She did the only thing she could, picked up a step or two, hit the go-pack, and leaped out over the chasm.
It was a bad moment. But the lamp picked up the floor on the other side and the thrusters gave her some lift and she glided across, crashed down with room to spare, and, while still rolling, got a warning back to Tor and George. “Big pit,” she said. “Look out.”
She scrambled back to the lip and looked down. The beam disappeared into the dark. Nick’s screams echoed back at her.
Tor showed up on the other side. It was about twenty meters across. “How deep?” he asked as he fell to his knees and peered in.
“Can’t see bottom.” I told you guys. I pleaded with you to let the experts do this stuff. But she said nothing. Her eyes squeezed shut in frustration and anger.
George hurried up behind Tor. “What happened?” he asked.
BUT HE KNEW. Knew as soon as he received Hutch’s warning, knew when he saw the shaft yawning before him. It was a very big hole. Why the hell would they have designed something like this? He sank down beside Tor and peered into the pit. “Lord help us,” he said.
But Nick was still screaming. How long would it take him to reach bottom?
In fact the reception was getting clearer.
“Nick,” he said, “where are you?”
“Don’t know.” His voice was stretched out, almost contralto.
A light appeared in the shaft. Deep down, but growing brighter.
“Falling,” he said.
Brighter.
“Help.”
“Hutch,” George said, “what’s happening?”
He got no answer. A superstitious chill ran through him as he watched the light rise. God help him, it was Nick, coming up the shaft, returning to them. But the light, Nick, was slowing down. Barely moving. And then he was only meters away, drifting to a stop, seeming to hang there, looking at them, his face framed in fear and the glow of their lamps. But they couldn’t reach him, and he began to fall again.
His screams ripped through George’s headset.
The shaft was enormous. It was a canyon. (How could they have missed it, even standing there in the dark?) Hutch stood twenty meters away from them, on the far side. It was almost as broad as the corridor, running flush against the wall on his right, leaving a rim about two meters wide on his left.
He looked across at her and wondered how she had gotten there. Her eyes were wide, saucer round, and her face was pale. Then, incredibly, without saying a word, she walked to the edge and stepped into the shaft.
Chapter 24
Till follies become ruinous, the world is better with them than it would be without them.
— GEORGE SAVILE (MARQUESS OF HALIFAX), POLITICAL, MORAL, AND MISCELLANEOUS REFLECTIONS, C. 1690
ALYX HAD MADE a mistake. The moment she saw George and the others disappear down the hatch into the chindi, she knew it. She wasn’t sure exactly what the nature of the error was, but she knew she didn’t like being alone on the Memphis while the people she’d been so close to for the last few weeks dropped completely out of sight.
What if something happened? If they didn’t come back—and the vast bulk of the chindi looked horribly daunting, looked like a place that people routinely wouldn’t come back from—at what point did she tell Bill to take her home?
After six hours, after their air supply runs out.
When their voices dwindled, and the carrier wave died, it had felt like a premonition, a signal of things to come. Alyx was not superstitious, did not believe in such things, and yet this experience was frightening. She was in a horror sim, waiting alone while the musical score intensified, the beat picked up, the score went deep, as it always did when the shadows closed in.
She’d gone up to the bridge and sat in Hutch’s chair. It made her feel as if she could exercise some control over events. Bill kept an image of the exit hatch on-screen, and she watched it, waiting for someone to pop out of the little hole that they’d cut in the door.
She’d expected they would be down there for only a few minutes, take a quick look around, enough so they could say they’d done it, and come back out. But she should have realized that George would not let go easily. He was scared, every bit as much as she was, and had he been alone she thought he wouldn’t have gone near the thing. But he was committed, and maybe they’d not taken him as seriously as they should, and his manhood had gotten caught up in it. She wasn’t sure. But Tor had been encouraging him, and even Nick, who she thought should have known better.
Boarding the chindi had been dumb. There was no other way to describe it.
There’d been studies over the years supporting the proposition that groups composed exclusively of women usually made intelligent decisions, that exclusively male groups did a bit less well, and that mixed groups did most poorly of all, by a substantial margin. It appeared that, when women were present, testosterone got the upper hand and men took greater risks than they might otherwise. Correspondingly, women in the mixed group tended to revert to roles, becoming more passive, and going along with whatever misjudgment the males might perpetrate.
Alyx had once participated in a management exercise in which several five-person groups, of various configurations, were stranded in a jungle setting when their simulated aircraft went down. Although wisdom dictated they stay with the plane, the mixed group had inevitably voted to march off into the wilderness, where the tigers got them.
Replace the three men on the chindi with women, and Alyx knew they’d have waited patiently for the arrival of Mogambo and let him take the risks. If that entailed allowing him to claim the credit, that was okay. There would, she believed, be more than enough for everyone.
She could have Bill bring the lander back, and then she could use it to go over to the chindi, where she could kneel at the exit hatch—but not go in—and try to raise them on the link.
But there was always a possibility they’d need to get away from there in a hurry. And if that happened while the lander was in the Memphis’s cargo bay…
So she waited. And asked Bill what he thought might be happening. Unlike Hutch, she was prepared to accept the illusion that someone was really there amid the transistors and relays. But Bill, of course, knew no more than she did. And he admitted to being the last one who’d want to guess. Or for that matter who saw any point in guessing.
The lander floated near the exit hatch. It looked forlorn and abandoned. A light blinked forward, down low near the place which housed the now-retracted treads. And there was a dim green glow in the cabin, probably from the instruments. The airlock had been left open. No one had said anything, but it was obvious that was to facilitate a quick getaway.
She wondered if the chindi had weapons.
“How long since they went down?” she asked Bill.
“Twenty-seven minutes.”
She got herself a cup of coffee and set it down in the holder. She sipped it once, then forgot about it.
HAD SHE HESITATED, had she taken a moment to think about it, Hutch would not have done it. The act was simply too fearful. But the moment was fleeting, the window of opportunity already virtually shut, and there was no time. Do it now or forget it.
So she jumped into the dark and plummeted deep into the chindi.
She had tried to get into the center of the shaft, away from the walls, which were already hurtling past in the uncertain beam from her lamp.
In her link, she heard Nick’s desperate cries. And the frantic voices of Tor and George. Screaming at her.
Screaming after her.
She fell. The walls, rough and cracked and stained, dissolved into a blur. Do not touch. Other passageways flickered past. Her lamplight slashed into them, and once or twice she thought she saw lights that were not hers.
She fought down a wave of panic.
Hold on.
“Nick.”
He was trying to breathe.
“Nick, keep your light on.”
There was only one explana
tion for Nick’s reappearance. This was a gravity tube, like the one she’d descended in the Wendy. Gravity tubes, when they were powered up, negated artificial gravity. They were used to move cargo and people from deck to deck in zero gee.
But the chindi wasn’t the Wendy Jay. It was enormously larger, and that was why Nick had come back. The tube passed completely through the ship, top to bottom. Except there was no bottom.
In Academy ships, gravity generators were located on the lowest deck. But the chindi was too big. If she was right, there was a deck running through the center of the ship. And gravity was generated in both directions from that deck. Stand on either side of it and you could look up. The chindi had no below decks. Everything was up.
Nick had passed through the central deck, gradually lost momentum, reached the end of his trajectory and fallen back. He’d become a kind of yo-yo, up and down.
“I’m behind you,” she said.
“—Happening to me?” She didn’t recognize his voice.
She felt a sudden rise and drop, as she might when a shuttle maneuver was completed with perfect technique. Gee forces squeezed her sides, then let go. She was beginning to slow. Moving up.
“I’m with you, Nick. I’m coming.”
She’d passed the central deck and was rising in the shaft, shedding momentum. She was upside down, feet up, head down, and her instincts tried to take over. Her body wanted to reverse its position.
No.
In a few moments, Nick would reach his apogee and begin to fall back. She had to get past him without a collision. “Nick, I want you to close your eyes.”
“What? Where—you, Hutch?”
“Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Do it!” If he saw her coming, he would try to get out of the way. That was what she didn’t need.
“Closed,” he said.
“Good.” She saw his light above her. In the dark. Getting brighter.
It looked to be right on top of her.
She watched it come. Knew it was an illusion. They were both, she thought, still ascending. But she was moving more quickly than he.
Gaining ground for the moment.
Then the distant light grew sharply brighter. He had begun falling.
“Keep cool, Nick.”
Coming fast. It was impossible to see well. But she took a quick look at the walls around her, which had slowed down so that she could see the cracks and stains again. Then she blipped the go-pack, pushing herself toward a corner, and he was past!
The wall came desperately close. She used another blip to get clear.
“Nick,” she said, “you can look now.”
She reached her own apogee and began to fall. Still head down. Ideally, she should have fired a short burst to speed things up, but she was already approaching a terrifying velocity and couldn’t summon the nerve.
The walls blurred again.
She did a quick calculation, eight hundred meters top to bottom, all apparently honeycombed with individual decks and compartments. Decks say five meters apart, 160 stories.
The world turned over again and another spurt of well-being flushed through her. She felt squeezed again, and released, a sensation so brief that she understood it happened as she passed the zero-gee level.
But she was right-side up now, her ascent already beginning to slow.
“Nick.” She hit the go-pack. Fired her thrusters. And picked up some lift.
“Help me, Hutch.”
“Coming.” Poor son of a bitch didn’t even know what was happening to him. “Nick, I’m behind you. Coming fast. Going to pull in front of you.”
“Okay.” The voice shrill.
“Grab hold of me when I pass. And hang on.” She watched his light, sometimes seeing the lamp, sometimes the beam sweeping around the shaft. “George.”
“Hutch, what the hell’s going on?”
“Give me some light. Need to see where you are.”
More lamps blinked on. High. Way up there.
“Don’t point them in the shaft.”
“Hutch—” Tor, sounding frantic.
“Not now.” She cut the thrusters, moved up close to Nick, long dark passageways blinking past as her lamp swept through them, but slowing down, rather like a sim losing power.
Above Nick, George’s light was coming too fast. The boost she’d given herself would crash her into the overhead. Couldn’t have that. As she approached Nick she twisted around, got her feet up, and the thrusters up. She moved past his legs, and presented him with her front to keep the go-pack away from him. She was, of course, upside down again.
He made a grab for her, got hold of her harness. His face was gray, his eyes round and the irises like marbles. Then the lamp angle changed, and she couldn’t see it anymore, but he had hold of her. Death grip.
She got one hand into Nick’s harness, whispered to him to hold on, and hit the power again. Just for a moment, just a blip from the thrusters, and then another one, enough to take off a little more momentum.
There was a cacophony of voices on her link. But she was too busy to listen. The passageways were almost distinct now as they flickered past.
She needed a place to land.
Couldn’t see above her. Didn’t know how far the roof was. But she’d be falling again momentarily.
Pick your spot, babe.
She twisted to get the thrusters horizontal to the passages. Tightened her grip on Nick.
Don’t hit the wall.
The passageways were opening up to her as she slowed. Her lamp swept each in turn and she tried to time them, now, now, now, getting into the rhythm.
Hit the button.
The thrusters ripped them sideways and took them into a tunnel. They crashed into something, an overhead, tore along it. Fell to the floor. Bounced. The lights flickered and went out. And then it was over and they lay sprawled in a tangle of arms, legs, thrusters, and air tanks.
She got to her hands and knees. One of Nick’s legs was bent the wrong way.
“How you doing?” she asked.
He managed a smile. “I’m hurting a little,” he said.
Hutch would not have believed it, but it had been just over one minute since she’d jumped.
“HUTCH, WHAT HAPPENED?” George leaned over and looked into the shaft. His stomach reeled as he peered into its depths. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” She sounded relieved, jubilant, scared, ecstatic, all at the same time. “We’re a little beaten up, but we’re alive.”
“Where are you?”
“Below you. Wait…” A lamp beam appeared down in the dark and played up the side of the shaft.
“I see you.” They looked to be three levels down. Say fifteen, maybe twenty, meters.
Nick’s voice: “What the hell was that all about?”
“It’s a bottomless pit,” Hutch said. And she explained. Something about artificial gravity radiating both directions from the center of the ship. “You could fall forever,” she continued, “back and forth. Up and down.”
“We were worried about you,” Tor said, in what had to be the understatement of the mission.
“It looks as if Nick broke his leg.”
“Lucky that’s the worst of it. How badly?”
“It’s not through the skin.” And then, obviously talking to Nick. “You’ll be fine.”
“You’d really fall forever?” asked Nick in a strained voice.
“Until they scraped you off the walls.”
“Well, that’s charming.”
“Do you have enough lift power to get out of there, Hutch?”
“No.”
“We’ll look around,” said George. “There should be a stairway here somewhere.”
“I think we just tried the stairway.”
“Then what do we do now?”
“Go back to the lander. It’s got plenty of cable.”
“Okay.”
“You know where we keep the aid kit?”
“It’s in one of the storage cabinets.”
“Right rear as you face the back. There’s a collapsible litter. Bring it back with you.”
“On my way.”
“Stay together.”
“Somebody needs to stay here.”
“Why?”
“With you.”
“We’re not going anywhere.”
Of course not. George edged away from the precipice and stood up. Tor was already on his feet, starting back.
They hurried down the passageway, past all the doors, and reached the ladder that ascended through a short alcove in the overhead and then to the exit hatch. George was relieved to look up and see the stars. And the arc of the rings.
They climbed out onto the surface. The lander floated a few meters overhead. “Bill,” George told his commlink, “we need to get into the lander.”
“What’s been happening?” It was Alyx’s voice. He’d forgotten about her.
“Nick fell into a bottomless pit,” he said. And then, quickly, he explained what they’d been through, what they’d seen.
“He is okay?”
“Yes. He’s fine. Other than that I guess he’ll be limping around for a bit.”
The lander descended, and the hatches opened.
THEY RETURNED WITH the cable and the litter and passed down some pain killers which Hutch administered. Tor tied the cable to the ring in one of the doors, and they hauled first Nick and then Hutch up to the top level. Then they got him into the litter. He was still pale but seemed to have gotten his wind back.
“I thought I was dead,” he told them. “I mean, you fall all that way, you don’t expect to walk around anymore.”
George told him to lie still. He and Tor lifted him, and they started back toward the exit. They’d reached the ladder when Hutch signaled them to put out their lights and set him down.
“What is it?” whispered George.
“Something’s coming,” she said.
He turned around but saw nothing.
She pointed. “Other way.” Forward.
And he saw that the darkness ahead was lessening. A light was approaching from somewhere. A side corridor. There was another intersection up there.
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