The Shattered Sphere

Two Left overs

Marcia MacDougal glanced at her wristaid for at least the dozenth time as the chancellor droned on. She knew that she really shouldn’t do it. She knew it looked bad, that it was a disrespectful thing to do—especially for someone who was on the speaker’s platform. The man was due some respect, after all. Chancellor Daltry had been running Armstrong University forever. But it seemed to Marcia that he had been speaking for about the same period of time.

Damn it, why couldn’t the man finish? MacDougal wanted the ceremony to end so she could go—but she also knew she had to stay, and see the ceremony out.

Damnation! She should never have come back here. She should have stayed at the Pole, close to the action, ready to move. But yes, there was business to do back here, and yes, she had to be in the city for the Abduction Day ceremonies. She was, after all, a Conner, to use the slang term for a citizen of the Lunar Republic. Marcia was a refugee from Tycho Purple Penal, and thus an immigrant to the Lunar Republic. Like most immigrants, she took her citizenship seriously. She wanted to be here. It was an honor to be here.

But how could she have known that they would have picked now, today, to find something at the Pole? A breakthrough, Selby had said.

At least a possible breakthrough. She hadn’t been willing to say more than that.

“We mourn today,” Chancellor Daltry said, “for that which is lost in the sense of misplaced, out of reach, and also for that which is lost in the sense of being hopelessly, utterly gone. We mourn for the Earth, but retain every hope and expectation that she lives. But we mourn also the lives lost, the destroyed worlds of the Solar System, the end of our previous way of life. In a sense, we are speaking not only for our dead, but to them, telling them all the things we desperately need for them to hear.”

Nice old guy, Marcia thought, but does he have to go on and on? She went back to tuning out the words, and applauding when everyone else did. Pretending to listen was enough.

Marcia had said her own piece toward the beginning of the service. Surely that was all they could expect of her. Maybe not even that much.

There was no real need for her to remain. Maybe she could sneak off the stage without anyone noticing. But Marcia was a rather striking woman, tall and slender, with smooth perfect skin the color of mahogany. Her eyes were bright and clear, dark brown in color, set in a round, expressive face. She had grown her luxuriant black hair out these last few years, and she wore it in a single thick braid down the middle of her back. Normally, she didn’t mind being the sort of person people looked at, but right now it made it seem unlikely that she would able to thread her way across a stage full of chairs without causing a ruckus. She shifted in her seat, feeling restless—and even that movement was enough to prompt a loud squeak from her chair. No. Face it. She had to sit tight, and that was that.

At last the chancellor droned to a halt. Marcia applauded as briefly as she decently could, stood with the others, and then made her way off the platform. She slipped out through the edge of the departing crowd and hurried on her way.

But rush as she might, on this day, Abduction Day, it was impossible not to think on all that had been lost. Marcia looked about the dome as she walked. Central City had suffered tremendous damage in the post-Abduction pulsequakes, and even now, much of it had yet to heal.

Central City had always been proud of its trees and its gardens, growing tall under the blue stone skies of the domes. Most of the decorative plant life had died during or after the quakes. Some plants were crushed or smashed or uprooted in the quake, but most died because the water-line systems that fed them were wrecked. Repair priority, quite rightly, was given to repairing the water system for the distinctly non-decorative hydroponic gardens that supplied the city with a large fraction of its food and air.

The city and the people had survived, but all too many of the trees and gardens died of thirst. Most of the gardens had come back and, here and there, a new sapling showed itself, green as life and fresh as hope; but even now, five years on, dead trees were everywhere. The city was cutting them down and replanting as best it could—but it had to move slowly. If it had cut down all the trees and sent them for recycling all at once, the city’s biomass and carbon-cycle balance would have been thrown totally out of whack. The city could not afford the effort and materials needed to do a major biomass rebalance. So the dead trees stayed up, grey skeletons thrusting up toward the sky.

Everything in the city was like that. Everywhere there were scars that should have healed by now, except that Central City, and its people, were still working on the basic structural repairs. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be imported. Earth wasn’t there to ship anything, and the other worlds were far worse off than the Moon. The Moon had effectively been self-sufficient for years—but Earth had always been there as a backstop, as a source of sophisticated spare parts and luxury items. No more.

Sidewalks were out of true. Windows were cracked. Here and there, the paint on the dome had peeled or chipped, revealing spots of grey-black rock behind the sky blue facade. Buildings were repaired with braces and struts, rather than rebuilt. Everything strong and ugly, and nowhere a hint of grace. People were expected to make do.

Marcia hurried down a once-moving walkway that had stood still for five years, went down two levels to the nearest transport center. The daily hopper run to the North Pole was going to lift in twenty minutes, and she had to be on it. The survey teams searching through the unbelievably vast corpse of the Lunar Wheel had found something.

She checked her wristaid for the time again. She could still just make it if she hurried.

Marcia MacDougal was not much for false modesty. She knew she was one of the leading experts—no, the leading expert—in Charonian visual language and symbology. It was fascinating and useful work, but it did have its drawbacks—for instance, traveling via hopper. She was constantly shuttling back and forth between Central City and Dreyfuss Station at the North Pole, and the trip never got any better.

Lunar travel used to mean leaving your comfortable surroundings, going aboard a cramped, uncomfortable roller to be jounced along on a bad road, or perhaps taking a sub-orbital hopper rocket, cramming yourself into the too-small seats and suffering through the roaring, rattling, crushing-heavy weight of the launch. It meant feeling a bit queasy as the roller hit a bad patch in the road or the hopper cut its engines and made that abrupt lurch into zero gee. It meant the thrill of fear when the roller seemed to come far too close to the edge of a precipice, or when the braking rockets appeared to be something more than a trifle late lighting up. It meant bad food, close quarters, and a distinct sense that time had stood still and you were going to be trapped in an oversized tin can forever. But then you would arrive, and step through the pressure lock, and it would be over, and you would be back in civilization, with good air and proper food and enough space to stand up and turn around in.

Nowadays, lunar travel was exactly the same, but the comfortable surroundings at either end had deteriorated quite seriously. If Central City was a bit shabby these days, Dreyfuss Station was positively grim.

The hopper ride was miserable, made no less so by the fact that safety regulations required everyone to wear a pressure suit during the flight. Marcia had no real quarrel with that rule. She knew as well as anyone exactly what condition the hopper fleet was in, but it did not make the suits any more pleasant to wear. At least you didn’t have to seal your suit, just be able to button up in a hurry. Wearing the thing unsealed was torture enough.

Having but little faith in the hull’s integrity, Marcia breathed a half sigh of relief when the underpowered spacecraft made a safe—if slightly bumpy—landing at the North Pole spaceport.

At least the memorial services meant the hopper wasn’t packed to the bulkheads the way it usually was. Marcia MacDougal waited with the two or three other passengers for the roller to dock up with the hopper. One obvious first-timer stood up and went over to wait by the hatch, but Marcia and the others waited it out in their seats. No sense standing on everybody else’s toes in the low-ceilinged hatchway for the ten minutes it would take to get the two crotchety old vehicles docked. Marcia closed her eyes and tried to think of quiet, comfortable places. It wasn’t easy.

At last the hatch opened with a weary creak. Marcia opened her eyes, pried herself out of her chair, grabbed her travel bag, and made her way to the hatch.

They filed into the roller and the hatch closed behind them. The first-timer made the mistake of sitting down for the ride, but Marcia and the others stood, holding onto one of the straps hanging from the overhead bulkhead. She slung the strap of her travel bag over her shoulder, and braced her feet as best she could. It was awkward, but it beat being thrown out of your seat on the first bounce. The roller’s seatbelts had been “borrowed” for use on other vehicles years ago.

The motors whirred to life, and the elderly surface vehicle lurched into motion. The roller was in no better shape than it had been the last time she had ridden it, and it creaked and groaned most alarmingly as it jounced over the lunar surface. The newcomer bounced out of her chair three times before standing with the rest of them.

After a more than usually bone-rattling ride, the roller arrived at the station and entered the vehicular airlock. The hatch closed behind the roller, and Marcia listened as the air hissed into the airlock chamber. The roller’s hull pinged and groaned as it adjusted to the change in pressure. The hatch opened, and she was there, even if “there” wasn’t much of a place.

Travel bag still over her shoulder, she stepped out of the airlock chamber and into the main transport entrance of Dome One, Dreyfuss Station, to be welcomed by the rotting-sweatsock smell that summed up the whole of Dreyfuss Station so far as Marcia was concerned.

The transport section took up about half the hundred-meter diameter of Dome One. It had all the ambience of a third-rate loading and storage bay—which was, of course, all it really was.

Everything up here at the Pole had always been rather utilitarian, but the repeated cutbacks in maintenance had turned things positively grim in the last year or two. The air was a trifle too dry. There was just a hint of the ozone odor of overworked electrical system. A few of the light fixtures here and there were dark. A film of dust lay over everything, and a sad greyness seemed to have settled with the dust. The shabby feel of the place never failed to get to Marcia, every time she came back. The place was less than five years old, and yet it all seemed to be moldering away.

Someday they would get the budget and the resources to refurbish this place. Not for the first time, she considered the likely fact that the people who were around here all the time didn’t even notice it anymore. Maybe that was the saddest thing of all.

Tunnels and chambers cut into the lunar rock, with a few surface domes. That was Dreyfuss Station. Yet there had been a time—and perhaps there would be a time once again—when those tunnels and domes were and would be something more than that. Once it had been a place with a purpose, a mission, the place where the people of the Moon would wrest the secrets of the Charonians from the ruined Lunar Wheel.

But no one had made any real progress toward that goal in a long, long time. The researchers had accumulated data, yes—huge masses of it. The people of the Moon now understood the biology and behavior of the Charonians far better than they ever had before. But none of that knowledge got them any closer to finding the Earth.

And, ultimately, what else mattered besides that?

Well, one thing did. At least it mattered to Marcia MacDougal. It was why she had signed on to the Lunar Wheel survey in the first place. Her husband, Gerald MacDougal, serving aboard the Terra Nova. She had lost him when the Earth had been Abducted, and if there was one goal in her life, it was it getting him back. Mastering the Charonian symbol language was nothing to her but a way of moving toward that goal. Humanity might be able to undo what the Charonians had done—if humanity learned Charonian.

None of which did her any good at the moment. Where was Selby? She glanced around the arrival room, half-hoping that Selby wasn’t going to be there. Yes, she had said she would meet her flight, and Marcia had agreed, but she couldn’t help wishing she could slip off to her own quarters and have a little peace and quiet—

But no. There was Selby, on the far side of the room, waving her hand a bit frantically. Marcia sighed, gave her a token wave, and made her way over to her.

The theory had been offered more than once that England kept an even keel through the simple expedient of shipping a fair number of the dottier cases off to foreign parts. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton lent credence to the theory. Marcia MacDougal had never met anyone quite like Selby. Normally, she rather enjoyed the other woman’s company—in small doses. Selby never quite seemed to be on the same wavelength as everyone else. There she was, on a day of general public mourning, grinning from ear to ear and literally bouncing up and down with excitement.

Selby was about forty-five or fifty, something under average height. Her dark brown hair had a bit of grey in it, and was cut in a too-short sort of pageboy. She had pale skin, startling blue eyes, even white teeth, and a strange sort of nonchalant enthusiasm for practically everything. She was a just a trifle on the stocky side, though really still quite trim.

“Coo-ee! Marcia! Marcia MacDougal! Over here!” As if Marcia couldn’t see her eight meters in front of her face. What was that coo-ee noise supposed to mean, anyway? Marcia stepped forward to greet her. “Hello, Selby,” she said, reaching out to shake her hand.

“Hello, Dr. MacDougal,” she said with exaggerated emphasis, a chirpy lilt in her voice. Instead of shaking hands, she sidestepped and gave Marcia a rather maternal peck on the cheek. “Always such a pleasure to see you. But you’ve been away so long this time I almost forgot you were gone.”

“Well, I, ah… what? What did you say?”

She smiled and pulled Marcia along by the arm, eager to get moving. “Welcome back,” she said, ignoring her question. “It’s been nothing but dull going since you left—until the excitement started, of course. Non-stop, all-out, all-go ever since we got started,” she went on, the sentences tumbling out of her, one after the other. “We’ve been down there doing the—well, you’ll see. No matter. Working round the clock and then some. But I swear we’ve been at it so hard I didn’t know the date until I realized what today was.”

MacDougal never quite knew how to react to Selby’s scrambled syntax. For her part, Selby never seemed to understand why people were constantly confused around her. It was as if she were speaking a private language of her own, one that made perfect sense to her, and that only resembled English by sheer chance. Marcia knew Tycho Purple Penal folk who were more understandable. “Sounds as if you’ve been busy,” she said, for want of anything better to say.

“Oh, I suppose so. Maybe not all that much,” she said, quite casually contradicting everything she had just said with an obviously spurious nonchalance. “Are you glad to be here?” she asked, quite out of the blue.

It was an absurd question, and Marcia was in no mood for nonsense, but at least it had the benefit of allowing a clear answer. “Not really,” she said. “Today’s not exactly a happy day. But you said you had something for me. Is it—”

Selby’s voice turned serious, at least for the moment. She stopped and looked her straight in the eye. “Yes. I said it might be a breakthrough. Our Rosetta Stone, the key that might let us learn… learn everything. If we have the stomach for it. Don’t bother getting back to your quarters. Just toss your gear in a locker and let’s go right now,” Selby said. “This will make better sense if you see for yourself. If it even makes sense then.”

It was not until that moment that Marcia realized Selby was still wearing her own pressure suit. She hated wearing that thing. She always stripped out of it the first chance she got. And she usually bent Marcia’s ear for at least a good fifteen minutes no matter what the topic under discussion. If Selby stayed in her suit, and didn’t stop to chat, then something was definitely up.

Selby seemed too excited. Marcia started to feel a nervous, queasy sensation in her stomach as she crossed to the single bank of luggage lockers and tossed her bag into one of the lockers that still worked. She came back, with more certainty in her stride than her heart. The sooner she found out what the hell they had found, the better. “All right, Selby,” she said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

The entrance complex to the Rabbit Hole took up most of the rest of Dome One. They made their way through the redundant airlock sealing off the Vertical Transit Center from the rest of the dome. There was normal pressure on either side of the lock, and perhaps it would have been more convenient to leave both doors open and allow easier access—but this was a station on a shoestring, and lots of things could change air pressure on either side of that lock. Safety regs required full standard lock cycling and sealed airlocks at all times. They went through the lock. “All set to see what we shall see?” Selby asked, her tone more serious than her words.

“All set,” Marcia said, trying hard to read Selby’s expression through her helmet. She was always a bit strained and tense, but something about her cheeriness seemed even more forced than usual.

MacDougal followed Selby into the transit elevator and took a seat on the opposite side of the car from her, trying to get far enough away that it would be awkward for Selby to start a conversation. She buckled her seatbelt and waited.

The Rabbit Hole. At some time in the deep past, the Charonians had dug the Lunar Wheel cavity, wrapping clear around the Moon forty kilometers beneath the surface. As part of that process, they had dug twin boreholes at the lunar North and South poles. They had dug these upward from the forty-kilometer level, almost but not quite to the surface, leaving the surface layers of rock undisturbed. As with most things regarding the Charonians, there were many theories as to why this might be so, but no real answer.

Five years before, search teams had used alternate-mode gravity detectors to locate the top of the North Pole borehole, which was promptly dubbed the Rabbit Hole. Back then, Lucian Dreyfuss and Chao’s TeleOperator had ridden a jury-rigged sort of cable car down the forty-kilometer shaft.

Today, a sophisticated system of four vertical-shuttle cars, each with twenty seats, handled the traffic.

A clock display by the car door reported that the car would descend in five minutes. The car had been empty when Marcia and Selby arrived, but two or three other people came in and sat down in the middle of the car. Good. It made it that much easier to avoid talking to Selby. In practical terms, yes, they could have set their comm systems to a private frequency and had a lovely chat. Normally Selby would have done just that, no matter if they were two meters or ten kilometers away. But for whatever reason, just now it seemed she actually did not want to speak.

Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton, Ph.D., was a Leftover, that being the rather unfortunate and semi-derogatory term for anyone from Earth stranded in the Solar System by the Abduction. Most of the Leftovers on the Moon had come to the Moon as tourists, and thus represented a more or less random cross-section of terrestrial affluence; well-to-do travelers from all walks of life. Most had adapted to their new circumstances reasonably well in the past few years.

Still, even the most stable and best-readjusted of them had been wounded pretty badly. To Marcia, and to most people who lived on the Moon, the Earth had been a pretty thing in the sky, a distant place that people and things came from and went to. Marcia had been to Earth, but she was not of the Earth. It was important to her, she mourned its passing as deeply as anyone, but it was not her home. To her, and for most folk on the Moon, it was more of an abstraction than a location, with the whole planet, all its myriad places and endless variety, lumped together under the name “Earth.”

But the Leftovers never spoke of themselves as being from Earth. They were from London, or Greenwich Village, or Cambridge or Fresno, from Kiev or Montevideo or Bangkok or Warsaw. Each of them had lost a different home, a different place, a different family. Everything they knew was gone, vanished. They had no way of knowing if their daughters or husbands or grandmothers lived. They knew that they themselves were lost to their loved ones. Their families might as well be dead, and, so far as their families were concerned, the Leftovers might as well be dead.

Marcia had only lost her husband, and she at least knew he had survived, where he had ended up. Her loss was trivial compared to Selby’s. How could she bear up under a loss of her world, of her everything?

Some Leftovers had remarried, started new lives, new families. Some lived their lives as if Earth was just about to return at any moment.

But all of them, all of them, had that look in their eyes. No matter how they dealt with it, or refused to deal with it, that pain, that wound, bright and clear, was just beneath the surface. Perhaps the only thing different about Selby was that she wore her wounds a bit more obviously—and pretended harder than most they weren’t there at all.

The departure clock counted down to zero, the door slid shut, and the car began its descent down the Rabbit Hole. It rolled downward, but only a few meters. Another airlock.

There was air pressure, if not air as such, on the other side of the lock. The Lunar Wheel was surrounded by a cloud of dismal green gas, a miasma of complex, foul-smelling compounds, residual gaseous waste products of the Wheel’s biochemistry. It had been a lot worse five years ago, when they had first drilled the shaft and punched through into the environment the Wheel had built for itself. But no airlock was perfect. A lot of the muck had leaked away into Dreyfuss Station since then, necessitating extra-heavy-duty air-scrubbers. Even they couldn’t get all of it. Dreyfuss Station would never smell good. Some further fraction of it seemed to have been reabsorbed by the Wheel, or else some undetected vent was allowing it to escape. In any event, the gas pressure inside the Wheel cavity had been dropping steadily for years.

The lock doors cycled, and the car moved downward again.

There were windows in the car, but not much outside the car to look at. The walls of the shaft and the support cables for the transit elevators were illuminated by the car’s running lights, turned a sickly green by the intervening gas. Usually you could spot a car headed toward the surface about halfway through the ride. A gleaming blob of light far below, moving upward at a most impressive speed, would rush past the downward car with a swoosh of noise and a noticeable jostling of the down car. It was disconcerting to a Conner like Marcia, quite unused to the effects of air pressure on vehicles. The other riders got up and went to the window to see the show.

But Marcia had seen it before. Right now, she was more interested in her traveling companion. Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton was an atypical Leftover. She had not come here as a tourist. She had come to the Moon to work. As an archaeologist. The only one on this world, though it might seem one more than was needed.

But archaeology was not as absurd as it sounded. Not quite, anyway. She was not, as some people assumed, some nut come to dig up the graves of imaginary ancient astronauts from Atlantis or from beyond the stars or something. People—regular, human people— had been on the Moon for centuries, and they had left more than a few interesting and important things behind. A good deal of her job was done just sitting at a comm panel, tooling through the historical data. She would dig through long-forgotten infobases, sift old records, go through long-forgotten datacubes and hardcopy records, finding the old details and key facts no one had seen in generations.

But she did fieldwork as well. Abandoned settlements, crashed vehicles, trash heaps and so on were scattered about the lunar surface. Selby had done some impressive digs under difficult circumstances, and had found enough evidence to rewrite a page or two of lunar history. Chancellor Daltry had talked about conversations with the dead at the memorial service. Selby had spent her working life talking with them.

From the archaeological point of view, the Lunar Wheel could be considered as one huge artifact—or one huge carcass, if you liked. Tyrone Vespasian, the director of Dreyfuss Station, had hired Selby his first day on the job—and, as he had told Marcia once or twice since, there had been few days since when he did not both congratulate himself on the choice and regret his decision. Selby was good at her job, there was no doubt about that. She had done any amount of first-class work. But she was also a royal pain in the neck.

The car began to slow as it came to the end of its journey. Smoothly, neatly, perfectly, it arrived at the base of the Rabbit Hole.

There was a slight pause as the car unsealed and matched air pressure with the outside. Marcia’s suit whirred and hummed, adjusting to the increase in pressure. The elevator door opened and a few tendrils of greenish smog drifted into the car. Marcia undid her seatbelt, sealed her helmet, and followed the other passengers out the door. She stepped out to stand on the corpse of the Lunar Wheel. The greenish tinge was not quite as noticeable down here. The techs had fooled with the lights to mask it somewhat. But no one was going be tricked into thinking there was normal air down here.

Selby was leading the way forward, down to the tunnel entrance, but Marcia hesitated for a moment. Beneath her feet was a continuous ribbon of material that wrapped clear around the Moon. She looked ahead, down a gaping tunnel that led off into the darkness. The surface she was standing on entered that tunnel like a road going though a mountain.

The tunnel itself was high and rounded, about twenty meters high at the center point, and about forty across. She turned around and looked the other way. There was the other end of the same damn tunnel, coming back to the same damn point, having wrapped clear around the Moon. She could set off down that tunnel and keep on walking until she was back where she started.

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 recognizable 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 kilometers 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 centerline 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 shriveled 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 discolored 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 irresistibly 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 recognize 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?

And Selby was kneeling beside her, putting her arm around her, drawing her up to stand, leading her back the way they had come. “Come on, love. We found a small empty side cavern a few hundred meters down the way. We’ve set up a pressure bubble and a field office there. You and I need to talk.”