On top of or underneath that combination of sounds was another pattern of noise. In this other pattern, the whole of the sound got steadily louder and then steadily got softer and then rose again. He remembered the rotating sprinklers that people plant in their yards and use to water their lawns. This reminded him of that. Then the stairway fell silent again.
Then it made the sound of turning again and, this time, listening to it, he was convinced, more than before, that someone walked on it. And, possibly because now he was more fully awake than he had been earlier, he was determined to find out the cause.
He put his hand on the steel bars on either side of him and used them to support his progress back to the door from which he had just come.
He said aloud, “Someone is there!” The sound had been fairly quiet as if coming from far away but was getting steadily louder. He realized that the stairs were turning at a speed and with a sound that he believed meant it would swing by the doorway behind him at any moment. He said aloud in a tone that people use when they are in awe of something: “Someone else is here.”
He tried running back towards the door he had just left but, in his eagerness to get back there, failed to keep his eye on one of the upraised bars and fell down on the ground again. He got up and moved more carefully towards the door he just left.
When he reached the door, he tried opening it and discovered that, just as before, he could not open it—it was locked. He formed his hands into a megaphone and put his mouth as close as he could next behind a hole in the door, and yelled, “Hey, I’m here. Who are you? Find me.”
Just then, the stairs grew silent again. He took his mouth away from the hole in the door and put an eye there instead. He looked out into the cylindrical space but, though his angle of vision was restricted, saw no one either on the stairs or crouching inside of any of the doorways. He looked for a long time but saw no one.
After waiting for a while for someone to answer him, he yelled again, “Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Sylvia, are you there?” When no one answered, he turned around, and walked carefully through the curved corridor to the first door he had come to, the one with the inscriptions on it that he had copied.
He wondered what would happen if he continued going around the curved corridor. Would he find other doors with other inscriptions?
Once again, he was not sure what to do. He was not sure if he should stay where he was, opening the door that was in front of him, or continue going around the curved corridor looking for doors and inscriptions, copying each inscription and trying each door and taking a chance that there would be no other doors and taking another chance that a door might close behind him or the curve straighten out or curve in another direction and meet another curved or straight corridor that, if he went through that forked path, he might never be able to find his way back.
Not having any basis on which to decide what to do, he decided to do what was easiest and what would lead to the quickest resolution of his dilemma.
So he opened the door he had first found, discovered that it did open, pushed the door open, walked through the opening, and emerged into another corridor, even narrower than the last one but which also curved around perhaps in a curve slightly broader than the curvature of the wall of the last corridor which in turn had a broader curve than the curvature of the wall of the cylindrical space.
This new corridor in which he found himself curved around to the right and to the left. It seemed to be a hollow space wrapped around the cylindrical space he just left. It amounted to a kind of circular track.
There were many doors spaced at equal intervals on his right but not at his left. He saw only the one door, the one that he opened to gain access to this new curved corridor, on his left. Perhaps, he reasoned, if he walked to his left after going through that doorway, he might find other doors on that side of the corridor. For the present, however, he decided not to try going that way. Instead, he continued walking to the right of the doorway and study each of a number of doors he passed, all set into the wall on his left. There seemed to be an endless number of such doors. With every step he took, it seemed, he would see another door on his right somewhere up ahead.
Along the top edge of each of the doors to his left that were near him was a brief inscription consisting of no more than three symbols set into a wide rectangle. He drew a few of those and then put away his notebook and pencil because there were just too many doors. He did not want to turn into his own jailer. He was prisoner enough. He figured there had to be a limit to what he should do along the lines of copying inscriptions.
So he put away his notebook and pencil. Besides, he figured that, combining the drawings in the two notebooks (assuming he would ever be reunited with his backpack and find that first notebook inside of it), he probably had done enough or as much as he could do to make it possible for experts back home to try to make sense of the language of the creatures who made them.
Rather than choosing the doors near him, he began running. He ran madly and desperately. He ran past door after door and, when the doors seemed to stop, he still ran.
Only when he was completely out of breath did he stop. His lungs burned. He was panting so badly had to bend over to keep from falling down. Only after he was rested enough to be able to stand up did he see that a door on his right and a little ahead of him. He went over there and examined it. On it was one more of those inscriptions that meant nothing to him.
He decided on a whim to try to open that door. So he turned the knob which consisted of a cylindrical bar attached at its center to another, shorter cylindrical bar that fitted into an opening on the door. The bar he held turned counter-clockwise. When he pushed on the door, he got resistance. So he pulled it towards him instead, which seemed to work because the door opened.
Because of bad experiences in the past, he kept his hand on the door while walking carefully through the doorway. In the past, when he went through a door, it would slam shut behind him right away, trapping him. He wanted to try to keep that from occurring this time if he could even though he realized that taking such precautions made no difference at this point.
Yet, despite his precaution, the door began to close as soon as he got through the doorway. Though he tried with all his might to keep it open, it nevertheless began to close. It was clear that whatever controlled it was much stronger than him. When he saw that he was losing the battle, he took his hand off the doorknob and just gave up on keeping it from closing.
He just backed away from the door that was closing and shrugged his shoulders, wondering what difference anything he did made to anything that would happen to him. Not paying attention to what was around him and still walking backwards, his heel caught on something and, when he tried to adjust to that interruption, the toe of the other foot got caught on probably the same obstruction and he started falling. And, as he fell, he heard the door that he tried to hold open snap shut.
He consoled himself with the fact that he was lucky to have fallen down in such a way and in such an angle that he didn’t get strangled by or decapitated by the door.
So, as it turned out, everything he tried to do to keep the door open was for naught. The door slammed shut anyway. And, when it closed, it made a loud banging sound, the sound reverberating through the place. Even though he quickly got up and began immediately to push and pound on door, he couldn’t make it budge. The door was now not only closed but also locked. There was not even a handle on his side.
Discouraged about not being able to reopen the door he had tried so hard to keep from closing, he backed away from it and, in so doing, tripped on the same thing that he had tripped on before. He tried to break his fall by twisting around and putting his hand down on the ground before his body or head hit it, and that effort at least worked. He was able to have a fairly gentle fall. He just lay there, panting.
He curled into a fetal position again, as he had done whenever he sensed he was about to get a visit from Despair. And, sure enough, Despai
r arrived. No matter how deep he got in this place and no matter how complicated the design of the place seemed to him, Despair always seemed to know how to find him. It seemed to have a free run of any place where he happened to be, even of the place.
He wondered how Despair managed to hitch a ride on board his space ship and slip out of the space ship without being seen and hide in the room that was an elevator without being seen and exit when he did and, before hounding him, exploring this place. He had no doubt that Despair, during the course of its wandering, saw parts of this maze he had not seen. He had no doubt that Despair knew the way out of this maze but far preferred seeing him suffer than tell him where to go.
Now, Despair put its hand on his back and caressed him. It talked about mistakes and poor thinking and about what might have been. It was in a very talkative mood. He listened without answering back for as long as a couple of hours. Then Despair said ‘so long’ and ‘I’ll see you again before long’ and disappeared.
He got up after a while and looked around him while dusting himself off. The new corridor was about eight feet wide and ten feet high. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all straight and met at right angles.
The place seemed to be divided into sections. The corridor went about ten feet straight ahead but at that point three steps raised it up a notch. The ceiling echoed the floor in that respect. It had what amounted to three steps also. This meant the ceiling was higher than before but no different in terms of its distance from the floor.
The floor was pale yellow. The walls and ceiling were white. There were three neon tubes at the center of the ceiling and running the length of each section. They stopped when the stairs began. When the stairs ended, a new set of three neon tubes began. The first set of neon tubes consisted of one filled with green light on his left, a second filled with yellow light, and a third (on his right) filled with red light. The second set of neon tubes were blue (on his left), orange (in the middle) and purple (on his right.
After getting to the end of the first section of this corridor and climbing the steps, he saw that the second section too had three steps at the end of that. After that, there was a third section with green, brown, and pink neon tubes.
The light of whatever color happened to predominate was the same in that it was all very eerie. The various colors reflected oddly off the surrounding walls, the ceiling, and the floor. He felt he was walking suspended at a level of a very large and very deep ocean.
When he got onto the third section of the corridor, he was relieved to see that the third section ended at three steps that went down not up and that furthermore the space opened up and was well lit with a whitish-yellowish light the source of which he could not determine form where he stood. There was a room up there, and he could see part of one blue door.
Chapter 36: Three Doors
When he got to the end of the third section of the corridor, he saw that he had come to a room with three doors. All were painted blue. Each one had an inscription consisting of nine symbols inside of geometric shapes. All nine were set inside of an upraised narrow line having the shape of a square with rounded corners.
The third door was decorated more elaborately than the rest. Along the outer edge of the upraised square, someone or something had inscribed what looked to him like the outlines of tulips and filled the hollow area with red and green paint. There was green paint where the leaves and stems would be (assuming these were tulips) and red paint where the petals would be assuming these were pictures of tulips). Beneath the tulips and the lower edge of the upraised square line was a single inscription set inside of a very small square with rounded corners.
Reluctantly, he pulled his notebook and pencil out of their respective pockets and began drawing what he saw. He went from door to door. He once again tried his artist to get everything right. He double-checked everything.
He figured that the translators back on Earth, assuming he ever got back there and got back with the notebooks, would appreciate this extra effort he had put into doing this even though he was now very tired of the drawing. He finished the job despite his weariness.
The more he drew, the wearier he became. He actually had to force himself to finish the job. Then he put away his notebook and pencil and backed away from the doors so that he could look at all of them at once.
He now had to choose between three doors and as usual he had no way of knowing what was behind any one of them. For all he knew, one of the doors led to freedom. For all he knew, down a corridor behind one of the doors, Sylvia Ridgeway patiently waited. But none of those possibilities really mattered since he had no way of knowing if any of them was true. Just as had been the case many times before, he had to choose at random.
He did not know and could not figure out which door it would be wisest of him to open, but he certainly knew which one he wanted to open.
It was the third one, the one with the addition of the scroll of painted tulips. There was a wheel with spokes close to the right side of the door. He turned it and pushed open the door and found himself inside of a well-lighted corridor made, it seems, entirely of white and gray marble or of some material that looked like marble.
The corridor was very short, perhaps a few yards at most, and came to a dead end at a door made of what looked like pure white marble. The door had no inscription on it or above it or on either side of it. He pushed on the door and found that it opened.
Book 3
Chapter 37: Marble Chamber
On the other side of the door with the drawing that looked like tulips was a very large and magnificently appointed room with numerous door in different colors of what seemed like marble filling its walls. At the center of the room was a platform set about three feet off the ground. At the center of the platform was a golden chair made of elaborately turned cylinders and long armrests that curved down and around as they reached their ends. There were small golden wheels at the bottom.
Sitting on the chair was a creature that looked something like a giant tick or a mite. Its carapace was flat. Its body had an overall octagonal shape. The seat of the chair had a slot in it designed to accommodate the pointed bottom portion of the octagonal carapace. The creature’s eyes jutted out from the top pointed end like two stalks surmounted by black globes. The eyes pivoted on the stalks.
The creature had six limbs. Two limbs rested above the armrests of the chair with the middle pair of limbs actually resting on the armrest while the upper limbs alternately straightened out and curved around until they nearly was lost inside of the edge of the carapace.
On either side of the creature stood creatures like it but with the lower part of their torsos set into the specially designed seats of motorized carts. The creatures in the carts leaned away from the creature at the center.
In addition, the creatures on either side of the one in the center held with their outside upper pair of limbs long wooden poles with hooks at the end that looked exactly like the pole he had found in one of the corridors. This pair of creatures also had eyes at the tops of their heads in the form of black globes attached to long grey stalks.
Behind the three creatures and their platform, a line of creatures of the same kind were lined up against the far wall. Each of them held two poles with hooks at the end on either side of them. They all sat in motorized wheeled carts like those in which the body guards sat.
There were doors set into that back door just as there were doors on all the walls which meant that some of the line of creatures blocked a door while others did not; however, blocking a door might not have been the point of what they were doing—the point might have been simply to add to the show of force surrounding and protecting the creature sitting on the seat that seemed to be some kind of throne—with the doors just happening to be behind some but not others of the supplementary bodyguard.
In addition to the three creatures on the raised platform and the line of perhaps twelve creatures against the wall, he saw a few other creatures moving about, seemingly a
t random, some set up in the motorized carts and others crawling on their bellies on the floor, propelled forward by the orchestrated movements of their limbs.
The creature sitting on the golden throne leaned forward in his direction and emitted sounds out of what might have been a set of three slits set into its upper torso. There were clicking, squealing, and buzzing sounds, each one punctured at times by silence and coming in sequels that varied from time to time. He had heard these kinds of sounds before. He heard them through the hole in the door that he had gone through to get outside of the circular room.
He wondered if the creature was talking to him. The series of sounds lasted for quite a while. He shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he did not understand what was being said. He also held out his hands, palms upwards, and shook his head no. He said, “I don’t understand.”
From his right, a woman’s voice said in English, “It is welcoming you to its kingdom. It is congratulating you for having survived the ordeal of the maze.
It is also apologizing to you for having put you through such an ordeal that, though undoubtedly painful to you, was, in his opinion and that of his advisors, absolutely necessary because, when a stranger arrives, an ordeal of that kind has to be imposed.
It has to be imposed for two reasons. First, it is a way to test the character and intentions of the stranger. And second it is a way of testing the effect on the stranger of the diet, atmosphere, and exercise regimen that the conditions here make necessary. He congratulates you for having passed first the one test and then the other. He hopes you understand the necessity of what they have done and do not hold it against them.”
He turned his neck and saw sitting on a fancy green chair a woman—Sylvia Ridgeway--dressed in what looked like a silken dress. He noticed also, in between the doors, bundles set against the wall. There were two carefully wrapped up space suits and two backpacks.
A Theory of Gravity Page 20
