“She said… something about the geology being more ancient than the planet itself. I think that was what she said, sir.”
I almost laughed. Danann was a planet close to ten billion years old. How could the geology not be ancient?
We kept walking westward, along the dark gray plastrene path. The farther we left the landing area behind, the more the darkness pressed in on us. It didn’t, really, but I felt that way. Darkness couldn’t really impose itself. So it had to be that I was getting so tired that it felt like that to me. Then we were walking along a curved canal or boulevard that ran through an area where the towers were taller. Maybe it wasn’t my imagination, but where would the light have come from that they were cutting off—if they were?
I played my light across the base of the nearest tower. It looked to be a paler silver than the others. That had to be my imagination. The scientists had measured them, and announced that they were all identical in all exterior characteristics. I didn’t see them as identical, but that was what the reports said.
As we walked, my feet felt colder and colder. The armor readouts indicated all systems and temperatures were normal. My legs felt heavier, but that was to be expected after three days in stronger gravity.
“There it is, sir.”
The structure was one of the few that wasn’t really a tower. It was more like a flattened oval with a curved roof that rose less than a meter or two above the ice and frozen atmosphere. It looked almost underground, with the ramp melted down to the circular entrance below.
The main door was the same circular shape as all the others, with the flattened base. Inside, our lights showed that the foyer beyond was also like all the other foyers, except smaller. As in every other building investigated so far, there was nothing in the foyer. I took the left-hand hallway from the foyer. All the internal doors on the lower level had been opened, but only wide enough to let a single person at a time step through the gap between the two halves. I peered through the first door. The chamber was like all the others. So was the next one, and the one after.
I couldn’t find anything worth looking at more closely on the entire first level. That had been my experience for the past two days, since I’d discovered the windows. I had taken lots of images and seen lots of windows, now that I knew what to look for, but nothing new. Would the windows be all I found out?
I trudged up the ramp to the second level. It was also the top level. Then, in the fifth chamber I peered into, I felt something was different. I stepped all the way through the narrow gap in the door sections. Nuovyl followed me. His light swept over the chamber.
“That looks different,” I blurted out.
“You think so, sir?”
I knew it was different. It took me a moment to determine what about the empty room was distinctive. Then I had it. All the other rooms in all the other structures I’d been in were oval, or arced one way or another. The chamber where we stood was oval on one end and curved on both sides, but the remaining part of the wall was ran nearly perpendicular to the curved sidewalls. I looked carefully again. There was the slightest convexity, almost as if the builder had not been able to bear the idea of a straight line.
I shook my head. How could I guess what an alien had thought billions of years ago? “The end of the room here. It’s almost flat. I’d bet something’s behind it. Do we have the equipment to open a door here?”
“No, sir. I can tell, maybe, if it’s like the other doors.”
“Go ahead.”
Nuovyl stepped up to the flatter wall and scanned it with some sort of detector. After a moment, he turned to me. “There’s a door here. Leastwise, there’s a change in the readings right in the center, and it runs floor to ceiling.”
“Can you get someone here who can open it?”
“I can see, sir. It will take a moment.”
While Nuovyl contacted whoever it was, I walked up to the center of the wall. I stood right where Nuovyl had been. Other than the minimal curve in the wall, I couldn’t see anything that suggested where the two sides of one of the Danannian doors might join.
“It’ll be a quarter stan or more, sir.”
“That’s fine. I’ll check out the rest of the building until they get here.” I left the chamber and walked to the next door, and the one after that. I made my way around the entire upper level and checked every room. All were the same size, except for the one with the internal door and one other. At the south end of the building was a room five times the size of the others. It was empty also, and its shape didn’t suggest anything hidden. I thought it might have been a meeting room, but that was a guess.
When I saw another set of lights coming up the ramp, I went back to the chamber where Nuovyl waited.
A pair of techs arrived. The second one pulled a slider with a heavy powerpak. The first tech looked at Nuovyl.
Nuovyl gestured to me.
“There’s a door here, on this wall.” I pointed. “There might be something behind it. We don’t know.”
“I suppose we can try.” She stepped up to the middle and pointed a scanner. She might have nodded. If she did, her helmet concealed the gesture. “We’ll see what’s possible.”
The second tech eased the powerpak forward. The two worked for several minutes, attaching a supercon cable.
The first tech took a cylinder from her belt and ran it across the center of the wall. It left an oily sheen. “Don’t look while I’m cutting. The material gives off secondaries that standard helmet filters don’t block.”
I turned away and waited. No artist wants his eyes injured. Was there anything behind the door, or just more empty space?
“I’m done with cutting.”
I looked back at the wall. The thinnest line was visible under the lights played on it by the two techs.
“This wasn’t as bad as some of them. Now we’ll give it some heat. Seems to help.” The tech adjusted the cutting head of the laser and checked the cable from the power-pak. Then she aimed the laser at the wall and played it across the silvery surfaces on each side of the thin line. Nothing happened for several minutes. Then the wall split. I couldn’t see any movement, yet a gap opened.
When it was about a meter wide, the tech flicked off the laser. “Should be good enough for now, sir. Don’t want to use any more power than we have to.”
The two began to disassemble the portable laser cutter.
I stepped forward and peered through the gap, then played my light across the darkness beyond. So far as I could tell, there was nothing there except walls, floor, and ceiling. Still, since I’d made an issue about how the chamber was different, I stepped through and began to study what lay beyond. I tried to be methodical as I did.
I almost missed the one difference in the chamber. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a shadow from the light. I moved forward and swept the beam across the silvered floor again. There was a faint oval depression—or indentation—a meter or so back from the internal door.
I bent over and studied the silvery floor. The indentation was somewhere between a centimeter and a centimeter and a half deep, and extended more than two meters from side to side, parallel with the door, but no more than thirty centimeters in the middle, tapering to less than fifteen before the curves of the elongated oval at each end. The depth of the indentation seemed constant throughout.
“Sir?” asked Nuovyl.
“There was something here. Or maybe there’s something beneath the floor.”
“Do you think…” Nuovyl left the sentence unfinished.
I stepped back, careful to avoid the oval indentation. “You’re right. We’ll just report it to Dr. Henjsen.”