He found one rock that budged a little bit. It was about the right size. He pushed and pulled on it repeatedly until he had opened up crevices at its base. He then got up behind it and pushed with all his might. It fell over sideways and rolled down into a little crater. He went over to it and, getting down on his hands and knees, put both arms around it and lifted it off the ground. Then, carrying the stone as if it was a beloved child or delirious lover, he walked slowly to the structure. He now had everything he needed to maximize his chances of not getting trapped inside of the structure once he entered it—the reinforced cable and the rock. He felt that he would be less likely to be trapped inside the structure than Ridgeway was given the facts that her cable had a much weaker sheath and her rock was much smaller.
He turned the handle of the structure’s door to the left. Just as had happened when astronaut Ridgeway had turned the same handle, the handle turned easily. He then pushed on the door. It opened. He then lifted the cable up to the bottom edge of the doorway and carefully unrolled it so that some small part of it was lodged inside of the partially open door while the rest dangled down to the ground and unwound loosely on the ground below.
He then once again put his arms around the rock and lifted it up to the bottom edge of the doorway, pushed it through the open doorway and set it carefully in a very carefully chosen place between right edge of the doorway and the right edge of the door.
After completing these arrangements, he was quite tired. The computer, listening to the sound of his heavy breathing, said, “Maybe you should rest for a little while before doing anything more. You sound tired.”
Philby replied, “I’m okay. I’ve gotten the rock wedged inside of the door so that it can’t close unless it closes with the force of a rock crusher. Even then, the door would need the aid of some kind of sweeping mechanism to get the pieces of crushed rock out of the way before it could close. I think I am safe. And I think the cable will be safe. I doubt if we really needed to bring reinforced cable in fact—the rock will keep the door from getting anywhere near it.” After saying that, he turned around so that he was facing the space ship and made a thumbs-up sign.
“Are you going in now, then?” the computer asked. “I am,” the astronaut said. “That time of taking irrevocable chances has come. Wish me well.” “You know without my having to say so that I wish you well. Still, I’ll say it: I wish you the best. I count on your having a successful expedition. I look forward not only to seeing astronaut Ridgeway but also to finding out from you what the mysteries behind the strange structure are,” the computer replied.
“I too certainly hope that I find Ridgeway somehow and, as for the other mysteries besides Ridgeway’s disappearance and fate, let us hope I can get to the bottom of at least some of those other mysteries.”
Philby added, “If anything goes wrong, I’ll race to get out of there. Even if things do go wrong, I’ll do my utmost to find astronaut Ridgeway and get her out of there. Count on my doing the utmost to bring that off. Even if I have to sacrifice my own life to do it, I’ll do it.”
Perhaps, as a way of putting off having actually to enter the structure, Philby indulged in a little musing about the mysteries surrounding the strange structure. He said, “I’ll explore this strange place. After all, what is it? It was obviously built by intelligent beings but who and when and why?” The computer replied, “Though you may have been preoccupied, my (as you so poetically put it) imagination has run amuck on this thing. I can’t say that I have come up with any really satisfactory answers. The thing remains quite a mystery. The more I think about it the more mysterious it seems.”
Then a clicking sound was heard and the other computer chimed in, “Quite a mystery. It has confounded me too and I have had more time than you to think about it.” When no one replied to it, it made the clicking sound again and said nothing more.
“Here goes,” astronaut Philby said, “I’m going in at last.” He pushed open the door enough so that he was able to step around the boulder he had lodged inside of the door and got inside of the little room with the bank of buttons to the right of the door. He next very carefully plugged the end of the cable he had pushed inside of the door to a portal on his space suit.
There was no sign of astronaut Ridgeway. Just to make sure she was not in an adjacent room or somewhere close enough to hear his voice, he called out, “Astronaut Ridgeway, I mean Sylvia, Sylvia Ridgeway, are you somewhere close enough to me to hear the sound of my voice? If so, call out.”
When he got no reply, he yelled this: “If astronaut Ridgeway cannot hear me, can anyone else? Because the chances of your understanding me are slight, if you are there, please make a sound of any kind just to let me know that my voice is being heard by someone. If, by chance, you know English, talk to me. Tell me what is going on and whether you have seen Ridgeway and whether she is alright and where she is.”
He waited for what seemed to him a long time. He kept his eyes on the clock that was projected onto the lower inside edge of his space suit until fifteen minutes had passed. But there was no reply nor any sound other than the sounds of his own breathing and heartbeat. Also, during the whole of the fifteen minutes, the door of the structure remained wide open.
Philby spoke to the computer, “As you no doubt are aware, I have not gotten any response to my calls for a response from astronaut Ridgeway or from anyone or anything else. The buttons on this panel next to the door have marks on them that must mean something to somebody but mean nothing to me. I’ll have to just press them at random. I don’t know what else to do. Staying in this little room makes no sense. Since there is no sign of astronaut Ridgeway, she must have gotten out of this room somehow, and I am assuming she did it by pressing buttons.
He went to the panel of buttons and pressed first one and then another and then another. When nothing happened, he pressed combinations of buttons—there were a total of six—but still nothing happened. Not even a light went on. The only light in the little room came from his space suit.
Then, suddenly, while he was still experimenting with the buttons on the panel next to the door, the door began to swing shut. Philby said to the computer, “Do you see what is happening? The door is closing. Is it possible that pushing one or more of the buttons activated the door? The door seemed to close on Ridgeway, however, without her having done anything in the little room. So it is possible that nothing I have done has caused this. It is possible that just my being here and pushing the door open started this.”
The door steadily closed until it began pressing against the boulder he had set into the opening. Then it stopped closing. Because the reinforced cable rested against the boulder, the door was nowhere near the cable. Everything seemed safe. His precautions seem to have worked. “I think that door is not going to close,” he told the computer. “It looks like it,” the computer replied.
Just then, the door opened wide again and then started closing, this time closing with greater force and at greater velocity. The lower left corner of the door banged into the rock so hard he supposed there would have been a deafening roar had there been an atmosphere able to carry sound. He did feel the ground vibrating beneath his feet. When the door hit the rock the second time, it cracked the rock a little bit but the rock stayed relatively intact.
Once again the door opened and then swiftly closed. It hit the boulder, causing numerous hairline cracks and causing a piece of the rock to fall away from rock blocking the door. But, aside from the loss of the one piece and the many hairline cracks, the rock withstood the force of the door. The cable, sheltered by the rock, was also okay.
Philby said to the computer, “I think the rock has done its job. It kept the door from closing.”
The computer replied, “Yet no lights have gone on inside of the room. Nor have you gotten the buttons on the panel to work. Though you can leave the room, you are deprived of any way to get past the room to any sort of vaster subterranean structure to which it is probably attached and whe
re, assuming she still lives, astronaut Ridgeway must be.”
“Good point,” Philby said. “Maybe the problem has to do with the width of the opening. If I pushed the rock outside of the door allowing the door to close almost completely—leaving just an opening as wide as the diameter of the cable, maybe the machinery will turn on. I guess I have no choice but to take that as at least a possibility.
“And I think the cable will hold. As you know, the engineers incorporated into their design of the sheathing two-inch wide and two-inch thick titanium rings. I’ll just make sure that a part of the sheath where one of those rings have been placed lies between the door frame and the door. Then, I think it will be safe for me to test my theory.”
“Go ahead. Try it,” the computer said. “It can’t hurt. If the machinery still does not turn on, you can push the door open a little wider, get out of there, and come back here. We can then check with Earth, tell them what’s going on, and ask them what they suggest.”
The computer that controlled the other space ship clicked on and said, “Be careful. Ridgeway thought she was being extra cautious too. Look what happened to her.”
The computer that Philby addressed said, “Just ignore that interruption. Try your plan. If it does not work, we will do as I suggested.” The comment evidently offended the second computer because, once again, a clicking sound indicated it was no longer listening and would no longer be communicating.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Philby said. “Here goes,” he said while picking up the rock which fell apart at the cracks that resulted from the banging of the door. It split into four pieces at least two of which, Philby noticed, also had cracks running through them and might also break apart.
Careful not to put added stress on any of the four pieces, he picked each one up and threw it out the door. Almost immediately, recessed lights went on in the ceiling above him. Starting out quite dim, they became brighter and brighter.
Also the buttons became illuminated with a soft blue light. While this happened, the door opened wide and began once again to close not rapidly but very steadily. When it got to the cable, it pushed against the cable in such a way that it caused the cable to slip down from where Philby had placed it (meaning that no titanium ring lay between the door and door frame).
The door pressed against the softer, somewhat weaker portion of the cable, squishing it. Then, very quickly, the door opened wide and closed quickly and with great force. In so doing, it cut the cable cleanly and closed all the way.
Philby did not want to believe that what he knew had happened had actually happened. Pulling on the part of the cable that was still connected to his space suit, he hoped he would find that the cable was wedged between the door and the doorframe and would not come when he pulled but some part of him knew that cable was cut and that he, the great rescuer, was now in as much need of being rescued as the one he came to rescue was..
He had to force himself to pull on the cable and, just as he feared and refused to let himself completely believe, the cable did not grow taut. Instead, he wound up holding the cable’s severed end. He looked at it as if it was a thing that made no sense to him. The cable was stuffed with numerous smaller diameter cables, each one also cleanly severed. He held the severed end of the cable in his hand for a long time before finally sighing and letting go of it. “Now what do I do?” he asked aloud but got no answer.
Book 2
Chapter 4: Closed Door
“Now what do I do?” he said again as he looked dumbly at the cable and its naked end lying like a dead snake on the floor beside the door. He called to the computer but got no answer. He disconnected the cable from his suit and called through the speaker built into his suit, but once again there was no answer.
“So,” he said, as he looked around him, “I guess I am in the same position as astronaut Ridgeway was. The added precautions made no difference. We thought we were being so smart, but we were dumb after all.” Not needing illumination from his space suit because of the bright overhead lights, he turned the lights on his space suit off.
He looked at the lighted buttons and said aloud, “Maybe the buttons will work now that the door is closed.” Before touching any, he examined them again. Each one had a different mark on it though none of them meant anything to him. One button had something that looked like a star (actually an outline in black of a circle with four triangular spikes coming out of it). Another had a zigzag line printed on it with dots at each place where the zigzag changed course. Another had three wavy lines and three straight horizontal lines, the different lines alternating. Another had a square with rounded corners surrounding two diagonal lines that crossed each other at their centers. There were also small circles close to the place where the lines crossed and in between each partial line.
He did not know what to make of any of it. If this was indeed an elevator, then he supposed that there must be a number of floors down below and that the floor he would come to would depend on which button or combination of buttons he pressed. This presented him with a problem since he wanted to go to whatever floor astronaut Ridgeway had gone to, but he had no way of knowing which floor that might be. He wished she had selected the button or buttons she would press before pressing any and then had written a note to whoever would eventually be sent to search for her explaining exactly what she had done.
He looked around but found no note. Nor did he see any scratches on any wall of the little room that she might have inscribed in place of a note.
Well, he decided, he would write a note to whoever might be sent out to rescue the two of them. So, after looking at the bank of buttons, he decided to press the first button from the left, then the fourth button from the left, and then both together. He pulled out his notebook, wrote a note explaining what he planned to do, folded it neatly and placed it on the floor of the little room directly beneath the buttons. Assuming the room was in fact an elevator car and that once it brought him to somewhere down below would return to the surface again, then whoever was sent to rescue him and Ridgeway would be able to follow him because of what he wrote there.
“Here goes,” he said out loud before pressing the buttons he intended to press and explained on the note that he would press. He made sure to press the exact same buttons in the exact same sequence as detailed in the note.
He pressed the buttons and, almost immediately, heard a rushing sound, a sound something like that of a weak wind blowing. He wondered if the sound meant that some kind of atmosphere was rushing into the closed room.
Then, when the rushing sound ceased, he heard a slight grinding sound as of a motor turning. He figured that an atmosphere had been pumped into the room and that, once it was there, he would be able to hear whatever else was going on and thus he heard a sound that might be the motor that powered the elevator.
Though he assumed the room was descending, he did not feel himself getting any lighter. This probably had to do with how weak gravity was in this place. No sooner had he reached this conclusion than he did feel himself getting lighter. There was a railing running around every one of the walls except the one with the door. He grabbed hold of the railing to steady himself. After a few minutes of feeling very light, almost to the point of having his feet and legs rise up off the ground, he felt himself getting heavy again. Then there was a jolt that caused him nearly to lose his footing though, because he was holding on tight to the railing, he stayed upright.
He figured that the jolt meant that the room had stopped descending. He noticed too that the buttons had put on a kind of light display while the presumed descent was going on. Different buttons went on and off very quickly and in odd sequences until, coinciding with the moment when he felt the jolt, all of the buttons except one went dark. The only one to stay lit up was the one with a circle and four radiating triangles and the dots.
He let go of the railing next to the panel of buttons that he had been clinging to and moved to the center of the room. He stood with his knees slightly bent and
his arms extended and his legs set apart. He wanted to make sure he was standing as firmly as possible in case the room tilted over or even turned upside down. In his pose (which was something like the pose a judo master takes when confronted by an opponent), he turned slowly around the room.
He heard a sound coming from the wall where the door was. He turned to face that wall and sound just in time to see a part of the wall that included the door slide open. It slid into a crevice in the wall that he had not suspected existed.
When the part of the wall that included the door slid nearly all the way into its receptacle, he saw a dimly lit corridor in front of him. Not wanting to risk having the wall close on him, thus trapping him in the little room, he rushed out of the room and into the corridor, not stopping until he reached a part of the wall on his right (as he came out of the little room) where a projection like a little bench existed. He sat down on the projection and turned to face the little room. He heard a rushing sound again. The sliding wall was slowly closing.
Seeing the wall close terrified him. He was afraid that the wall would close and thus trap him in this spooky place. This would be the second trap.
Unwilling to resign himself to what he believed was a terrible fate, he got up and ran to the now nearly closed wall and tried to get in between the left edge of the sliding panel and the part of the wall it was rushing towards. He leaned into the edge of the wall hoping to push it back. But it was too strong for him. It kept closing until it pressed against him with such force he could barely breathe.
Afraid that his space suit might be punctured, he jumped back, fell backwards, pushed his outstretched arms behind him, and landed on his rear end. He had to impotently watch as the wall closed all the way.
A Theory of Gravity Page 3
