It was not a good solution, but it was a reasonable compromise. He hesitated for a few minutes more, until a Phage came whistling past almost close enough to grab him.
The Summer Dreamboat was no more than two minutes’ travel at a rapid trot. J’merlia closed the cabin of the Have-It-All and set off for the other ship.
He was less than a hundred meters away when it rose smoothly from the surface of Glister. As J’merlia gaped up, it hurtled away at maximum acceleration into the glimmering void above his head.
CHAPTER 13
Seen from a distance with the great bulk of Gargantua as backdrop, Glister was an insignificant mote. Without the telltale signal from the Have-It-All’s beacon, the planetoid would have been too small to notice, lost amid a thousand larger fragments.
But viewed from the inside…
The floors, bulging walls, and arched ceilings of the lower levels were formed of broad interlocking hoops, each one pleated and rigid and glowing with its own faint phosphorescence. It was like walking through the curling alimentary canal of a giant alien beast. Some sections were filled with nets and cables, like those found on the higher levels, while others were totally empty; occasional areas were littered with pieces of equipment placed apparently at random.
Darya was muttering to herself as Hans Rebka led the way deeper and deeper, on through endless corridors.
“What’s that?” he asked over his shoulder as she swore more loudly than usual.
“Calculations. Depressing ones. The radius of Glister is one-point-one-six kilometers. Even if each interior level is fifty meters high, that’s a hundred and twenty square kilometers of floor. How long is it going to take us to look at it all?”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll starve to death first.”
Hans Rebka had to be hungry, too, but he was defiantly cheerful. Starvation, or even the mention of it, did not make Darya cheerful. It made her grouchy. Back on Sentinel Gate she had not missed a meal in twenty years. That thought was no help at all. “We don’t seem to be finding anything useful. Where do you think you’re taking us?”
Hans did not answer. In spite of her grumbles, it was Darya who had insisted on stopping every few minutes to take a close look at some novel structure or machine. Every object in the interior of Glister was a product of the Builders’ technology and therefore a source of fascination to the professor in her. She could recognize many of them, devices that occurred in some of the other 1236 known Builder artifacts scattered around the spiral arm, but a number were totally unfamiliar, and she wanted to inspect them closely and estimate their function. Rebka was the one who had to drag her away, every time, insisting that they must find the control center of Glister before they did anything else. Since the planetoid was artificial and habitable, something had to be keeping it in working order.
Rebka had not mentioned his own secret fear. Gravity was increasing steadily as they wound their way down toward the center of Glister. Now it was close to two gees. Beneath their feet must be some powerful field source. They could still walk easily enough — but what would they do if it rose higher yet? No one knew what gravity field the Builders had found natural. A central control room for Glister might occupy a high-gee environment that neither he nor Darya could tolerate.
From the curvature of the floor he estimated that they were still about six hundred meters from the center of Glister. Given a choice of paths, he had always descended. It was only an instinct, the belief that the most important regions of the planetoid ought to be near the center rather than on some upper level. If he was wrong, he would have doomed both of them.
In spite of all that, Rebka was quite enjoying himself. This was what life was all about. Exploring things that no human had ever seen before, with an interesting companion — what more could a man ask, unless it was for a little food?
“I think we’re coming to something,” he said. “The light ahead is different. It’s getting fainter.”
The answering growl behind Rebka sounded skeptical. He wondered if it was just Darya’s stomach. As the illumination from walls and ceiling faded, he stepped forward more cautiously. Soon he could see nothing ahead, not even the floor, but his instincts told him they were approaching something new.
“Stay there.” He kept his voice down to the softest whisper. “I don’t know what’s ahead, but I want to feel my way for a bit before we shine a light.” Even those breathed words sounded strange, hollow and echoing.
He went down on hands and knees and felt his way forward. Five meters farther on, his left hand found itself groping into empty space. He reached out as far as he could on both sides. Nothing. The tunnel ended in a blind drop. There was no light below, or in any direction. He crawled back to join Darya and placed his mouth next to her ear.
“We’ll have to use your flashlight,” he whispered. “Take a look ahead. Be careful how you shine it — straight down on the floor first, then raise it up slowly.” He moved aside to allow her to come level with him, then paced her carefully forward.
“No farther now!” He stopped her. “There’s nothing ahead.”
Darya nodded, unseen in the darkness. The light beam shone on the floor at her feet, then moved out over the lip in front of them. As it came higher its narrow beam reflected faintly off a distant wall. Darya inched forward, shining the light downward. One more step, and she would be over the edge.
The ledge she stood on was halfway up the wall of a great open room, with a sheer drop below that plunged twenty meters before it curved around to form the bowl-shaped empty floor of the chamber.
Darya stepped back a pace. In this gravity field, any fall could be fatal. She shone the beam higher. Above them was a vaulted ceiling, confirming the spherical shape of the chamber. The domed vault was featureless, without lights or support struts. The whole room had to be at least sixty meters across.
“Something’s there.” Hans kept his voice to a whisper, but the echoes came rolling in from across the room, reluctant to die. There… there… there… there.
“Right in the middle. Shine the light in the center.”
Darya pointed the flashlight straight ahead. Hovering in the middle of the room without any visible support was a silvery sphere about ten meters across. She thought at once of the sphere that had risen from the broken surface of Quake at Summertide, but this one was hundreds of times smaller.
And it was more active. The ball had been hanging in a fixed position, but as the beam touched it the surface became a play of motion. The flashlight reflected an undulatory pattern, like slow waves on a ball of rippling mercury. The waves grew and steadied. The sphere began to deform and elongate.
There… there… there… there… A rusty, creaking voice filled the chamber, as deep and ancient as the sea. There… there… there… there. Center… center… center… center.
Darya was so excited that she could hardly hold the flashlight steady. The sphere had become a distorted ellipsoid. A frond of silver began to grow upward from the top, slowly evolving to a five-sided flower that turned to face Darya and Hans. Open pentagonal disks extruded from the front of the ball, pointing toward the flashlight beam. A long, thin tail grew down, extending to the floor of the chamber. In three minutes the featureless sphere became a horned and tailed devil-beast, with a flowerlike head that sought the source of the intrusion.