Johnston had abandoned his exaggerated gait and was now walking normally, seemingly heading for the heart of the city. The buildings ahead loomed taller; they seemed to be draped with thick steel cobwebs that connected their roofs to each other and spilled to the ground. They had the look of melting toffee that had been pulled and stretched so that long sticky strands ran drooping in all directions. A low note sounded through the air and Herb thought he saw a flicker of movement in the distance, barely seen through the crowded misshapes of the buildings. He broke into a run to catch up with Johnston.
“What was that?” he hissed.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Johnston pushed his hands into his pockets and continued strolling, singing softly to himself as he went. Herb fell into step next to him, glancing around nervously. They rounded a corner.
Johnston broke off his singing unexpectedly. “Look!” he said, pointing upward, a cufflink made of four balls of multicolored metal peeping from the edge of his suit. Herb felt his stomach sink as he looked up.
A tower stretched up into the very sky, rising higher and higher above the rest of the city, dwarfing all the other buildings. A tapering needle of steel piercing the clouds of silver spaceships that hung silently above them. Herb wondered how it could remain standing; it seemed too thin to support itself. He had a sudden urge to run, convinced it was going to come crashing down on him—
Johnston interrupted his thoughts. “We need to get up to where the spaceships are. I’m guessing that building is a space elevator.”
“Oh.” Herb bit his lip thoughtfully. “You said we were spying. What are we looking for?”
“Lots of things. Size of Enemy resources, possible intentions, possible weaknesses, but mostly we’re looking for a way back.”
“A way back? I still don’t understand how we got here.”
Before Johnston could answer, the humming noise was heard again, only closer. A yellow pod with black stripes appeared in a gap between two buildings, only a couple of hundred meters away. It rotated 360 degrees on its axis and then moved off again, vanishing from their view among the forest of towers.
“What was that?” whispered Herb. “It looked like a giant bumblebee. I think it was looking for us. Should we hide?”
“I don’t think so,” said Johnston. “Not yet anyway. Now…look at that. That’s interesting.” He pointed to the building next to them.
Herb gazed at it, puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said. “It just looks like the entrance to a shopping center.”
He was led by Johnston to a wide portico. It was too high, of course, like everything else in the Necropolis. Away above them, a silver-grey pediment seemed to melt into a colonnade that oozed down around them to merge with the ground. Herb felt as if he was standing in a rib cage. They peered through tall windows into a brightly lit atrium, lined on all sides by small glass-fronted rooms. Deformed escalators climbed the walls at too steep an angle. Herb shivered at the thought of what goods might be sold in such a place.
Johnston seemed delighted, however. “It does look like a shopping center, doesn’t it?” he said. “Now doesn’t that suggest something?”
“Yeah,” muttered Herb. “This would not be a good place to ask for a refund.”
The strangeness of his surroundings was making Herb light-headed.
“Was that supposed to be funny?” Johnston said sharply. “I do the comedy stylings: you just listen and learn. No. The fact that this place looks like a shopping center suggests that this planet is intended for a civilian population. Furthermore, one that resembles an Earthlike society. Do you think they have shops on Delta Scuti 4?”
“You’d be astonished how rarely I think about such things.”
Johnston gave him a withering look.
“No, I don’t,” Herb said, chastened.
Johnston stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Now that changes things considerably. This is not what we were expecting at all.” He lapsed into a thoughtful silence.
The humming sound rose in volume so quickly that Herb instinctively leaped forward to grab Johnston’s jacket. He caught a flash of yellow and black reflected in the glass before him as a bumblebee pod whisked down the street behind them.
“It’s seen us,” he gasped.
Johnston shook Herb’s hand from his sleeve.
“Don’t be so silly,” he said, then pointed into the atrium. “Come on. We’re going in there.”
Herb didn’t know whether to feel relief at avoiding their pursuer or fear at entering the eerie mall. Johnston seemed completely unconcerned about either. He placed a hand on one of the tall glass doors and pushed gently.
“Stuck. I should have guessed as much.”
Herb could see that the doors were not so much fused together as imprints in the front of the building. They seemed to be one piece of glass that had not managed to separate in two. Wondering what Johnston was going to do next, he suddenly found himself standing inside, right in the center of the atrium, looking up at the high-vaulted ceiling. Silver metal creepers hung above his head. Like everything outside, the building’s interior had the look of stretched and melting toffee. Herb’s mind caught up with events.
“What happened there?” asked Herb, astonished.
“I readjusted our position to be inside the building.”
“How? Hyperspace jump?” Herb was impressed despite himself. “I didn’t think anyone was capable of that degree of control.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Johnston. “Haven’t you realized yet that we’re not really here? Do you think I’d bring our physical bodies into the Enemy Domain? Now come on, we need to get our report back to the EA.”
“What report?”
“The report confirming the fact that the Domain contains—or will contain—civilians. Haven’t you wondered where they’re going to come from?”
“No.”
Johnston gave an exasperated sigh and walked on, past the squashed retail units that surrounded them, heading toward an arch at the rear of the atrium. The walls back here seemed to have melted drastically; they hung down like great folds of cloth. Herb gazed uneasily at the narrow corridor beyond the arch. If he didn’t know better, he would have said they were walking into the building’s throat.
“Are you sure about this?” he murmured.
“We’re heading for the space elevator, right? This is a shopping mall. How do you think the shoppers are going to get here?” Johnston rolled his eyes. “Hyperspace jumps?”
They passed through the arch, Herb’s uneasiness passing along with him. A high-ceilinged hallway lay beyond; four unmoving escalators disgorged from subterranean depths grasping its walls with long metallic strands.
Herb swallowed hard. He didn’t want to risk descending an escalator. At the same time, he didn’t want Johnston to know he was frightened.
“Okay,” he stammered, “which one should we take?”
Johnston was staring at the patterns engraved on the nearby wall.
“If this diagram is a map, as I think it is, I would suggest that escalator over there. If it’s not a map, then you’ll be an extremely privileged young man.”
“Why?” Herb asked, mystified.
“Because you will have been present on the occasion when, for the first time in my life, I was wrong about something.”
Before Herb could reply, Johnston had moved quickly to his chosen escalator and started to descend, his shoes clicking brightly on the polished metal steps. Herb took a deep breath and followed him.
The escalator went a long way below ground. Herb had to concentrate on keeping up with Johnston. Herb had never attempted to be any fitter than the minimum level that the EA’s exercise program instilled in him; indeed, he tended to look down on those pursuing extra fitness as an end in itself. All those wasted kilojoules. He could understand the fact that Johnston was in better condition. What he found galling was the way that the brilliant tapping of Robert’s feet gave the impression he was dancing down the steps.
He was beginning to understand that everything Johnston did was intended subtly to mock Herb in some way. If only he weren’t getting so tired he could pursue that thought further. He wished the escalator would start moving, not that there was any chance of that. Like everything else he had seen in the Necropolis, the steps seemed to be fused with the surrounding structure. Silver-grey strands ran in every direction. Herb wondered what would be waiting at the bottom of the steps. A Lite train station would be the obvious answer, but if they had instead stepped out into the first circle of Hell, Herb liked to think that he would not have been that surprised.
“What is it with this place?” Herb gasped as he clattered on down the steps.
“Haven’t you figured that out yet?” Johnston called back to him. “This whole city is the result of a faulty VNM. You get this happening sometimes with large-scale VNM projects. Maybe errors in the original machine’s design didn’t show up until the nth generation. Or sometimes a machine reproduces badly at the start of the process, and then you get faulty machines making copies of themselves. History lesson, Herb: that’s what happened back on Earth with the first major VNM-built arcology.”
“I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to tell you about this,” Johnston snorted. “Given what you did yourself, you should know all about badly designed machines.”
Herb didn’t rise to the bait. “So this city is a reject. That’s why everything is so misshapen.” He paused for thought. “Even so, this is weird. You’d expect the whole place just to collapse, or maybe not to have gotten built at all. Just end up as a pile of machines.”
Like on my planet
, he added ruefully to himself.
“Usually you’d be right. But sometimes the fault is very subtle. That’s what happened here. I would guess that the suicide mechanism isn’t working properly. Everything seems to have formed correctly, but nothing has shriveled away when finished with. That’s why everything is still fused together.”
Johnston idly reached up and patted a silver loop hanging from the ceiling. “Probably why the scaffolding and struts are still hanging around, too.”
“How can you touch that if we’re not here?” Herb asked.
“How can you hear sounds and see things? How come your feet touch the ground? Listen, Herb, when I model something, I do it properly.”
And that, it seemed, was all the explanation Herb was getting for the moment.
At last!
Herb thankfully saw the bottom of the escalator approaching. A large, elongated archway loomed ahead of them. But through it he could see only darkness…
“Amazing when you think about it,” Johnston continued. “It helps you grasp just how extensive the Enemy Domain is. I mean, you can see it shaded in on the Star Charts, but that doesn’t give you any real sense of scale. We’re currently walking down an escalator at the edge of an extremely large city on a nondescript planet that has been practically forgotten by the Domain. You’d think it would destroy this place and start again; instead, it uses the planet as a staging post. Ah, well. It has given us an opportunity.”
Johnston reached the bottom of the steps and hurried through the archway into the station beyond.
“Hell’s teeth!” he shouted.
“Robert! What is it?”
Herb clattered the last few steps into the station. He could see something moving.
Johnston was bending to pick up his hat from the tiled floor, an embarrassed grin across his face.
“I forgot what we were for a moment.”
Herb didn’t feel anywhere near so calm. The vaulted spaces of the station roof were swarming with large, metal, spiderlike creatures: thin metal abdomens and long, spindly legs. They moved lazily backwards and forwards, crawling over each other’s bodies. One of them dropped from the ceiling, landing nearby. It turned around blindly for a moment before scuttling to the platform edge and dropping down onto the tracks. It rapidly headed off down a dark tunnel.
“What the hell?” Herb danced back across the platform in panic.
Johnston couldn’t stop laughing “Just VNMs. Construction robots! If only you could see your face.” He gasped for breath. “They can’t commit suicide, remember? They don’t know what to do when they’ve finished their work. These tunnels must be choked with them.”
He straightened up and wiped a tear from his eye. “They gave me a bit of a start, too, I must admit. But you. Your face.” A thought suddenly occurred to him and he giggled. “Can you imagine what would happen if the Enemy Domain sent colonists here now? Can you imagine them coming down here to catch a train?”
“That isn’t funny.”
“Ah. I suppose not.”
Johnston seemed to gain some self-control. He turned left then right, sniffing the air for a moment.
“This way, I guess,” he said, pointing down one tunnel.
Herb looked horrified. “What? With all those robots scuttling back and forth?”
Johnston shook his head. “I told you before. We’re not really here. We just needed to find a clear path. The train tracks should be conductive enough. If not…Well, I guess we’ll never find out about it.”
“Just a minute…” said Herb, but it was already too late. They were no longer in the station.
Johnston got it right the first time.
“Not that that should be any surprise,” he said, looking around the basement of the space elevator. Herb felt his knees give way. The space he was standing in was just too big. He felt like a microbe, looking up into the bell of an enormous trumpet. The tiled floor seemed to vanish as it approached the distant, inward-curving walls. Long cables ran down from the seeming infinity above to burrow themselves into the floor all around them. There was a hollowness to the air, a feeling of resonance stilled and of themselves standing in the low-density part of the wave. If the space elevator was a trumpet, the mouthpiece must be out in space. Herb felt delirious: the hollowness that he felt was the sound blown by the emptiness above.
He reeled a little. He wasn’t thinking straight and he knew it. His mind couldn’t grasp the sheer size of the room.
“This is part of the Enemy Domain?” whispered Herb, eyes wide. He swallowed.
“What?” said Johnston, taking in Herb’s awestruck expression. “Oh, this is nothing. We almost built space elevators like this in Earth space. They’d have been bigger than this, too. The EA didn’t allow them, though. There is tremendous stress on one of these things. If they snap…” He paused, looking thoughtful. “The question is why the Enemy Domain thought it was needed…Anyway, come on. We’ll ride that cable up to the top.”