noticed the tendency of the vegetable growths to point toward that center. As they advanced the gnarled trunks were leaning farther and farther backward.
Earth blended into sky with no visible break in the forest. Everything was intergrown in thick profusion. The Cygnans made a wild leap, trailing the light puff of the sack, and caught at the wall of branches opposite. All at once, instead of plunging downhill they were climbing toward another of the mile-high central ridges. The jungle they had just left behind became their sky.
Why hadn’t the Cygnans built on sensible circular plan, like human beings? Again, Jameson could merely guess that it simply didn’t matter to them. This flat-sided plan was more convenient to them in other ways. It simplified the engineering of the folding spar arrangement. Straight lines made for easier construction. And as for the gravity gradient, perhaps the Cygnans lived in three dimensions, like monkeys or birds. Or—the thought came to him—perhaps they lived along surfaces, like so many small, clinging terrestrial creatures.
With startling suddenness, the forest ended. Jameson was looking through the branches at a flat metal prairie studded with surrealistic structures. They were placed at random along the plain: silolike cylinders of shiny metal, skyscraper-size prismoids set with gemlike facets, flaring hyperboloids with barber-pole skirts, enormous lattices of translucent colored materials. They were connected by looping transparent tubes, like some crazy gigantic chemistry apparatus, and there were dark specks moving fittingly through the tubes.
Everything leaned.
As the geometric shapes retreated from the vast tent of the central ridge, they leaned farther and farther toward center, until, at the knife-edge crease where ground met sloping ceiling, structures hundreds of feet high were tilting drunkenly. The mad architecture continued along the metal sky until it disappeared into the mists.
For there was a vast tubular cloud running down the spine of the empty space above. As the mists swirled and parted, Jameson could catch glimpses of a gleaming pipe stretching the length of the no-gravity center of this artificial world. Condensation? Escaping gases? Jameson shuddered. One thing was clear. That pipe—wide as the Mississippi River—had something to do with the mighty drive that had carried the Cygnans across the universe. Humans kept such relatively feeble things as nuclear power plants out of sight, if possible! What manner of creatures were the Cygnans to live and work, unconcerned, in such proximity to
As the Cygnans jostled him along, he could see what supported the pipe: a row of slender metal pillars raised from the apex of the central ridge—from all three of the ridges. They didn’t look half massive enough to hold up the pipe. But then, he realized, it was in zero-g up there, and the pillars need do nothing but brace it lightly in place.
Jameson found himself being stuffed through a rubbery membrane into a circular port. The membrane closed behind him—he couldn’t tell how—and he was with his two keepers in a crazy rotating drum. They scuttled round its walls while a lens-shaped aperture widened into the shape made by two intersecting circles. Before it was quite a full circle they picked up Jameson’s sack and heaved him through. He struck another of the rubbery membranes. He expected to bounce back in time to be snipped in half by the closing edges, but in some mysterious fashion he oozed through and settled to the floor like a toy balloon.
He found himself in an immense warehouse of a place with acres of spongy floor. The ceiling hung distant and shadowy above. The walls leaned inward. Dim shapes bulked against the walls and in random piles all over the floor. These sacks and bales and queer pyramid-shaped boxes were stenciled with odd cursive symbols that, instead of following one another in straight lines like human script, wandered in random peaks and valleys up and down.
There was a sound like a maniac trying to play Bartok on the harmonica, and Jameson realized it had been made by one of the Cygnans. The other Cygnan answered with an incredibly rapid fragment of twelve-tone solfege.
Jameson came to full attention. There had been
Whatever those brief cadenzas had meant, the Cygnans picked him up again and toted him to a cluster of what looked like manholes in the spongy floor. One of them lifted a lid, apparently at random, and, legs tucked in, dropped through. Another one of those damned tubes! Jameson was tossed in next, and the other Cygnan dove through after him, head first.
They were hurtling at dizzying speed down a corkscrew spiral. Outside the transparent walls of the tube was an enormous dim void, hung round with the ghostly outlines of fantastic shapes. If they had entered one of the spars, they were plunging down a shaft fifteen miles deep, with a boxed world at the bottom.
He could feel gravity starting to take hold after a mile or two; It didn’t amount to much yet, but it would be a third of an Earth g at the bottom, if Ruiz’s figures on the rotation had been correct. Enough to smash him to a bloody paste if he’d gone tobogganing down the spiral by himself without the Cygnans twelve busily pedaling legs to brake him.
His eyes began getting used to the dimness and he could see other transparent spirals in the hugeness around him, wrapped round slim silvery shafts. Other many-legged shapes were scooting up or down them. He peered down through the coils of his own tubeway and suddenly went rigid with fear.
A column of Cygnans was scurrying
Nothing! Jameson looked upward. The ascending Cygnans were streaking through the tubes above. How the hell had they gotten past without a collision?
He looked across at the other tubes. The same trick was going on all around him. Ascending and descending Cygnans on a collison course in the same spiral tubeway passing one another without meeting!
Then he understood. He almost laughed, in spite of the gravity of his situation. The solution was ridiculously simple. A double spiral, like the elevators at the MacDonald. You could even find the same thing in that French chateau in the Loire valley with the famous double-spiral staircase. Chambord. He’d seen it in a holo travelogue. People going up never met the people coming down—a handy trick in the sixteenth century for getting out of the place.
They took more than an hour to reach bottom, an hour of being whipped round and round the central shaft at breakneck speed, while the remote walls of the murky chasm whirled dizzyingly around him and the indistinct structures that filled it blended into a tornado blur. Jameson passed out somewhere along the way. When he regained consciousness, he was out of the sack, but still in his suit, lying on a bare floor whose surface bristled with minute rubbery villi. He was alone.
He tried to stand up and immediately lost his balance and fell down again. The blood rushed through his head and the room wheeled and tilted.
He waited until the dizziness passed, then cautiously sat up. He was in a small room with an odd shape. It was a parallelogram rather than a rectangle. It was a shape that would have made sense to Cygnans if they’d built rows of chambers along one of the three sides of an environmental pod and kept the dividing walls parallel to the bulkhead at the end.
He struggled shakily to his feet, his hands groping for support along the wall. The wall was a mass of the same rubbery projections. He cast no shadow. Light seemed to exist in the room without an apparent source. It was a dim reddish light that turned his spacesuit the color of blood.
How long had he been unconscious? Reluctantly he lifted his eyes to the luminous squares of the helmet telltales. It was worse than he’d thought. Barely ten minutes worth of air was left.
“Are you afraid?” Maggie said.
“Terrified,” Maybury said. Her dark eyes were big. “What’s going to happen now?”
Around them the big hemispherical chamber was alive with subdued conversation and purposeless moving to and fro. The air was already beginning to taste stale. Some seventy people were crowded into the bridge and observatory areas. Everything below hydroponics was hard vacuum.
Another twenty people were trapped in the tail of the ship: the Chinese and American engine techs and the
