Chindi

Chapter 25

TOR WENT FIRST, enjoying the sudden grab that gravity made at him as he climbed onto the ladder and started down. Actually it was a potentially dangerous moment because the gravity field extended out of the ship, through the section of door they’d removed. An unwary visitor, expecting to feel nothing but zero gee until he actually passed through the hatch, could get a swift surprise, followed by a long fall to the floor.

Alyx had been warned, and she placed her feet carefully onto the top rungs. George stayed on the surface, handing down equipment, food stores, and water tanks, until they had everything. Then he turned, waved at the distant Memphis, and descended into the tunnel.

They couldn’t handle all the equipment in a single load so they left the food and water stores and some of the gear in the passageway below the exit hatch, and moved out.

Tor showed her the werewolf. Even though she knew it was coming, her pulse ran up a few notches. “Looks intelligent,” he pointed out.

From what she’d heard, she expected a horrific manifestation. Instead she was looking at a wolf in evening clothes. She giggled and Tor looked annoyed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it. It’s a lovely outfit, though.”

Tor explained how they had come on it completely unaware, and it was pretty unsettling when you just wander into it in the dark, no advance warning, you just don’t know what you’re up against.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said.

They took her to the other chambers of interest and came at last to the gravity tube, The Ditch, as George had designated it on the chart he was making. The cable they’d used to haul Hutch and Nick up still dangled into the pit.

“She really jumped in there?” she asked.

Tor nodded.

She approached and looked down. “That’s a woman worth having.” She smiled at George. “You fall in, you’re on your own.” And speaking of the captain, this seemed like a good time to try the relay. She opened the link. “Hutch, you there? Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Alyx.”

“Okay, we’re at the pit. Proceeding which way, George?”

“Turning right,” he said.

She relayed the information. But before they left, she took a handkerchief out of her vest, unfolded it, and lobbed it into the shaft. Unopposed by air, even at a half gee, it dropped like a rock.

“What are you doing?” demanded George.

“I wanted to see it work.” She checked the time.

Tor grinned, and George looked discomfited. “We should have some respect for this place.” He looked with great disapproval into the shaft. “That is almost vandalism.”

It took one minute four seconds. The handkerchief reappeared and dropped back into the darkness. “Incredible,” she said.

They moved into unknown territory, resisting the temptation to open doors until they had penetrated deeply enough to establish their base. They would do that, they decided, in one of the empty chambers, out of the way of anything patrolling the corridors. The signal began to fade, and Alyx planted the second of four relay devices she’d brought, reestablishing contact.

THEY WERE ABOUT a kilometer from the exit hatch when they stopped, looked into an empty chamber, and selected it as their base. They chose a spot off to one side so they wouldn’t be immediately visible to anything looking casually through the door.

Tor released the clips on the pack, they connected the nozzles from the air tanks, and Alyx stood back while the dome inflated.

They installed the life-support gear, seated a power cell, leaving the spare in its storage compartment, and turned the lights on. “Looks good,” said Alyx. In fact it looked absolutely inviting. They set the thermostat at a comfortable room temperature. The heater came on and began pumping warm air into the space.

Alyx knew that all the evidence so far indicated that whoever was running the chindi was inclined to ignore them, but she still felt safer inside the dome, not that it could have kept out any serious threat, but because it was part of a familiar world.

When they were finished they turned off the lights—there was no point wasting power—went back to the exit hatch, and collected their food and water, their sleeping pads, and a few other pieces of equipment. They paused at the Ditch to wait for Alyx’s handkerchief to reappear. Within a few seconds it did.

The conversation consisted mostly of the same remarks over and over, how empty the place was, how big it was, how there must be a control area somewhere. A captain’s bridge. A command center. Alyx was thinking how much energy it must take to get the chindi moving, to lift it out of orbit, or to stop it once it got started. She would have liked a chance to see the engines, but it would probably take weeks to find them.

They returned to the dome, buttoned up, and killed their e-suits. They stored their food, got the drinking water into the dispenser, and put the plumbing on-line.

When they’d finished, Alyx stood up, flexed her shoulders, and said, “Gentlemen, let’s go exploring.” Her apparent fearlessness surprised both them and herself.

GEORGE WAS ATTEMPTING to construct a systematic map. The exit hatch led onto Main Street. Parallel passageways would be named alphabetically. They were on Alexander. Next over would be Barbara. Argentina was on the far side of Main. People in one direction, places in the other. Cross corridors would be numbered from the hatch, streets moving forward, avenues aft. Thus the Ditch was located at the intersection of Main and First Streets. The chambers were numbered according to the corridor they were in. The werewolf occupied Main-6.

There were no chambers off the numbered corridors.

Most of the rooms, by far the vast majority that they looked at that first day, were empty. But not all. Alexander-17 had a display that resembled a chemistry laboratory except that the tables were all too low and there were no benches or chairs. Barbara-11 was a primitive armory, with bows and darts and animal-hide shields stored everywhere. Charlie-5 seemed to be a waiting room, a place with long benches and a ticket window and a framed photo of a creature that looked like a grasshopper wearing a hat.

Moses-23 was filled with a three-dimensional geometric design, a single piece of ceramic, covered with arcane symbols, that looped and dipped and soared around the chamber.

Britain-2 provided a chess game of sorts, a cluster of chairs, a game in progress on an eighty-one-square board set on a table, and a half dozen tankards lying about. The pieces, some on the board and others off to the side, looked nothing like the familiar knights and bishops.

There were chambers that simply defied interpretation. Solid objects with no imaginable purpose, arranged in no intelligible order. Chambers filled with electronic equipment, others with purely mechanical apparatus that might have been pumps or heating systems or water carriers. The feature that most, but not quite all, had in common was a sense of considerable age. The objects almost invariably appeared to be no longer functional, and occasionally to have collapsed. But if that was so, it was also true that they seemed to be well taken care of now, as if they’d been frozen in time, preserved for some unknown audience.

BILL COMPLETED BREAKING down the filings Hutch had collected on the chindi, and she forwarded the results to the Academy for analysis.

Nick spent most of his time on the bridge with her. He admitted that when this was over, he would never leave the ground again. “I don’t think I even want to fly,” he said.

Hutch was thinking the same thing. After they got back, she was going to find a nice quiet apartment and spend the rest of her life in wind, rain, and sunlight.

Traffic came in from Mogambo’s Longworth announcing an “imminent arrival,” which was in fact still more than a week away, and directing the Memphis to stay clear of any alien site until they were on the scene. Well, he was already a couple of days late with that demand. There was at present a ninety-minute delay in round-trip transmission time, so she wasn’t faced with a give-and-take conversation. Interstellar distances occasionally had their advantages.

A second message, a few hours later, wanted an explanation for her silence, and requested a detailed report on the Retreat. Hutch responded with a message stating that she’d relayed the request to the head of mission. Which she then did.

“Hutch, how much does he know?” asked George.

“About the chindi?”

“Yes.”

“He knows it’s there.”

“But he doesn’t know what we’ve found?”

“No. He doesn’t know we’ve been aboard at all.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

“Sure. Why? I mean, you’ll be out of there by the time he arrives, anyhow.”

“Hutch, you obviously don’t understand how these things work. Once he hears we’ve penetrated this thing, he’ll start issuing statements. Taking over.”

“But he’s not even here.”

“He doesn’t have to be. He’s a major player. What am I? A guy who made some money on the market.” He broke off for a minute, talking to one of the others. Then he was back. “I know it seems paranoid, but just do it for me, okay? Don’t tell him anything.”

Okay. He was right, she decided. She’d felt the same way, although she hadn’t thought it out. But she’d instinctively held back a running description of events on the chindi, information she would ordinarily have passed along. Maybe it was important who got the credit, because Herman and Pete and Preach and a lot of others had died, and this was why, this was the event people would remember when they’d forgotten Columbus and Armstrong and Pirc.

“I tell you what I’d like,” George said. “I wish we could get as much time here as possible, but that an hour before Mogambo shows up, the chindi would take off. Preferably just as he pulls alongside.”

“Talk to the captain over there. Maybe you can arrange it.”

“We’re working on it. By the way, we found something interesting.”

“What’s that?”

“A small amphitheater, we think. With electronics. And seating. Chairs are just the right size for us. Well, maybe a little small. But it has power. We think if we can figure out how to get it running, we may get some answers. Tor’s working on it now.”

“Tor? What’s Tor know about it?”

“As much as any of us.”

“If you do get something,” she said, “record it. The signal’s not strong enough for me to do it at this end.”

ACTUALLY, IT LOOKED simple enough. There were twelve chairs spread well apart in two rows with an aisle down the middle. The arm of one of the chairs at the front opened up, and inside was a pressure-sensitive plate, a couple of push buttons, and a semitransparent red disk that Tor thought might be a light sensor.

“What do you think?” asked George.

“It’s got power,” Tor said. “Put your hand on it. You can feel it.”

George touched it and nodded. “Let’s try it, okay?”

They took three seats in the front row left, with Tor on the aisle. When they’d indicated they were ready, he selected the larger button, a black square, and pushed it. The door closed and air flowed into the room. Not breathable. Relatively little oxygen, but air all the same.

He tried the smaller one, which was round and emerald-colored. It lit up. The power levels increased. Lights came on around the chamber, and dimmed. The room faded, became transparent, became a field of stars and rings, and they, with their chairs, were afloat in the night!

“Tor.” Alyx’s voice was very small, and she reached over and took his hand. There was really nothing particularly outré about the technology, nothing they hadn’t seen before. Yet having the chindi come suddenly to life was unsettling.

“I’m here, Alyx.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Showtime. You should be right at home.”

The long arc of a planetary ring curved away into the stars. It glittered white and gold until, far out in the night, a shadow fell across it. He turned in his chair, looking for the source of the shadow, and saw behind him the vast bulk of a gas giant. It was not either of the Twins. Its skies were dark, restless, with churning winds and streaking clouds and electrical storms everywhere.

“Look,” said George. To the right.

There was a small moon. Actually, it was hard to be sure about size, because there was nothing against which to make contrasts. But it was probably only a few hundred meters long. It was a barbell of a world, thin in the middle, misshapen and swollen at either end. At first he couldn’t make out why George was interested in it. Then he saw the ship beyond. It was sleek, exotic, different. Light poured out of a single line of ports, and there was movement inside! The vessel seemed to be tracking the moonlet.

“What is it?” asked Alyx.

“Don’t know,” George whispered impatiently. “Watch.”

The ship was closing. It got within a few meters, and a hatch opened. A figure appeared, silhouetted against the ship’s internal lights. It was wearing a pressure suit.

The moonlet was tumbling, but the ship had set itself so that it maintained the same aspect.

The figure launched itself from the airlock. A tether trailed behind. It approached the rock, using a set of thrusters, a go-pack, but a larger, more ungainly version than the ones he was accustomed to. It slowed, and stopped. A second figure appeared, carrying a rod. There was a sphere at the upper end of the rod, about the size of a basketball, and there was something mounted on it. A bird’s image, he thought.

“What is it?” asked Alyx.

Tor tried pressing the plate and was gratified to discover he could exercise some control over the environment. He could bring the ship and the moonlet closer, he could change the angles, he could withdraw and watch from a distance. He could even swing around the area to get a look at the neighborhood. Four moons could be brought within his field of view. All were in their second quarter. One exceptionally bright satellite had oceans and continents, rivers and cumulus clouds. A bright sun dominated the sky.

“Can you increase the magnification?” asked George. “It would be nice to get a better look.”

Tor brought the two figures in as close as he could. They wore helmets. They were humanoid. But beyond that he couldn’t see what manner of creatures they were.

A second tether unfurled, and the second spacewalker, still carrying the rod, joined the first.

“What are they doing?” asked Alyx.

Tor was baffled. He saw nothing unusual about the moonlet. The pressure suits reminded him of the kind that humans had worn during the early days of the lunar missions. They were large and clumsy, with enormous boots and tool belts slung around their middles. Symbols were stitched on their sleeves.

“The thing on the sphere,” said George. “It looks like a hawk.”

More or less. Tor thought it was a bit stringy for a hawk, but it was avian and decidedly predatory.

They were both moving methodically toward the moon, using the thrusters on their backpacks. They rotated themselves, bringing their legs down, striving to land on the surface. It appeared they hoped to arrange things so they both touched down at the same moment. If so, they didn’t quite manage it.

The rod-carrier came in a second or two behind his partner. They must have been wearing grip shoes of some sort, because they landed and stayed. There was another delay, perhaps as much as a minute, while they turned on lamps fitted to their sleeves and stood front to front. Then they fitted the end of the rod opposite the hawk to a base plate. They laid the plate flat down on the rocky surface, knelt beside it, and produced a handful of spikes.

“It’s a marker,” said Alyx.

They drove the spikes in and tugged at the rod. It was secure.

“What in hell,” asked Tor, “is the significance? It’s just a big rock.”

“Maybe a battle was fought there,” said Alyx.

George frowned. “That seems unlikely.”

One of the figures stood beside the rod, and the other lifted a device that had been suspended from his belt and aimed it at his colleague.

“Picture!” whispered Alyx. “He’s taking a picture.”

They took more. Pictures of each other. Of the rod. Of the rock. Sometimes they pointed the device out toward the stars.

Then they put it away and walked across the moonlet. One knelt, produced a chisel, and loosened a piece of rock. He brought out a bag, put the piece in the bag, sealed it, and attached it to his belt.

When light fell on their faceplates, Tor could see nothing except a reflection of the light source, sometimes the sun, sometimes the rings, sometimes a nearby moon or one of their own lamps.

Tor went in close to get a better look at the rod. The hawk was perched on a small globe. Its wings were half-folded, its tail feathers spread. Its short curved beak was open. When he’d seen enough, he started to go long range again.

“Hold it,” said Alyx.

He reversed himself and tried to close back in, pushing on the plate, left side, right, top, and bottom. Rings and moons and stars wheeled around them. The dark giant moved beneath and drifted to the rear. Damned system. But gradually he began to understand how it all worked. He found the moonlet and locked in on the top of the rod. On the globe.

“Good,” said Alyx. And then: “How about that?”

“How about what?” asked George.

“Look at the sphere,” she said.

Tor did, but saw nothing out of the way. It was gold, and it had a few irregularly raised sections.

“Can you bring up the big moon again?” asked Alyx. “The one with the atmosphere?”

He tried to remember where it was, rotated the sky, found it, and brought it in close.

“Look,” she said.

He looked. Much of the land surface was green. “It’s a living world,” said George.

And very much like Earth, as all living worlds had been, so far. Blue oceans and broad continents. Ice caps at the poles. Mountain ranges and broad forests. Great rivers and inland seas. But in the face of all that, he knew he still hadn’t understood Alyx’s point.

“The shape of the continents,” she said.

There were two of them on the side he could see, and it looked like a third partially swung around the other side. “What?” he asked.

“It’s the design on the sphere. The space guys are from this world.”

“Planting the flag,” he said.

“I think so.”

“First landing on another world?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

The blue planet was bright in the sunlight. “You know,” George said, “I’m beginning to understand what the chindi really is.”

PUSH THE BLACK button, the square one, and the scenario changed. They traveled to a broken desert fortress beneath racing moons. Their chairs floated above the sand, charged the walls (“Look out,” breathed Alyx, while Tor closed his eyes), and drifted above a cobbled parade ground filled with serpentine creatures wearing war helmets, carrying shields and waving banners. A hot wind blew across them, and a swollen sun burned in a cloudless sky. The creatures were engaging in synchronized drills, cut and parry, advance and retreat. It was vaguely reminiscent of old-style military drill, but these were far better coordinated and faster than anything humans could have managed. Tor had forgotten to use his imager to record the first sequence. But he unclipped it now and tried to get as much as he could. It wasn’t as good as a direct on-line capture, but it would work.

“It’s almost choreographed,” said Alyx. “Set to music.”

But there was no music. “Push the button again,” said George, anxious to be away from the serpents. Tor wondered if he was beginning to suspect that a quiet fireside conversation would only be possible with another human.

He complied, and the fortress faded to rich hill country. They looked down on a broad river, and Tor saw spires on the horizon. And bursts of light in the sky. Explosions.

Someone was under attack.

“Can you get us over there?” asked George, meaning the spires.

It was a matter of following the river. They passed over idyllic farm country, and saw near-humans (arms too long, hands too wide, bodies too narrow, too much height, as if someone had bred an entire generation of basketball players) in the fields. The spires grew, silver and purple in the late-afternoon sunlight. They were tall and spare, linked by bridges and trams. Fountains and pools glittered.

As they drew nearer they saw that the explosions were fireworks. And they could hear music, of a sort. Cacophonic. Discordant. Wind music. Flutes, he thought. And something that sounded vaguely like bagpipes.

And drums! There was no mistaking that sound. There was an army of them somewhere, tucked out of sight, or maybe broadcast over a sound system, but pounding away.

And the city was singing. Voices rose with the flutes and bagpipes, and more fireworks raced into the sky. Cheers rolled through the night. Squadrons of inhabitants paraded through elevated courtyards and malls and along rooftop walkways.

“They’re celebrating something,” said George, relaxing a bit.

Alyx squeezed Tor’s wrist. “What, I wonder,” she said.

After a while, Tor hit the button, and they moved on. Past a glass mosaic, a pattern of cubes and spheres atop a snowbound precipice, apparently abandoned.

To a torchlit city of marble columns and majestic public buildings, waiting by the sea as dawn crept in.

They saw battles. Hordes of creatures in every conceivable form, creatures with multiple limbs, creatures that glided across the landscape, creatures with shining eyes, engaging each other in bloody and merciless combat. They fought with spears and shields, with projectile weapons, with weapons that flashed light. They fought from vast seagoing armadas and from groundcars drawn by all manner of beasts. Twice, Tor saw mushroom clouds.

A fleet of airships, hurried along by sails for God’s sake, emerged from clouds and dropped fire (burning oil, probably) on a city spread across the tops of a range of hills. Smaller vessels rose from the city to contest the attackers. Ships on both sides exploded and sank, their crews leaping overboard without benefit of parachute.

“That’s enough,” said George. “Turn it off. Let’s look at something else.”

Tor hit the button.

They were in space again, adrift near the long blazing rim of a sun, watching fiery fountains rise into the skies, while solar tides ebbed and flowed. And then the surface began to expand, and Tor suspected that the images were accelerated. But he didn’t really know. How long did it take for a sun to go nova? Within moments, the solar surface became bloated as if it were about to give birth. And it exploded. The whole vast globe of the sun simply blew up.

In that moment, the magnification switched on its own, and they were far out, away from the immediate effects of the blast, where the sun looked sickly pale and the sky was full of fire. Abruptly the chamber went dark.

Tor understood that these were the products of the stealth satellites, images captured by orbiting recorders and transmitted forward, relayed through other systems circling other worlds.

“Cosmic Snoops,” said Nick, who’d been watching from the Memphis.

Alyx switched on her wristlamp. “I don’t believe this is happening. We travel all over the Arm and find a few ruins, and the Noks, while these people have all this. George, we have to find out how this works and duplicate the record.”

“Or make off with it,” Nick said.

His chair shook.

He looked at Alyx.

“What was that?” she said.

George took a deep breath.

The room trembled again, a shudder, a spasm. As if something were happening deep in the ship.

“SOMETHING’S GOING ON, Hutch.”

A cloud of objects was expanding from the underside of the chindi. Bill locked in on one. It looked like a sack. It was generally shapeless, more or less rounded, a little wider at one end than at the other. It had no visible means of propulsion.

“Where are they going?”

Below, Autumn’s upper atmosphere was calm.

“I’ve no idea. They’re all headed in different directions at the moment. I’ll track them and let you know when I have something.”

George’s voice came in over the circuit. It was weak and far away. “—Are they getting ready to leave?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Hutch. “They’ve just ejected a bunch of sacks.”

“Say again please.”

“Sacks. Packages.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you ought to get out of there. Just in case.”

“Let’s not panic,” he said. “We just got set up over here. Keep an eye open. Let us know if you see anything else.”

“HUTCH.” SYLVIA WAS so excited she could barely speak. “You’ll be interested in knowing that the Academy has had a breakthrough. We are now reading the transmissions on the star web. We’re getting pictures of previously unknown alien civilizations, we’ve got a black hole rolling through the atmosphere of Mendel 771, we’ve got a cluster of artificial bubble structures orbiting Shaula. It’s really incredible.” She brushed her hair back from her eyes and literally glowed. “We’ve unlocked the grail.”

Well, the metaphor seemed strange, but that hardly mattered.

“You’ve unlocked it,” she continued. “You and the Contact Society. Who would’ve thought? Pass my congratulations along to George.”

ALYX SMILED AT him. He could almost read her mind. They’d been inside barely ten hours and, at the first suggestion of activity, they’d run like rabbits. No, they’d told Hutch, let’s not panic. Don’t pick us up. We’re just getting started. But nevertheless they’d left the VR chamber and hurried back down Barbara Street, toward the pocket dome. One of the wheeled robots had passed them, paying no attention, just rolling past as if they weren’t there. Tor wondered where it was going.

Back at the dome, they’d refilled their air tanks, taken turns using the washroom, and waited for more signs that the chindi might be getting ready to leave. Hutch thought it was something else, a launch of some kind, but that was okay for her. She wasn’t going to get stranded if the damned thing took off. So they were ready to clear out at the first sign.

After a while, they decided they were probably okay, and they’d relaxed a bit and had dinner.

Tor was accustomed to the twenty-four-hour cycle on the Memphis, where the lights dimmed at night and brightened in the morning. In the chindi, of course, it was always dark. The light from the dome illuminated the outer chamber somewhat, but there were still gloomy recesses. The place felt remote, abandoned, spooky. He wondered whether he could capture the mood on canvas.

That evening, they again took to the passageways. There were more empty chambers, of course, but increasingly they found displays, many with objects they readily recognized, weapons and furniture, tapestries and musical instruments, electronic equipment and sleeping gear. Two chambers contained libraries, one limited to scrolls, the other to chapbooks with brown pages rendered inflexible by the cold.

Sometimes they saw broken shards and collapsed tables and shreds of clothing, carefully preserved in display cases that prevented an observer from getting too close to them. Lovingly preserved, one might almost think. At other times, the artifacts were new, as if they’d just been gathered from a shop, brought here, and put on display.

One exhibition of absolutely unfathomable objects, which might have been a series of geometric puzzles, was enclosed by magnificent russet curtains that could have come directly from a well-appointed terrestrial dining room.

Sometimes there were figures, presumably representing those from whose world the artifacts had been salvaged. They came in countless shapes and types, mammalian and avian and reptilian and others for which there was no category. Their aspects often suggested a kind of placidity and congeniality. A creature with a crocodilian skull and teeth seemed to possess the serenity of a Socrates. Others were majestic, still others terrifying. The most unsettling, for Tor, was a dark-eyed horror inhabiting what appeared to be a drawing room directly across from the chapbook library.

They debated splitting up. There was too much to see and too little time to continue as they were. George suggested that the forty-eight-hour limit they’d imposed on themselves was unrealistic. That they had an obligation to stay longer, to survey the place as thoroughly as they could. After all, they really didn’t know the chindi was going to leave. It was possible it had been there for years.

“It’s refueling,” said Alyx. “That tells me we don’t have forever.”

Tor agreed. “If I thought we could do it,” he said, “I’d suggest sabotaging it. Prevent it from going anywhere. I hate to think of this thing getting away from us.”

“But it won’t get away,” said Alyx. “Hutch says we can follow it. It’s not as if it’s going to go somewhere we can’t.”

By then they were exhausted. They’d been awake more than thirty consecutive hours, and had gone through the night. It was late morning back on the Memphis. Tor suggested they quit for a few hours, return to the dome, and get some sleep.

“Why don’t you two go back?” George suggested. “I’m not really tired yet.”

“No,” said Alyx. “We all need a break. You get tired, you get careless.”

AFTER A SECOND sleepless night, Hutch went up to the bridge, where Bill was still tracking the sacks. Not all of them, because they’d continued to disperse, and there were more than the sensors could handle. But the dozen they were monitoring were reaching the inner ring.

“One of them,” Bill said, “is about to impact.” He put the image on-screen, a cluster of rocks and the sack. “Here’s the target,” Bill said. He highlighted it for her. “Predominantly iron and ice.” It was shaped like a potato. “Roughly thirty meters down the long axis. Maybe half as wide.”

The sack glided through the rubble, skimmed past a boulder, and splashed against the target, dashing a gray-white smear across its surface.

Hutch poured herself some coffee. “The rock will be orbiting out of view shortly,” said Bill. “Do you want to follow it?”

“What about the other sacks?”

“We’ll have another impact in six minutes.”

“Okay, Bill,” she said. “Let’s just sit and watch. I want to stay close to the chindi.”

Nick wandered in on his crutches. He seemed to be feeling better. The painkillers had rendered him unusually jovial, to the point where he’d been telling jokes about his profession. Talk to us and you’ll never need to talk to anyone else. You can rely on us, Hutch, to be with you until the end.

She ached to have the landing party clear of the chindi. Professional researchers might be expected to take this sort of risk, but it was their business. George, Tor, and Alyx seemed like such innocents. “We’re going to lose them,” she told Nick.

He smiled as if he had another funeral-director joke. But then he let it go.

George was scheduled to come back to the Memphis in a few hours, but she knew it wasn’t going to happen. It had been impossible to miss the enthusiasm in their voices when they reported the wonders of the chindi. And then the call came, the one she knew she was going to receive.

“George on the circuit,” said Bill.

Even Nick knew.

“Hutch,” George said, “we keep finding stuff.” He went on to describe a dead city in the middle of a plain. “We don’t know what happened there. Broad boulevards, wide green parks, malls. Even a theatrical district. I’d say it was abandoned a few years before the pictures were taken. We figure there’s an explanation somewhere in the record, but we don’t know yet how to access it.” Pause. A guilty pause, she thought.

“We’re trying to figure out how it works. We’d like to get copies of all this if we can.”

“You’re running out of time,” said Hutch.

“Yeah. Listen, I wanted to talk to you about that. We’ve been discussing it, and you said there should be some warning before this thing leaves. I mean, they’ll have to warm up their engines. Right? And there’s the funnel they use to bring up the ice crystals. They’ll want to recover that.”

All old stuff. They’d been over it before.

“What we want to do is to have you keep an eye open for us. If you see something happening, anything at all that suggests it’s getting ready to pull out, give us a holler. We figure we can be back at the exit hatch within an hour and a half at worst.”

Hutch looked at Nick. Nick looked away.

“You’re assuming the funnel’s not disposable.”

“Yes. Well, anyhow, we’re going to hang on here for a bit. Hutch, I know how you feel about this, but this place. We can’t just walk away from it.”

The sense of approaching disaster was thick. “Dammit, George, you’re going to hang on over there until the last minute, aren’t you? And then I’m supposed to come do a rescue.”

“Hutch, I’m sorry you feel that way. But listen, there really should be time. As soon as there’s the slightest indication that they’re getting ready to pull out, we’ll come running.”

“Yes. That’s real good. The first indication is probably going to be a change in velocity. They’re going to start braking or accelerating. Once that happens, it’s over.”

“There’s another possibility. Something we haven’t considered.”

“And what’s that?”

“They know we’re aboard. I wonder if they’d really leave while we’re still here? This whole place seems designed for visitors.”

“I think that’s a reach, George. If it were designed for visitors, it’d be a bit warmer, don’t you think?”

“Hutch.” He sounded genuinely pained. “Please try to understand—”

“How do the others feel?”

There was a pause. Then Tor: “Hutch, he’s right. There’s just too much here.”

And even Alyx: “The place feels safe. I think we’ll be okay.”

“Do what you want,” she said. She severed the connection and glanced up at the Phillies picture. Her image knelt in the on-deck circle with the bats propped against her knee. Idiot, she thought, not sure whom she had in mind.