“Every time they added rods to the outside while bots were between the piles of rods—here in this valley or aisle,” she said as we walked in the area between rods, “they would disappear.
Finally, Oracle quit adding rods to the outside and started storing them inside. Even though there shouldn’t have been room.”
“Computer logic.” I chuckled. “As long as they could get the rods back and quit losing bots, there was no reason for the program to question
“Exactly. And they quit losing bots after that.”
“The rods added on the outside must have changed the coordinates.”
“The coordinates of what?” Nikki asked.
“Of the gate,” I said. “The bots that were lost must have gone… but that would mean that somewhere… there are other gates.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that someone—or something—is already building the gates. Sure you want to come? We might be meeting a bot-eating monster.” I said as we neared the blurred area ahead of us.
“You can’t scare me, Phil.”
“Jake,” I said. “We’re entering the field now. You might want to call my team so they can know what’s going on.”
“Will do.”
Nikki and I remained speechless as we stepped into the blurred area and headed down what should have been a wall of rods but looked like a long black tunnel ahead of us. The darkness seemed to shimmer and made my eyes hurt whenever I glanced at it. “Jake, can you read us?”
Nothing. I stopped for a moment. “What do you think?” I said to Nikki. ” If we were smart, we’d probably go back.”
“If we were smart is a little iffy, right.”
“Yeah. Let’s go on and see what’s making that rainbow ball of light ahead of us.”
The sphere of light was beautiful. The calculations said the rods warped space. Period. But they did more than that. They created one of the most beautiful displays of changing patterns of light ever seen by human eyes. The ball of light danced ahead of us as and then, as we neared it, it proved to be a hole which we stepped. Our bodies seemed to become part of the interplay of shapes and colors. Almost with regret, we stepped out of the gate and felt a heavy, Earth-weight gravity.
“Look at that!” I said as we both stumbled to regain our footing under the heavier pull of the gravity. We certainly were no longer on the moon. Wooded areas were broken by long expanses of grass. The plants were growing wild and looked like an ancient, pristine Earth. Butterflies the size of footballs fluttered about while a strange whirring insect or small animal occasionally zipped by on an unknown task.
At first I thought we really were back on Earth. But the small animals and greenish sky told me we weren’t. And everything had two shadows; I sneaked a peek at the sun, “Binary sun?” I said. “Where do you suppose we are?”
“There’re the rods, anyway,” Nikki said and pointed to a huge stack of rods several meters away resting in a clump of trees. “And what do you suppose that is?”
I looked where she pointed. In the distance, a blue, lacy crystal mountain which appeared to be floating in the air. Large bud-like areas seemed to grow out of the narrow tubes connecting everything. The size was deceptive; it had to be huge, judging from the hazy look it had which could only be caused by the distance it was from it.
“That,” I finally said, ” Is what a city looks like when the culture building it has anti-grav rods.”
“Do you suppose it’s inhabited?” Nikki asked.
“If it is, they must be the most uncurious living beings in the universe. I can’t imagine having this gate with bots coming through it all the time. And not checking up on them.”
“Abandoned?”
“Maybe. We’ll have to see later on. For now, we’d better get back,” I said.
“Yeah.”
We turned toward our entrance. Unlike its counterpart on the Moon, this one was created by two monoliths of blue stone, apparently designed just to be a gate. A “stargate,” since we were somewhere far, far from Earth. An alien control panel or—perhaps just an elaborate work of art—
stood in front of it, glowing with a changing pattern of small lights.
We walked toward the gate and stepped into the blurred area that marked the entrance and moved back into the shimmering darkness. We walked without talking.
But we didn’t step out on our Moon. It was an airless, barren world. But not the Moon.
“What’s going on?” Nikki ask.
“I don’t know. But I think I know how the bots got lost. Let’s backtrack real quickly.”
We started at a walk and ended in a run. We stepped back out on the planet with the blue crystal city in the distance.
“We’d better sit tight for a while,” I said. “They’ll surely start sending bots through the stargate we created on the Moon. Then, we can follow one of the bots back.”
We waited.
Hours passed while we explored the area around us.
We slowly ran out of air in the suits’ tanks.
“Do you think it’s safe to breathe the atmosphere?” Nikki said.
“There isn’t much alternative. I did notice that some of the plants… Look there, if that isn’t a dandelion… So maybe.”
We cracked our helmets open and tried a quick breath. We didn’t die right away, so we removed our helmets to conserve the last of our oxygen in case we ever did find a way back to the Moon.
Hours later, it still appeared that the air was safe. I hoped we hadn’t picked up some weird virus or fungus that would kill us later on. I decided to keep that worry to myself.
“They’ll get to us before long,” I said, hoping my voice sounded more sure than I was. I put my arm around Nikki and we sat, watching first one sunset and then the other as the second sun sunk below the horizon and foreign stars dotted the purplish sky. We put our gloves back on as the air turned cool.
When we awoke the next day. There still wasn’t a bot to be seen.
At noon, alien planet time, a bot finally wandered through the gate with a load of rods as if it were business as usual. We put on our helmets and followed it back through the alien gate after it had deposited the rods in the pile and started back—we hoped—for the Moon.
We stepped out to look down the rows of rods to the barren surface of the Moon.
“We’re back!” Nikki said as we bounced out onto the lunar surface.
Cheering range out over our radio, then Jake’s voice crackled through the din of voices. “Get back into the dome you two. You’ve got some explaining to do.”
I took Nikki’s gloved hand in mine and we headed toward the base.
Copyright
Copyright © 1988, 2002 by Duncan Long. Cover artwork of second edition by Duncan Long. For more information, see http://duncanlong.com/
First printing by Avon Books, August 1988. Current edition published by arrangement with the author.
Original ISBN: 0-380-75357-X.
All rights on both text and cover artwork reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by US and international copyright laws. Any resemblance between characters in this book and those living or dead is purely coincidental.
