She had walked quite a ways into the antenna grid and now she turned around and headed back to the power plant, puzzling things over in her mind. She hadn’t noticed the bunker the first time she’d passed it, but this time it caught her eye—a set of concrete steps leading down under the antenna field. She contemplated it, moved closer without much motivation.
The bunker, too, looked like it hadn’t been used in years. At the bottom of the stairs was a door. Did she dare? Was there a reason to? She sighed. What she wanted was to go back to the apartment and see if Nate was there. But she was here and it had been a long walk. She might as well get her money’s worth.
She went down the steep well of a staircase and felt the air grow chill. The door at the bottom looked heavy and old. It did not open automatically. She put her fingers experimentally into a narrow slot and found a latch. The door sprang inward.
Inside, steep stairs continued down and down. A cool tunnel of a stairwell arched overhead, lit by protruding lights. These were on a dim level of power causing the steps to cast shadows on one another and bleed together. And she was greeted with the smell of old air, surprisingly musty for such a dry planet. She hesitated, glancing behind her, then decided she would just go a little ways.
She began descending, one hand checking her balance against the wall.
The stairs went on and on for a long time. At several points she almost turned around, but in the end she went down the steps because they were there, because the bottom, by definition, had to exist. She felt as though she was descending into the underworld. There was a metallic smell, like the reek of a subway system.
The stairs leveled out, growing narrower and narrower. Then there were no more stairs.
She stepped out into a vast underground complex. It was so cavernous, the distant sides were lost in darkness. It had to be vast because it had been built to house a machine, a machine with long, curving arms that stretched for miles. Its scale reminded her of a superconductor, but it wasn’t a superconductor. No, she knew what it was: it was a generator, a wave generator. She had found what she’d been looking for.
She stood and admired it, heart tripping in her chest, appreciating its scale, appreciating its very existence. The antennae were aboveground from here. This machine had originally, she surmised, been built underground, though not nearly as deep as this. It had been built underground to insulate the wave it was generating. The antennae above relayed the resultant pulse.
But this machine was as ancient as the antennae. It was covered with inches of dust and rusted with time. Still, she felt extraordinarily hopeful. This technology would be closer to the world she and Nate could understand, closer to what Earth might be able to accomplish. It lay between where the aliens were now and where the humans were before the one-minus-one. It was the connection, the missing link.
She found a door in one of the curved walls—a door with a handle not very much different from those on Earth. She pulled on it—it gave a little, but it was stuck from neglect. She tugged and tugged, slowly gaining half inch by half inch.
Inside the machine, the corridors were so dark she had to grope her way along. With some trepidation she moved away from the door, unwilling to give up now. She felt chairs and walls and knobby instruments. She thought she could make out a faint glow up ahead, and she stumbled toward it.
The glow, up close, was coming from a screen set in a disarray of wires and switches, a screen that looked very much like a computer or a television screen. There was a button underneath the screen and she touched it. The glow was replaced by a video recording of a man. It wasn’t a man exactly, but it was humanoid and closer to her own species than the aliens were. The translator in her ear clicked into action, deciphering his words.
He was explaining the use of the machine. His voice was low-pitched and slow and there was something wrong with him. There was something in his voice, in the wildness of his large, swimmy eyes. But she couldn’t quite make out what he was saying about the machine because he was repeating himself. He kept talking about “only wanting to help” and the dead, the dead, the dead.
The screen switched to images of bloody carnage in the desert sun, of red-soaked sand and fragments of limbs and unidentifiable body parts, of a city in ruins, smoldering, parts of it oddly warped and distorted. In one surreal image the camera panned in and Jill could see fingers sticking out of a solid wall like some horrific avant-garde art.
Explosion, Jill thought, her mind and heart sickening. It was the only thing that came to mind. But where was this city and who were these people? Why were these images here, in the bowels of this machine, in the subterranean vaults of this place?
And then on the screen she saw the wall as the camera panned out into the desert. There—the red glass wavy wall. It was new and sharp and the sand beyond it was seared and blackened and in places sprayed with blood. The wall marked the boundaries of the rubble as if the sand had risen up…
…in a giant “splash.” As if the City had been set down intact, like the house in The Wizard of Oz.
The ruined city she was seeing was this city or, at least, its predecessor. And the planet where this cataclysm had taken place was this planet.
The man was back, his voice rising and falling with emotion. He tried to explain what had gone wrong, but it didn’t sound like he really knew. He knew only that they had turned on the machine, they had turned it on, and at first it had all gone well, but then at nine hours, twenty-three minutes, and sixteen seconds after throwing the switch…
Idiots! Jill thought, furious. They made a weapon! They made a negative one pulse machine. And it…it… it exploded. Or… for god’s sake!
Her hands were clammy. She felt dizzy. She was going to pass out; her consciousness was slipping away like quicksilver. It was the musty air in this place, those ghastly images.
She groped around in the dark for a chair, but her hands found nothing. The man was saying that the machine had been shut down and it must never, ever be turned on again, at least not until they had found a way to reverse the effect, to get home. But Jill just kept thinking, They made a weapon; they made a goddamn weapon!
The dark was stifling, suffocating, and she wanted out. The slightly restrained hysteria of the man on the tape was getting to her; it was sinking hooks into her that would probably never come out. But if she turned around now and tried to grope her way through the dark toward the door she might not find it in her panic—she might miss the door and spend hours wandering this vast machine in the dark!
She made herself sink to the floor and put her head between her knees. The air in here was so bad, it was like breathing the air of a coffin. But her nausea did slowly fade. As her head cleared, she kept hearing the man repeating over and over, We only wanted to help, and those words, and a dozen other hints in his long speech, finally clicked.
Dear God. Oh dear God. This isn’t a negative one pulse machine. It wasn’t created as a weapon. This machine was made to send a one pulse.
Jill gasped hugely, her head coming up, eyes riveted on the screen. It was true. She had just told Nate about her idea, that they could push the one pulse instead of the negative one, make Earth a living paradise. She thought she would be a god, a legend, an immortal for inventing such a thing, that she would change humanity’s lot forever. And this very machine was just that—a “benevolent atmosphere producer”—and the aliens had built it. And it had done that.