THEY WERE Overjoyed to be back. They whooped it up, giddy with excitement. They climbed over the chairs.
They bugged and patted erne another on the back. All of them were dose to tears. They had succeeded—but not only that, they had returned, safely negotiating all the tunnels. Abruptly, amidst a bail of static, the radio began blar-ing out the Machine status report. All three benzels were decelerating. The built-up electrical charge was dissipating. From the commentary, it was clear that Project had no idea of what had happened.
Ellie wondered how much time had passed. She glanced at her watch. It had been a day at least, which would bring them well into the year 2000. Appropriate enough. Oh, wait till they hear what we have to tell them, she thought. Reas-suringly, she patted the compartment where the dozens of video microcassettes were stored. How the world would change when these films were released!The space between and around the benzels had been re-pressurized. The airlock doors were being opened. Now there were radio inquiries about their well-being.
“We're fine!” she shouted back into her microphone. “Let us out. You won't believe what happened to us.”
The Five emerged from the airlock happy, effusively greeting their comrades who had helped build and operate the Machine. The Japanese technicians saluted them. Project officials surged toward them.
Devi said quietly to Ellie, “As far as I can tell, everyone's wearing exactly the same clothing they did yesterday. Look at that ghastly yellow tie on Peter Valerian.”
“Oh, he wears that old thing all the time,” Ellie replied. “His wife gave it to him.” The clocks read 15:20. Activation had occurred close to three o'clock the previous afternoon. So they had been gone just a little over twenty-four…
“What day is it?” she asked. They looked at her uncom-prehendingly. Something was wrong. “Peter, for heaven's sake, what day is it?”
“How do you mean?” Valerian answered. “It's today. Friday, December 31, 1999. It's New Year's Eve.
Is that what you mean? Ellie, are you all right?”
Vaygay was telling Archangelsky to let him begin at the beginning, but only after his cigarettes were produced. Project officials and representatives of the Machine Consortium were converging around them.
She saw der Heer wedging his way to her through the crowd.
“From your perspective, what happened?” she asked as finally he came within conversational range.
“Nothing. The vacuum system worked, the benzels spun up, they accumulated quite an electrical charge, they reached the prescribed speed, and then everything reversed.”
“What do you mean, “everything reversed'?”
“The benzels slowed down and the charge dissipated. The system was repressurized, the benzels stopped, and all of you came out. The whole thing took maybe twenty minutes, and we couldn't talk to you while the benzels were spinning. Did you experience anything at all?”
She laughed. “Ken, my boy,” she said, “have I got a story for you.”
There was a party for project personnel to celebrate Machine Activation and the momentous New Year.
Ellie and her traveling companions did not attend. The television stations were full of celebrations, parades, exhibits, retro-spectives, prognostications and optimistic addresses by national leaders. She caught a glimpse of remarks by the Abbot Utsumi, beatific as ever. But she could not dawdle. Project Directorate had quickly concluded, from the fragments of their adventures that the Five had time to recount, that something had gone wrong. They found themselves hustled away from the milling crowds of government and Consortium officials for a preliminary interrogation. It was thought prudent, project officials explained, for each of the Five to be questioned separately. Der Heer and Valerian conducted her debriefing in asmall conference room. There were other project officials present, including Vaygay's former student Anatoly Gold-mann.
She understood that Bobby Bui, who spoke Russian, was sitting in for the Americans during Vaygay's interrogation.
They listened politely, and Peter was encouraging now and again. But they had difficulty understanding the sequence of events. Much of what she related somehow worried them. Her excitement was noncontagious. It was hard for them to grasp that the dodecahedron had been gone for twenty minutes, much less a day, because the armada of instruments exterior to the benzels had filmed and recorded the event, and reported nothing extraordinary. All that had happened. Valerian explained, was that the benzels had reached their prescribed speed, several instruments of unknown purpose had the equivalent of their needles move, the benzels slowed down and stopped, and the Five emerged in a state of great excitement.
He didn't exactly say “babbling nonsense,” but she could sense his concern. They treated her with deference, but she knew what they were thinking: The only function of the Machine was in twenty minutes to produce a memorable illusion, or—just possibly—to drive the Five of them mad.
She played back the video microcassettes for them, each carefully labeled: “Vega Ring System,” for example, or “Vega Radio (?) Facility,”
“Quintuple System,”
“Galactic Center Starscape,” and one bearing the inscription “Beach.” She inserted them in “play” mode one after the other. They had nothing on them. The cassettes were blank. She couldn't understand what had gone wrong. She had carefully learned the operation of the video microcam-era system and had used it successfully in tests before Machine Activation. She had even done a spot check on some of the footage after they had left the Vega system. She was further devastated later when she was told that the instruments carried by the others had also somehow failed. Peter Valerian wanted to believe her, der Heer also. But it was hard for them, even with the best will in the world. The story the Five had come back with was a little, well, unexpected—and entirely unsupported by physical evidence. Also, there hadn't been enough time.
They had been out of sight for only twenty minutes.
This was not the reception she had expected. But she was confident it would all sort itself out. For the moment, she was content to play the experience back in her mind and make some detailed notes. She wanted to be sure she would forget nothing.
Although a front of extremely cold air was moving in from Kamchatka, it was still unseasonably warm when late on New Year's Day, a number of unscheduled flights arrived at Sapporo International Airport.
The new American Secretary of Defense, Michael Kitz, and a team of hastily gathered experts arrived in an airplane marked “The United States of America.” Their presence was confirmed by Washington only when the story was about to break in Hokkaido. The terse press release noted that the visit was routine, that there was no crisis, no danger, and that “nothing extraordinary has been reported at the Machine Systems Integration Facility northeast of Sapporo.” A Tu-120 had flown overnight from Moscow, carrying, among others, Stefan Baruda and Timofei Gotsridze. Doubtless neither group was delighted to spend this New Year's holiday away from their families. But the weather in Hokkaido was a pleasant surprise; it was so warm that the sculptures in Sapporo were melting, and the dodecahedron of ice had become an almost featureless small glacier, the water dripping off rounded surfaces that once had been the edges of the pentagonal surfaces.
Two days later, a severe winter storm struck, and all traffic into the Machine facility, even by fourwheel-drive vehicles, was interrupted. Some radio and all television links were severed; apparently a microwave relay tower had been blown down. During most of the new interrogations, the only communication with the outside world was by telephone. And just conceivably, Ellie thought, by dodecahedron. She was tempted to steal herself onboard andspin up the benzels. She enjoyed elaborating on this fantasy. But in fact there was no way to know whether the Machine would ever work again, at least from this side of the tunnel. He had said it would not. She allowed herself to think of the seashore again.