“I’ll be damned,” said Lasker.
Max noticed a wave of warm air at the opening. The interior was heated.
April compared the glove with her mitten. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Freewater didn’t know. “It only works,” he said, “if someone is wearing my glove.”
“How could that be?” asked Max.
“Don’t know,” continued the guard. “Bare hands won’t do it, either.”
“Odd.” April looked down the passageway and then again at the glove. “George, if you don’t mind, I’m going to hang onto it for a few minutes.” She stuffed it into a pocket and looked at Max. “You ready?”
“To do what?”
“Go inside.”
Max’s jaw dropped. “Are you kidding?” he said. “We could get sealed in there.”
“I’d like to go,” said Freewater.
“No. No one else. I’ll feel better if you’re out here to open the door if we can’t do it from the inside. I assume both gloves work?”
They tested the other one, and it did. “Give us five minutes,” April said. “If we’re not out, open up.”
“April,” said Max, “you know how the Venus flytrap works?”
She smiled at Max as if he were kidding and stepped into the passageway. Max hesitated, felt everyone’s eyes on him. And followed.
The space was barely six feet high, maybe four across. It was too small, almost claustrophobic. The walls were off-white and so thick with dust it was hard to make out their composition. Dirt covered the floor.
“We’re getting heat from somewhere,” said April. She held out her hands to detect air currents.
Max was looking for a door opener. The only thing he saw that offered itself as a candidate was the series of six plates. Two pairs were directly across from each other. The fifth and sixth seemed positioned near either end of the passageway. He fixed the one closest to the entrance in his mind so he could find it when the door closed and they lost their light.
April ran her palms across the wall and then wiped the dust from them. “Heat seems to be coming from everywhere,” she said.
The door started down. Max resisted an urge to duck under it while he could, and watched it shut.
The lights did not go out. A gray band running horizontally across the back of the door gave them enough illumination to see by. When Max wiped his sleeve on the band, it brightened, and in a moment he was looking through it at the people on the other side. “It’s transparent,” he said.
April grinned. “Okay,” she said. She also had been studying the wall plates. She approached the one at the far end of the corridor and put on Freewater’s glove. “You ready, Max?”
“Do it.”
She inhaled. “It’s one small step for a woman….” She touched the plate. Pushed it.
Something clicked in the wall. A door opened up directly in front of her. They were looking into a rotunda. “Yes,” breathed April. She stepped inside.
The light was gray and bleak. Just enough to see by.
“This is it,” she said. “Main stage.”
It was empty. A few columns reached up to connect with a network of overhead beams. And that was all. A trench ran from the middle of the floor toward the other side of the dome, which would have been the front.
The door slid down.
He felt a momentary twinge until he saw a plate identical to the ones outside.
“That’s our channel,” said April, indicating the trench. “Boat came in through the front, tied up right here.” There were even a few posts that would have served the purpose.
It was getting hard to breathe. “Heads up,” Max said. “The air’s bad.” How could it have been otherwise?
They propped the doors open and used a couple of blowers to circulate fresh air inside. When they felt it was safe, they opened it up for their people and for the journalists.
The trench was about fifteen feet deep. The dimensions were sufficient to accommodate the boat. They’d have had to fold the mainmast over to get it inside. But it would have worked.
Four rooms opened off the passageway. Two might once have been apartments or storage areas but were now simply bare spaces. The others contained cabinets and plumbing. The cabinets were empty. A sunken tub and a drainage unit not unlike the device on the ketch suggested one had been a washroom. The other appeared to be a kitchen.
Max noticed almost immediately a sense of anticlimax and disappointment. April especially seemed down. “What did we expect?” he asked.
It was just empty.
No interstellar cruiser. No ancient records. No prehistoric computers. No gadgets.
Nothing.
15
The true power centers are not in the earth. But in ourselves.
Tom Brokaw displays just the right amount of skepticism. “There is,” he says, “more evidence tonight that extraterrestrials may have visited North America near the end of the last ice age. Scientists today entered a mysterious structure that may have been buried for thousands of years on a ridge near the Canadian border.” A computer graphic of the Walhalla—Fort Moxie area appears beside him, and the camera cuts quickly to overhead shots and silhouettes of the Roundhouse. “This building is constructed of materials that, we are being told, cannot be reproduced by human technology. Robert Bazell is on the scene.”
Bazell is standing in front of the Roundhouse, and he looks cold. The wind tries to take the microphone out of his hand. “Hello, Tom,” he says, half turning so the camera can get a better look at the structure. “This is the artifact that scientists think may have been left by someone ten thousand years ago. No one knows where it came from or who put it here. It is constructed of a material that experts say we’ve never seen before. A team led by Dr. April Cannon got inside today for the first time, and this is what they saw.”
The interior of the dome rises above the viewer. Accompanied by strains from Bach’s Third Concerto for Organ, the camera glides along the green curves and over the gaping trench.
To Max, watching with April and the Laskers at the Prairie Schooner, it only stirred his sense of disappointment and bad luck. Even the cabinets had been empty! At the very least, Max thought, it would have been nice to find, say, a discarded shoe.
Something.
“If the Roundhouse is really as old as some of the experts are saying, Tom,” Bazell continues, “we are looking at a technological marvel. The temperature inside is almost sixty degrees. As you can see, it’s cold up here. So we have to conclude that there’s a heating system and that it still works.” They cut back to the top of the ridge, where snow is blowing and people are standing around with their collars tugged up. “I should add that the structure glows in the dark. Or at least it did last night. So much so that it frightened people in nearby Walhalla and emptied the town.”
Split screen. Brokaw looks intrigued. “Are we sure it’s not a hoax?”
“It depends on what you’re asking about, Tom. The experts don’t all agree on the age of the Roundhouse. But they seem to be unanimous that the material it’s made from could not be produced by any human agency.”
They cut to a bearded, older man seated at a desk before a book-lined wall. The screen identifies him as Eliot Rearden, chairman of the Department of Chemistry, University of Minnesota.
“Professor Rearden,” says Brokaw, “can you hear me?”
“Yes, Tom.”
“Professor, what do you make of all this?”
“The claim appears to be valid.” Rearden’s gray eyes blaze with excitement.
“Why do you say ‘appears,’ Professor?”