairs doffed his rain cap. Patricia looked down to see her former professor, his face ruddy and bearded, eyes small and suspicious as if from some long-harbored hurt. Rimskaya was just as she remembered him. He returned her stare defensively, then nodded to Lanier. Behind him, a tall, even-featured blond woman and two Chinese, a man and a woman wearing green caps, removed their gear and shook water off onto the floor.
Rimskaya approached Patricia, his every gesture conveying aloofness, if not disgust. ”Miss Vasquez,’ he said. ”I hope you are up to this. I hope you do not make me seem like a fool for choosing you.”
She opened and shut her mouth like a carp, then laughed too loudly.
“Professor, I hope so, too!”
“Don’t mind him,” said the blond woman, her voice pleasant and deep, with a faint British accent. ”He’s said nothing but good about you for four months now.” She clutched her own cap under her arm and held out her hand.
Patricia shook it. Her grip was firm and warm. ”I’m Karen Farley, this is Wu Gi Me, and Chang i Hsing.” Chang smiled at Patricia, her straight black bangs hanging down over her eyebrows, the latest Chinese fashion. ”We’re from Beijing Technological University.”
Rimskaya still studied Patricia. His gray eyes narrowed.
“You are healthy, no space sickness, no emotional distress?”
“I’m fine, Professor,” she said.
“Good. Then you—” he indicated Farley, Wu and Chang “—you take care of her. I’m going to the first chamber to rest. I’ll be gone a week, perhaps longer.” He held his hand out to Lanier and they shook once, firmly. ”I am tired,” Rimskaya said, “not least because I have no idea what this all signifies. I have never been an imaginative man, and this place ...” He shuddered. ”Perhaps it will suit you better, Miss Vasquez.”
He bowed stiffly to his colleagues, then picked up his gear and walked toward the ramp leading to the train platform.
Patricia looked after him, nonplussed.
“I envy him ... a bit,” said Wu in perfect California English.
He was about her height, just on the edge of plumpness, with a stiff crew cut and a childlike face. ”I have read some of your papers recently, Miss Vasquez.”
“Patricia, please.”
“They are quite beyond me, I’m afraid. Chang and I are electrical engineers. Karen is a physicist.”
“Theoretical physics. I’ve been very impay-tient to meet you,” Farley said.
“‘Impay-shent,’” Lanier corrected.
“Yes.” Farley grinned at Patricia’s puzzlement. ”I’m a Chinese citizen also. I can fool most people most of the time. Correct me, please, when I blunder.”
Patricia looked between them owlishly. She felt a bit strung-out, not yet ready to meet new people and stretch her sociability.
“We’re escorting Patricia to the seventh chamber,” Lanier said. “But she may want to rest here awhile.”
“No.” Patricia shook her head firmly. ”I’m going for the big picture today.”
“That’s a woman,” Farley said. ”Suicidal doggedness. Something I admire. Chang has it. Gi Me—we call him Lucky—Gi Me’s a lazy fellow, though.”
“Both she and Professor Rimskaya are slave drivers,” Chang said.
Her English accent was markedly less proficient than Wu’s and Farley’s.
She produced two packets of rain gear from a pouch in her own coat and gave them to Lanier and Patricia. They suited up quickly and left the shelter of the Annex.
The air smelled of clean rain, ozone and metal. The rain had slowed to a drizzle and the snow had stopped. Water slid in sheets from sloping metal walls below the elevated road, collecting in gutters and washing to a catch basin meters below. Patricia peered into the basin and saw the smooth funnel of water descending into darkness.
The truck on the roadbed was a replica of the vehicle which had taken them across the first chamber. Farley offered Patricia the shotgun seat again, and the others climbed into the back, pushing aside boxes of fabric-wrapped scientific gear. Farley edged the truck forward, then brought it up to speed.
The roadbed expanded into a broad flat ribbon, winding through complexes of tanks and gray shapes hidden behind a rapidly spreading fog. Wu leaned between the two seats.
“This stuff that looks like asphalt—it isn’t. It’s asteroid rock, all the metals removed, ground up and mixed with a plant-based oil. Very tough, no cracks. We wonder who’s going to patent it.”
Somehow, Patricia found the dreariness invigorating. There was a bluish quality about the fog that made her feel as if she were within a sapphire. The rain resumed, and the drum of water on the track’s roof—combined with a gentle surge of warm air from the heater—made everything seem secure, no more strenuous than watching an entertainment on a video.
She snapped herself out of that feeling quickly. Lanier was watching her. She angled her face toward him and then looked away.
How could they consider her so important? In the face of this monumental mystery, what could she possibly do?
The size alone was enough to paralyze thought. Looking up through gaps in the cloud cover to the opposite side, she could just as well have been looking from the window of a shuttle reentering the atmosphere.
The truck followed the gently curving highway and crossed the sixth chamber in twenty minutes. The familiar arch and tunnel entrance loomed ahead. Farley switched on the lights as the tunnel enveloped them.
After the stormy sixth chamber, the clarity and brightness of the unhindered plasma tube light was welcome.
“You can almost hear the birds singing,” Patricia commented.
“I wish,” Farley said. They descended the ramp. Ahead stretched an arrow-straight road, about half as broad as the sixth chamber highway and made of the same material. To each side of the road, sandy hummocks topped with stiff yellow grass dotted the floor for several kilometers. A short hike away were stands of low, scrawny trees. To the west, up the curve of the chamber floor, Patricia saw small lakes and what looked like a river emerging from one of the cap tunnels.
A few fleecy clouds clung to the cap. The landscape was equally homogenous and bland right up to the limits of the tube light both east and west. The plasma tube itself emerged from the center of the cap in a straight, unobscured beacon.
Patricia could feel the anticipation building in the cabin, centering on her. They were waiting for her reaction.
Reaction to what? if anything, this chamber was less impressive than the first. Her shoulders tensed. So what was she supposed to say?
Lanier reached between the seats to touch her arm. ”What do you see?” he asked.
“Sand, grass, lakes, trees. A river. Some clouds.”
“Look straight ahead.”
She looked. The air was clear. Visibility was at least thirty kilometers. The northern cap seemed to be obscured, not nearly as obvious as the looming gray presence in the other chambers. She looked up and squinted, trying to make out the end of the plasma tube.
It didn’t end. It went on, certainly more than thirty kilometers, getting dimmer and thinner until it almost merged with the horizon.
Of course, on a non-curved surface—as the cylinders were, viewed parallel to the axis—the horizon was much higher.
Given unlimited distance, the horizon would begin at a true vanishing point in the perspective ...
“This chamber’s longer,” she said.
“Yes,” Wu agreed cautiously. Chang nodded, grinning as if at some joke, her hands folded demurely in her lap.
“Now, let me get this straight. We’ve traveled about two hundred and twenty kilometers into the Stone, which is about two hundred and ninety kilometers long. So this chamber could be, maybe, fifty kilometers across.” Her hands were trembling. ”But it isn’t.”
“Look closely,” Lanier said.
“It’s an optical illusion. I can’t see the northern cap.”
“No,” Farley said, all too sympathetic.
“So?” Patricia looked around the cab. The others kept their faces impassive, except for Chang’s secretive smile. ”What the hell am I supposed to see?”
“You tell us,” Lanier said.
She figured furiously in her head, looking up at the opposite side of the chamber, trying to calculate distances in the strange perspective of the huge cylinders. ”Stop the truck.”
Farley brought the vehicle to a halt and Patricia descended from the cab to stand on the roadway. Then she clambered up a ladder to a platform on top of the cab and looked down the straight line of the road. The road went to its own vanishing point—no cap, no barrier.
Above, the rest of the landscape did much the same.
“It’s bigger,” she said. Farley and Lanier stood by the truck, looking up at her. Wu and Chang joined them. ”It’s bigger than the asteroid. It goes beyond the end. Is that what you’re trying to tell m?”
“We don’t tell,” Lanier said. ”We show. It’s the only way.”
“You’re trying to tell me it doesn’t stop, it goes right on out the other end?”
She heard the touch of panic and high-pitched fascination in her own voice.
The Stanford professor, six years before, had been wrong.
Someone besides extraterrestrials and gods could appreciate her work.
She now knew why she had been brought up from Vandenberg, carried to the Stone by shuttle and OTV.
The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside.
The seventh chamber went on forever.
Chapter Five
Patricia had slept— she checked her watch—nine hours.
She lay on the cot, listening to the gentle sound of tent canvas clapping in the breeze.
In at least this region of the seventh chamber, there was little need for solid-walled buildings. The weather was dry and mild, the air temperature warm. She stared up at the awning stretched between aluminum poles, at the smoky outline of the plasma tube through the cloth.
I am here. This is real.
“You bet your life,” she whispered. Inside the tent, a complex of partitions and tarp floors covering about a hundred square meters, Farley and Chang were speaking Chinese in muted tones.
The first few hours in the chamber, while they had arranged a cubicle in the tent for her and prepared for a cookout, Patricia had been hyperactive, darting about like a moth, asking questions that sometimes made little sense. Lanier had watched her glumly for a while; she had felt she was somehow disappointing him. But later he had joined the others in laughing at her—with her—and had produced a surprise bottle of champagne. ”To christen your new self,” he had said.
On the first round, they had tried to find something more fitting in the way of names for what everyone had, heretofore, referred to simply as the “seventh chamber,” or “the corridor.”
“Spaghetti world,” Farley had suggested. No, Wu countered—more like macaroni world, hollow in the middle.
Chang tossed in pipe world. ”Tube” and “tunnel” had already been appropriated for other parts of the Stone;. the words and shapes seemed to echo against each other, a sexually charged confusion of fittings-within-fittings.
A couple of glasses of champagne and Patricia had become desperately drowsy. They had barely set up a cot under the awning before she was sound asleep.
She stretched and propped her head on her elbow, looking across the scrub and sand, and up at the enormous cylinder of land stretching into the haze. Farley came out of the tent and sat beside the cot.
“Dreaming?”
“No,” Patricia said. ”Musing.”
“When Garry gave us the grand tour, a year and a half ago, I thought I’d go crazy. What’s your opinion of the indoctrination? I mean, it’s really just beginning for you, but ...” She trailed off, regarding Patricia with very blue eyes. Farley was perhaps ten years older than she, and there was humor evident in the lines around her lips and eyes. She had a demanding directness in her manner—almost a female version of Lanier, Patricia thought.
“Seeing is not quite believing,” she answered. ”So just hearing about it certainly wouldn’t be enough.”
“After a while, we tend to become complacent,” Farley said, staring down the gray-green road. ”It worries me sometimes. When new people arrive and see what we see every day, we’re shaken back into realizing how strange it really is. Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don’t understand everything.”
She sighed. ”I’m not sure Garry approves, but I think you should be warned about the boojums.”
“He mentioned them. What are they?”
“Some of us have seen boojums. Spooks. I haven’t, and none of our group have. The consensus is they’re psychological, a sign of the strain. There haven’t been any really clear sightings, photographs or anything. So be wary of what you see. And be doubly wary—no one has proven that the Stone or the corridor is completely deserted. We’re just too few to adequately explore and police all the chambers. So if you see anything, report it, but don’t believe it.” She smiled. ”Does that make sense?”
“No,” Patricia said, swinging her legs over the side of the cot. “Do I have a work schedule, some idea of what I’m supposed to be doing, when?”
“Garry will tell you all about that in a half hour or so. He’s sleeping now. Exhaled. I mean, exhausted. We’re all a bit worried about him, you know.”
“You and the others—you have green badges, but do you have third level clearance?”
“Heavens, no.” Farley laughed, tossing her long blond hair back over her shoulders. ”We’re Chinese. We’re lucky to have gotten this far. We’re here by courtesy and because our governments happen to be friendly this decade. All the same, we’re much better off than the poor Russians. They get to study the bore holes and the plasma tubes, and very little else. Everyone perceives plasma physics to be their specialty, so they’re stuck on the axis. Americans have no conception what fine archaeologists they have. Now, as for their sociology ...” She shook her head ruefully. ”I’m a born and bred Marxist, but I’m not sure the Stoners would fit strict Leninist dogma.”
“Garry hasn’t given me any details on the agreements. I read about them at home. But I know we weren’t told everything.”
“NATO-Eurospace vessels were the first to reach the Stone and begin exploration. By the ISCCOM agreements, NATO has the right to control exploitation, and NATO is dominated by the United States, of course. The Russians have protested this is a special case, but they haven’t gotten anywhere so far. The Chinese have never been tebbly—terribly—interested in deep space, so we’ve accepted what little we’ve been allowed. By being quiet and subservient, we’ve come much further than the Russians. No Russians in the seventh chamber, you’ll notice.”
“You don’t sound Chinese.”
Farley laughed. ”Thank you. Everyone says my accent is good, but sometimes my words ... Well. What you’re really saying, I think, is I don’t look Chinese. I’m a second-generation Caucasian immigrant. My parents were British expatriates in Czechoslovakia. They were agricultural specialists, and China welcomed them with open arms when they emigrated in 1978. I was born there.”
“I’ve spent all of my life in California,” Patricia said. ”I feel so protected compared to you. Out of touch with the real world.”
“The world of intrigue and international politics? Me too. I spent most of my life on a farm in Hopeh. Rather cut off. And now ... we’re both here.” She looked down at the ground, shaking her head.
“For various reasons, there are a lot of things we shouldn’t talk about. Garry trusts me, and I respect his trust. We’ve all done our best to be courteous and trustworthy. That’s why we’ve come this far. So. Technical matters directly relating to our work, that’s okay. But anything having to do with subjects off limits to Wu, Ch
ang and me—no discussion. None at all.”
“Okay,” Patricia said.
Farley looked north, directly down the throat of the corridor.
“The Stoners made this. They were humans, just like you and me. Beyond that, we’re encaved—in the dark. But sometime, we will run into them—or something even stranger.”
She smiled thinly. ”Is that a prediction strong enough for you?”
Patricia nodded. ”Anything more specific, I’ll get the shakes.”
Farley patted her on the shoulder. ”Must get back. Garry will be with you shortly.”
She entered the tent.
Patricia stood and smoothed down her jumper, then walked a few dozen meters across the sand. She bent down and ran her hands through the blades of a clump of grass.
The length of the corridor was so startling, compelling, that her breath slowed. It was spare, economical, incredibly beautiful. The even lighting, the gradually receding but nevertheless clear details; the sand, the bushes, the lakes and rivers flowing from southern cap condensation ...
Despite what Farley had said, Patricia felt safe walking another dozen or so meters west. And having gone that far, still within a few minutes’ run of the tent, it seemed no big deal to go an equal distance beyond. She reached the edge of the dwarf forest in ten minutes, then glanced back to orient herself to the tent and the ramp emerging from the cap tunnel.
The trees resembled scrubby pines, none more than two meters tall, their gnarled branches intertwined into an impenetrable thicket. She had never seen anything precisely like them on Earth, but their needles were similar to those on the Douglas fir Christmas trees her family used to buy before settling on an aluminum substitute.
She bent down to peer under the low canopy but saw no sign of life.
How strange, that the Stoners should take every living, moving thing with them. Stripping the Stone. Where did they all go?
That much was obvious, now. She could feel the compulsion each time she looked down the corridor. They headed into the infinite north, if the corridor truly was infinite.