But if not a spaceship, then what? And why the structural-integrity field?
She knew what she had to do. She had to reattach the removed cube while still remaining inside the central hollow. But surely she should tell someone first. Even with her “I’m inside the third cube” note, it could be hours, or days, before someone entered her office. What if she got trapped inside?
She thought about phoning Kyle. But that wouldn’t do.
She didn’t have any grad students of her own during the summer, but there always were a few milling about. She could grab one of them—although then she might have to share some credit with the student when she published her results.
And then, of course, there was the most logical name—the one she knew she’d been deliberately suppressing.
Paul.
She could call him up. He’d doubtless get credit anyway; after all, he’d manufactured the components from which the construct was made, and had helped her assemble them.
Maybe, in its own crazy way, this was a perfectly reasonable excuse to call him. Not that last night had been a date or anything, not that any further contact was required.
She got out of the cubic hollow and crossed over to her desk, stretching as she did so, trying to get a crick out of her neck.
She picked up her handset. “Internal directory: Komensky, Paul.”
There were a few electronic bleeps, then Paul’s voice mail came on. “Hello, this is Professor Paul Komensky, Mechanical Engineering. I can’t come to the phone right now. My office hours for student appointments are—”
Heather replaced the handset. Her heart was fluttering a bit—she’d wanted to connect with him, yet felt a tinge of relief that she hadn’t.
She felt warm, perhaps even warmer than the bright lights should have made her feel. She looked back at the construct and then over at her computer monitor. The Alien Signal Center Web page hadn’t changed. There must be thousands of researchers working on the problem of what the alien messages had meant now that they were apparently over. She felt sure she had a good jump on everyone else—the lucky coincidence of Kyle having that Dali painting on his wall had let her leap ahead. But how long would it be before someone else built a similar construct?
She hesitated for another full minute, warring with herself.
And then—
And then she walked across the room, hefted the cube she’d removed earlier and brought it closer to the construct. She then got one of the suction-cup handles Paul had given her and placed it over the center of one face of the cube—the face that consisted of two substrate panels sandwiched together. There was a little pump on top of the black plastic handle; she pulled it up and the unit clamped onto the cube. She then tried lifting the cube by the handle. She feared it would fall apart, but the whole thing held together nicely.
After one more moment of hesitation, she tucked herself back into the hollow and then, pulling on the suction-cup handle, she lifted the cube back up into place. It clicked easily into position, locking on.
Heather felt a wave of panic wash over her as she was plunged into darkness.
But it wasn’t total darkness. The piezoelectric paint shone slightly with that same greenish tinge that glow-in-the-dark children’s toys gave off.
She took a deep breath. There was plenty of air, although the close confines did make it seem stuffy. Still, even though she clearly wasn’t going to suffocate in here, she wanted to be sure she could leave the construct whenever she wished. She splayed her hands and used them to try to push out the same cube she’d detached earlier.
Another wave of panic washed over her—the cube didn’t want to give. The structural-integrity field might be sealing her in.
She balled her hands into fists and pounded on the cube again—
— and it popped free, tumbling to the carpeted floor, the face with the suction-cup handle ending up on top.
Heather felt herself grinning sheepishly at her own panic. It probably was a good thing that the construct wasn’t a spaceship—she’d have ended up making first contact with soiled panties.
She got out, stretched again, and let herself calm down a bit. And then she tried once more, climbing back into the construct and using the glass handle to close what she was already thinking of as “the cubic door.”
This time she just sat, letting her eyes adjust to the semidarkness and breathing the warm air.
Heather looked at the phosphorescent pattern on the panel in front of her, trying to make out any meaning in the design. Of course she’d had no way of knowing whether she’d oriented the construct the right way. She might have it on its side, or—
Or backward. That is, she could be sitting in it backward. The confines were too tight for her to turn around with the door closed. She removed the cubic door, swung her legs outside, swiveling on her butt. Once she was in place, facing the short end of the shaft instead of the long one, she pulled on the suction-cup handle to bring the cubic door—which was now on her right—into position.
She’d wrecked her night vision by opening the door again, so she sat waiting for her eyes to readjust.
And, slowly, they did.
In front of her were two circles. One was continuous, the other was broken into eight short arcs.
It came to her in a flash. The closed circle was “On,” quite literally a completed circuit. And the broken circle was “Off.”
She took a deep breath, then started to move her left hand forward.
“Alpha Centauri, here I come,” she said softly, and pressed her palm against the closed circle.
18
At first, nothing seemed to happen. But then Heather felt a sinking sensation in her stomach, as though she were in an elevator that was dropping rapidly down its shaft. A moment later her ears popped.
She smashed her fist against the stop button—
— and everything returned to normal.
Heather waited for her breathing to calm down. She tried the door, disengaging it slightly.
Okay: she could halt the process at any time, and she could get out at any time.
And so she resolved to try again. She closed her eyes, summoning inner strength, then pulled on the handle to reseal the door, and with an extended index finger, touched the center of the area on the panel in front of her circumscribed by the solid circle.
Heather’s stomach dropped away from her again, and her ears, not yet recovered enough from the last time to pop, ached a bit.
And in front of her, the constellations of phosphorescent squares started shifting, moving, rearranging, as—
As the unfolded hypercube she’d built began to close in on itself, moving ana or kata, collapsing into a tesseract, with Heather at its very heart.
She felt herself twisting, and although the landscape around her was all just apparently random patterns of piezoelectric paint, it seemed that the design visible in her left peripheral vision was the same one she could detect in her right. The straight edges of the square panels were bowing in and out, now convex, now concave. Heather looked down in the dim light at her body and saw it stretched and flattened, as if someone had painted an image of her on paper, then pasted that paper to the inside of a bowl.
And yet, except for the undeniable feeling of rapid motion in her stomach and the pressure shifts in her ears, and now and again stars before her eyes—also, she knew, a phenomenon associated with pressure shifts—there was no real discomfort. She could see her surroundings folding over and bending, and she could see herself doing the same things, but her bones were twisting without breaking.
The folding continued. The whole process took no more than a few seconds—judging by the runaway metronome of her heart pounding in her ears—but as it was happening, it seemed as though time were attenuated.