Cliff won the draw to lead an exploring party through the door they would cut. As pilot, Beth stayed with the shuttle party. The two of them didn’t like this, but they were short of crew, and nobody else had the right mix of skills. Beth grimaced at Cliff, and they made it up to each other that night.
Or at least that was their excuse. Nobody wanted to admit being afraid.
NINE
They started the next morning — not that there were any sunrises here.
Cliff’s team were four men and Irma, all muscular and tall and athletic. Beth and Cliff did not like being more than a few meters from each other, but they overcame that.
They followed Greenwich Meridian morn, of course, because the sun never set on the British Empire and certainly not here; the reddish star always hung in the sky at midafternoon. The star’s jet was a furious neon line scratched across the sky, adding diffuse shadows. The eerie landscape confused their eyes and unsettled the mind.
They could not be sure if the Bird Folk slept, though Irma had compared camera runs and found that each did take a few hours of closed-eye time, still standing up. They never seemed to sit; maybe their knees locked. Nor did they fly.
Cliff had come to think of them as like ostriches. Far prettier and more graceful, but there was a similarity. Could such birds have built the Bowl?
The gas laser took three hours to eat through the outer lock door. On broad-beam, it then cut an arc big enough for humans to squeeze through. Cliff went first. He felt very vulnerable, hurried and impeded by his pressure suit, crawling through a hole not much bigger than his torso.
By then the laser was short on charge and overheating. The operators — two engineers, Lau Pin and Aybe — shut it down and worked over the gas chamber fittings, which were looking the worse for wear.
Irma passed him some gear, then wriggled through. Cliff watched the Bird Folk for reactions. The big ones nearby fluttered a little, stamping their big feet, then went back to their steady stares. Much rippling of feathers, glorious runs of color.
Irma was through, and Terry Gould was having some trouble. “Let’s move!”
Cliff felt alien eyes on his back as he got his five through the hole. Aybe came through, and Howard Blaire. Hustle, hustle, hustle. They had planned to put a plate over the round bore hole and let one of the party partake of the lock air. Getting set up for this, Cliff happened to look behind them.
The hole had changed. It was lopsided … and smaller.
He blinked some sweat from his eyes, smelled the sour flavor of the helmet. He had spent too much time inside. The hole still looked lopsided. As he watched, the rim of it wrinkled, changed color, crinkled at the edges and … grew. Inward.
Not diamond after all.
“Block it!” he cried, lunging at the hole.
They wedged some fittings into the gap. Abduss had a hand laser on his tool belt and he cut some more metal bars to jam the hole from the butte side. These stuck … then bent … and snapped in two and flew away with lethal force, bouncing like shrapnel around the air lock as the hole tightened further.
Howard cried,
“It’s self-repairing,” Beth called over the comm. “Get out — now!”
“Can’t — it’s already too small.” Cliff eyed the rate of closing. “It regrows just about as fast as we can cut it.”
They stood helplessly watching the wall ooze into place, like a liquid. The laser team struggled to get it back in operation, but —
“Too late.” Cliff stepped away from the narrowing hole. He scowled at the Bird Folk. “Why do I think they saw this coming? No wonder they didn’t look bothered.”
“They knew something else, too,” Beth said. He followed her pointing finger.
He hadn’t noticed the dust motes rising behind
“That dust. It’s been there, ticking at the corners of my eye,” Beth said. “More every minute.”
Until suddenly they were all glowing, as if bright sunlight were falling into the butte. Cliff heard shocked voices in his earphone, and Beth shouting, “Into the ship! Tananareve, you at least, get into
Four of Beth’s team were still in the pressure box they’d built around the air lock’s wall. The fifth must be Tananareve, and she was running for
Jets of ice white lowered the hexagon toward the floor of the butte.
Everybody was talking over comm — panic and anger and shouted orders that made no sense. Cliff watched the thing descend in the vacuum outside, tremendous compared to
It might as well have been a light-year. The hole in the air lock kept narrowing, and the ship that looked like an assembly of boxes and rhomboids and coiled tubes settled down nearby. Out of it came a lumbering machine on wheels.
Soundless, the horror unfolded. The machine had a transparent cowling that looked like the atmospheric membrane, a shimmering pale blue balloon. Inside that sat three Bird Folk, working controls, staring at consoles that flitted across the walls in splashes of vibrant color. They moved with jittery intensity. Cliff made himself study the three and saw that they had different feather markings, and looked larger than the bigger variety on his side of the air lock. They moved with a lumbering, muscular purpose.
Three more of Beth’s team were free of the pressure box. Coiled tubes unwound on the wheeled tank. These reached Tananareve, caught her. They plucked her up none too gently and dropped her into a cargo hold behind the cabin. Arms reached for the other crew, yanked them up one by one, added them to the hold.
Then the tank rolled back toward its ship, up a ramp, and was gone. Just like that, Beth disappeared. Just like that.
Horror paralyzed him while his own crew still fought the hole’s steady closing. Nothing worked. Cliff watched but could think of nothing to do. Their shouts came through on comm. But he heard it all through a cottony buffer, the words hollow and refracting. Meaningless. He dimly realized that he was in a state of shock, numb, unable to process the events. Part of him had shut down.
The hole sealed itself up — a neat engineering trick, Cliff admitted distantly. He did not see the flicker of motion outside. Three tall Bird Folk were standing beside the air lock. They were of the third variety. They had the same markings as the ones in the crawler outside, and with a level, steely concentration they gazed impassively in at the humans.
Something thrummed up through his feet. He turned and on one of the lock walls a set of symbols flashed, rippled, changed in a cadence. He sensed a change in the pressure. Behind the three taller Bird Folk the crowd backed away, their leathery mouths working. The three were somebody important. Maybe a funeral guard …
“They’re going to open the inner lock door,” Irma said with an odd, flat calm.
Cliff said, “Aybe!” The man’s head jerked around, wide-eyed. “We’re going out the instant there’s room. Here, give me that hand laser.”
Someone called, “We shouldn’t make any fast moves. Just be — ”
“We’ll make a run for it,” Cliff said loudly. “Everybody, get all the gear you can into your packs.”
He had to try the laser himself. It worked, a brief flash. He watched the aliens. This was dangerous and he was in charge. But he was damned if he’d let his crew get scooped up like Beth.
What to do? He looked up into the bowers of the forest. Some looked dry. Last night’s rain was long gone.
“Burn the trees,” Cliff called. “No shots toward the birds.” The lock door somehow slid aside, though Cliff could see no housing it fed into. The door just shortened along one side. A puff of ivory fog swirled around it,
