The eastern crater rim reconstituted ragged against a paling sky and then a merciless sun swelled to stretch a vast crescent shadow across the crater bowl. The silence was exquisite. Farley realized he had not seen or heard a bird in all the growing morning. No insect sounds had scored the night. Apart from people the only living things he’d seen were green carpets of lichens and dull olive patches of mold on rocks, paltry weeds struggling from cracks.
They rounded a ridge protruding down the length of the crater wall and Wennda raised an arm to call a halt.
Half a mile away a group was headed toward them. Farley counted four figures, all in black, all armed. No balaclavas, though. Farley kept an eye on Wennda. She pulled out something that looked like a large cigarette case and expanded it to a box with a fold-down eyepiece like binoculars. She used it to study the group and then collapsed it again and broke into a huge grin. It changed her face completely, fine-boned features suddenly coltish and unguarded. Arshall and Sten had set Francis down, and for the first time they visibly relaxed.
Farley’s crew stood waiting. Depleted, disoriented, and battle fatigued, they greeted any new development with dull suspicion. Most took advantage of the break to light up and watch this new bunch come on. For his own part Farley felt like an emptied vessel as he waited.
One of the approaching group raised a hand. Wennda waved back. Farley thought they looked cagey as they approached, scrutinizing him and his crew. Of course they would be wondering what the hell was going on. A group of four had left, and a group of thirteen was coming back.
Wennda’s grin grew wider as the new group stopped before them. Three men and a woman. They looked nervous. All of them had the chunky Buck Rogers egg-cooker guns slung on their shoulders and they kept their hands on them. None of them smiled back at Wennda.
Broben raised his eyebrows at Farley and Farley gave a little nod. Broben ground out his cigarette and folded his arms to put his hand near his shoulder holster. Garrett casually leaned the Browning against his leg. The length of trailing ammo belt rested against Everett’s foot. Shorty stood with his hands against his lower back. Farley noted that his holster was empty.
“So,” said Wennda, still smiling, “you found us.”
The one who had waved nodded. “And then some,” he said, indicating the crew.
“This isn’t even the best part. I’ll tell you about it while we head back.”
The man shook his head. “I’m sorry, Wennda. I need you to turn over your weapons.”
“Our—excuse me?”
“Your mission was unauthorized and conducted without the knowledge, order, or consent of the commander or the Quorum,” he said formally. “My orders are to conduct the four of you back to the Dome for a hearing.”
“Wait a minute,” said Wennda. “We learned a lot of—”
“Tell the commander, not me,” he said. “I’m just doing my job. Which I wouldn’t have to do if you’d done yours.” He held up a hand to stop her reply. “Your weapons,” he said. He glanced at the crew. “Everybody’s weapons.”
Farley stepped forward. “Captain Joseph Farley, United States Army Air Force,” he said. And waited.
The man frowned. “I don’t know what most of that means,” he said. “I’m Grobe. I’m a lieutenant.”
“Well, lieutenant,” said Farley. “My crew aren’t part of any unauthorized mission, and we aren’t anybody’s prisoners. This woman offered us shelter in your city. One of my men is badly wounded, and we need to get him to a doctor fast.”
Grobe glanced at Wennda. “She doesn’t have the authority to make that offer,” he said. “As I said, she’s acting without permission here.”
Farley felt detached from the whole scene, as if watching it in a movie theater. His heart wasn’t even beating faster. He genuinely had no feeling for what was about to happen. “So you think we’re your prisoners?” he asked.
Grobe hesitated. He looked back at one of his own team. “We’ll sort that out when we get back,” he said. “Meantime—”
“Meantime nothing. Do you think we’re prisoners or don’t you? I have a vested interest in your answer.” He drew his sidearm. “So do you.”
Farley didn’t have to look to know that his crew had followed suit. He knew exactly where Garrett was standing with the .30-cal leveled, because all four of the new team were staring at it. Their own weapons were readied, but their bearers were uncertain.
“That weapon you’re all looking at is a Browning M1919 machine gun,” said Farley. “It fires four hundred thirty-caliber rounds a minute, and it will turn you into something a cat wouldn’t eat. Now I’ll ask you one more time: Are we prisoners, or are we guests?”
Wennda stepped closer to Farley. She held both hands palm-up, her weapon hanging freely from its sling. “Please,” she said. “Put down your weapons.”
“Not on your life,” said Farley.
“Please. This is all a misunderstanding. It’ll be cleared up when I make my report.”
“No offense, toots,” said Broben, “but what I just heard sounded like you were gonna end up in the joint.”
She looked at Farley. “You’ve trusted me this far,” she said. She turned to Grobe with her hands out and slowly went to one knee. She brought her gunstrap over her head and set her weapon on the ground, then rose and stepped back from it. “Arshall,” she said. “Sten.”
Arshall and Sten scowled but removed their weapons. Two of Grobe’s team came forward and collected them. They looked apologetic about it and Farley realized that they all knew each other.
“Now you,” Grobe told Farley.
“Pound sand.”
The two men regarded each other from behind their weapons.
“Grobe,” said Wennda, “your orders cover the four of us, not these men. They aren’t the enemy and they weren’t on my mission. Please lower your guns.” She turned to Farley. “Tell your men to holster their weapons,” she said. “Nobody wants to shoot anybody here.”
It made Farley angry that he believed her just because he already knew her face. What had that belief gotten them into?
He did not look away from Grobe as he lifted his shoulder-holster strap and slid his pistol in. Grobe looked like he wanted to argue about it some more, but he lowered his weapon and nodded.
“Stand down,” Farley ordered. He smiled at Grobe and indicated the wasteland ahead. “After you,” he said.
Grobe nodded uncertainly. He gestured to his squad and they took up positions in a diamond around the group. The woman in their party, short and dark-haired, shrugged at Arshall. Arshall shrugged back. Then he and Sten picked up Francis and the seventeen of them set out.
Farley walked beside Wennda. He had a lot he wanted to say but she was clearly occupied with her own problems.
Grobe nodded silently as Wennda and Farley caught up to him. After a moment he looked past Wennda at Farley. “What’s a cat?” he asked
twelve
Farley had assumed they would head into another fissure, where there would be another fish-tank city. Instead they made their way up a gradual rise of dark stone smooth as poured concrete ramping toward the crater wall. There was a cluster of enormous bulges up the rise half a mile ahead where stone floor met sheer cliff. Smooth and round and the same color as the ground on which they walked. The largest of these was at least a hundred feet wide. Like balls dropped by some careless child god, fallen to embed here in this ruined place.
Wennda and her group bucked up at the sight of them. Farley figured they must be close to home.
They rounded the largest of the seemingly embedded spheres until they reached its juncture with the crater wall. Here a dark recess led into the rock, irregular in shape, ten feet high by ten wide. The entrance blended with the shadow that usually obtained along the crater rim, and looked like a natural formation when it could be discerned at all.
The group was ushered into this space. Wennda and her crew didn’t look especially worried, so Farley stepped in an
d closed his eyes to help them adjust more quickly. The party stumbled against one another. The flat reverberations of their voices and footsteps told Farley that the space was long and narrow.
“Gee, the world’s cheapest Tunnel of Love,” said Shorty.
From ahead came a sound like a huge sigh. A warm breeze blew by as if a sleeping giant had breathed across them. Farley thought of Odysseus and his crew in the cave of Polyphemus the Cyclops.
A small bright light shone from what Farley had assumed was a watch on Grobe’s wrist. It revealed what looked like a door to a bank vault. Beside it was a black glass plate. Grobe shone the wrist light on the panel and drew a pattern on the dark glass with his right index finger. A green square lit up on the plate and Grobe pressed his hand against it. A dull clack reverberated. Grobe glanced back at Wennda and pulled open the door. The inner side was heavily gasketed, several inches thick, and set with a wheel crank in the center.
Grobe and Wennda stepped through and cold blue light flickered on. Farley stopped short in the hatchway. Lighted ceiling panels showed a large bare metal room. On the opposite wall was a door like a heavy battleship hatch, with another black glass panel beside it.
Someone bumped into Farley from behind. He glanced back.
“What’s cooking?” Broben asked.
“Keep them back,” Farley told him. He put his hand on his pistol and looked at Grobe and Wennda. “What’s the purpose of this room?” he asked.
Wennda glanced at Farley’s hand on his sidearm. “It’s an airlock,” she said.
“Airlock.”
“The Dome’s a positive-pressure environment,” she said. “Air pressure inside is higher than outside. It lowers our exposure. We can’t have invasive insects or weeds or diseases.”
“Show me.”
“Everyone has to be inside first,” said Grobe.
Farley shook his head. “You, me, and her.”
“There’s no reason to. Just bring your men inside and—”
“Just do it,” Wennda told Grobe. “Clearly he’s figured out our plan to flatten his men with our evil smashy ceiling.”
Grobe frowned at her, but relented. “They can only throw you in the reverter once,” he said.
Farley leaned back into the hatchway. “If I’m not in here when they open up again,” he told Broben, “do what you have to do to get out of here.”
“And go where, the Stork Club?” Broben snorted. “Never mind, I got it.”
Farley stepped into the metal room.
Broben gave Grobe the stink eye as the man shut the heavy door and dogged it.
Wennda approached the panel by the inner door, but Grobe waved her off. “Your clearance was revoked,” he said. “Sorry.”
“I guess the old man’s pretty shanked at me.”
Grobe smirked. “You could say that.” He drew a pattern on the console’s glass plate and pressed his palm against the lighted square that appeared.
The air grille sighed. Farley yawned and felt his ears pop. A green dot appeared on the glass plate.
Wennda turned the inner door wheel and opened the door. She gestured for Farley to take a look. Farley stood in the doorway and looked out on a wide stone ramp that gently curved down and out of sight. Dim light beads shone near the floor.
“It leads to another access door,” Wennda said behind him.
“Where you keep the real smashy ceiling,” said Farley.
“I see why you’re the one in charge.”
Farley raised an eyebrow at her. “Okay, lieutenant,” he told Grobe. “Once more around the park.”
*
Broben was fascinated by the pinprick lights spaced along the downcurving ramp. “How do they make them so small?” he wanted to know.
“I swear if you were having brain surgery,” said Farley, “you’d want to know where the doctor got his watch.”
“If it was a good watch, sure.”
Farley shook his head. “Just keep your eyes peeled,” he said.
They marched down into the curving dark.
*
Another metal hatch. Another pattern drawn upon a glass panel. Grobe pulled open the hatch and sunlight flooded the rampway. Farley squinted and shook his head. He had a pilot’s sense of direction, and everything was telling him that this couldn’t be right, that they’d entered the chamber near the western rim and circled down a long and gradual quarter turn that ought to have placed them underground and almost directly beneath the rim wall.
He followed Grobe and Wennda through the hatchway and emerged blinking into a late summer day. The sky was pale clear blue, the sun was just past the horizon, the day was warm, the air was cool. A large cluster of adobe buildings rose ahead and to the right like some architecturally themed downtown. In the middle distance were patchwork fields. Beyond that, tall grass grew in a shallow marsh beside a rectangular reflecting lake that was the same size. Toward the horizon flat rock buttes emerged from a dense growth of enormous trees.
Then Farley’s other senses caught up to his vision. The air smelled stale and slightly funky. He felt no wind. No grass waved in any breeze. No insects sounded from the fields, no birds sang, no traffic noises came from the downtown cluster.
He saw a group of people working in a field, and his sense of scale changed radically. The neatly ordered geometry of crops became tiny, maybe a tenth of a mile square. The reflecting lake was smaller than a football field. The adobe buildings were not a downtown skyline but a cluster of what looked like apartments and offices. The distant buttes were suspiciously regular and no more than a hundred feet high, and their surrounding trees were not enormous but low and dense with foliage. Everything had looked larger than it really was because the horizon was not three or four miles away but half a mile.
Farley looked up again. The sky was cloudless and its blue was oddly uniform. The sun did not shimmer or show false motion around its edges. It glowed steady as a nightlight. And it was not perfectly round. More like a hexagon with rounded sides.
He shielded his eyes from the sun and made out a faint geometry across the sky, a regular tracework like giant chicken wire revealing hexagonal panels.
The Dome. Of course.
Wennda and Grobe were conversing in low tones. From their body language and gestures it was clear that they were unsure what to do with their new guests. The absence of established protocol was interesting.
Finally Grobe nodded, though he didn’t look happy about it, and Wennda turned away and collected Arshall and Sten. She pointed to Francis on his makeshift stretcher currently being carried by Garrett and Everett. “Get him to the Med Center and then report to the commander’s office,” she ordered.
Farley went to Francis as Arshall and Sten relieved Garrett and Everett. He bent down and put a hand on Francis’ good shoulder. Half the kid’s head and upper left torso looked like badly wrapped hamburger. The dressing stains had turned dark brown. The large red spot on the white wrapping where Francis’ left eye ought to be was unnerving. His breathing was shallow.
“We’re getting you to a doctor now, Francis,” Farley told him. “You’re going to be all right. I need you to hold on, okay?” He patted Francis’ shoulder and stood.
“We’ll take care of him,” said Arshall. “Dr. Manday will have him back on his feet in no time.”
Farley raised an eyebrow, but the man seemed sincere. “Thanks,” he said.
Arshall and Sten lifted Francis.
“Got him?” asked Garrett.
“Got him,” said Sten. Everett held up crossed fingers and the two men trotted away.
Farley watched them go and then saw Wennda watching him. He nodded his thanks and she nodded back and turned to lead them on.
*
They were herded along a narrow brick walkway between fields and marsh toward the pale brown buildings. Grass grew through the dark brown brick in places and the edges of the path were ragged, as if bricks had broken off and been removed.
Grobe and his squ
ad resumed their guard formation. Wennda walked beside Grobe at point, followed by Farley and his crew. Yone walked beside Martin. They seemed to have struck up a friendship, which made sense when Farley thought about it. Martin had been through combat with the rest of the crew, and though he was their brother now they still hardly knew one another. Yone seemed to be a bit of an outsider as well, and like Martin he had risked his neck to help get Francis out of the line of fire. Farley noted the friendship without worry. He had enough sense of Martin to know the man was smart enough to keep his cards close. And maybe he’d find out some useful info in the meantime.
None of Wennda’s people looked around as they walked toward the cluster of drab buildings. This was home base for them. Farley’s crew, on the other hand, stared at their surroundings and nudged one another and pointed. They didn’t talk much. Among uncertain allies in unknown territory they were instinctively tight-lipped.
They were also punch-drunk and exhausted. Thirty hours ago they’d been sleeping in their bunks in southeast England and trying not to worry themselves sick about a bombing raid on a munitions factory.
They had not gone very far before Grobe called a halt. He turned to Farley with an expectant look, as if Farley should know why he’d stopped them. Farley just waited.
Grobe waved at Farley’s men. “Those have to be extinguished,” he said.
“Extinguished? You’re talking about my crew, you—”
“The things in their mouths,” Grobe interrupted. He mimed smoking.
“Their cigarettes?” Farley blinked.
“The filtration units are already strained,” said Grobe. “We can’t afford the extra burden.”
“Mister, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
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