The cold stars of the Moon’s north polar sky glared down on the busy team below. A tense group of engineers stood inside the transparent pressure dome, watching the strain gauges on the flare drill. Larry, still holding the gee-wave detector that had led them to the spot, stood back a bit from the others, wishing they could all get out of their pressure suits. But there was no pressure in the dome yet, and if there was some later, it wouldn’t be anything you’d want to breathe. Everyone at the Pole had been briefed about the Wheel—but it would take something like a jet of gas from the Moon to convince most of them. The majority of the techs were skeptical, to put it mildly.
Larry was tired, but that was understandable. They had roused him in the middle of the night, as soon as the news from Mars had come in. At least Lucian was being allowed to sleep. Lucian, exhausted by his rush trip to Central City and back, was going to need his rest.
Larry looked around at all the activity inside the dome. Four hours ago, this had been a barren piece of undistinguished Lunar landscape. But then the message from Mars came down, describing the alternate-form gravity-wave detector and how to build it. It hadn’t taken long to confirm that it received a form of gravity-wave signal beam.
The alternate-form detector was a device easy to build and easy to use—and it led them right to this spot the moment they switched it on.
“Strain drop to zero!” the flare controller called. “We’re breaking through—”
A cheer went up, but was drowned out almost immediately by a plume of dust and vile greenish gas jetting up from the drillhole. But the Martians had warned of that too, prompting the placement of the dome.
“Pressure in there for sure,” the drill-gang boss said, walking over to Larry. “God only knows what this muck is,” he said, fanning a hand through the fog. “Looks like the same stuff they had on Mars. You know what the hell is it?”
“Most likely biological waste products.”
“From the Wheel! You mean to say we’re walking around in gaseous Wheel shit?”
Larry turned his palms upward, the pressure-suit version of a shrug. “Could be. Probably. Your guess is as good as mine. But we’re through? Broken through into the top of the Rabbit Hole?”
“Still spooling up the drill head. Then we drop a camera and see what we’ve got. But yeah, we’re through. You guys get to find out what it is we’ve broken into. If I were you, I’d go wake up your pal and start getting into the teleoperator rig.”
Larry watched as Lucian struggled into his armored pressure suit. “You clear on this alternate-form gravity-wave stuff?” he asked. “It could make the difference between—”
Lucian nodded testily. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I know what difference it could make.” He turned and glared at the suit technician. “And you, take it easy with that clamp,” he snapped. “You’re supposed to hook up the suit, not amputate my arm.”
Larry checked his watch. He would have to leave soon if he was going to have time to get into the T.O. rig. “Look, there’s one other thing you need to be clear on. The rock monster sprouted eyes, a mouth, and legs in a matter of minutes. It had a circulatory system and a nervous system, and what resembled electronic power and logic circuits where its brain should have been. Obviously, the ability to generate all that was in the rock all the time. They’re calling it an existing implicate order, whatever the hell that means. The point is, the rock monster was hidden away in the rock all along. The signal from Mars says that before it woke up, the rock monster was indistinguishable from asteroidal rock. This Dr. Mercer Chavez thinks that some of the asteroids we’ve mined for organic material were in fact Lander creatures in an inert, encysted phase. And don’t ask how you can get such camouflage at the molecular level. No one knows.”
Lucian frowned. “In other words, anything that looks like a rock down there could suddenly come to life and bite me in the ass,” he said. “How could that be?”
“Try a better question. Like why? These things are the size of mountains. They can land on a planet and just take over. But they disguise themselves as rocks and hide, maybe for millions of years at a time. So what are they hiding from? What’s dangerous enough to scare them?”
That drew Lucian up short, and the suit technician too.
“Jesus,” Lucian said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But why? Why land asteroids and build pyramids on Mars?”
“And Venus and Mercury and the big moons of the outer planets as well,” Larry said. “Word from all over: radar scans of Venus, Sunside flyovers of Mercury, and eyewitness accounts from Ganymede and Titan. These things are going up everywhere.”
“Why? And who? Who is doing this? Are the Lander creatures the ones running the show, or is it the Wheel— or something else?”
“Answer those questions, and you’ll be earning the really big money,” Larry said, a forced and frightened smile on his face. The tension between the two of them was eased, at least for the moment.
“Any update from the drilling crew?” Lucian asked.
“Got a call just before you came in. Confirmation just a minute or two ago: we’ve drilled down into a hollow cavity. They dropped a camera on a cable—and found the top of a hollow shaft fifty meters across, six hundred meters under the surface. Now they’re using a heavyweight Gopher shaft borer to widen the drillhole. Crew boss said it’s strictly routine tunnel-cutting procedure.”
Lucian nodded woodenly. “Except that the next step is to hang me on a cable and lower me down a hole forty kilometers deep,” he said.
Larry shivered at that thought as the suit tech made the last hookups to the armored suit. But what else could they do? Fly a spaceship down?
There had even been some serious thought about doing just that, and a small rocket-powered lander had been flown to the pole just in case—but the dangers were simply too great. Lowering Lucian on a cable seemed risky, but flying a lander inside an enclosed and pressurized area seemed insanely dangerous, all but suicidal.
But suppose the cable broke? What if one of those scorpion robots was down there, and decided to snip it in two?
Given time, Larry had no doubt they could have come up with a better way to do it. But there was no time. Those damn pyramids were going up on every world except the Moon. Humanity needed to know what they were for.
And they had a deadline. The Saint Anthony, traveling inert, on a leisurely course that was supposed to keep the Charonians from noticing it, would be at Earthpoint in another day. There was no way to stop, or even delay, the probe. Nor was there a desire to do so. Delay might mean detection. But once the Saint Anthony went through the Earthpoint wormhole, the game might well be up.
The Charonian leaders—whoever and whatever they were—would very likely prevent any further contact. Earth would need every scrap of data it could get, every scrap the investigators in the Solar System could relay to the Saint Anthony before the probe went through the hole in search of Earth.
And it was a pretty good bet that what answers there were waited at the bottom of the Rabbit Hole. Down the hole. Larry shivered at the very thought.
Larry blinked suddenly, and came back to himself. “There’s one other thing that comes out of the news from Mars. Now we know how to listen in to their gravity-wave transmissions. The machine shop is rigging up induction taps for us to carry down. They should be able to pick any signals the Wheel sends, convert them to radio signals, and relay them up the Rabbit Hole to the surface. Trouble is, for the induction taps to work, they have to be physically attached to whatever they are tapping.”