The Web Between the Worlds

by Charles Sheffield

  Even as he spoke, an icy trickle of rage dribbled into his brain, washing away the fatigue and the terror. He knew that his face was beginning to sear and blister from the harsh sleet of radiation that he had experienced, but he was able to ignore it. All that mattered was the battle ahead. He stared about him.

  On each side of the asteroid a stream of ionized gases was roaring past, boiled out from the sunward surface and driven by light pressure. The halo that they formed scattered the Sun’s rays to make a ghostly sheath of green, blue and white, flickering all around him. A hundred meters below, the dark surface of the rock was beginning to bubble and smoke as it slowly turned, roasting in the solar glare like a joint on a spit. He stared at it, cold-eyed. He would have to keep well clear of that, now and for the next seventy hours. No matter. It was just one more reason why he could not afford to fall asleep again. He would not sleep again.

  “They never found any trace of Alexis Galley, and of course the other crew member was dead. The verdict on the whole thing was an unfortunate accident, with no one to blame. When they brought the asteroid in to Earth orbit, Regulo owned all of it — survivors on the mining teams always willed the finds to each other if some of them were killed. And Regulo had stayed with the rock, otherwise the value would have been shared with the crew who salvaged the Alberich.”

  Corrie was silent for a few moments as she watched the display with its final landing instructions for the field at Way Down.

  “That was enough to give him the financing for his first transportation company,” she went on. “He pioneered the techniques for the hyperbolic orbit and cut all the transit times by a factor of two. But he never flew another hyperbolic himself. He has never been closer to the Sun than the orbit of Earth. And he will not tolerate any form of intense light. It upsets him, makes him almost unstable. It’s the only thing that ever has that effect on him.”

  “Not surprising, though, after what he went through,” Rob said. “He must have been in terrible condition when they finally picked him up.”

  “Not as bad as you’d think. Once he got past perihelion, he did everything right. The old logs of that trip are still in his office. They make interesting listening — I’ve played them myself. Regulo had the sense to ignore everything about the Alberich until he had treated his burns and doped himself up to sleep for a solid twenty-four hours. That took real nerve, to put himself under for so long when the Sun was still big and blazing and he didn’t know if he’d be picked up at all.”

  “But why couldn’t they do anything about his face?” Rob asked. “I mean, no matter what the burns were like, surely they could have used grafts or regeneration to repair most of it. I’ve never seen scars like that, and I’ve had bad accidents to my crew on construction jobs.”

  Corrie did not answer. She stared straight ahead with a curious expression on her face, as they left the craft and began to walk together to the entry point of Way Down. Rob waited for a reply. When it did not come, he turned to her and looked more closely. Corrie’s skin had paled, so that the smooth tan had become like old ivory, cold and bloodless.

  “Are you feeling all right?” he asked. “It never occurred to me to ask before, but I hope you’re not claustrophobic.”

  She shivered and forced a smile. “Just a little bit. I’m all right, though. I know what it will be like at Way Down, and it won’t worry me. Come on, let’s start down.”

  She walked quickly ahead of Rob, to where the four great elevators stood in the center of the Way Down entrance facility. She stopped at the first elevator, the fast express that would descend twelve miles in less than two minutes, flashing smoothly through the evacuated shaft.

  “No. Not that one.” Rob came up beside her and took her arm as she was about to press the Call key. “That’s the nonstop. We want one that we can stop partway down. It’s the one at the end of the building, past the heavy-load elevators.”

  “Partway? There’s nothing to stop for,” protested Corrie; but she allowed herself to be led along the broad corridor to a smaller elevator and watched in silence as Rob manipulated the depth selector. He set it to halt a little more than a mile and a half down.

  “Just wait and see,” he said. His look was self-satisfied and expectant. “There are things about Way Down that the average customer never knows. Anyone can use this elevator, but most people have no reason to want to. Ready?”

  Corrie nodded. The descent began, with the car supported and accelerated by linear synchronous motors set at regular intervals along the length of the shaft. As Rob adjusted the polarization of the surrounding field the walls of the car became transparent. He dimmed the internal lights and switched on an external illuminator set above the ceiling of the car. The sides of the shaft became visible, flashing past them. As they moved deeper Rob gradually slowed the descent. They moved steadily past multi-colored rock strata: hematite reds and silvers, the deep blue of azurite, slate-grays and dark emerald green. The rock layers drifted by them as they fell, slower and slower. The car stopped at last alongside a thick seam of shining black rock. It formed a continuous wall, except at one point where a circular opening about three feet across had been neatly cut.

  “This is it,” Rob said. He glanced at his watch and nodded. “Any time now. Take a look through the opening, and keep watching along that corridor.”

  The circular window looked out onto a horizontal shaft about four feet high, leading away into the depths of the black rock. The lights from the car cast their reflection just a few yards along the dark tunnel. Corrie, her skin prickling with anticipation, stared out into the darkness. Suddenly she saw a faint movement at the limit of visibility, deep in the corridor. She strained to see it more clearly. A dark shape was moving out of a side shaft to the main tunnel. The form was long and flat, a little more than three feet tall. She could see a blind, stubby head, and as her eyes adjusted to the dim light she could gain an idea of its size. The body appeared to be endless, approaching them silently on broad, black feet. It came closer and closer, shuffling along the tunnel. Finally she could see the whole beast. It was supported on eight pairs of short legs, and formed a long, black-furred cylinder. The rear end of the animal had not one tail but five, long sinewy tentacles. Each lifted above the broad back and ended in a ringed orifice. Corrie judged the whole creature to be about ten meters long. As it continued to come closer, she stepped back from the window.

  “Don’t worry,” said Rob. “It’s harmless. Keep looking.”

  Corrie turned to him in sudden comprehension. “I know what it is! It must be a Coal Mole.”

  “Quite right.” Rob was grinning in triumph. “I told you you’d have something to see down here. When I called from the ship I wanted to check whether there would be one of them anywhere near the Way Down shaft. When I found that there was, I called Chernick and asked if he would direct it here at the right time for us to take a look.”

  Corrie was staring at the Coal Mole in fascination. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life.”

  “I believe you. Very few people have.”

  “But what does it live on? I know Chernick says that he breeds them, but I thought that was just a funny way of describing their manufacture. It looks like a real animal, but surely it can’t be?”

  Rob shrugged. “If you’ll define a real animal, I might be able to tell you if it is one. The Coal Moles feed, they move, they reproduce, but they can’t function without Chernick’s microcircuitry inside them. They couldn’t exist in Nature without the inorganic components that humans have added — but lots of pets couldn’t survive in the wild, either.”

  “How does it mine the coal?” asked Corrie. The Mole, having come within a couple of meters of the window, was now backing silently away again down the tunnel.

  Rob nodded his head at the receding creature. “See the rear end there? Those tentacles handle the narrow seams. One of them can chew along a layer that’s only a few centimeters thick. The head end handles the big seams. As
you’d expect, the teeth regenerate continuously — it’s tough work, crunching up coal, but I suppose it’s not much different from a beaver, chewing through wood. The Mole stores the ground-up coal in the main body pouch, and when it’s full it takes it back to a central storage area and dumps it.”

  “And it eats, like an ordinary animal? What does it feed on?”

  “Mostly coal — what would you expect? It takes about one percent of what it mines to drive its own metabolism, so it’s very efficient. It’s a bit like a bee, eating some of the nectar and taking most of it back to the hive. The only other thing it needs is water, and there’s a supply of that at the storage areas.” Rob put his hands to the controls. “Ready to descend the rest of the way? There’s nothing more to see here, or until we get to Way Down.”

  Corrie nodded, but she was still gazing along the tunnel where the Mole had disappeared into the darkness. “Won’t it be coming back to mine?”

  “Not here. They don’t mine coal this close to the Way Down shafts. I asked Chernick to send it towards us, just so we could see it. He grumbled a bit — said it wasn’t kind to the Mole, it’s not happy if you take it away from its job. It’s on the way back to the seam now, a mile or two away. Chernick rotates the Moles among the different coal types, he says that for some reason they do better if they’re rotated. One week on anthracite, one on bituminous, one on lignite. I suppose they pick up different trace elements they need from different types of coal. I’ll have to ask him about it sometime — he almost thinks like a Coal Mole himself.”

  “But if the Moles don’t like to stop, why was Chernick willing to send one over here for you?” Corrie had turned from the window and was looking at Rob with big, pale eyes.

  “I suppose it’s all right to tell you.” Rob felt a sudden desire to impress her. “But I’d rather you didn’t talk about it to other people. Chernick feels he owes me. He uses one of my patented ideas in the Coal Moles, and he says he could never have got it from anyone else. It makes the whole idea of the Moles possible.”

  He was surprised by her reaction. Corrie’s face lit with a quick flash of total comprehension.

  “The Spider,” she said. “The thing that you developed for the extrusion process. I know that Regulo has been trying to decide how it works for years, and he’s failed. It’s partly biological and partly machine, isn’t it? In the same way that the Coal Moles are mainly animal but part electronic. The Spider is a machine with a biological component.”

  Rob had seen that lightning flash of understanding illumine her face, and been shocked by it. He drew in a deep breath, rubbed at his dark beard and looked with new respect at those alert, pale-blue eyes.

  “I’ll bet people do that all the time with you,” he said wryly. “You look about eighteen, and you stare at them with those big eyes and ask innocent questions. They want to show off a bit, the way I did a moment ago, and before they know what’s happening they’ve spilled something important. Well, the damage is done. I won’t deny it, even though it has been a well-kept secret. The Spider has a key bio component where logically there would be a computer. I suspect that Regulo’s people have been going mad trying to come up with a microprocessor with a high enough level of parallel processing — that was my bottleneck for about six months. Who are you going to tell?”

  Corrie looked demure — another part of her trap, Rob thought, at the same time as he admired it.

  “I wouldn’t dream of spreading it about,” she said. “Though if you don’t mind too much I’d like to tell Regulo. He’s been stewing on that gadget for years, and he’s too proud to ask when he thinks he ought to be able to deduce something for himself.”

  “That’s all right.” Rob smiled. “He’ll curse himself, but he shouldn’t. All the techniques to make the Spider and the Moles were developed in the past five years. I doubt if Regulo has caught up with them yet, because a lot of them aren’t anywhere in the literature. Feel free to tell him, if you want to.”

  “He won’t talk,” Corrie said quickly. “I know that. It won’t make any difference to your relationship with Regulo Enterprises, either — he told me that he wants the man who invented the Spider a lot more than he wants the use of the Spider itself. Regulo buys brains, not gadgets. You’ve seen the sign on his desk? IDEAS-THINGS-PEOPLE. He says that he’s interested in the world in that order. But he also says that only people have ideas, so I suppose his sign could just as well say PEOPLE-IDEAS-THINGS.”

  “Did you ever tell him that?”

  “Once. He said that people are only interesting because of the ideas they have.”

  As they talked the elevator had been descending steadily. Corrie’s words were interrupted by a gentle bump.

  They had reached Way Down. The natural cavern, twelve miles beneath the Yucatan Peninsula, should not have existed. Every geophysicist had agreed on that point. The pressure of surrounding rocks should have closed it instantly, even if some violent movement within the earth had led to its temporary creation. Gabry-Poussin had the same reaction, when his seismic measurements first pointed to the existence of a great chamber, half a mile across and three hundred feet high, in the basement rock of Central America. Then he had looked again at the data.

  In the famous debate before the Geological Society of Punta Arenas, Kasrov had conclusively proved that the chamber was a theoretical impossibility. At the end of Kasrov’s presentation, Gabry-Poussin had confined his reply to a single sentence: “Your logic is impeccable, Professor, and proves that geophysics needs a new theoretical basis.”

  Now there were new theories in plenty, about the local gravity anomalies, the peculiar plate tectonics, the inexplicable temperature inversion from depths of five to fourteen miles, the odd depth to basement of the whole region — and they added to an incomplete explanation that reinforced Gabry-Poussin’s original comment.

  While the theorists pondered, the practical side of the world took over. The first shaft to Way Down had been drilled in search of scientific data. The second one, ten times as wide, aimed at commercial exploitation. It had an exotic setting, a limited capacity, a good deal of mystery, and always a hint of danger. What more could be asked for a luxury club and secret hideaway for the world’s wealthiest?

  The elevator shaft that Rob and Corrie had used was a little way from the main entrance, at the very end of the vaulted chamber. They had to walk a hundred meters across the smooth basalt floor before reaching the official entry point. Above them hung the great central chandeliers, drawing their power from generators on the surface far above. Just before they reached the main reception point, Rob paused and turned again to Corrie.

  “I don’t want to make the same mistake twice about what you know,” he said. “You must have a lot more scientific training than you admit to, just to see that connection so fast between the Spider and the Coal Moles. What is your real specialty?”

  Corrie grinned at him. “Aw, I’m just a little old go-fer for Regulo, you know that. But I am a licensed engineer — and my graduation project was in large space structures. And I do have engineering on both sides of the family, if you believe in heredity as a major influence. One thing about me, though—”

  She stopped in mid-sentence, and the smile on her lips died. Her mouth twisted as she looked past Rob, on into the main reception area of Way Down. “I’m sorry, Rob,” she said. “This is the thing that I was afraid of when you first suggested Way Down, but I didn’t expect it to happen the moment we arrived. Look behind you. There’s the reason I had my doubts about coming here. And now it’s too late to turn back.”

  CHAPTER 5: “The Light of Other Days”

  In front of them the cavern that was Way Down broadened to its main chamber, five hundred meters across. Smaller side chambers led off from each side, connected to the main area by a series of natural arches and tunnels. The floor was all of smooth basalt, leading in a gentle curve to the low point of Way Down, just beyond the middle of the vast dome. Rob and Corrie stood at the head of t
he escalator leading to the central dispersal point, from which patrons and guests could make their choices of the casinos, sensory chambers, private booths, and pleasure rooms, or any one of the six renowned restaurants that made Way Down famous throughout the System.

  Corrie was standing motionless, her eyes fixed on a small group of people standing by a reception center twenty meters ahead of them. Rob followed her gaze as they moved on down the escalator. There were four people in the party in front of them, two men and two women.

  As Rob and Corrie paused at the bottom of the escalator, one man in the group turned and glanced at them casually. Then he looked back again, quickly, and spoke softly to the others. They all turned to face the escalator.

  There was a long and awkward pause, during which Rob had time to appraise the members of the other group. The two men were tall and slim, impeccably dressed in colorful and formal dinner wear. Rob formed the instant, negative impression that he was seeing a couple of social escorts, at the same time as he belatedly realized that his own clothes were suited to an environment less socially pretentious than Way Down. He looked at Corrie, recognizing for the first time the fine cut and elegant design of her leisure suit — she had understood the setting far better than he.

  One woman in the other party was a tall blonde, with a thin, red-cheeked face and graceful bare arms. Although both the women facing Rob wore iridescent, full-length dresses, the impressions they created were very different. The tall woman’s gown was like a sheath for a fragile and delicate ornament, the other’s like the container for a moving flame.

  It was that second woman who drew Rob’s full attention. She was short, no taller than Corrie herself. Instead of the latter’s slim figure, however, she possessed a full and sensuous build, shown off to advantage by the clinging formal gown. Her hair was dark and glossy, framing her small head and taken smoothly back from her brown forehead. Rob saw the delicacy of her cheekbones under a tanned flawless skin, the wide mouth, and the dark irises of her eyes with their clear blue-white surrounding.