by Bill Adams
Slowly, we gathered around the base of the formation, the other archaeologists joining us. We looked without speaking at the cleverness of the hinge, still invisible, the rock facings folded past each other. We felt a curious vibration through the soles of our boots, the whole ridge faintly trembling, and heard a sound rise and rise, like many voices, or the rush of great waters. It became a roar that filled the sky and drew us to one side of the plateau.
Something was happening. Something as big as the switch we’d thrown to make it happen.
As we watched, awed and silent, the entire lake below us disappeared. Emptied. Like bathwater down a drain.
Chapter Ten
And still we stared, and still we were silent.
What does one say about something as big as an earthquake, as eerie as an eclipse? Nothing that wouldn’t have sounded tinny and all too mortal when the rush of water died away.
This, I knew as I watched the last cataract of brown water spiral into the immense pit, was Condé’s “barrow.” I was still stuck with my impersonation, but all other bets were off.
“Look! Look!”
Harry Lagado danced on the edge of empty air. Most of the lake had been shallow, and the greater part of the now-exposed basin was flat brown mud, still puddled here and there. The water had run out through a broad circular shaft close to the shore; it was at this huge well that Harry pointed. “Look! A dome!”
Slowly, more slowly than one might expect given the speed of the emptying, a bulbous shape emerged from depths beyond view. The dome, a spinning wet hemisphere of polyurethane appearance, was supported by a cylinder of equal circumference and increasingly revealed height—a blatantly obscene effect.
“Drills through the mud, and spins it off,” Wongama said. “Can’t say how many revolutions per second.”
“Is it a missile, do you think?” asked Helen Hogg-Smythe. The resemblance to an ancient chemical-propulsion weapon was frightening—but then the illusion was dispelled.
The dome, having just passed the height of the former waterline, irised open and disappeared. The curved wedges that had composed it retracted, flexed, and plastered themselves to the outside of the cylinder, which was revealed to be a wide, hollow shaft. And now something like an elevator was rising within the shaft.
There was time to take a step back. Everyone appeared to be surprised at what was going on, though I noted that Bunny showed no fear. If Mishima or Foyle had secrets, this was not one of them, unless they were better actors than I had ever worked with.
“Very, uh, grandiose and impressive,” Lagado said. “But notice, notice that technologically—”
“Pretty old-fashioned,” Foyle agreed. “Yes. All mechanical, no force fields. Like a hollow asteroid base from colonial times.”
“An artifact, in fact!” Hogg-Smythe said, and someone emitted an uncertain laugh.
Far below, the elevator deck stopped as soon as it cleared the lip of its shaft. “I put its area at about two hectares,” Wongama said. The man had a mania for quantifying.
“We can’t see anything from here,” Harry complained.
“Just as well. They may not be able to see us, either,” Foyle pointed out.
“Who says there is a ‘they’?” Wongama objected. “Surely anyone running an underground station on this planet would have made contact with the senator’s people by now. Unless they had reason to hide. In which case…”
“Why come up now?” I said.
“Exactly. And why come up empty? No: I think we will find that whatever it was, it’s abandoned, running on automatic. The underground part can’t be too big, or our orbital scanners—”
“Should have seen it anyway—underground!” Lagado insisted. “It’s already too big to miss.”
Friar Francisco had a deep, thoughtful voice. “This use of the balancing rock as a trigger for the opening. Why? Why not a little red button?”
“We know nothing,” Hogg-Smythe said. “We have everything to learn.”
The archaeologists, I realized, were in heaven.
For the first time we heard a mechanical noise, as the elevator deck swiveled briskly halfway off the shaft. It kissed the shore nearest the ridge and came to a stop with finality—a locking sound.
No one said anything. To suggest a closer investigation might have provoked someone to point out all the reasons to be careful and leave it alone—might have provoked the sub-commissioner to remind them that they were just amateurs, forbidden access to any new or important find. So no one said anything in front of me. They just went, and so did I.
◆◆◆
Harry Lagado led the way, his father bleating unheard warnings from the rear. Most of the others were encumbered by pieces of equipment grabbed at random from the racks in the vehicles. Foyle was wearing her backpack, and Friar Francisco carried a whiskbroom and a trowel.
Helen Hogg-Smythe, hampered by a large coil of climbing rope—why?—tripped and stopped short, just in front of me, and I was nearly brained by the crook of her metal walking stick. After that I was more chivalrous and helped her over the rough spots.
“Rush and tear, tear and rush,” she puffed—but as excited as any of them, like a young girl off to meet her lover.
“Don’t, Harry! Wait!”
With the selective deafness of adolescence Harry dashed from the bank of the lake crater onto the elevator deck and ran toward one of the two small structures that broke its flat surface. But as the rest of us reached level ground and approached the bank he came halfway back, looking unsure of himself. By this time, though, his father was too short of breath to chew him out.
There he stood. The thing hadn’t tipped over and dumped him down the shaft, or electrocuted him, or fried him like an egg. It was just an elevator. The rest of the party began to filter across.
Ariel hung back with me, as empty-handed, in a sky-blue jacket and overalls designed more for looks than for crawling around mechanical relics.
“What’s that booth over there?” she asked, pointing at the larger and closer projection. It did look somewhat like a weatherproof telecom booth. Foyle was at its threshold.
“I think it may be a control turret,” she called out.
I was reluctant to get onto the platform. Whoever had built the lift might have abandoned it, but—unlike the archaeologists—I had reason to believe that it had been found and used since. How deep did the elevator go, and what did Condé have stashed down there?
Even Helen Hogg-Smythe had decided to venture onto the deck, after tying herself to the climbing rope and securing the other end to a sturdy little tree on the shore. I gave a mental shrug and offered Ariel my arm. “Shall we?”
Friar Francisco stepped off just as we stepped on, murmuring something about going for a camera.
Our boots did not ring on the gray surface; the underlying metal bore the same slaty coating you see on colonial-era landing fields. And as we went farther and farther, I realized that the platform was large enough to accommodate spacecraft. I don’t think in hectares, but it must have been a hundred and fifty meters across. No wonder the two little booths on its rim had gone unnoticed from the crest of the ridge.
I felt exposed. When Ken Mishima hailed me from the farther of the two booths, we headed in his direction. There was something off-center about the man, but I never doubted he’d be handy in an emergency.
This booth, set in far enough from the rim to avoid a dizzying view down the shaft, was more solid than the other, like a cannon barrel with a wheel-lock vault door open in its side and a large, tricky-looking valve on top.
“It’s an airlock connector,” Mishima said. “You can always tell a military design. No frills. Shaped only by need, like a soldier himself.”
“Sure,” I said, stiffening my neck against the g-force of his turns of phrase. “But what does it connect to?”
“When the elevator is retracted, there must be a false lake floor that closes over it.”
“Mimickin
g bedrock, to fool scanners,” Lagado managed to put in.
“Certainly.” Mishima nodded. “But individuals in diving equipment could be exfiltrated to the surface without emptying the lake and revealing the base.”
“And at other times, when the planet was known to be secure,” I said, “they could let the water out, and bring up this…cargo loader we’re standing on. It’s big enough to take a good-sized spacecraft down into hiding.”
“A privateer, say, during one of the intercolonial wars,” Mishima speculated. “Something reinforced for surface gravities because it couldn’t afford to be spotted in orbit.”
“I suppose…” Lagado said. “If the underground chambers don’t extend beyond the radius of the lake, they might just escape scanner detection. And the holding tanks for the lake water are perhaps concealed by the mass of the ridge.”
“Were scanners less powerful in those days?” Ariel asked.
“No, by then human ingenuity had already peaked,” Mishima said. “In our post-classical era, the war with nature is at a truce.”
“Sure,” I said. “Ruy, didn’t you say that the clay strata here tend to confuse scanners?”
Lagado shook his head. “I don’t say it. Some do.”
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there is a little more to it?” Helen Hogg-Smythe had just joined the conversation, her safety line coiled around one shoulder and trailing behind her. “Perhaps a small barracks down there, with some personal effects left behind? Even a trash basket could contain treasures. And for just a little while, perhaps a week, it’s all ours!” She gave Ariel a playful nudge. “When you stranded us without a radio, you didn’t anticipate anything like this.”
“I wish you joy of it,” Ariel said, smiling.
Hogg-Smythe’s face fell. “But of course your defense satellites will spot it right away. They’re always on the lookout for volcanoes and tidal waves and things of that sort, aren’t they? When they notice this, they’ll order a flitter sent immediately. You, Commissioner, will be obliged to report the find to your superiors. And that will be the end of our role.”
“I’m not so sure,” Ariel said. “Until the satellites are fully operational, I think they’re concentrating on basic security—takeoffs, landings, and radio transmissions. They wouldn’t ignore a forest fire, but this is less obvious. You may get your week here. Unless the commissioner wants us to load up a buggy with extra batteries and drive to the hotel. We could make it in a few days. Is it really so important to report it right away, Alun—sir? What will the Commission say if you don’t?”
I knew what the Commission would say if I did—“Who the hell are you?”
Lagado surprised me with a way out. “Wait, wait, wait a minute! With all due respect, Commissioner, your jurisdiction is over alien artifacts. All we need to excavate human-built ruins is the permission of the planetary government, and the senator’s representative is more or less that.”
“Good point,” I said.
“This installation may well be related to the Stone Huts,” Mishima said, shaking his head. “We mustn’t be ruled by ego desires.”
His attitude seemed to surprise and irritate the others.
“No, no, it’s obviously of human manufacture, colonial era,” Wongama countered.
“I can prove it!” Helen Hogg-Smythe said. “Here, let me show you the other booth.”
She led the way, perhaps too fast; by the time we arrived, she was panting. “Where is my stick?” she asked, and Lagado, spotting it back on shore, ordered Harry after it. Poised at the entrance to the booth, the boy looked torn, then ran. He jumped onto the bank just before Friar Francisco returned with his camera.
The walls of the booth were transparent and its gray dome was decorated with a rim of glassy black ornaments. Bunny was leaning against the outside, looking frustrated. He must have realized that he couldn’t keep obstructing the investigation without revealing ulterior motives. For my part, I was resigned to the loss of Condé’s money; I could only hope to arrange an early departure, before our cover was blown.
Inside the booth, Foyle and Mishima stood before what had to be a control panel. “See?” said Helen Hogg-Smythe. There was no data screen or instruction plaque, but the touchpoints were labeled in the alphanumerics of good old Ur-Linguish.
“Confirmed human,” I said. “But please don’t touch it. We don’t want this thing to move just yet.”
Wongama smiled tautly. “No, sir.”
“I’m going to the far edge to look down the inner shaft,” Foyle announced. I nodded, as if she’d been asking permission.
“I’ll come with you,” Ken Mishima said.
Ariel and I left the booth to Wongama and Lagado, who had already started an argument. Then Friar Francisco positioned us more shoreward, to provide scale for one of his pictures.
The midday sun washed into the slate-gray surface of the platform, and I could feel the heat through my boots. A rotten cabbage smell blew in from the marsh, along with puzzled birds that landed, pecked about, and took off again. I marveled at how quickly this mystery from an Arabian Nights cave was becoming just another abandoned military base.
Harry Lagado emerged from the tall grass on shore, waving Hogg-Smythe’s staff. The old woman straightened and walked briskly across to meet him as he jumped back onto the platform.
“Alun,” Ariel said, leaning close, “Was Lagado right? Or will the Column claim jurisdiction over this thing? I’m just worried about the red tape, if—”
The air filled with a deep whine. The deck shuddered and then pulled away from the bank. The rotation was surprisingly smooth and fast, the stop cushioned. The deck clicked back into place atop the shaft, isolated from the shore.
“Wongama!” I shouted.
“We didn’t do it!”
“It’s…it’s all right,” Helen Hogg-Smythe called out. She’d dropped the coil of safety line from her shoulder in time to keep the movement of the deck from tearing it off. It now extended without much slack to the small tree on shore; she started to untie the other end from her belt. “That’s why I brought this. We’ll just tie it to one of the booths and use it to get back across—”
A hidden klaxon began to sound from the larger booth.
I found myself running toward her. “Helen, hurry! Just take the belt off!”
She couldn’t have heard me over the raving of the klaxon. She’d realized what could happen, but tugged uselessly at the knot, panicky. Harry dropped the metal crook and ran toward her, too.
The platform beneath our feet began to sink into its hole. Smoothly. Quickly. In effect, the circular shaft wall rose—pulling the safety line up and taut, swinging Hogg-Smythe like a pendulum. Harry managed to interpose his body and muffle the impact as the two of them crashed against the shaft wall. As I reached them the klaxon died and the platform came to a halt; we’d only dropped twenty meters or so. But it continued to get darker—and I realized that the mudguard dome was irising closed above us.
The two of them were still tugging at the knot. “Just the buckle!” I cried, but too late: one of the rising wedges of metal lifted the line, tugging Hogg-Smythe upward; her feet had left the surface. I threw Harry to one side and reached for the belt buckle, failed, and got a boot in the face.
But then, as the iris closed on the last of the sunlight, it also—with a loud snapping sound—severed the line. I caught the little woman as she fell, and she grabbed me around the neck as I staggered there. “Stupid, stupid,” she moaned, and I shushed her.
“You okay, Harry?” I asked. He nodded, his face pale in the dim blue lights that had popped up around the rim of the platform. The others were coming toward us now, casting long blue shadows; they walked gingerly, as if the platform might give way beneath their feet. The klaxon spoke once more, and we all flinched.
The same dropping sensation again, but this time the shaft wall remained stationary relative to us; I almost thought I imagined the motion.
“The whole shaft’s being lowered,” Wongama said.
This descent didn’t last more than twice as long as the previous one. Now we heard a great rumbling over our heads, and as the mudguard dome retracted again, we dimly saw our new ceiling—the lake’s new floor: an enormous, girder-reinforced slab of layered stone. A moment later we were dazzled. Bright floodlights had been lit among the girders.
I put Helen Hogg-Smythe down. “Back to the control turret,” I suggested, and we walked that way.
Lagado pointed at a hatch in the distant ceiling, directly above the smaller of our booths. “There’s your airlock, Ken. If only we could get that far back up, and connect.”
A new rumbling, a whoosh, and the roar of pumps.
“And if we had diving equipment,” Mishima said.
“So stupid to tie myself like that,” Helen Hogg-Smythe murmured. “What could I have been thinking of?”
“We all saw you do it, and no one thought twice,” I said.
“Which is not to say it wasn’t stupid,” Bunny added.
“It’s getting cold,” Harry said.
“There are no doors in the shaft wall,” Foyle pointed out. “There ought to be, if people used to hide here for any length of time. There ought to be more.”
The klaxon shouted agreement. The elevator began to descend again, within the shaft this time, the polished walls rising fast and faster.
Down and down, with no sign of stopping.
The floodlights turned themselves off once we’d receded from them. The rim lamps stayed on, however, dim and blue but permitting us to see stringcourses in the shaft wall shoot up at regular intervals. After arguing for a few minutes with Lagado over how far apart they were, Piet Wongama estimated our speed at forty k’s an hour. We wouldn’t go that fast for long.
We gathered around the control booth, except for Foyle and Wongama, who paced aimlessly nearer the rim. Ariel had backed up against me, and I put an arm around her waist. Helen Hogg-Smythe leaned heavily on her staff next to the Lagados; one of the tall boy’s hands rested on her shoulder, the other on his father’s. Lips moving without sound, Friar Francisco performed a devotion, while Bunny Velasquez slouched against the side of the booth, his head drawn in like a turtle’s. Ken Mishima stood to one side as if waiting to receive—or give—orders. And everyone kept yawning. Not just from tension, but to pop our ears in instinctive response to the changing air pressure.
