Something popped out of the wall and dropped to the floor.
It looked like a metal ball, about the size of a marble. For several seconds it did nothing at all. We all stared at it, knowing that something unpleasant was going to happen, but unsure what.
Then the ball trembled, and — without deforming in any way — bounced itself off the ground to knee-height.
It hit the ground and bounced again; a little higher this time. ‘Celestine,’ Childe said, ‘I strongly suggest that you come to a decision—’
Horrified, Celestine forced her attention back to the puzzle marked on the frame. The ball continued bouncing; reaching higher each time.
‘I don’t like this,’ Hirz said.
‘I’m not exactly thrilled by it myself,’ Childe told her, watching as the ball hit the ceiling and slammed back to the floor, landing to one side of the place where it had begun its bouncing. This time its rebound was enough to make it hit the ceiling again, and on the recoil it streaked diagonally across the room, hitting one of the side walls before glancing off at a different angle. The ball slammed into Trintignant, ricocheting off his metal leg, and then connected with the walls twice — gaining speed with each collision — before hitting me in the chest. The force of it was like a hard punch, driving the air from my lungs.
I fell to the ground, emitting a groan of discomfort.
The little ball continued arcing around the room, its momentum not sapped in any appreciable way. It kept getting faster, in fact, so that its trajectory came to resemble a constantly shifting silver loom which occasionally intersected with one of us. I heard groans, and then felt a sudden pain in my leg, and the ball kept on getting faster. The sound it made was like a fusillade of gunshots, the space between each detonation growing smaller.
Childe, who had been hit himself, shouted: ‘Celestine! Make your choice!’
The ball chose that moment to slam into her, making her gasp in pain. She buckled down on one knee, but in the process reached out and palmed one of the markings on the right side of the frame.
The gunshot sounds — the silver loom — even the ball itself — vanished.
Nothing happened for several more seconds, and then the door ahead of us began to open.
We inspected our injuries. There was nothing life-threatening, but we had all been bruised badly, and it was likely that a bone or two had been fractured. I was sure I had broken a rib, and Childe grimaced when he tried to put weight on his right ankle. My leg felt tender where the ball had struck me, but I could still walk, and after a few minutes the pain abated, soothed by a combination of my own medichines and the shunt’s analgesics.
‘Thank God we’d put the helmets back on,’ I said, fingering a deep bump in the crown. ‘We’d have been pulped otherwise.’
‘Would someone please tell me what just happened?’ Celestine asked, inspecting her own wounds.
‘I guess the Spire thought we were taking too long,’ Childe said. ‘It’s given us as long as we like to solve the problems until now, but from now on it looks like we’ll be up against the clock.’
Hirz said: ‘And how long did we have?’
‘After the last door opened? Forty minutes or so.’
‘Forty-three, to be precise,’ Trintignant said.
‘I strongly suggest we start work on the next door,’ Childe said. ‘How long do you think we have, Doctor?’
‘As an upper limit? In the region of twenty-eight minutes.’
‘That’s nowhere near enough time,’ I said. ‘We’d better retreat and come back.’
‘No,’ Childe said. ‘Not until we’re injured.’
‘You’re insane,’ Celestine said.
But Childe ignored her. He just stepped through the door, into the next room. Behind us the exit door slammed shut.
‘Not insane,’ he said, turning back to us. ‘Just very eager to continue.’
It was never the same thing twice.
Celestine made her selection as quickly as she could, every muscle tense with concentration, and that gave us — by Trintignant’s estimation — five or six clear minutes before the Spire would demand an answer.
‘We’ll wait it out,’ Childe said, eyeing us all to see if anyone disagreed. ‘Celestine can keep checking her results. There’s no sense in giving the fucking thing an answer before we have to; not when so much is at stake.’
‘I’m sure of the answer,’ Celestine said, pointing to the part of the frame she would eventually palm.
‘Then take five minutes to clear your head. Whatever. Just don’t make the choice until we’re forced into it.’
‘If we get through this room, Childe…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m going back. You can’t stop me.’
‘You won’t do it, Celestine, and you know it.’
She glared at him, but said nothing. I think what followed was the longest five minutes in my life. None of us dared speak again, unwilling to begin anything — even a word — for fear that something like the ball would return. All I heard for five minutes was our own breathing; backgrounded by the awful slow thrumming of the Spire itself.
Then something slithered out of one wall.
It hit the floor, writhing. It was an inch-thick, three-metre-long length of flexible metal.
‘Back off…’ Childe told us.
Celestine looked over her shoulder. ‘You want me to press this, or not?’
‘On my word. Not a moment before.’
The cable continued writhing: flexing, coiling and uncoiling like a demented eel. Childe stared at it, fascinated. The writhing grew in strength, accompanied by the slithering, hissing sounds of metal on metal.
‘Childe?’ Celestine asked.
‘I just want to see what this thing actually—’
The cable flexed and writhed, and then propelled itself rapidly across the floor in Childe’s direction. He hopped nimbly out of the way, the cable passing under his feet. The writhing had become a continuous whipcracking now, and we all pressed ourselves against the walls. The cable — having missed Childe — retreated to the middle of the room and hissed furiously. It looked much longer and thinner than it had a moment ago, as if it had elongated itself.
‘Childe,’ Celestine said, ‘I’m making the choice in five seconds, whether you like it or not.’
‘Wait, will you?’
The cable moved with blinding speed now, rearing up so that its motion was no longer confined to a few inches above the floor. Its writhing was so fast that it took on a quasi-solidity: an irregularly shaped pillar of flickering, whistling metal. I looked at Celestine, willing her to palm the frame, no matter what Childe said. I appreciated his fascination — the thing was entrancing to look at — but I suspected he was pushing curiosity slightly too far.
‘Celestine…’ I started saying.
But what happened next happened with lightning speed: a silver-grey tentacle of the blur — a thin loop of the cable — whipped out to form a double coil around Celestine’s arm. It was the one Trintignant had already worked on. She looked at it in horror; the cable tightened itself and snipped the arm off. Celestine slumped to the floor, screaming.
The tentacle tugged her arm to the centre of the room, retreating into the hissing, flickering pillar of whirling metal.
I dashed for the door, remembering the symbol she had pressed. The whirl reached a loop out to me, but I threw myself against the wall and the loop merely brushed the chest of my suit before flicking back into the mass. From the whirl, tiny pieces of flesh and bone dribbled to the ground. Then another loop flicked out and snared Hirz, wrapping around her midsection and pulling her towards the centre.