“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 upended.
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…i
f 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 possibili
ty 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.”
The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 51