by Ben Bova
Adela and Brendan glanced down inside their helmets, confirming that a countdown timer had started, the softly glowing numerals ticking down the remaining time.
“Good luck, everyone.”
Hannah powered up the platform and they moved freely away from the hopper, the silhouettes of Anmoore and the copilot still on the flight deck diminishing rapidly as they increased their distance.
As they entered the gaping fissure, Hannah slowed the platform and turned on the floodlights mounted on the underside, orienting them in such a way as to sweep the steady beams around the opening. There was still a good bit of natural sunshine from outside, but the bare rock face was dark, nonreflective—darker, in fact, than the rock on Luna—and seemed to drink in the light as she played the beams around. One by one they each turned on their helmet pin-spots to better cut through the gloom, careful not to turn around into each other’s faces and inadvertently blind one another. Heathseven, meanwhile, had a combination spotlight/video pickup mounted at the top of his helmet, and activated both, although any hope of getting decent images in the heavy gloom seemed unlikely.
“Mr. Secchi?” the xenoguide asked, bringing them in closer.
The geologist reached into his bag and produced a hand scanner. He pointed it at the rock, and then down into the blackness ahead. “There’s no metal here, but the readings from inside remain steady. They match what we got from the probe, all right.” Vito scrutinized the bare stone with a geologist’s eye. “It looks okay to me, but I’ll have a better idea once we’re in a few meters.” The platform eased forward into the fissure while Vito looked carefully around, examining everything he saw. “All right, hold it here.” The platform slowed to a stop and hovered roughly twenty meters into the crack. After several minutes, Vito said, “It’s solid; there hasn’t been any breakdown action in here for centuries. I say go.”
“Captain Anmoore,” Hannah said, “we are going to proceed on in now.”
There was a soft click as he manually keyed his microphone back on the shuttle. As he did, she heard the background noise of the copilot moving around, as well as some nondescript music. “Fine. I’ll be listening.” He clicked off and the open channel was silent again but for the soft breathing of the others.
The platform sailed smoothly, evenly into the tunnel, and the last bit of light from the opening disappeared. There was little discussion as they moved along, just the infrequent remark from Vito concerning the readings he was getting, or an occasional exclamation directing their attention to one rock formation or another.
The fissure continued in a nearly straight line, tall and narrow, and rose to a pointed, cathedral-like joint that ran the length of the tunnel like a backbone. The floor below them—when they could see it—was littered with thousands of tons of sharp, jagged breakdown. As she gazed at the passing jumble below her, Adela speculated idly if the platform had been fully charged before being loaded underneath the hopper.
“Look there.” They followed Waltz’s outstretched arm and could see a thin shaft of sunlight coming from above at a point where the fissure did not quite meet at the top.
“I’ll bet that’s where I picked up those initial anomalous readings in the first orbital scans,” Vito offered. “There should be a couple spots along here where the scans got through.”
A half hour passed—the moment duly noted by Captain Anmoore back on the shuttle when he called their attention to the time and reminded them of their deadline—and there had been little change in the fissure. They seemed to have angled down in their forward motion a bit, taking them farther away from the surface; and from time to time the width of the fissure grew broader in some spots and more narrow in others. Towsen was the first to notice that the deeper they went, the less breakdown there appeared to be below them. At the same time the fissure became considerably wider and more rounded at the top, and started to look less like a crack, and more like a tunnel or cave.
“Slow down a minute,” Vito said unexpectedly. “I’m getting confused here.”
Hannah brought the platform to a stop, and Towsen glanced over the geologist’s shoulder at the readout on the hand scanner. The readings showed nothing at all ahead except the ever-present rock. “The metal’s gone. What happened to it?”
Vito cursed under his breath and handed the scanner over to Towsen, then pulled another instrument from his bag. Although slightly larger than the other, it looked otherwise identical. It, too, showed that the readings had vanished.
“What the hell—?” He looked frantically around at the tunnel, trying to find some clue as to why the readings had stopped. Gripping the platform railing with his free hand, he leaned over as far as he dared. “I can’t see anything at all down there.”
There was a soft click, accompanied again by the faint strains of music as Anmoore started to say something on the suit-to-ship link, but he thought better of it and clicked out again.
Hannah turned away from the controls momentarily. “Can you give us some more light?”
“Watch your eyes, everyone.” Mike pulled a magnaflare from her pouch, looped it into a length of cord and snapped it to life, then slung it over the side to let it dangle a few meters below the platform. Waltz did the same with a second flare, and then again with a third. The tunnel became bathed in light.
Although there were no unusual features to be seen, they now had their first good look at their location.
As they had suspected, the structure of the fissure had changed radically. Instead of the craggy, irregular rock surface, the nearly vertical sides tapering to narrowness at top and bottom, the tunnel was now smooth and fairly oval in shape, wider from side to side than from ceiling to floor. And therein lay the biggest surprise: Until now the bottom of the fissure had been a breakdown-filled crack that was, reasonably, tapered in much the same manner as the ceiling had been. But it was clear that the area below them, and as far as they could see along the length of the tunnel ahead and behind them, was flat and nearly level. The platform hovered motionless at a point roughly thirty meters from the ceiling; the floor was about a hundred meters below.
Although no one said it out loud—verbal confirmation would have been unnecessary—it was now obvious that the tunnel, or at least this portion of it, had been hollowed out of the rock artificially.
“I am going to set the platform down,” Hannah announced. “Please grip the handrail.”
They lowered smoothly, but at a point about halfway down Towsen and the geologist became simultaneously excited.
“Hold it here!” he shouted to Hannah. “It’s back!” Vito compared his reading with that on Towsen’s unit, and sure enough, both once more detected the enormous mass of metal that was their goal. “I don’t get this at all. What was blocking it?”
At Vito’s request, she experimentally maneuvered the platform higher, whereupon the readings once again disappeared. They tried a side-to-side motion at their present height, then again at varying distances from the floor, and found that nothing could be read in an area extending sixty meters down from the ceiling, and from wall to wall.
“Maybe the scan signal is deflecting somewhere up ahead,” Brendan suggested as the platform resumed settling to the bottom of the tunnel, “in such a way as to block the scanner from certain angles? The ceiling is a lot higher off the floor here … .” He stared upward, adding, “Or maybe there’s an ore pocket or something up there the scanner can’t read through?”
The xenoguide held the platform a meter off the bottom and waited for the two security people to retrieve the magnaflares before she allowed it to thud silently to the floor. The two pulled small, funnel-shaped collars from their pouches and snapped them to the flares, turning them into effective spotlights, and pointed them above their heads.
“No, I don’t think it’s an ore pocket.” Vito extended the scanner ceilingward, with Towsen doing likewise with the other unit. “No, that’s not it.”
“But wait a minute,” Adela interjected. “You sa
id yesterday, when most of us were still at South Camp, that this metal deposit—whatever it is—was shielded, maybe even deliberately. Could we be at the edge of the shielding?”
They looked at each other, then up again at the ceiling. As before, there was nothing to see.
Vito moved toward the opening in the railing, ready to hop off the platform.
“Wait.” Hannah’s command, her tone firm, stopped him before he could move through the opening. She motioned to Mike to follow her and the two stepped down to the tunnel floor. “It is quite solid,” she reported after a brief examination.
“But soft,” Mike added. “Feels almost like a layer of sand beneath my boots.” She dug into her pouch, but could not find what she wanted, and turned to Heathseven. “Lan, throw me a stick or something.”
The vac tech unclipped a short rod from the side of his leg; there was a grip on one end, a small hook on the other. “Catch,” he said, tossing it her way.
She easily snagged it as it tumbled in a slow-motion arc in the low gravity, then pulled at the ends, showing it to be a telescoping tool of some kind. She kicked at a portion of the soft floor, then dug deeper with the tool, scraping solid rock several centimeters below the sandy covering.
“All right,” Hannah declared finally. “You may come on down, one at a time. But stay close together.”
Once on the floor they noticed almost immediately that it sloped at a gentle angle, downward, back in the direction from which they had come.
Click. “That’s one hour, everybody. Thirty more minutes and you’re at the halfway mark and time to head back. Not a minute more. Be careful.” Click.
“Mike? Waltz?” Vito called from the far wall several meters farther down the tunnel where the platform had settled. “Can you bring those spotlights over? Bring the camera, too, Lan.” He stood leaning close against the rock wall, his back to them. “The rest of you might want to see this, too.”
They strode over to him, the hand-carried lights sending dizzy, dancing snowman shadows everywhere.
“Look here,” he said, once they were gathered at the spot. He traced a gloved finger along what looked like a scratch in the rock face. The scratch was perfectly straight and ran from the sandy floor up along the curved face toward the ceiling. It probably went all the way over the top, although it grew too difficult to see. “Can one of you take a light and trot over to the other side, then see if there’s a similar mark, directly across from this one?”
“Got it.” Mike took her light and bounded gracefully across the floor, calling back over her shoulder once she reached the opposite wall, “Yeah, there’s one over here, too, going straight up just like that one. I can’t see how high up it goes, though.”
“Shield lines?” Adela asked.
“That’s my guess.” Vito stepped away from the wall, tilted back as best he could in the restricting suit, and stared up. “It’s up there, all right. Good thing we stopped when we did—another fifteen or twenty meters and we would have smacked right into it.”
“Not that we were going that fast …” Mike offered, rejoining the group.
“You people are starting to break up a little bit.” Anmoore’s voice, scratchy and static-laden, buzzed in their helmets. Adela noted that they had turned the music off. “Can you move back to the platform?” They turned, as a group, back down the tunnel. Before following, Waltz knelt down carefully and embedded the end of the spotlight flare into the sandy floor in such a way that the light shined upward along the curving wall.
“You’ve got any theories, Vito, I’d like to hear them.”
“It’s the impact craters, Gareth, out there where you are. There was a series of impacts a long time ago, big ones, that cracked the surface badly enough in some places to be seen from orbit, as well as creating the fissure we followed in to get here. I’m pretty sure this tunnel we’re in now was already here when it happened.” He paused. “Glad I wasn’t. When those things hit they raised the terrain up, then dropped it again. That’s why this whole thing is at an angle—I’m betting this tunnel used to be level.”
“And the lines on the wall … ?” Adela looked back at the spotlight tracing its beam upward. “That’s where the shielding originally was, right?”
“I think so.” The geologist looked around again at the tunnel. “I think this area used to be—” He turned to Towsen. “What do you think, Academician? Forty, maybe fifty meters higher when it was originally cut out of this rock?”
“He might be right, Captain. Whatever is generating the shield is still farther up ahead, but the tunnel is sloping upward. The generator may be near or even at its original position, forming the shield in the original place … up there.” He pointed at the ceiling. “In spite of where the tunnel now is.”
“How much time would it take to find the source?”
No one knew what to estimate. Finally, Hannah spoke. “It will take longer than before. I do not think it is a good idea to use the platform, not after we almost ran into that shielding up there. We will need more time, Captain.”
“All right, then, but do it on foot. Don’t fly the platform past the shield line. I’ll give you all an additional half hour.” A blinking from the heads-up display caught Adela’s attention, and she saw that the countdown timer had jumped back by thirty minutes. “I noticed you were starting to fade out a bit when you were on the other side of the shield line. I want a couple of you to stay at the platform; you’ll be closer to those who go in and can relay what’s happening back to me.”
A few minutes later, with Waltz and Towsen staying behind at the platform, Adela and the others moved up the gradual incline toward what they hoped would be the source of the shield, as well as the metal readings that had precipitated this expedition.
“Captain said he’s already lost you,” Waltz reported when they had gone about a hundred meters. “You getting me all right?”
“You’re coming in fine, Kent.” Mike turned back, staring down the sloped floor of the tunnel, but could not see the two men or the platform lights. “Let us know if we start fading out on you, too.”
“Will do, but your signal’s nice and strong.”
As they went on, it became apparent that the angle of the floor was getting steeper. Adela checked the countdown timer, noting that if they didn’t find something in the next fifteen minutes they’d have to turn back. Maybe they could push it, though, since it would be easier, faster going back downhill to the platform.
“Look there.”
Everyone swung their lights in the direction Hannah had indicated, the beams falling on more breakdown, filling a series of faults running across their path. They spread out, examining the obstruction, and could see that the cracked and broken stone ran up the side walls, as well, and across the ceiling where vertical fissures extended beyond the reach of their lights. On the other side of the breakdown, however, the lights revealed that not only did the tunnel become perfectly level again, but that it also appeared to widen considerably. They played their lights over the pile, looking for a way across.
“This is where a fault line ran through,” Vito said. “Everything this side of the fault line was lifted up and then slammed down hard after the meteorite impact, tearing everything up and lowering the level of the tunnel. That side over there was probably shaken up a good bit, but it stayed where it was.”
“Over here! I found an opening.”
They followed the beam of Mike’s spotlight and saw that, yes, there was a fairly level, clear pathway through the rubble. She stood aside as Hannah went through.
“Wait here. I will tell you when to follow.” The footing was loose, uneven, and she was forced to take her time, but she emerged on the other side with slightly more than ten minutes left before they had to return to the platform.
“Come through slowly,” Hannah called back, a slight edge to her voice. “When you are through, move quickly to allow the next person room to get clear of the rocks, but do not proceed further.”
“What is it?” Adela asked. “What do you see?”
“We have but nine minutes remaining now, Doctor; do not waste time.”
They came through one at a time, and as each emerged, there was soft gasp or comment made to the others already through. Bringing up the rear, Lan Heathseven was nearly ready to burst with anticipation.
What they saw there when they were all through the breakdown had more than made the trip worthwhile. There, in the center of a huge circular cavern cut from the solid rock, was an enormous, round structure, low and roughly cylindrical like a fuel storage tank, only much, much larger. It did not appear to be a spacecraft, or even movable as some of them had speculated on the ride here from the Paloma Blanca, but from here no one could tell for certain. There was a circular door or gate in the side of it, near the floor of the cavern, that appeared closed or sealed, and randomly placed around the perimeter of the thing was a series of dark depressions, almost like funneled openings that seemed to lead into the interior. The surface of the thing reflected an unmistakable metallic silver-gray in the beams of their lights.
“I knew it!” Vito shouted gleefully. “I knew the metal at South Camp came from here. Hannah! Can we go closer, or at least close enough for Lan to get some good video?”
She thought a moment, shooting a glance at the countdown timer in her helmet display. “All right, but Mike and Lan only; everyone else is to stay here.”
“Hannah!”
She started to protest, but then relented. “All right, but get on with it; we have only five minutes and then back we go.”
Mike pulled out another magnaflare and snapped it to life, wrapped a reflective collar around it to make a spotlight as she had with the others and passed it over to Vito. The glare shone momentarily through his visor, and Adela saw him squinting and grinning like a boy.