It didn't make any sense. Frustrated, he aimed the camera and took a few shots of the paragraph anyway.
They returned to the «north» pole of the habitat— the one facing the Banshee. There was an airlock here, but not at the «south» pole, which only had a ring tying down the cord to the plow sail.
This airlock was of the same design as the one at Lake Flaccid. The iridescent black material of the hull gave way to a burnished metal ring— beryllium, Salas had declared— with the familiar black disk inside it like the pupil of a giant eye.
"Hold up here," said Crisler. The three sleds braked to a stop a meter from the lock. Michael took a flashlight and shone it on the black surface of the sphere. He was astonished to see that the surface was not smooth. "It's fur," he said. "The thing is covered in fur."
He reached out to touch it, even as Katz was saying something about fur being a better insulator in vacuum than air. The fine black pelt didn't seem to give at all under his touch. He pushed harder and felt a sudden sting in his fingertips.
"Damn!" He pulled his hand back. A red diagnostic window popped open, telling him he'd suffered a minor breach of suit integrity.
"What happened?" asked Crisler.
"It's hard as diamond— it poked me right through the glove."
"Well, nobody touch it, then."
The red writing was apparently bald hull. Very weird. While the others focused on finding the latch for the airlock, he swept his light along a long swath of hull. Now he could see texture to the fur, as if it had been mussed by the hand of a passing giant. It was like the back of some enormous, sleeping creature.
"Here it is," said one of the marines.
"Good work, Barendts." Crisler and Herat drifted over to the man. Without hesitation Herat reached out and put his hand in the switch hollow. The black disk roiled in a now-familiar manner.
Crisler put his arm out to block Herat's way. "We should send in a mesobot first."
"I suppose you're right." Herat gestured to Michael, who fetched a fist-sized explorer from the sled. Herat pushed it into the liquid material of the lock, letting go only when he was up to his elbow. "That's got it."
Michael made a public inscape window of the mesobot's camera readout and put it next to the lock. Everyone gathered around to watch. For the first few moments there was nothing to see but blackness.
"Registering magnetic field— very strong," said Herat. "And the walls are vibrating. Temperature rising rapidly… this place is alive, whatever it is." The little mesobot's lights came on, illuminating a metal wall several centimeters away; it swiveled around at Michael's command.
There was a collective intake of breath among the watchers. In the window, a large curving space appeared, cluttered with drifting debris. "Look at that crap," said the marine Barendts. "Something must have blew up."
"No." Michael skewed the camera around again. Now it was clear what the curving space was. The outer hull of the Lasa habitat was separated by a space of at least five meters from an inner sphere which was made of white metal. This inner sphere had no writing on it; instead, it was covered with hundreds of outward-dimpling airlock doors, one every four meters across the whole visible surface.
The space between the hulls contained various freely drifting objects. They were mostly spherical, but some were torus or bolo-shaped. Michael stared at one for a few seconds, trying to puzzle out what it was.
"Models!" shouted Dr. Herat. "Those are models of habitats!"
Crisler cursed under his breath; it was an exclamation of wonder. Michael shook his head. Once again, Herat had beaten him to an essential realization. He was indeed looking at a model habitat. In fact, the little sphere, which must be about a meter in diameter, was a dead ringer for Lake Flaccid.
"What are we waiting for?" said Rue. She sounded tense. "Let's get in there already."
Just then the inscape window flashed so quickly that Michael almost missed it. "What was that?"
"Not sure. Wait— there's some kind of light source coming on in there."
"It knows we're here?"
A slow pulse of light welled up from several small points on the inner hull. It started out deep red, then rainbowed all the way to blue before fading away completely. The mesobot reported that it had started out in the deep infrared and went up to ultraviolet before fading. It happened again and began repeating at nine second intervals.
"What's it mean?" asked Crisler.
"Damned if I know," said Herat. "It doesn't seem dangerous, anyway. We'll wait and see if there's any change. If it's still doing this in five minutes, I'm going in."
As they waited, Rue drifted over to Michael's side. "Hey." She made a sign for him to go on private channel. "Did you get your photos?" she asked when he had.
"Yeah— but none of it makes any sense." He was beginning to feel like he was being had, somehow.
"Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so," she said. "What about this place? Models? What does that mean?"
"I can't even begin to speculate. And Dr. Herat's stymied too, for once." He said it with some relish.
"The pattern's not changing," said Herat. "I'm going in, unless one of you burly gentlemen has some objection?"
Crisler waved a gloved hand indifferently. Herat reached into the edge of the airlock disk and pulled himself through.
"No resistance," he said as his feet vanished into the black surface. "There's no atmosphere at all in here."
"Any ice?" asked Rue. "We need to find more oxygen."
Michael groped inside the lock and found the familiar bar, then flipped himself through. Pride demanded that he be second inside after Dr. Herat and he was, but only by seconds as the rest of the team followed, leaving three marines with rescue training outside. They snaked some umbilicals through the airlock; these stood up out of the disk like surreal reeds in the light of Michael's helmet lamp.
He called the mesobot and it obediently returned to him. Just then, a sweep of prisming light swept over it, causing Michael to miss his first grab for the bot.
"This is wild," said Rue. "Beautiful— but weird."
For someone raised on planets like Michael, it was a hard environment to get used to. It was natural to choose an up and a down to orient yourself, but here the choice was arbitrary and none of the options was comfortable. If he decided that down was in the direction of the airlock on the outer hull, that meant he was floating at the bottom of a giant bowl, with a huge metal sphere hanging over his head. If he put down in some direction tangent to the airlock, then he was in midair beside a sphere, with a long drop beneath him that curved out of sight. And if he pictured himself at the very top, then he had nothing to hold onto and could imagine sliding down that inner sphere and falling into the space between them.
"The light's brightening," said Crisler.
Michael turned his head and at that moment the small circles that were flashing went out. In their place, a series of red expanding rings appeared on the outer hull. One of these swept over Michael before he had time to even look away. His eye was momentarily dazzled by crimson laser-light. The marines started shouting.
"It's all right!" said Dr. Herat. "We're being scanned, is all. We can't see the beams because we're in vacuum— only the reflections off the outer hull. I think whatever it is that's in here is trying to decide what we are."
"We should leave," said Crisler.
"That might be prudent." They swarmed the airlock disk. Michael let go of the mesobot and popped out into familiar starlight last. The others were all talking at once; he counted to make sure they were all there, then connected to the mesobot again.