"As a matter of fact, we may not be the first ones to do the testing," Jennifer added. The two Foitani from Rof Golan, still paying no attention to the humans or their sledges, tramped past them toward the tower.
"If you are somehow correct and there is an opening I cannot perceive, you must not permit the Rof Golani to exploit it. Use whatever means necessary to prevent their gaining entry," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. The translator didn't let him sound agitated, no matter how upset he really was.
"How are we supposed to stop them?" Jennifer asked.
"Use whatever means necessary," Pawasar Pawasar Ras repeated.
Jennifer looked at the Foitani. Each of them was more than a meter and a half taller than she was. Each of them carried a weapon that could kill her at five times the range she could even make him itch. She looked at Greenberg. He'd been looking at the Foitani, too. Now his gaze swung back to her. She said, "Bullshit."
He nodded. "You'd better believe it." He spoke into the communicator. "Honored kin-group leader, we didn't sign up with you to commit suicide. You ought to know, though, that the Foitani from Rof Golan seem to be suffering from the same thing your people do when they get too close to the Great Unknown. They don't seem to be in any shape to relay whatever they learn to anybody."
A long silence followed. At last Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "There may be some truth to this comment. Nevertheless?"
"No," Greenberg broke in, adding, "It's too late anyhow, honored kin-group leader. The first two Rof Golani have reached the tower."
The big, blue-gray Foitani dropped their weapons to press themselves against the smooth white stone of the wall. They were only five or six meters from the hole in its side, but gave no sign of noticing it. For several minutes, they seemed content just to stand there. Then, not getting more than a meter or so away from the edge of the wall, they began walking parallel to it, one of them behind the other.
They walked right past the hole. Their feet scuffed through the pieces of stone the shaped charge had blasted loose. They took no notice of them, either; as far as they were concerned, the area was as perfectly smooth as any other part of the processionway.
Greenberg turned to Jennifer. "I will be damned. They can't see that it's there."
Spanglish failed her. She fell back into Middle English. "Curiouser and curiouser." Then she said, "It makes me wonder whether the hole really is there after all."
"I can tell you two things about that," he answered. "Thing number one is that we know the Great Unknown makes Foitani crazy and we don't think it does that to us. Thing number two is, we can go and find out, so let's go and find out."
He stood up and walked toward the hole. Jennifer followed him. She saw the chunks of white stone that lay in front of it. Pretty soon, she kicked one of them. She felt it as her boot collided with it and heard it rattle away. All the same, she had the feeling she was approaching one of those holes quickly painted on the side of a mountain in an ancient animated fantasy video, the sort that would let whoever painted them go through and then turn solid again so a pursuer smashed himself against hard, hard rock. She stretched a hand out in front of her so she wouldn't hurt herself if the opening ahead proved not to be an opening.
She kicked another fragment of stone out of the way. This one clicked off the side of the tower. The noise seemed no different to her from the one the first stone had made, but the Foitani from Rof Golan hadn't noticed that one. They noticed this time. They spun around. Their red eyes blazed. They'd let their weapons fall when they came up to the column, but they still had fangs and claws and bulk. Roaring like beasts of prey, they charged at the two humans.
"Uh-oh," Greenberg said, which summed things up well enough. Running away from the Foitani didn't seem as if it would help. Greenberg and Jennifer ran for the hole instead. He shoved her in ahead of him. The rough stone at the edge of the hole ripped the knees out of her coveralls as she scrambled through. Greenberg dove after her scant seconds later, just ahead of the Foitani.
By then she had a fist-sized rock in her hand, ready to fling in the face of one of the aliens. At such a close range, she thought, she might even hurt him. Greenberg scrabbled around in the darkness for a rock for himself.
The Foitani came up to the hole and stared at it. They said something in their own language. Even without the moderating effect of the translator, Foitani from Odern sounded calm whether they were or not. As Jennifer had heard over the HaroldMeeker's radio, Foitani from Rof Golan yelled even when there was nothing worth yelling about. These two screamed back and forth at each other. Jennifer didn't need a translator to guess they were saying something like, "Where did the funny-looking critters go?"
Then she drew back her arm again to throw that rock, for a Foitan reached toward the hole. Those big, clawed hands came straight for her. If she waited any longer, she thought, the Foitan would pluck her straight out of her hiding place.
But his hands stopped, right where the surface of the wall had been before Enfram Enfram Marf's charge bit through it. Jennifer watched his palms flatten out against what to him was plainly still a solid surface. He turned to his comrade, gesturing as if to say, Come on; you try it.
The other Foitan tried it. His hands stopped where the wall should have been, too. He squawked something to his friend. Friend squawked back. They walked off, both of them shaking their heads.
Greenberg indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt, "Whew!" Then he said, "You don't know how glad I am that they'd put down their guns. I didn't care to find out whether bullets believed in hallucinations."
"Urk." Jennifer hadn't thought of that. After a moment, she added, "Who says I don't know how glad you are?"
Greenberg spoke into the communicator. "Research base, we are inside the central tower to the Great Unknown. I say again, we are inside." He repeated himself several times, but got no answer. He stuck the comm in his pocket. "Maybe the Foitani from Rof Golan are jamming again."
"Or maybe Pawasar Pawasar Ras and his friends can't hear you because you're calling from inside the tower and don't exist any more as far as they're concerned," Jennifer said.
He gave her a dirty look. "I was right after all when I first got to know you?reading all that ancient science fiction has twisted your mind."
"People used to say that about it then, too." Jennifer took out a hand torch and clicked it on. "As long as we're here, shall we see what here is like?"
Greenberg also got out a light." We don't want to shine these out through the hole," he told her. "If the effect that keeps the Foitani from seeing it is like a one-way mirror, bright light from this side could ruin it."
"All right," Jennifer said, "but if the effect is like a one-way mirror, how come the Foitani couldn't feel their way in, either?"
"I don't know. I'm just glad they couldn't. Aren't you?"
"Now that you mention it, yes." Jennifer turned around and played the torch on the far wall of the chamber. However disagreeable he was, Enfram Enfram Marf had been an artist with his shaped charge: that wall, only four or five meters from the blast, was hardly even scorched. The chamber itself was bare, but for the fragments of stone from the outer wall.
"We're lucky," Greenberg said. "Looks like we didn't damage anything much in here."
"We didn't, did we?" Jennifer looked around again. "This room is so bare, it's almost as if they emptied it out on purpose, knowing this was where we'd break in." The words hung in the air after she spoke them. She deliberately shook her head, "It couldn't be. The Suicide Wars happened twenty-eight thousand years ago."