Incredible. And all of it built God knows how just to house the thing, the Wheel under her feet. The survey teams were just starting to explore the whole Wheel, but the drillings and sounding and excavations they had done so far suggested that most of it had the cross-section of a rounded-off oval about forty meters side to side and thirty top to bottom. In places it bulged out vertically or horizontally, the tunnel enlarging to accommodate it.
This one thing, this one object, went clear around the world. She had to look down at it, stare at it, marvel at it every time she came down here. Maybe that was why lately she came down so rarely. Hell, we built the Ring of Charon, and that’s practically the same size, Marcia told herself. The difference was, of course, that the Ring had been built in open space. Digging a tunnel clear around a world was far beyond human capability—or, for that matter, human necessity. There had been no reason to hide the Ring of Charon. There was the question that nagged at the back of everything: what the devil had the Lunar Wheel been hiding from? It had taken tremendous effort to hide it. What could be so powerful that something as huge and mighty as the Wheel feared it, hid from it?
The surface of the Wheel was a dark, hard, flaky brown substance. It was, in effect, the thing’s dead, dried-out skin. When the first teams had come down here, the area at the base of the Rabbit Hole had been covered in a layer of thin, flat, broken-up pieces of the stuff, with a consistency like that of dried leaves that crunched when you walked on them. The surface had been littered with bits of Charonian junk. Bits of dead carrier bug, carapaces from unknown Charonian forms, broken pieces that seemed a cross between the mechanical and the biological.
All of that had been cleared away, leaving the lower epidermal layers exposed. Bit by bit, those were drying up and flaking away as well. Bits of dead wheelskin were constantly drifting in from the tunnel. It was a struggle to keep the area clear.
One of the several well-worn paths in the epidermal layer led toward the east entrance to the tunnel. Marcia stood and stared at that entrance. Just over five years ago, a strange, wheeled Charonian had grabbed Lucian Dreyfuss off his feet and raced away with him in that direction. No one knew what had happened to him after that. Lucian Dreyfuss’s personal abduction had become the stuff of legend, of folklore, a mystery that intrigued everyone—in part, no doubt, because it bore similarities to the real Abduction, but on a small enough scale that people could understand it. You could imagine one man being kidnapped, even if you couldn’t imagine a whole world being snatched away. It had inspired all sorts of theories and search parties and explorations—but none of them had come to anything.
“Come on, now, Marcia,” Selby said from up ahead. “Don’t be a lollygagger. Off we go.”
She nodded agreement and followed along behind. Work lights had been strung in the tunnel, affording a fairly bright illumination. A line of small white runcarts sat parked not far inside the entrance. Selby went to the first one in line and sat down at the controls, Marcia trailing a step or two behind, still more than a little reluctant to deal with all of this. Best to plunge on. “All right, Selby,” she said. “Let’s go get a look at this mystery of yours.”
“Right,” Selby said, her face set and determined. She grabbed the car’s steering wheel, jammed her foot on the accelerator, and took off.
◊ ◊ ◊
The runcart lurched forward with a jolt before Marcia could attach her seatbelt. The cart took off at speed, Marcia hanging on for dear life. At least this time Selby was driving on the right-hand side of the road. When she forgot herself and reverted to driving on the left-hand side, as was the English habit, the ride was just that much more exciting.
Selby’s driving settled down after a moment, and they moved down the tunnel at a steady clip. Marcia released her grip long enough to get her seatbelt fastened.
They drove out of the overhead lighting a minute or two after starting out, and plunged into the darkness with disconcerting abruptness. Selby flicked on the headlights and the car rushed into the tunnel, its wall looming up out of the darkness into the glare of the lights as they hurtled down the road.
The Wheel Tunnel moved ahead, seemingly straight as an arrow. So far as Marcia could tell, they were moving down a perfectly straight, infinitely long road.
But there were plenty of side caverns that were anything but straight. Here and there they passed lighted signs, each with a number on it. Each indicated a side cavern off the main Wheelway. The runcart rushed past them, past the entrances they marked, huge gaping holes to one side or the other of the tunnel, and one or two from its top. The glow of work lights was visible from some of the entrances. Some side caverns were little more than widenings in the main tunnel, or were simple, straight cul-de-sacs. Others led to absolute mazes of chambers and side tunnels wandering off in all directions—up, down, east, west, north, south—all at once.
The survey teams could easily be kept busy for the next several centuries exploring all the twisting labyrinthine turns of the side caverns. Some were mere empty holes in the rock. Some held nothing but a few bits of the ubiquitous flakes of the wheel’s epidermal layers.
But others were filled with things. Bits of strange machines, dead Charonians of all sorts. Other chambers held God only knew what. One chamber was full of cubes of an unknown material somewhere between a metal and a plastic. There was a deep pit filled with some sort of tarry liquid. Another pit was half-filled with coils of some sort of rather flimsy rope or cable. Were the chambers maintenance depots? Kitchens? Medicine cabinets? Storehouses for art supplies?
But perhaps the most disturbing finds were the most recognisable and least mysterious—chambers full of bones and desiccated corpses. The remains of terrestrial animals.
Dinosaurs, to be exact.
It was more shocking, more disconcerting, than it was surprising. There had been direct evidence early on that the Charonians had visited Earth and taken some biological samples. There were strands of terrestrial DNA and RNA in the cell structure of a number of Charonian forms. But no one had expected the Charonians to do their lab work in a tunnel under the lunar surface.
The runcart rushed past a particularly bright-lit side cavern. Marcia spotted the number over the entrance. Chamber 281. In there, inside a huge, high-ceilinged cavern three kilometres across, the survey teams had found a half-dozen tyrannosaurs—some merely skeletal, the others desiccated whole remains. They had been tucked away since the end of the Cretaceous, along with dozens of what were either some kind of thescelosaurids, or perhaps orthinominids— ostrich-like dinosaurs—of some sort. There were twenty or thirty other, smaller types no one had been able to identify even that closely. No one on the Moon knew enough about dinosaurs to say more. If there had not been much need for archaeologists on the pre-Abduction Moon, there had been even less call for paleontologists.
But then Chamber 281 swept past, and they were off again into the darkness.
“Marcia?” Selby said, breaking the silence at last. “I know you don’t feel like talking just now, and neither do I, but I want to tell you something anyway. You won’t be prepared for this unless you get ready first.”
Marcia smiled, her expression hidden behind her pressure suit helmet and the darkness. Say what else you might about the emotions of the moment, or about the woman herself, Selby brought incomprehensibility to a fine art. “All right, Selby, what is it you have to tell me?”
“The dinosaurs, love. The dinosaurs. New information since the last time you paid a call. The chaps working on them think they died here instead of being killed on Earth. Found Lunar rocks in their gizzards, or some such. I didn’t understand, exactly, but the point is they were alive here for quite a while. Like fifteen million years.”
“What?”
“They can do dating based on radioactive decay. Relative amounts of various forms of this or that atom—I don’t know the precise details. And there might be some contamination muddling it all up, or something. But the chaps tell me some of the
dinos died maybe fifteen million years after some of the others.”
“You’re trying to tell me there were dinosaurs living in this tunnel for fifteen million years?”
“No, love, not a bit of it. Just that some of them died fifteen million years after the others.”
“I don’t understand,” Marcia said. What was Selby talking about?
“I know you don’t,” Selby said. “That’s for the best, just for now. But when you do understand, I think maybe it will make more sense to you after that.”
“Fine. Whatever,” Marcia replied.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” Selby said.
In less time than that, Marcia spotted a new light far down the tunnel. It grew as they drew toward it, and Selby slowed the cart. It was another side cavern, a small one, off to the right. Worklights inside threw a warm glow into the greenish air of the tunnel.
“One of our survey workers found her about three days ago,” Selby said. “Look, Marcia,” she said in a softer voice, “punch over to comm circuit twelve, will you? The team doesn’t use that one, and we’ll be able to talk more private-like.”
Marcia got the distinct impression that Selby was more concerned with her not hearing what the survey workers had to say. More than a bit mystified, Marcia did as she was told, but there was one question she needed to ask. “We’re still very close to the Rabbit Hole. They’ve explored much further than this. Why did they just find the—the whatever it is—now?”
They got down off the runcart, and Selby led her to the cavern entrance. “You’ve got to understand there are hundreds, maybe thousands or tens of thousands of these side chambers,” she said in apologetic tones. “We’re still not a tenth of the way around in our initial survey of the tunnel. We’re frightfully understaffed. No people at all, except for our workers. We’re just starting in to map them all in, and there’s nothing in a lot of them—the caverns I mean, not the workers. Sometimes it’s all we can do to just poke our head in for a quick peek and then move on. Our records show this cavern was first mapped four years ago—but we didn’t check it all the way. Three days ago, Peng Li was doing a follow-up and noticed the inner chambers. Come on inside.”
Marcia followed her into the side chamber. The entrance was a circle cut out of the main tunnel, about a meter and a half across, about half a meter off the floor of the cavern. She climbed up into it and found herself in an oblong room about ten meters long, three high, and two wide. The chamber was empty.
“We’re going to have to widen this out before very much longer,” Selby said, half to herself. “Lots of gear we’ll need to get in here. Anyway, there’s the entrance Li found.”
Marcia looked over and saw a hole in the floor of the room, at the far end, about the size and shape of a small maintenance accessway. A ladder was sticking up out of it. Light was glowing up from it, and the exterior mikes on Marcia’s suit were picking up the sounds of movement from inside. In the dark, on a quick check, it would be easy to miss.
“Right, now, in we go.” Selby crossed the chamber and started down the ladder. She hesitated with her head just at ground level and looked back up at Marcia. “Now be careful here,” she said. “No one has disturbed anything in this chamber yet. We want to make sure we have it photographed and scanned every way we possibly can before we move—ah, it.” Her voice turned as stony as the cavern, and her face was expressionless, cold and firm through her suit helmet. “It is not as bad as I’ve made it out to be. But it’s also much worse. Come.”
She continued down the ladder. It took Marcia a moment or two before she could force herself to follow. She stepped onto the ladder and made her way down, moving very carefully, staring straight ahead. She stepped back from the ladder and found herself standing near the edge of a hemispherical chamber, a dome in the rock about ten meters high at the center. The room was dead empty except for a rack of too-bright lights shining almost exactly in her eyes—and one other thing, splayed out in the center of the floor. Good God, what was that? A human body?
“Lucian Dreyfuss,” Selby said. “Or at least his pressure suit.”
Marcia’s eyes adjusted, and she could see more clearly. Fresh relief and fresh horror sprang to her heart at one and the same time.
It was indeed a pressure suit, lying flat on its back, arms and legs spread-eagled, sliced neatly open, straight down the centreline of the body, one continuous cut clean through the fabric of the suit, through the helmet, down the chest and abdomen packs, and finishing up at the crotch. The cut was surgically precise, slicing perfectly, flawlessly, through all the different materials, the two sides of the cut neatly peeled back. There were other, equally perfect cuts down the arms and legs of the suit, likewise peeled back.
Flecks and bits of Wheel epidermis had sifted down on the suit, and some sort of reaction with the Wheel’s interior atmosphere had turned it from white to brown. It was an old shrivelled thing that had been lying here in the darkness for five years, like the desiccated remains of some corpse mummified by chance. Marcia stared at the suit, her heart beating wildly, her breath suddenly short. Lucian Dreyfuss. He had vanished down that tunnel, and then had been laid out here in his suit, sliced out of it, picked like a pea from a pod and then taken—
“Where?” Marcia asked. Her voice was not steady, and she could not trust herself to say more.
Selby didn’t need any other words to know what Marcia meant. “This way,” she said. She led her around the edge of the chamber, careful not to come too close to the violated pressure suit.
She stepped behind the rack of worklights. Just behind it to one side was the entrance to yet another chamber. It had been hidden by the glare of the lights. It was a tall, broad passage, about fifteen meters long and three wide, leading downward at about a five-degree grade, the walls high, the ceiling vaulted.
Marcia followed Selby down the passage, moving slowly. Her mind pursued meaningless side questions. Why were the chambers built in this odd configuration? Why this large passage when the way to the exterior was so much smaller? None of that mattered in the slightest just now, but at least for a few seconds, it kept her mind off what she had just seen—and whatever she was about to see.
Light and movement filled the inner chamber, figures going back and forth, moving with the slightly awkward stiffness of people not completely used to working in pressure suits.
As they stepped into the chamber, all movement stopped. People stopped in their tracks and looked toward Marcia. The tableaux held for a moment, and then, moving with one accord, everyone filed past Marcia, out of the chamber. Selby must have jumped to another comm channel and given the order to leave.
The third chamber was of precisely the same dimensions as the second one. But where the second room was empty but for the suit, this one was filled with all manner of artifacts, both human and Charonian. Marcia could not even identify most of the human gear. It was all on portable racks, and most of it looked vaguely medical, somehow. Lights gleamed, displays glowed, leads trailed off.
Three or four small dead Charonians of various sorts lay slumped over against the far wall of the chamber. Were they the ones who had cut Lucian from his suit and then—and then what?
Marcia stepped forward into the chamber, toward the cluster of human machines. Something lay on floor in the center of the chamber, hard to see with the machines in the way. A low hummock in the floor of the chamber, a discoloured brownish lump that looked as if it had been melted and poured into place. It was translucent, and gleamed dimly. Someone had dusted it off, polished it up. Any number of wires led from the medical machines to various points on the lumpen shape.
“Oh, my God,” Marcia whispered. She got closer, shoved past the surrounding monitoring gear, and looked down at the shape from above.
The shape of the thing was more complicated than she had thought. It was no simple blob in the floor. Instead it repeated exactly the same pose and orientation as the sliced-open pressure suits. It reminded Marcia irresist
ibly of the chalk outline policemen drew around a corpse in murder stories. There was the torso, and the head, and the arms and legs spread wide.
Every body part was in the same relative position as on the pressure suit, but everything was rounded, spread out, made large enough to surround that which was inside. It looked like some strange, misshapen, hideous caricature of a gingerbread man.
Marcia stepped forward, pulled her handlight out of the holster on her suit, and shone it down on the—the whatever it was.
Her throat went dry. There. Yes. She could see the body, ever so dimly, through the exterior shell, clearly enough to recognise the man she had known, slightly and briefly, five years before. Perfect, uncorrupted, intact, suspended in the brown substance a few inches off the floor. His eyes were shut, his expression calm. Only his hair was disordered, floating up around his head just a trifle.
Except—except—there were cables—no, not cables, not wires. Somehow, they had more of the look of living tissue than mechanical hardware. Marcia knelt down and looked closer. Elongated growths—call them tendrils—coming up from the floor of the cavern, and attached to Lucian’s head and neck. Others were attached to his chest and his genitalia.
Sweet God. Sweet God. Of course. The dinosaurs. The damned dinosaurs Selby had been babbling about. Half of them died fifteen million years after the others because the Charonians had kept them alive, like this, for fifteen million years.
Alive. Sweet Jesus in Hell, Lucian Dreyfuss was in death alive, entombed inside that thing, with no way to get out. Marcia collapsed to her knees, and the tears fell from her eyes.
The Charonians had snatched him and put him, still living, in a specimen bottle. Good God, fifteen million years! Might he wait as long as the poor tyrannosaurs to be released from this nightmare storage into real, honest death?
Hunted Earth Omnibus Page 48
