If only I could take out one of the vent grilles, even part way. But how to do it?
A dozen of us, pulling on a piece of rope or chain, might be able to do it. I would need all my friends.
I went over to the largest vent in the empty dining hall and tried to see how the grillwork was set. The cross-hatched metal net seemed to be attached from the other side, but I couldn’t see. Maybe we could batter it in.
“A ram!” my father said when I told him. “A tree trunk, stripped, of course. It will take you awhile to get one using garden tools.” He looked at me with a smile. “I’m glad you didn’t try it the other way.”
Six of us went out among the lofty pines. “Get one of the biggest,” my father had said, “as big as all of you can carry. Its massiveness will help you break the grille more easily.”
We worked on a ten meter tall pine, taking turns with the small pruning saw. It took hours of sweat, and lots of impatience to cut through the trunk.
“We’ll push it over now,” I said. I pointed to a clear area, where we wanted the tree to fall.
It went down with a whoosh and a whallop, branches brushing its neighbors, and rolled a bit. We cheered. Then we started cutting away the limbs, but leaving a few stubs for handgrabs. Finally we picked it up and carried it to the large dining hall and laid it down outside.
We went inside and ate.
When the hall began to empty, Johnny Spengler asked, “Why is it you’ll be the only one to go? Do you have to go alone?”
I looked around at the suddenly questioning faces.
I was startled, but said with a smile, “I had no idea anyone else really wanted to go,” then frowned. “Might get killed, you know.”
“Or maybe you want it all for yourself,” said Johnny.
“Want what?”
“The credit, the fun, maybe...”
“So who’s coming with me?” I asked suddenly, knowing that the question would decide the matter.
There was a silence.
“You think we could get killed?” Johnny asked.
“Maybe,” I said, seeing his reluctance spread through the gathered faces. And once again I realized that I would have to do it the hard way, and alone.
When it became obvious that no one was going to volunteer, they got up and went outside and brought in the battering ram.
There were still some people in the dining hall, mostly young, but at least a dozen oldsters. They cheered us when we began to pound at the large ventilation grille. Their shouts encouraged us, and we rammed harder than we knew, because the grille slid down after only three blows.
We put the tree down, and I went and looked down into the opening.
Cool, sweet, oxygen-rich air blew into my face. I saw that there was a ladder going down the inside. I stepped back and let the others see. One by one they peered down and backed away.
We stood there in silence, looking at each other as if for the first time.
“Well, I’m off,” I said, climbing up.
I straddled the edge and got my feet onto the ladder. There was no way I could back out now.
My five friends stared at me strangely, almost as if they were looking at me for the last time. For a moment I thought that Johnny Spengler would decide to come with me, but he had retreated into himself and I couldn’t see into his eyes. Abasi looked guilty and avoided my gaze. Pierre’s expression was easy—I just can’t do this, his face said without apology. Juan Geyle and Chen Lee simply looked defeated by the idea.
I held onto the edge as I put my feet on the next rung of the ladder and started down into the airy well. I looked up once. There was no one looking down after me. I thought of my father. Things had moved too fast for him to be here, and that would only have tipped off my mother about what was happening, so he would not have come anyway.
It was all a smooth, square shaft of metal. There was no light except from above. I could see no bottom.
I descended slowly, aware that one slip would end my life.
I might have missed the grille had I not touched the mesh, because there was no light coming through it. It was of the same type as the one we had removed overhead. My eyes were still adjusting to the gloom. I tried to peer through the grille. There seemed to be a dark space on the other side.
I put the fingers of my right hand into the mesh, and pulled, recalling how easily the one above had slid down. It did not move. I stepped down lower on the ladder and felt around the lower edge of the grille, thinking there might be some kind of fastener holding it.
I found one. It slid down. Then I realized that there might be another at the top, so I climbed up and felt around the edge. Sure enough, there was another. I slid it open, then pushed down on the grille. It slid down, and I was looking into darkness.
It seemed to me that if I climbed in, there would be a floor, same as above. I stepped up into position on the ladder and put one leg over.
A light went on overhead, startling me, but I went through and stepped down onto a black floor.
Looking around, I saw that I was in a corner of a larger area. I took a few steps away from the ventilator opening, and more overhead lights went on.
I was in a large area with a low ceiling that seemed to go on forever into darkness. I took a few more steps forward, and more lights went on. These were large squares of white light, unlike the yellower-orange that we got from the sunplate.
I walked ahead. Lights went off behind me. I veered left and right, but couldn’t find the walls. I continued forward.
After a while I came to what seemed to be a large, circular opening in the floor. I stepped up close and looked down.
Light flashed, and a picture of some kind appeared.
I stared breathless at a sweeping panorama of the rock core’s inner landscape. I knew it at once. The view swept from one end to the rocky far end, then back to the sunplate, slowing on the three towns. I saw people moving around, completely unaware of me.
But was I the only one looking? I peered around, thinking there might be people here on this level, but there was no one. Yet the viewing area seemed to have been made for an audience.
I realized then that I had come toward the sunplate, under the land, toward the area where we had found the buried metal box for what might have been a control unit.
Keep in mind that I’m telling this from a time when I had learned a lot more than I knew when this was happening. At that moment it was very confusing. Nothing seemed as dangerous to me as the air shaft that had brought me here, so I now figured I was not going to die. But I had little idea of doing anything except exploring, hoping I would learn enough to have some idea of what I could do.
When I stepped back from the circle, the view went dark. Then I noticed squares on the floor around the viewer. When I stepped on different ones, I could get longer and closer looks. I went around the circle, calling up different views, wondering what my father would say about this device.
And I saw him.
He was walking with my mother around the barracks. She held his arm. He seemed slightly stooped. Two gray heads, silent. I had the sudden impression of their thoughts: they were far from home, had been far from home for a long time, and were resigned to their fate.
As I watched, they changed direction and started for the growth of tall pines. An idea came into my head, that the pines were off to my left on this level.
I hurried off in that direction. The lights went on in front of me. I had a sudden urge to run, and I did. The lights paced me, flashing on ahead of me, winking off behind me.
I halted. Something seemed wrong.
The floor sloped up toward the ceiling in one area ahead of me, and stopped there. On both sides, the floor continued. I was breathing hard from the run, trying to understand what I was seeing. It seemed unguessable.
I went forward and stopped before the rise. Strange, how the obvious is a mystery until you see through it. I took another step and the ceiling went up with a whoosh. Instinctively, I s
tepped back. The ceiling came down.
And I knew!
I was at the bottom of a ramp that led back out into the land. That’s what it was, but it took me a few minutes to grasp the idea.
They’d left it to open from the inside only. That was what the empty utility box had contained. Someone had decided they didn’t want us opening the ramp from outside.
I stepped forward again. The ceiling went up. I walked up the ramp and back out to the land I knew. Seeing it again suddenly, fresh from my success in penetrating the engineering level, overcame me with a rush of feeling.
Then I saw my parents coming up the hill toward me. I waved and shouted, and even jumped up and down. Behind them, people were pointing toward where I stood below the raised strangeness of the ramp cover, which had ripped up some grass and dirt. As my parents drew closer, I saw groups gathering to follow them.
I felt proud and joyful. I had done something new, in a place where there was nothing new to do. It was the biggest event in my life up to then, and I felt the promise of greater things still to come. Tears surprised my eyes as I ran down the hill.
My father embraced me. My mother kissed me. Abasi, Pierre, Juan, Johnny, and Chen grinned at me from some ways off. And she was there too, far down the hillside between her puzzled parents, gazing at me with admiration.
10
We explored the level below our land, my father and I and Johnny, Pierre, Chen, Abasi, and Juan. My friends were happy to finally be able to do something after they had sent me off alone, Father included. He seemed to have lost years off his age.
Each day we searched for what he was sure would be a way to look out from the rock, and maybe see what had happened to us. We might simply be continuing on a much longer orbit of the sun than had been planned, one that would take us far out of the solar system, maybe never to come back. It all depended on the size of our initial boost.
The engineering level, as we began to picture it, was a wide corridor, with branches, that ran the length of the rock’s ten kilometer long axis; but the curvature made the entire level some twelve or more kilometers long, and nearly half a kilometer wide, with a four meter high ceiling. We walked it all in the first week of exploration.
It was a lot of empty space, with storage and dormitory areas. The life support areas were closed off, with doors we could not open.
My father hoped to find an observation area, much like the circle viewers we found in the floor at ten different locations, for looking into the rock. There had to be a place to look out.
He finally concluded that it had to be somewhere near one of the ends of the rock, down one of the two dozen branches off the main space. He also thought that the engineering level had been a staging area, for bringing in prisoners, and an area that had more use during the time of construction, and before that during the mineral mining period, when the center of the asteroid had been hollowed out.
The level was also used, he was sure, by observers who had visited the rock on its outward swing, which, he reminded us, had been slow compared to the ships that could come and go as they pleased. We were not that far beyond Earth’s sun, given our orbital speed. Speed was not the object. It was the length of sentence that mattered. We should have been back by now. Maybe they had simply left us to go around again, for another fifty years or more.
“What if they’re still coming and going,” I said one day. “How would we know?”
He shook his white-haired head under the glare of the ceiling lights. “No, I think they lost interest in us a while ago. Who knows what changes Earth has had by now.”
We went down a long passage. Lights flashed on before us and blackened behind us. We began to see that the passage ended.
It was a black opening.
We slowed. The lights continued to flash on ahead of us. We came to the opening and stopped. It was a large rectangular entrance, big enough to receive groups of people. There was no sign of a door that might close. I looked at my father, then stepped forward and put my hand into the darkness.
It glowed dimly.
“Wait!” my father cried out, but I stepped inside.
The glow increased, but not up to the brightness of the passageway.
My father came in and stood beside me.
As our eyes adjusted, we saw a large circle on the far wall, exactly like the other viewers but much larger. I looked at the floor and saw the control squares running to our left and right.
My father peered at them. “This is it,” he said, and stepped on the center square.
The screen lit up in reds, browns, yellows, blacks, whites, and we had no idea of what we were seeing. We stood there, trying.
“It’s like a kaleidoscope I once had,” my father said as the view shifted.
We watched, puzzled and fascinated. Was this something outside that we were looking at?
Finally, my father said, “I have an idea now of what has happened to us. We’ve been captured by that. We’re in orbit around it. And we’re not really seeing it directly as it is. We’re picking up the radiation it sends out, and it’s being visualized for us by giving it these colors. See that red-brown body at the center of the clouds?”
I looked and saw what he was describing.
“That’s a planet of some size, way outside our solar system. It’s circling the sun at a vast distance, or maybe it’s just passing through.”
“So we’re trapped here,” I said.
The planet seemed to be at the bottom of a pit, partially hidden by clouds.
“What will become of us?” I asked.
“We can’t live down there,” he said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. And we don’t know enough, and don’t have the means to learn enough, to make use of what resources exist here. If ever our life support systems fail, that will end us. We don’t have enough to reproduce our population safely. All we need is some disease we can’t treat with the all-purpose drugs we have.”
What lay below was a hell pit, a wandering world warmed by volcanism, its heat held in by a poisonous atmospheric blanket.
“If we knew more, or could learn, we’d have a chance of benefiting from this world. It could become everything to our willing hands, if we had the knowledge and tools, yielding important discoveries.”
“We need help,” I said.
He shook his head. “We’re not equal to the task. I can only imagine what we would need. Just barely.”
I said, “Maybe we’ll learn more, or help will come.”
He looked at me as if I were a stranger. Fresh from the only triumph of my life, I was prone to imagine greater ones.
“And our orbit may not be stable,” he said. “It may be decaying. No telling how long we may have before we get pulled in.”
He explained it to me in more detail. “But it’s not sure that is what’s happening,” I said.
“No, it’s not sure,” he said. “We might get a clue watching this display change.”
“We must keep going,” I said as I looked at the maelstrom that held us.
11
We looked sunward with hope in the years that followed. Most of us, even the oldest, visited the viewing area. I was a guide, explaining what was being shown.
It became clear that the braking we had felt ten years earlier had been the effect of our rock being captured by a loose planet wandering beyond Earth’s sun, or in a wide orbit around it, maybe even free of any sun. We had been lucky, having been slowed just enough to put us into orbit around the body. We might have crashed into it.
But we continued to watch for signs of danger. Orbits might take a long time to decay, but time would not stop it from happening. We had no way to measure the time.
Father continued teaching me, dredging up everything that he could remember, however fragmented.
“Planets are clouds that failed to become suns, for lack of mass,” he continued. “In the formation of solar systems, the central area gets the mass and lights up. Gravity is the contractor. When you d
on’t have enough mass, you have no choice but to become a planet. There’s too little debris left for you to sweep up and grow larger.” He smiled at me and said, “The universe is made up of objects that failed to become black holes, but became stars and planets, lacking the mass to collapse into black holes. Gravity wants eventually to make everything into a black hole.” He smiled again and said, “So planets get a chance, some of them, to dream up life that talks like me.”
“That place down there,” I said, “can it have... life?”
“Maybe. Depends on the source of energy and how it reaches the surface, or near-surface. Maybe the inner heat of the planet, from simple gravitational contraction, has given enough heat for strange life to develop below the surface, maybe even intelligent life unlike our own, unlike all the other life that comes up in sun-warmed, wet worlds like the Earth.”
“You do know a thing or two,” I said.
“Useless,” he said, “too general to tell us what we might do. We don’t have the tools. All we can do is exist as long as our support systems hold out.” He sighed with a resignation that was wearing away at me.
One day I took my mother to the view. She had heard my conversations with Father, but had avoided going to the viewer.
“How horrible,” she said, standing before it. “What did I bring you into?”
I came close and embraced her. “Don’t worry. We’ll learn to do what we need to do.”
She looked up at me with her large, blue eyes, still youthful looking in a wrinkled, gray head, and said, “You’re as good a liar as your father, maybe better. I almost believe you.”
We looked at the loose planet that had failed to become a star. Clouds of red, white, gray, and blue roiled around it, and I imagined things rising up from the pit to take hold of our small world and break it open, spilling our life into the void.
My mother smiled, but I felt the darkness spilling out of her. She struggled less against it than my father. I didn’t have enough history in me to let it bother me as much. The forward looking, hungry pressure in my mind would not let me.
Black Pockets Page 17
