“Believe it!” he said. “You haven’t seen the sheer scale of that reactor! If they can build something like that, and use alien science to make air in a way we couldn’t, they can seed a star to go nova?”
“Well, maybe so, if you say so. But what has that to do with this?”
“I told you, they don’t pussyfoot! It’s all or nothing with them. No second chance.”
“Yes, but—”
“The destruct symbol,” he said, feeling the horror rise as he spoke. “It was a nova.”
Melina shrugged. “Why not? We put a skull and crossbones to indicate poison. We don’t mean it literally. It’s figurative.”
“They don’t know figurative. They’re a literal species, maybe because of the way they come genetically preprogrammed, like ants. To them, something either is or it isn’t, or it is ignored. It can’t be partway, unless it’s something under construction. So when they use a nova symbol—”
Now the horror came to her face too. “You mean—?”
“I mean that when they say nova, they mean nova! If we abuse the reactor—”
“Our sun will go nova,” she said.
“It must be keyed in. The moment the reactor starts to go wrong, it sends the destruct signal to the sun. The sun flares up and takes everything out, maybe through the orbit of Jupiter. Just a little flare, on the galactic scale, but our species will be gone. Just as those other species went, thousands of years ago when they didn’t pass the test, and now we’re seeing their novas. There are three requirements, one being that we achieve limited space travel on our own, another that we are able to recognize the nature of the artifact, and the third is undefined—but now we know that it means to do it right, or else.”
“No second chance,” she agreed, staring straight ahead.
“We’re shooting for all the marbles!” His face felt frozen. He remembered the dream he had had, of mankind ending. No dream, but an alien warning!
“All the marbles,” she echoed hollowly. “God, Doug—”
“Yeah.” He arrowed on down the passage, feeling numb.
The mole passed an intersecting tunnel. A second mole pulled out of the tunnel and took off in pursuit.
Melina looked back. “That’s Benny!” she exclaimed. “Watch out—he knows how to drive!”
Indeed he did. The moles were supposed to be uniform in speed, but the one behind was gaining. Its drill started spinning.
“Look out!” Melina cried.
But there wasn’t much Quaid could do. He watched in the rearview as Benny’s mole caught up and bored into the back of his own mole. The giant screw was made to handle rock; how would it react to metal?
There was a horrendous screech of metal chewing metal. Shrapnel flew through the cabin. The whole vehicle vibrated violently.
Ask a silly question! Quaid had already been traveling at top velocity, but somehow he managed to coax more from the engine and pull ahead. It was no good; Benny caught up and drilled again.
The spinning drill bit appeared in the cabin, chewing hungrily. They leaned forward to avoid it, but had too little room. The sound was deafening. The thing could grind them into sausage!
Then it stopped, inches from their backs. Melina stared at it. “I guess that’s its limit,” she said. “It’s meant for rock, and rock will crack open and fragment away. It’s stuck in the metal.”
“Stuck, eh?” Quaid smiled grimly. “Then maybe we have him by the balls.”
“Balls?” she inquired, glancing sidelong at him.
“Whatever. Let’s see how this pecker likes our action.”
Quaid swerved left, then right, making his mole rock back and forth in the passage. Benny’s mole, held captive by its proboscis, was whipped into the stone walls. He hastily braked and disengaged from Quaid’s mole. It wasn’t enough; he ended up with two wheels propped against a wall.
“I’ll keep that ploy in mind if I ever don’t like your action,” Melina murmured.
Quaid kept a straight face. Behind, he saw Benny’s mole maneuvering clumsily, its gears grinding. Then it flopped back on the level and resumed its forward motion.
They entered a dark chamber. Quaid turned his headlight to the side and saw that there was room here to make a loop. He shut off the light and began to turn in darkness.
“What are you doing?” Melina asked, alarmed.
“Maybe I can get him in the ass this time,” Quaid said. “See how he likes his own medicine.”
He completed most of his loop and slowed, lights out. He saw Benny’s headlights, then the nose of the mole, coming slowly in. The lights cast about, scanning the chamber.
Quaid gunned his engine and turned on his lights. They illuminated the side of Benny’s mole, glaringly bright.
With his drill extended straight forward, churning ferociously, Quaid headed directly for Benny’s cabin. “Screw you,” he said succinctly.
He saw Benny’s eyes and mouth open wide, in the glare of the lights, as the man saw the drill coming straight at him. He tried to gun his own mole out of the way, but was too late. Quaid’s mole bored through the cabin, having no trouble at all with glass and plastic, and chewed it up as if it were being fed into a giant food processor. Benny was shredded into chopped meat, in a manner literal enough for even the No’ui.
Benny’s mole had been near the far cavern wall. Quaid’s mole couldn’t stop; it drilled right on into the wall. Sand and gravel poured in through holes. The whole machine rattled.
There was nothing to do but keep going. The stone wall started to crumble. Quaid ground forward, hoping he wouldn’t get stuck. But he was in luck; the other side of the wall was hollow space.
“Doug!” Melina screamed, staring ahead.
Now he realized that the luck he was in was bad. There was nothing ahead. They were drilling into the abyss of the alien reactor!
He slammed on the brakes. The mole tilted through the aperture, starting its fall. But the torn rear of the mole lodged against the top of the tunnel, making it pause a moment.
“Jump!” Quaid shouted, tearing away his seat belt.
The two of them barely had time to jump out of the doors and grab onto scaffolding before the huge machine dislodged itself and fell into the depths.
But why weren’t they suffocating? The abyss of his dream-memory had been a near-vacuum; they had used space suits to enter it. How could he forget the frustration of trying to kiss Melina through the helmet! But there was air here; this was pressurized.
Then he remembered a bit more of his Hauser knowledge: the main part of the reactor was pressurized, because Cohaagen had been trying to find out more about it. Cohaagen had been cautious, which was just as welclass="underline" if he had done anything ignorant to it, the nova would have been set off. The pressurization hadn’t affected it; the reactor was constructed to handle atmospheric pressure, because it was part of the process that made the atmosphere. Hauser and Melina had entered the unpressurized, unexplored section that Cohaagen thought didn’t matter—and had discovered that it mattered very much. It wasn’t just one unit, it was an interlocking complex of units, with the nuclear reactor just the tip of the iceberg in an almost literal manner.
They hung from the scaffolding on opposite sides of the hole, then got their footing and scanned the vast reaches of the abyss.
“You’re right,” Melina whispered, awed. “I never saw this. It’s ten times as big as I ever imagined, and—”
“And a hundred times as complex,” he said, awed himself, though he had explored much of it in his prior visit and in his buried memory of that visit, and had experienced the No’ui explanation of it. “This is our future—man’s future—if we can get it started before Cohaagen destroys it.”
They continued gazing at it. An enormous metal truss stretched from the wall into space, reminiscent of the ancient Eiffel Tower laid on its side. Four such arches supported an immense round platform in the middle of the abyss.