Midnight at the Well of Souls

Hain emerged shortly after, having more trouble climbing down with his bulk despite the weak gravity. He chose a position just forward of the nose where he was mostly sheltered but could still use the edge of the boat to steady his pistol.

Brazil, satisfied, moved cautiously forward.

He reached the nearest craft in less than two minutes. “No sign of life yet,” he told them. “I’m going to climb up on top and have a look inside.” He mounted the rail-type ladder along the side of the shuttle and walked over to the entry hatch.

“Still nothing,” Brazil reported. “I’m going in.”

It took only another three minutes to get inside and find nobody home. He then repeated the sequence with the second craft and found it empty too, although this one showed signs that somebody had spent many hours there.

“Come on up, anybody,” he called. “There’s no one here, or for many kilometers around. See what you make of it.”

Hain told Wu Julee to join him. Vardia climbed out last, and they all went over to the captain, who was standing near the second shuttle and looking anxiously at the ground. Brazil noted with some amusement that Vardia clutched her nice, pretty sword.

“Look at the ground here,” he said, pointing to the tracks of a person in a pressure suit coming up to a point at which the dust around was greatly disturbed for a large area.

“What do you make of it, Captain?” Hain asked.

“Well, it looks as if my theory’s right, anyway. See—the first one was here, then saw the second one land, and he hid out on the back of the shuttle. When the pursuer—the guy who landed second I assume was the murderer—found nobody home, he walked around to here”—Brazil gestured at the mottled dust thrown about —“and was jumped by the first person from on top. They fought here, then one took off across the plain, the other in pursuit. See how we get only the toe tracks coming out of the fight scene?”

Vardia was already following the tracks out onto the plain. Suddenly she stopped short and stared, incredulous, at the ground. “Captain! Everyone! Came here!” she called urgently. They rushed up to her. She was pointing at the ground immediately ahead of her.

The fine dust was thinner here, and the rock changed color from a dull orange to more of a gray, but at first they didn’t see what she meant. Brazil went over and stooped down. Then it sank in on him.

At the place where one man had stepped, just where the two strains of rock met, there was half a footprint. Not the running type—it was angled, so that a little less than half of a grown man’s footprint, pressure suit pattern and all, was visible in the orange. Where it met the gray, there was unbroken dust.

“How is it possible, Captain?” Vardia asked, awed for the first time in her life—and not a little scared.

“There must be an explanation. It’s a freakish thing—but I’d believe almost anything after all we’ve seen. I’m sure we’ll find their prints continue farther on. Let’s see.”

They all walked onto the gray area for some distance. Vardia suddenly looked back to make certain that they were making footprints, and was relieved to see that they were. Suddenly she stopped short.

“Captain!” she exclaimed, that toneless voice suddenly tinged with panic and fear. The rest caught it, stopped, and turned. Vardia was pointing back at the ships from which they had come.

There were no shuttlecraft. There was no lifeboat. Only a bleak, unbroken orange plain stretching off to the mountains in the distance.

“Now what the hell?” Brazil managed, looking all around him to see if they had somehow turned around. They hadn’t. He looked up to see if he could spot anything leaving, but there was nothing but the cold stars as darknesss overtook them.

“What happened?” Hain asked plaintively. “Did our murderer—”

“No, that’s not it,” Brazil cut in quickly, a cold chill suddenly going through him. “No one person—not even two—could have managed all three craft, and nobody but me could have lifted that lifeboat for another two hours.”

There was a sudden vibration, like a small earthquake, that knocked them all off their feet.

Brazil broke his fall and held on in a crouch on his hands and knees. He looked up suddenly.

The whole area seemed bathed in eerie flashes of blue-white lightning, thousands of them!

“Damn me for an asshead!” Brazil swore. “We’ve been had!”

“But by whom?” Vardia called out.

Wu Julee screamed.

Then there was nothing but darkness and that weird, blue lightning, now laced, it appeared, with golden sparks. They all felt the sensation of falling and turning and twisting in the air, as if they were dropping down some bottomless pit. There was no up, no down, nothing but that dizzy sensation.

And Wu Julee kept screaming.

Suddenly they were lying on a flat, glassy-smooth black surface. Lights were on around them, and there seemed to be a structure—as if they were in some building, like a great warehouse.

Things didn’t stop spinning around for a while. They were dizzy, and sick. All but Brazil threw up into their helmets, which neatly and efficiently cleared the mess away. A professional spaceman, Brazil was the first to recover his equilibrium. Then he steadied himself, half sitting up on the black, glassy floor.

It was a room, he saw—no, a great chamber, with six sides. The glassy area was also a hexagon, and around it stretched a railing and what appeared to be a walkway. A single great light, also six-sided, was suspended above them in the curved ceiling. The place was huge, Brazil saw, easily large enough to house a small freighter.

The others were there. Vardia, he saw, was already sitting up, but Wu Julee, it appeared, had passed out. Hain just lay on the floor, breathing hard. Brazil struggled to his feet and made his way unsteadily to Wu Julee. He checked and saw that she was in fact still breathing but unconscious.

“Everybody all right?” he called. Vardia nodded and tried to rise. He helped her to her feet, and she managed. Hain groaned, but tried, and was game about it. He finally managed it.

“Just about one gee,” Brazil noted. “That’s interesting.”

“Now what?” asked Datham Hain.

“Looks like some breaks in that railing—the closest one is over there to your right. We might as well make for it.” Taking their silence for assent, he picked up Wu Julee’s limp body and they started off. She weighed hardly anything, he noted, and he wasn’t a particularly strong man.

He looked down at her, sorrow in his eyes. What will happen to you now, Wu Julee? But I tried! God! I tried!

Her eyes opened, and she looked up into his through the tinted helmet faceplates. Perhaps it was the gentle way he carried her, perhaps it was his expression, perhaps it was just the fact that she saw him and not Hain, but she smiled.

She got much heavier about halfway there, he noted, as his body was drained of the adrenalin that had pumped into him during the—fall? Finally he was straining at the weight, although she weighed no more than half what she should. He finally admitted defeat and had to put her down. She didn’t protest, but as they continued to walk she clung tightly to his arm.

No matter what, Hain no longer owned her.

Steps of what looked like polished stone led up to the break in the rail—six of them, they noted. Finally they were all up on some kind of platform from which a conveyor belt stretched out. But it was not moving in either direction.

They all looked to the captain for guidance. For the first time in his life, Nathan Brazil felt the full weight of responsibility. He had gotten them into this—never mind that they had talked him into it, it was his responsibility— and he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do next.

“Well,” he began, “if we stay here we starve to death, or run out of air—or both. We may do so anyway, but we at least ought to see what we’re into. There has to be a doorway out of this place.”

“Probably six of them,” Hain said caustically.

Brazil stepped out onto one of the conveyors, and it suddenly started moving. The movement was so unexpected that he found himself carried along farther and farther away from the rest before anyone could say