He pounded again and yelled again, this time trying to draw the attention of anyone or anything who was nearby listening. “Can anyone hear me?” he yelled in between his poundings. “Have some pity on a lost traveler, on a stranger from far away, who came here wanting to rescue another stranger, one named Sylvia Ridgeway? Please do something to get me out of this trap in which I find myself.”
Once again, he stopped pounding and yelling. Once again, he listened. From somewhere nearby, maybe on the other side of the wall on his left, he heard a sound like that which a motor makes when revving up. It was very quiet though--barely audible. He did not know what to make of it.
The fact that his pounding and yelling resulted in noise coming from somewhere else in the labyrinth made him wonder whether going through one of the two doors or staying where he was made the most sense. He figured that, if he stayed where he was, something might happen that built on or followed from the noise whereas, if he went forward, anything might happen—something possibly better and something possibly worse. He was not sure what to do.
Standing in front of the two doors and perplexed about how or whether to proceed, he happened to notice something unusual. He noticed that the room in which he stood had suddenly become much brighter. In fact, the walls, ceiling and floor had become blindingly white.
Since the only illumination came from the glass-lined corridor behind him, he looked back there and saw that the light streaming from the windows, which had always been bright and pure white, had become even brighter. It was as if something had exploded out there and that the first explosion was but one of a series because everything stayed very bright. But there was no noise associated with it. If there were indeed explosions, then they were utterly, eerily silent.
He had been thinking of going back there with the stick he had found which he thought he might use to open a window and look outside without having to be separated from it by the glass, but, now that the light had intensified to such an extent—now that there was possibly an explosion out there—he dropped that idea.
Instead of going back, he went up to the door on his right. Besides, he figured, after having tried as hard as he could to reach someone or something and having waited awhile for something more than unintelligible sound, the time had come to move on.
Chapter 32: Coral Corridor
He went up to the door on his right, reached inside of the round hole which was on the left edge of that door, and pulled. The door swung open. He then stepped through the doorway, altering the position of his hand so that it reached through the hole from the side opposite. That way, as he stepped through the doorway, he could pull the door closed behind him. He got through. He pulled the door closed and held it closed. There did not seem to be any latch to catch it. It seemed to be loose and easily pushed open.
But, while he held onto it, not sure what to do, he heard a squeaking sound and then a clicking sound and then a banging sound. After the banging sound stopped, he tried pushing on the door and found that it was held fast. He concluded that the sounds he heard must have been part of some sort of mechanism that was part either of the door or wall and that either held the door closed or more likely locked it.
He turned around and ran through a corridor made out of blocks that seem to have been cut out of coral. It had the pitted surface he regarded as being characteristic of coral. And, like the pieces of coral he had seen, these blocks were either white or red; and they were arranged in a checkerboard pattern. He ran on a red-and-white floor, beneath a red-and-white ceiling, and in between red and white walls.
Even as he ran, he sometimes turned his neck so he could glance behind him, but nothing unusual occurred. The door behind him stayed locked. No one came through it.
He slowed down. He gazed at the walls on either side of him. The material truly seemed to be a kind of coral. The surface was pitted like coral. There actually seemed to be fossils or something that looked very much like fossils embedded in it. While he did not recognize the fossils, he was also not knowledgeable about fossils. He wondered if this might have been mined on Earth at some point in the past and brought to this place and used as an exotic building material. Another possibility is that the material that looked like coral came from elsewhere. Another possibility is that the material was synthetic.
Despite the possibilities and despite his lack of knowledge, the more he studied the material the more it looked like coral. And the longer he looked at the fossils the more familiar they seemed to him. He found what he thought might be fossils of ancient seashells, mollusks, and fish.
He saw something that looked like a miniature manta ray. He saw spiral shapes that shined because they happened to be where the coral was cut. Some of the fossils were quite large and nearly complete. One, with what looked like eyes, jutted pretty far out from the wall. He felt it was watching him as he passed by. He decided to pull out his notebook and pencil and make some drawings of the fossils. Maybe, if he ever returned to Earth, these might be as helpful to biologists as the inscriptions would be to the linguists.
There were a lot of fossils. He decided to draw ten. He picked out a few that he thought resembled what he remembered seeing on Earth and a few that he did not recognize. After making what he thought were reasonably accurate drawings on both sides of a single page, he labeled one side “coral corridor: fossils like what I think I recall seeing before” and the other side “coral corridor: fossils unlike any I recall seeing.”
He knew that the ones he thought he saw before might strike the biologists as more alien than the other ones, but that, he figured, was something for the experts to deal with. He tried his best. Maybe it would help advance science. Maybe it would add to or subtract from the mystery of how this asteroid came to be riddled with corridors and rooms constructed out of such a variety of exotic materials.
After checking over and then putting away his notebook and pencil, he proceeded to walk down the corridor, going faster now that he had done the drawings. Still, he could not help but look to the side and wonder about all of the mysteries of space and time and life and death that these walls put so casually on display.
Chapter 33: The Cylindrical Room
That coral corridor was no more than a hundred yards or so long. It emptied into a very large cylindrical room with walls made of red brick or a material that looked a lot like red brick. The corridor came to an end about three feet above the floor of the cylinder. He paused for a moment to look over the huge cylindrical room before jumping down to the floor.
Looking around this strange new room, he realized how much bigger this space was than any he had yet entered. It was probably thirty feet in diameter and a couple of hundred feet high. It was all red brick. A ladder was wrapped around the edge. Also he saw doors in even horizontal rows that circled the interior of the space every thirty yards or so.
Also, there was a round hole in the center of the floor. That hole had about half the diameter of the cylinder in which he stood. He went up to the edge of it and looked down. Light came from a small round hole far below. And, once his eyes became accustomed to the dim light of this new place, he saw that the cylinder that made up the room was the first of a number of cylinders that became ever smaller in diameter the farther down it went. He saw that the cylinder he was looking down into came to an end and was replaced by a narrower cylinder which went still farther down there. Somewhere down there light shined up at him.
He saw also that a ladder wrapped around the wall of the first, the second, and presumably the third cylinder. Possibly it kept going down, cylinder after cylinder.
High up above, the brick ceiling was dome-shaped. It had a round hole at the very top through which light poured. He meandered around this enormous room, examined the stairway, touched the base of the only door that was within reach and came to a halt where he could get the best possible view of the hole up above without also having to descend into the hole beneath.
He looked up into the hole and saw a circle of b
lue, a very good imitation of the blue sky on Earth on a clear day. While he looked, a small white cloud drifted over the blue. While he watched, the edges of the circle seemed to twist diagonally and, as they did so, the circle got steadily larger. When it was three times as large as when he first looked at it, the edges of the circle reversed the direction of their twisting, thus reducing the size of the circle. The edges stopped twisting when the circle was about the same size as it was when he first looked at it.
He was relieved when the twisting stopped because, before it did, he worried that the edges would keep twisting until the hole or eye or lens or whatever it was would close. He did not want to lose that light because the light from down below was comparatively weak and, for all he knew, might close too, plunging him once again into utter darkness.
He looked down and saw blue sky down below also. He wondered if what existed down below was nothing but a mirror that reflected what shown down from up above. Yet the light was, if anything, brighter down there. And there didn’t seem to be any sort of lens up above to concentrate and direct the light from up above. Perhaps, he thought, what I see down there comes from another source of light altogether.
Then he noticed that the opening down below was slowly narrowing. Its edges were twisting closed.
He wondered what he might do in this place. There were a number of possibilities. For instance, he could try to climb the ladder. If so, he would have to decide whether to go up or down. There were a lot of doors on the wall of the circular room around him. Perhaps there were also doors down below. But the doors were all too high for him to be able to reach them; and none were close enough to the ladder to make it possible for him to reach one by climbing the ladder.
He was afraid to climb downwards. He lay down on his stomach, scooted over to the edge of the hole going downwards, and looked around. He did not see any doors down there.
He stood up and walked around close to the wall of the cylinder, thinking perhaps he had overlooked something significant when he first looked around. Also he wanted to get to know the place as well as he could so that he would have a chance to orient himself in case both of the openings closed at once or in case nighttime came from both directions at once.
He looked at the stairway. It was made of grey slabs that reminded him of steel with roughened surfaces perhaps etched by acid. The stairway going up seemed to be made of the same materials and designed in the same way as the one going down.
Looking upwards again, he saw that there was a steel bar about a foot thick and two feet wide that spiraled around the wall of the cylinder. The spiral is what supported the grey slabs that made up the steps of the stairway.
Doors were arranged in rows that went all around the interior of the space, set at equal intervals. Every 100 feet or so was another row, going up and down as far as he could see. He supposed that altogether he was looking at hundreds of doors and, if the cylindrical hole kept going down indefinitely with the pattern of doors staying the same, he supposed there might be thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of doors.
He noticed that the doors on each row were exactly the same in shape but slightly different in size, color, texture, and design from the doors on other rows. Because every door also lay directly underneath a door of all the rows above and below, there were columns of doors too.
He noticed also that rows came in groups of threes. There seemed to be a pink row, then a green one, and then a blue one. There were also green rows separating the groups of threes (the green of the doors of the divider rows much darker than the pastel green of the row that came second in the group of three).
The doors were all rectangular. He noticed that, though every door was exactly the same size as every other door on its row and every other door on a row where the doors had the same color, the sizes varied according to color. The dark green ones were smallest, the pink ones larger, the pale green ones largest, and the blue ones larger than the pink but a little smaller than the pale green.
Another thing he noticed had to do with the way the doors were set into the wall. Because the doors were flat and the wall was curved, they had to either extend outwards (with only the middle part of the door flush with the wall) or be recessed inwards (again with only the middle part flush with the wall). The first option however was not employed however for, as he looked around, he saw that all of the doors were recessed into the wall on their right and left edges. He noticed too that the extent of the recess differed which meant that the center section of some of the doors was not flush with the wall but lay back inside of the wall though not as far as the right and left edges.
He noticed also that the extent of the recess varied with the color and size of the door. The dark green (smallest) ones were set in the least, the pink ones (a little larger) were a little more recessed, the pale green ones (the largest of the doors) were set in the most, and the blue ones (a little smaller than the pale green ones) were recessed a little bit less than the pale green ones.
Some doors, the dark green ones, had no handles or knobs at all. The pale green doors had round knobs the same exact color as the color of the door to which they were attached. The blue and pink doors had handles that dipped down from the rod to which they were attached, made a u-shaped loop, and ended at a circular knob about 9 inches away from the rod that connected the handle to the door.
All of the doors except for the dark green ones had an inscription at the center of the top edge. The inscriptions consisted of one or a pair of symbols. To accentuate the inscriptions, the recessed surface was painted or dyed black. From where he stood, he was unable to make out any of the inscriptions well enough to make possible an accurate drawing. The inscriptions were just too far away. His eyes were just not that good. Also, the light was dim and unsteady. When clouds floated across the round opening at top, the light dimmed considerably.
He supposed that, by using the stairs, he might be able to get close enough to a couple of the doors to make decent copies. But, even if he used the stairs, most of the doors would still be too far away from him for him to be able to copy what was there.
The very lowest row of doors, the bottoms of which were about eight feet from the floor on which he stood, was dark green. One door was missing though. Instead of a door, there was a hole with a small amount of light streaming through it. That was the end of the corridor through which he had come.
Chapter 34: Spiral Stairway
Studying the spiral stairway and especially at the way it touched the wall, he noticed that sometimes the stairway ran diagonally across a door, covering it up. That struck him as odd. It didn’t make sense to him. He asked himself why a stairway would block rather than give access to a door.
He also saw a few places where the stairs ran right underneath a door or close enough to a door that someone could reach a handle and try opening a door from a step.
After giving the matter some thought, he decided that his best recourse was to concentrate on the doors he COULD reach rather than worry about the ones he couldn’t. He decided also to concentrate only on the doors on the walls of the part of the cylinder where he was right now rather than worry about doors farther up or farther down.
Before setting foot on any of the stairs, he decided to do some drawing. So he pulled out his notebook and pencil and made drawings of the inscriptions on the doors close enough to him while standing on the floor of the cylinder for him to be able to make out what was there.
He did the best he could. If a symbol was too confusing, he bypassed it. He figured that, if the stairs worked out and he did not feel too anxious about losing a chance to get into a door, he might make a few more drawings later. But, for now, he would just draw the inscriptions on the few doors close enough to him (if he walked around the floor of the cylinder) to make possible fairly accurate drawings.
When he finished with that project (which did not involve very many doors and did not take a lot of time), he put his pencil and notebook away and concentrated on finding a
door that he could reach through the stairs. There were several. He also had to decide which door to pick.
He decided finally that he would try to open any door he could reach before actually opening any door wide enough to go through. He had adopted this strategy in other parts of the maze and, though he wasn’t able to follow through on the strategy for one reason or another during any of his previous adventures, he figured he might be able to do it now. He would open doors, close them, and then decide which one to enter.
The stairway spiraled upwards in a clockwise direction. It had a railing. He went over to the place where the first step was. He put his right hand on the railing and began climbing. He wanted to get to the same level as and not very far away from a blue door he had spotted.
Imagine his surprise when the stairway began revolving just as he shifted his weight from the first step to the second. Despite this, he kept climbing. As he climbed, the stairs turned around and around at first slowly and then more and more quickly.
His weight shifting on the stairs seemed to cause the whole structure of which they were a part to rotate. He remembered riding merry-go-rounds and carousels when he was younger. This experience was like those experiences.
He tried to perform different experiments while climbing so that he might better understand what was going on. He tried varying the speed of his climbing and discovered that the speed of rotation varied with the speed of his climbing. He also discovered that, if he stopped climbing, the stairs would slow down and eventually stop.
He also discovered that, if he climbed downwards instead of upwards, the stairs would slow down, stop, and start rotating in the opposite direction. He noticed also that the motion of the stairs was not quite in sync with his actions. There would be a delay. For a while, the stairs would move even though he had stopped climbing. For a while the stairs would not move even though he was climbing or descending. For a while, it would go the way it went when he was climbing even though he was descending.
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