Coyote saw fluid movement, huge size, dark color, the gleam of a shiny-wet surface—and thought she saw a whale. For a half moment of time, she wrestled with the impossible question of how a blue whale could have come to be here, and even, absurdly, worked up a moment of righteous indignation that someone would have so cruelly treated a member of a protected species.
But then her helmet lamp caught the glittering metallic cable sprouting from the brow of the dimly seen thing. She followed the cable upward toward the forward end of the hollow, and saw it join with a massive spherical object that hung there, supported by heavy braces that bound it to the surrounding rock on all sides. That heavily braced sphere had to be the source of the gravity drive. But it was hooked up to the whale thing. Why would a massive cable be implanted in a living creature? Or was it alive? Was it controlling the gravity drive?
She swung her light around again and wondered that she had even thought of it as a whale. At second glance, and with the idea of machinery instead of life in mind, she saw the smooth lines of a sleek machine. More cables terminated at it, coiling here and there to other devices around the cavern. And there, sprouting from the skin of the thing, was a manipulator arm, obviously mechanical. That was the movement she had seen. She adjusted the helmet lamp to give a wider-angle beam and now saw a perfect forest of manipulator arms, busy about unknowable tasks, all of them sprouting from the featureless, shapeless blue-gray surface of the huge object that lay huddled at the base of the cavern. Strange gadgets littered its surface, dropped there by the arms. The surface itself seemed to move and quiver a bit, as if other devices beneath its surface were in action. But there was nothing there but machines, all machines. Nothing here was alive. Of that much she was certain.
Until one of the manipulator arms extruded a cutting blade, bent over the surface of the massive body it sprang from, and sliced the skin open. Crimson blood splattered for a second and then was gone. Gleaming, pink underflesh peeled away under the knife, and a flaccid tentacle with a bulbous end to it floated up out of the gore. Before the tentacle was wholly unfurled, two new arms were at work, somehow sealing up the wound the first arm had made.
Coyote watched in stunned horror as the tentacle swung toward her. But she did not scream, or run, or panic, until the skin of the bulbous tip peeled back to reveal a huge, staring eye, hovering in the darkness, regarding her with obvious curiosity.
Larry looked out of the lander’s viewport at the cold lands of the Moon’s North Pole. Damn it, he hadn’t come billions of kilometers just to find himself on another ice world.
Tortured sheets of frozen water cowered at the Moon’s poles, hiding from the blinding power of the Sun. On a map, the ice fields are minute, covering a mere dot of the surface, easily missed from orbit. But right at the North Pole, it seemed to Larry as if the ice covered everything. The craters, the hillocks and the boulders were all covered in the midnight-black gleam of glare ice as seen by starlight. Here the Sun, hidden by high crater walls and mountains, never shone.
The first signs of polar ice had not been noticed until human settlement on the Moon was well advanced. Some thought it was all there as a result of human activity, water vapor leaking out of life-support systems on the Moon and the nearby habitats. The theory rather vaguely suggested the water was transported to the Lunar poles and deposited there. Other theories held that the ice was natural and cyclic, appearing and vanishing in a very long-term pattern that had nothing to do with humans.
No one quite knew who had started calling the still-hypothetical entrance to the Lunar Wheel the Rabbit Hole, but the name fit. The data from the gravity-telescope images wasn’t good enough to give a precise location, or show just how deeply buried the top of the hole was. It might not even be a hole. Larry himself had dreamed up at least four possible purposes for the spikes growing out of the pole points of the buried Lunar Wheel. That didn’t matter. Getting at anything related to the Wheel would tell them volumes about the Charonians.
Larry sighed. The time pressure had eased, at least a bit: the engineers refurbing the Nenya had discovered a dangerous flaw in the main fuel-pump assembly. It would take them three more days to get her repaired. On the bright side, they had installed external fuel tanks, eliminating the need to use the ship’s interior space for tankage. There would be a lot more room on the ride back to Pluto.
The silence that hung over the Moon’s North Pole reminded him of Pluto’s emptiness. He wished desperately for more faces, more people. Even the few days he had spent in the hustle and bustle of the Moon’s cities had been enough to remind him of how much he missed human beings.
Of course, there was at least one person he would not miss. Larry was devoutly grateful that Lucian Dreyfuss had made the run south to Central City for more equipment.
One of the small robot rollers crawled over the horizon as he watched. Crammed full of every kind of sensor, the roborollers could spot virtually any kind of subsurface anomaly. Magnetic and gravitic properties, thermal energy, dielectric constant, seismic, color. Anything the searchers could think of to use. Surely the buried top of the Rabbit Hole would reveal itself to one of them. He looked over at the search chart that showed how much of the area had been surveyed. Slowly the shaded area was growing.
But it would help if they knew what they were looking for.
The signal-probe design had barely firmed up in the computer when Tyrone Vespasian christened the craft.
Lucian Dreyfuss, however, was not up on his saints. He, Vespasian, and Raphael stood by the viewport, watching the rollout. “I don’t get it,” Lucian said as the probe was rolled out. “The Saint Anthony? Shouldn’t that be the Saint Jude? Wasn’t she the patron saint of losing things?”
Simon Raphael watched through the viewport as the massive cylinder was towed from the thermal lock and into position on the linear accelerator’s launch cradle. “If I recall my hagiography,” he said, “Jude was a man, not a woman, and he was the patron saint of lost causes. But one prays to Saint Anthony if one loses an object. Which would you rather call Earth? A lost cause, or simply lost, misplaced?”
Lucian didn’t have an answer for that. Or if he did, he kept it to himself.
Raphael went on. “By naming the probe after Anthony, Mr. Vespasian obviously meant to remind us of Jude—and to remind us that Jude is not appropriate here, that there is hope. I’d call Saint Anthony a subtle and apt name for our little emissary.”
It pleased Tyrone to be so honored by such a scholar as Dr. Raphael. He nudged the younger man and chuckled. “Fallen away, Lucian?” he asked.
“Never was a Catholic to start with,” Lucian said with a slight edge of irritation. “But I’ll be taking a leap of faith soon enough, Tyrone. Maybe Saint Jude can go with me, so long as he’s not going to be busy.”
The two older men shifted uncomfortably. Lucian had been showing more than a few rough edges as the search for the Rabbit Hole progressed.
Descending forty-odd kilometers below the surface to confront the thing that waited down there. Tyrone Vespasian shuddered. Even for a Conner used to living underground, that idea induced claustrophobia. No wonder Lucian was nervous, Tyrone thought. Going down into the pit of Hell.
If Vespasian was reading his old friend right, Lucian was treating Daltry’s ruling as a draw in the odd rivalry between Larry and Lucian. No one pretended to understand that silent battle completely—not even, Vespasian guessed, Lucian or Larry. But such things were not enough to explain Lucian’s odd behavior. There was, in Vespasian’s eyes, something else in Lucian’s character that explained it.