He watched a long line of rain clouds caught in the crest of a wave. Angry blue gray clouds were corralled in the high peak, as if in rising they cooled and let go their moisture. His eye followed the cloud-racked crest to the far horizon. A marching regimental rainstorm. He felt a cold sensation of strangeness at this sight. The idea of a rainstorm that stretched long and slender over distances far greater than continents made him suck in his breath.
Now they were above the black pillar, descending. Cliff’s stomach fluttered up into his throat. He clenched his teeth as
“The butte!” she shouted. “Damn!”
Abduss shouted, “What? What is it?”
Pause. “It’ll be fine,” she said flatly with forced calm. “I can figure this. Keep your crash webs tight. Someone should have noticed.” Beth was talking through clenched teeth.
Abduss frowned. “What is — ?”
“That’s no butte. We’re inside a hollow tube! The surface is — I don’t see a surface, it’s in shadow, seven kilometers down.” Thrust went away. “I don’t want to run out of fuel. I’m going to assume there’s a floor and it’s flush with the forest. Abduss, can you get me anything with radar?”
Cliff’s throat was dry and his voice cracked. “Floor as opposed to … what?”
“As opposed to a hole that goes right through the Cupworld and out into space!”
Abduss said, “What?” His eyes showed a lot of white.
“Suppose it’s a through-out tube, to save the trouble of going around the whole Bowl. That’s what it looks like in a full-spectrum picture.” Beth gestured at a stack set of views. In some, stars hung in the opening.
“Uh, so?”
“We could go right through. What’s radar say? You can get an angle on the floor now, right?”
Abduss nodded and worked his board. He was sweating.
Cliff ventured, “We’d be picked up with
“Maybe,” Beth said tensely. “Unless somebody slams the door.”
“There’s a bottom down there,” Abduss said. “Watch yourself, radar says it’s not flat.”
The motor thrummed again. High thrust. Pings and pops in the ship.
Cliff didn’t try to speak. Beth was talking her way through it, and that was nerve racking. “It’s flat, Abduss. There’s a hole in it, a pit with stars at the bottom. We want to land, right?
EIGHT
She set them down less than two kilometers from the butte wall, on a cluttered ledge that was perhaps four kilometers across. There was a wall along the inner rim. Beyond that, the universe peeked through a hole ten kilometers across. She made the ship linger on its jets, finding a bare spot. They thunked down and felt the tug of centrifugal gravity.
She looked toward the butte face. Pale ivory light spilled out along the bottom of the wall, from a row of windows running from tiny to huge.
They all felt the significance of the moment, but there was no time for reflection. They didn’t know what waited outside, but talking wasn’t going to tell them anything.
They emerged from the scout ship in full space gear. Cliff listened with half his attention to Fred reporting to Redwing. The lightspeed time gap was seventeen seconds and rising. They stood at the foot of
“Air locks,” Fred said, and laughed happily. “With transparent walls.” He stopped laughing when nobody joined him. “That one at the far end is fifty or sixty times as big as
“We want one of the little locks,” Cliff said.
These gigantic structures weren’t funny; they were daunting. The one ahead would easily pass
Redwing, lightspeed delayed, barked on comm, “Cameras are working. Definition isn’t good. Keep talking, Fred. We’re lonely up here.”
Beth added, “And nobody’s coming out to greet us, either.”
The smallest hatch that seemed to be an air lock wasn’t a good choice. It was no bigger than a child. Cliff had picked one big enough to pass a couple of elephants, Beth judged. They brought the cart rovers down the ramp from
Beth felt odd indeed, looking through two walls of faintly blue cliff to see … trees. Spindly black trunks, soft pink fronds, carrot-topped — but trees. They set to work opening the air lock.
Only they couldn’t.
For three days, they tried to find a way into the air lock. The task took all the gear they had in the lander. Beth got tired from lugging apparatus out to the working area, setting it up, trial testing, integrating, then listening to the arguments about the results.
People under stress, she observed, need to argue. It lets off steam.
The team looked for obvious controls in the window/walls, but the surfaces were translucent, smooth, unmarked. They were synthetic diamond, at a guess. Carbon, anyway. Mounted on a blue interior wall were odd protrusions that might be controls — “For something with big fingers, or clumsy,” Fred reported to
They tested the cliff wall — a hard shell, rising straight up with a vacuum on one side and on the other an atmosphere. They could see the weather was heavy with sleeting rain the second day, and cloudy the next. Looking up the height of the transparent inner wall was like taking a cross section of the sky, with clouds sometimes stacked against it. Slowly winds blew the clouds around the enormous boundary of the butte. While the others labored, Beth and Cliff took time to watch the trees and soil and small darting things that flitted among the swaying trees. Something foxlike almost escaped a pouncing bird.…
An alien world. It was like standing on one side of a museum diorama, only they were in skin suits and packs. And the other side was a living world just doing its business.
Quick flitting birds like swallows, but much bigger. They were fast and sometimes flew in formations. Bright splashes of color amid snarled undergrowth looked like flowers with petals, but threw tendrils through the underbrush. Why? Trees of curious zigzag trunks and branches. Scampering slick-skinned blue gray things —
Howard kept making analogies to Earth life. Sometimes they worked, but other features made no immediate sense. Strange and wondrous. Gradually Howard stopped talking to Cliff and just made notes.
Redwing got irritated that they could not find a way in. He started giving orders in a stern tone.
Beth figured there was some signal they were supposed to give, but the blank, smooth, slick face of the air lock wall gave no clue about what to try. Here was the abstract problem of communicating with aliens, brought down to a concrete level.
Beams of particles, laser pulses, microwave antennas brought to within a meter — none made any
