"Well, Colonel?" Perez prodded from behind him. "Was it for defense or not?"
Meredith let his eyes rove the wall's length. No crenels or loopholes for gunners to shoot through, no towers or turrets, nor any indication the wall had ever had them.
"If it was, it was an extremely passive system," he said. "Regardless, we've got to get through it. Anyone see anything that looked like a break or gateway on our way in?"
"I thought I saw a gap over to the left," Barner offered, frowning off in that direction. "But I can't find it now."
"Maybe the color pattern's hiding it," Meredith suggested. "Let's go take a look."
They piled into the car; and barely fifty meters away they found the tall, thin opening Barner had seen.
"Wouldn't have believed a simple hole could be that hard to see," Barner grunted, leaning through the gap for a quick look at the other side. "Well … it's a cinch we're not going to get the car through here, Colonel, but the tower looks to be only a ten-minute hike away."
Meredith motioned him aside and stepped through the opening himself. Unlike the other side, this part of the cavern was nearly devoid of structures. Those he could see looked less like houses than industrial or business buildings: long and low, with little of the decoration they'd seen on the domed homes behind them. Or they could be the town cafeteria and rec centers, he reminded himself. All the vacant ground could have been gardens or a forest. In which case the tower would have been … what?
The tower. It rose up from the ground perhaps half a kilometer away, looking rather like a cross between a church spire and an airport control tower. About fifty meters tall, he estimated, with what looked like wide windows halfway up and also near the top. A half-dozen flat-roofed buildings were clustered at its base.
Service sheds or housing for the night shift, perhaps? Or were they the local dispatch points for little nasties like the one they'd already run into?
"We'll go on foot," he announced, stepping back to the group. "Major, get the rifles and four grenades out of the trunk. Dr. Hafner, go with him and bring back the Geiger counter that's under the front passenger seat."
Harrier's eyes widened a bit at mention of the extra weaponry, but he obeyed without argument. Meredith consulted his watch: they'd already used up over an hour of the four he'd allotted for his reconnaissance. The return trip should be faster, but that was still a lot of tower to explore in two hours. They'd have to make some guesses as to where the most interesting sections were likely to be.
Barner and Hafner returned with their loads. "Okay," Meredith said, slinging his Stoner 5.56 mm over his shoulder and hooking two of the rifle grenades onto his belt. "Stay in a loose formation and keep your eyes open."
The cluster of huts surrounding the tower base were not, as Meredith had assumed, physically connected to the structure, but were placed two or three meters away from its dull-metal wall.
"Interesting," Hafner said as they circled the tower in search of a door. "First structure we've come across in here that doesn't have that white ceramic coating."
"Would that make it a more recent building?" Perez suggested. "Put up near the end, when they didn't have time for cosmetic appearances?"
"Or else it's subject to vibrations," Meredith said, recalling the fragile ceramic in the village building. "I think I see a door around that side. Let's take a look."
Like the doors they'd seen elsewhere, this one was tall, slender, and elaborately carved. It was also unlocked, leading into a bare lobby like area shaped like a small piece of pie with a bite taken out of the tip. The missing point contained a floor-to-ceiling cylinder. "The elevator, I'd guess," Barner said as he took one final look outside and closed the door behind them. "Shall we see if it's running?"
"We can," Meredith said reluctantly, "but we'd better not actually ride it. Let's see if the Spinners understood the concept of stairs."
It took several minutes, but eventually they discovered that pressing a wall design caused the whole cylinder to rotate, bringing an off-center and doorless opening into view. Stepping into the opening and turning to the right led into the elevator car proper, while a left-hand turn ended in the stairway Meredith had hoped to find. With the colonel in the lead, they started up.
Progress was slow, hampered as they were by both the relatively cramped quarters and by Meredith's insistence on slowly easing his weight onto each new step.
Hafner muttered at least once that such exaggerated care was a waste of time with cable material structures, but Meredith ignored him. There was little conversation; faint hums and clicks were becoming audible from the areas around and above them, and no one seemed willing to drown them out with idle chatter.
Meredith took them to the very top of the stairway, hoping the most important equipment would be at that level. The inside release for the rotating cylinder, once located, worked perfectly. Holding his pistol ready, the colonel stepped through the short runnel and into a garish sea of color.
For a moment he just stood there, his eyes and mind struggling furiously to adjust to the sight. Give a small child a box of crayons and a detailed photo of a shuttle flight deck, he thought, and you might wind up with something like this. The meterwide semicircular ring that wrapped around the room beneath the windows was a familiar control board design; the panels set into it were decidedly not. Painted some of the brightest colors Meredith had ever seen, the panels had curved or even squiggled edges; some vaguely rectangular, but most not. For several seconds Meredith's brain tried anyway to classify them in terms of familiar polygons—squarish, trapezoidal, triangular—before finally giving up the exercise as pointless. The controls themselves—mostly black, but with occasional colored ones mixed in—were similarly arranged without regard for the concept of straight lines. None of the panels had exactly the same shape or layout, and some of the color juxtapositions were almost painful. Make that a color-blind child, he added.
The others were crowding out behind him now, muttering their own reactions to the visual assault. Of all of them, Hafner seemed the least affected, stepping over to the board with only a slight pause and peering down at it. "Well, at least the controls seem to be marked," he announced. "That's something."
Meredith joined him. Sure enough, there were small black marks to the left of each of the buttons and knobs, marks that looked like a cross between Chinese and Arabic. "Yeah, it really helps," he told Hafner dryly. He looked back at the wall that split this floor into halves, eyes searching for a doorway that would get them through to the other side. Two full-length cylinders, smaller versions of the elevator/stairway shaft that they flanked, were the obvious candidates.
"Sure looks like the place," Nichols commented, looking around the room. "Must be … oh, a good five to ten thousand separate controls in here. What else could anyone need that much stuff for?"
"Who knows what else they might have down here?" Perez countered, leaning carefully on a bare part of the control board to gaze out one of the windows. "One certainly gets a good view from here. Perhaps all this does is handle power or lighting for the village."
"Maybe whatever's in the other room will give us a clue," Meredith said, taking one last look at the odd Spinner lettering. In a science fiction movie, he thought, the hero would take all of ten seconds to figure out an alien control board like this. Wish to hell we'd brought one of those geniuses along.
"Colonel," Barrier said, his tone getting Meredith's instant attention. The major was peering out another of the windows. "We've got company."