"Can we fly down through them, as did Captain Rebka and Professor Lang?" Tally addressed Birdie Kelly, as the most experienced pilot. "They reached the surface safely."
"Fly down there—in this scumbucket?" Birdie glared around at the controls and fittings of the ore freighter. "We sure as hell can't. Take a look at us. The drive don't work at more than half power, there's no weapons to pop Phages with, and we're about as mobile as a Dowser. If those are all Phages down there, and they're half as nippy as Captain Rebka says, we've got problems. Maybe if they get a good
sniff
of this ship before they start chewing, we'll have a chance. I know Phages are supposed to eat anything, but there have to be limits."
"A sniff—"
"I was
joking
, E.C. What I mean is, we'd better stay well out of the way."
"But we don't have to rely on the
Incomparable
to get us there," Julius Graves said. "We can use the
Summer Dreamboat
. It took the others safely past the Phages, and Professor Lang said in her last message that she left it on remote control. We can call it up to us, and fly it down."
"But what about Rebka and Lang and Kallik?" Birdie did not like the assumption that they were all going down to Glister, danger or no danger. "They'll need a ship if they want to get out of there in a hurry."
"They'll have one—the
Have-It-All
. It's still there if they need it. And we can surely borrow the
Dreamboat
for a few hours. We'll have it back to them before they even know it's gone. But it will take a while for the
Dreamboat
to get here. We ought to give the command at once. So if you will please proceed, Commissioner . . ."
It
was
a Phage on the surface of Glister.
Or maybe it was best to say that it was the devastated remains of one. J'merlia had approached as closely as he cared to and confirmed that the heap of slate-gray debris contained regular pentagonal elements. But he could see nothing of organs or an internal structure, and other factors made him question that this was a Phage as they were known in the rest of the spiral arm. For one thing, Phages were supposed to be just about indestructible. This one looked as though it had hurtled vertically and at high velocity into the surface of Glister. It should have smashed a giant hole. But the impact had left no mark, or else the mark had since vanished.
What could Glister be made of, to remain unscathed after such a blow?
J'merlia lifted lemon-yellow eyes on their short eyestalks to the heavens and looked for more Phages. They were there, whipping past overhead. Lower on every pass, if he was any judge.
He trotted on, scanning the surface of Glister for anything familiar. It was less than five minutes before he came across a taut cable running from horizon to horizon. He followed it and soon saw the
Have-It-All
. He hurried to the ship hoping to find Kallik or the missing humans, but a quick look inside showed that the cabins were deserted; the message from Kallik confirmed that. Forty meters away stood a piece of equipment, partially sunk into Glister's smooth gray surface. Four tight-stretched lines at ninety degrees to each other appeared to support the machine.
J'merlia decided that the lines probably ran all the way around the planetoid. There was no point in following them. He went closer to the machine and recognized it as a field monitor and inhibitor. If it was operating as Kallik had suggested, the surface around it might offer no resistance to weight. J'merlia went forward cautiously to the place where one of the lines vanished into Glister's interior. When he placed a forelimb on the surface at that point, it went down without resistance. The smooth gray appeared totally insubstantial.
He straightened up. Another cable ran from a stout stanchion on the
Have-It-All
's hull all the way to the point where it plunged into the unblemished surface by the field inhibitor. Anyone might try to climb down that rope, into the unknown gray region—or, more likely, use it as a way to return to the outside of Glister.
J'merlia went back to the ship and gave it a more thorough inspection. As when Rebka and Lang had found it, everything was in working order. Given an hour or two to familiarize himself with the controls, he could make a fair shot at flying it anywhere in the spiral arm via the Bose Network Transition Points.
Which more and more felt like a good idea. Every few minutes now he heard the whistle of Phages overhead. Something was maddening them, and that something was probably the presence of newcomers on the surface of Glister. The place was not safe anymore; even as he watched, a Phage came sailing by with open maw, no more than a hundred meters above the
Have-It-All
.
It was only a matter of time before some furiously energized Phage, by accident or design, made a direct hit on him or on the ship. He had to get away from the planetoid, or he would soon be of no use to anyone.
J'merlia was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with his own actions. He had come to Glister with a poorly defined idea of saving Rebka, Lang, and Kallik, and perhaps Atvar H'sial and Louis Nenda. But having arrived here he had no idea what to do next. He lacked Kallik's initiative and decisiveness. It certainly seemed a poor idea to follow her to the interior of Glister. On the other hand it was no better to stay on the surface, because that option appeared more dangerous with every minute.
J'merlia sat in the cabin of the
Have-It-All
and dithered.
He had had enough of this free-thinking misery; what he longed for was a master to give him directions.
His own orders had been to stay on Dreyfus-27. It was the one thing he had been told to do, and he had disobeyed. He did not want to go back to Dreyfus-27—it was too far from Glister—but maybe he should take a good intermediate step. He could fly the
Summer Dreamboat
far enough from Glister to be safe from the Phages, yet close enough to monitor everything that happened on the planetoid's surface. Then if Kallik or one of the others appeared, J'merlia could have the ship down to pick them up in a few minutes.
It was not a good solution, but it was a reasonable compromise. He hesitated for a few minutes more, until a Phage came whistling past almost close enough to grab him.
The
Summer Dreamboat
was no more than two minutes' travel at a rapid trot. J'merlia closed the cabin of the
Have-It-All
and set off for the other ship.
He was less than a hundred meters away when it rose smoothly from the surface of Glister. As J'merlia gaped up, it hurtled away at maximum acceleration into the glimmering void above his head.
Seen from a distance with the great bulk of Gargantua as backdrop, Glister was an insignificant mote. Without the telltale signal from the
Have-It-All
's beacon, the planetoid would have been too small to notice, lost amid a thousand larger fragments.
But viewed from the
inside
. . .
The floors, bulging walls, and arched ceilings of the lower levels were formed of broad interlocking hoops, each one pleated and rigid and glowing with its own faint phosphorescence. It was like walking through the curling alimentary canal of a giant alien beast. Some sections were filled with nets and cables, like those found on the higher levels, while others were totally empty; occasional areas were littered with pieces of equipment placed apparently at random.
Darya was muttering to herself as Hans Rebka led the way deeper and deeper, on through endless corridors.
"What's that?" he asked over his shoulder as she swore more loudly than usual.
"Calculations. Depressing ones. The radius of Glister is one-point-one-six kilometers. Even if each interior level is fifty meters high, that's a hundred and twenty square kilometers of floor. How long is it going to take us to look at it all?"
"Don't worry about it. You'll starve to death first."
Hans Rebka had to be hungry, too, but he was defiantly cheerful. Starvation, or even the mention of it, did not make Darya cheerful. It made her grouchy. Back on Sentinel Gate she had not missed a meal in twenty years. That thought was no help at all. "We don't seem to be finding anything useful. Where do you think you're taking us?"
Hans did not answer. In spite of her grumbles, it was Darya who had insisted on stopping every few minutes to take a close look at some novel structure or machine. Every object in the interior of Glister was a product of the Builders' technology and therefore a source of fascination to the professor in her. She could recognize many of them, devices that occurred in some of the other 1236 known Builder artifacts scattered around the spiral arm, but a number were totally unfamiliar, and she wanted to inspect them closely and estimate their function. Rebka was the one who had to drag her away, every time, insisting that they must find the control center of Glister before they did anything else. Since the planetoid was artificial and habitable,
something
had to be keeping it in working order.
Rebka had not mentioned his own secret fear. Gravity was increasing steadily as they wound their way down toward the center of Glister. Now it was close to two gees. Beneath their feet must be some powerful field source. They could still walk easily enough—but what would they do if it rose higher yet? No one knew what gravity field the Builders had found natural. A central control room for Glister might occupy a high-gee environment that neither he nor Darya could tolerate.
From the curvature of the floor he estimated that they were still about six hundred meters from the center of Glister. Given a choice of paths, he had always descended. It was only an instinct, the belief that the most important regions of the planetoid ought to be near the center rather than on some upper level. If he was wrong, he would have doomed both of them.
In spite of all that, Rebka was quite enjoying himself. This was what life was all about. Exploring things that no human had ever seen before, with an interesting companion—what more could a man ask, unless it was for a little food?
"I think we're coming to something," he said. "The light ahead is different. It's getting fainter."
The answering growl behind Rebka sounded skeptical. He wondered if it was just Darya's stomach. As the illumination from walls and ceiling faded, he stepped forward more cautiously. Soon he could see nothing ahead, not even the floor, but his instincts told him they were approaching something new.
"Stay there." He kept his voice down to the softest whisper. "I don't know what's ahead, but I want to feel my way for a bit before we shine a light." Even those breathed words sounded strange, hollow and echoing.
He went down on hands and knees and felt his way forward. Five meters farther on, his left hand found itself groping into empty space. He reached out as far as he could on both sides. Nothing. The tunnel ended in a blind drop. There was no light below, or in any direction. He crawled back to join Darya and placed his mouth next to her ear.
"We'll have to use your flashlight," he whispered. "Take a look ahead. Be careful how you shine it—straight down on the floor first, then raise it up slowly." He moved aside to allow her to come level with him, then paced her carefully forward.
"No farther now!" He stopped her. "There's nothing ahead."
Darya nodded, unseen in the darkness. The light beam shone on the floor at her feet, then moved out over the lip in front of them. As it came higher its narrow beam reflected faintly off a distant wall. Darya inched forward, shining the light downward. One more step, and she would be over the edge.
The ledge she stood on was halfway up the wall of a great open room, with a sheer drop below that plunged twenty meters before it curved around to form the bowl-shaped empty floor of the chamber.
Darya stepped back a pace. In this gravity field, any fall could be fatal. She shone the beam higher. Above them was a vaulted ceiling, confirming the spherical shape of the chamber. The domed vault was featureless, without lights or support struts. The whole room had to be at least sixty meters across.
"Something's there." Hans kept his voice to a whisper, but the echoes came rolling in from across the room, reluctant to die.
There . . . there . . . there . . . there.
"Right in the middle. Shine the light in the center."
Darya pointed the flashlight straight ahead. Hovering in the middle of the room without any visible support was a silvery sphere about ten meters across. She thought at once of the sphere that had risen from the broken surface of Quake at Summertide, but this one was hundreds of times smaller.
And it was more active. The ball had been hanging in a fixed position, but as the beam touched it the surface became a play of motion. The flashlight reflected an undulatory pattern, like slow waves on a ball of rippling mercury. The waves grew and steadied. The sphere began to deform and elongate.
There . . . there . . . there . . . there .
. . A rusty, creaking voice filled the chamber, as deep and ancient as the sea.
There . . . there . . . there . . . there. Center . . . center . . . center . . . center.
Darya was so excited that she could hardly hold the flashlight steady. The sphere had become a distorted ellipsoid. A frond of silver began to grow upward from the top, slowly evolving to a five-sided flower that turned to face Darya and Hans. Open pentagonal disks extruded from the front of the ball, pointing toward the flashlight beam. A long, thin tail grew down, extending to the floor of the chamber. In three minutes the featureless sphere became a horned and tailed devil-beast, with a flowerlike head that sought the source of the intrusion.
A flickering green light shone from an aperture in the body of the demon and illuminated Hans and Darya. The inside of the great chamber shimmered with its reflection. Darya turned off the flashlight.
Human form . . . human . . . human. Too soon . . . soon . . . soon .
. . The weary voice came echoing across to them.
Who . . . who . . . who . . . who .
. .