The corridors inside the wall were like those in any other complex, but the doors that Saul had opened showed us rooms that were different from any I had seen before. For one thing, they hadn’t been entirely emptied. There was payload here—enough to have made Saul rich even without the shaft to the interior.
There were no bare walls inside the rooms; there was storage space of one kind or another, all of it packed tight. There were shelves for objects, and big pieces of equipment with display screens, keyboards and instrument panels. Even the chairs were still in place. There were sinks and benches, and sealed chambers fitted with artificial manipulators. There was a great deal of glassware.
Obviously, this was one place the cavies had intended to come back to. Equally obviously, they hadn’t actually been back for a very long time.
“It’s a laboratory,” said Crucero, looking around one of the bigger rooms.
“Damn right,” I replied, abstractedly. I was examining some big steel boxes, which might have been refrigerators, ovens, radiation chambers or autoclaves, and wondering whether there was any way to get inside them.
“It’s a biotech lab,” said Susarma Lear, by way of amplification. I could tell that her imagination was showing her ranks of technicians trying to solve the problem of defending a closed world against a plague-attack… and failing.
“The C.R.E. would pay plenty for a place like this,” I told her. “If it’s been stripped at all, it doesn’t show. They may have closed it down, but they left it ready to be started up again. Everywhere else, we’ve found nothing but the litter they left behind because they considered it useless. This is the real thing.”
Even so, there was a kind of desolation about the place. It was too tidy. It hadn’t been deserted in a panic; whatever work had gone on here had been brought to a conclusion. It looked as if you could simply find the main power-switch, and turn everything right back on, but that was misleading.
Khalekhan brushed his suited forefinger over one of the keyboards, as though he expected the keys to click and the screen above it to light up. But the keys were stuck solid, immovable, and whatever data had been enshrined in the silicon chips inside the machine must have long since decayed into chaos. Even at twenty degrees Kelvin—and it was no colder than that here—entropy takes its slow toll. Electronic systems can last for millions of years, because silicon is tough stuff, but they need use and maintenance. The unnatural stillness of the deep-freeze isn’t such a wonderful preservative as some people make out.
“Let’s not waste time,” said the star-captain, gruffly. “You can play games to your heart’s content when we come back. We have a job to do, remember?” The reason she sounded gruff was that her last hopes of catching Myrlin in the upper levels had now evaporated. If she was going to catch and kill him, she was going to have to do it much closer to the centre of the world.
I didn’t protest against her haste. I was as keen to find the dropshaft as she was, albeit for very different reasons. These laboratories were exciting, but they paled into insignificance by comparison with what might be waiting for us down below.
So we moved on, passing doors which Saul had never got round to forcing, barely glancing into the rooms which he had opened up. There was only one where I lingered a little while, letting my curiosity off the bit; that was when I found myself beside one of the sealed transparent chambers where artificial hands were poised above a small assortment of equipment: pipettes, reagent jars, beakers. It was a touch of untidiness that seemed fascinating, and somehow very promising. Whatever was inside that sealed chamber might have been the very last thing that the cavies were working on before they left—before they made their exit down the deep elevator shaft which might have taken them all the way to the mysterious centre.
While I paused momentarily, Serne went ahead, scanning the path for tripwires. He didn’t find any booby-traps, but he found the shaft.
He called out for us to come quickly, but he was out of sight; we all went through the standard pantomime of asking “Where?” so that he could reply, unhelpfully, “Here.” Eventually, though, we managed to find him.
If we had been in any doubt as to whether Myrlin was still ahead of us, what we found in the shaft settled the question. There were two doubled-up cords secured at the top, and there were half a dozen pieces of equipment abandoned there. It was my equipment, taken from my truck. There was no sled—Myrlin had been strong enough to carry all that he needed, at a pace we couldn’t match.
There was an air current drifting up the shaft. We couldn’t feel it inside our suits, but we could see its effects in the corridor, where some of the ices had begun to melt or sublimate. This was one little corner of level three that had begun to warm up, though our instruments confirmed that the effect was as yet slight. It was one hell of a chimney that the warm air had to climb, and the top of it was still pretty cold. Saul had only drilled a small hole in the door at the bottom of the shaft—just enough to let him look around— but the flow we monitored implied that there was a much bigger breach now. Myrlin had obviously made a gap big enough to let him through.
We had made very good progress, despite the pauses caused by Myrlin’s one real trap and several fake ones, and I was pretty sure that our advantages would have allowed us to catch up with any normal fugitive. The android, though, was still a step and a half in front of us. I hoped that we never would catch up.
“It’s going to be a long ride down to the bottom,” I said. “It’s obviously possible to abseil down, but we should rig some kind of cradle using the winch. We’ll have to come up again soon enough, and I don’t relish the thought of having to climb. The temperature’s high enough for us to leave a block-and-tackle for some time without the pulley freezing solid, but we ought to leave a man here anyhow.”
“Why?” asked Crucero.
“Because if we don’t,” the star-captain put in, “those goons who are following us might simply squat here and wait for us. Someone has to make this place seriously defensible, and lay a much better series of traps than the one the android left for us. If those fail, he has to take the bastards from behind. I don’t mind if they follow us down, so that we can meet them on equal terms, but I’m not going to let them take us one by one as we come up. Okay?”
“You want a volunteer?” asked Serne.
“No,” she said. “I want Crucero.”
She didn’t explain why. That was one of the prerogatives of being a star-captain. I think Crucero had mixed feelings about the job, but he followed the logic of the case well enough. He didn’t have the same curiosity about what was down below as I had, and he wasn’t about to howl with anguish at the lost opportunity. He was probably more worried about the number of men Amara Guur might have sent after us, and whether one lousy lieutenant and a dozen cunning booby-traps could hold the fort against them all.
“They also serve who only stand and wait,” I assured him.
He didn’t laugh.
“Let’s get to work,” said Susarma Lear.
We began preparing for our descent into the abyss—our passage from the seventh circle of hell to what I hoped would be the hinterlands of paradise.
I am not by nature an optimist, but as we worked to rig the makeshift cradle I felt almost rigid with excitement. I really did hope that I was on my way to some kind of paradise run by men like gods; the allure of the centre had a very powerful hold on me.
But as the star-captain had remarked, sometimes hope just isn’t enough.