It was really no decision at all. We might not survive within the Eye; we would die for sure if we remained outside.
I ignored the screens and kept my eyes on the status monitors. Both engines were about equally bad. Both of them were red-lining. All I could do was balance them as closely as I could; and when Mel, watching the displays, quietly said, “Coming clear,” I knew it before she spoke. The engines were in their death rattle, but in spite of that the Cuchulain’s speed was increasing. We were through.
I cut the drive. We drifted on toward the base. If I had stared before at its globular middle section, now I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Or keep them on it. Flashes of light ran within the surface, with bright afterimages that fooled me into fancying strange shapes within the globe. I could imagine a giant human ear, a human face, a great fist clutching a twisted caricature of a Godspeed ship.
“Who goes inside Flicker, and who stays?” That was Mel, naming the middle region at the same time as she voiced my own question: Who would go? With the drive dead, the Cuchulain was no better than a derelict adrift in space. This time I wouldn’t remain behind.
“Can we leave the Eye again?” asked Doctor Eileen.
I shook my head. “Not in this ship.”
“Then we may as well stick together. Collect anything that you want to take with you. I’ll start loading food and drink. There’s nothing to be gained by anyone staying here.”
She was right. The Cuchulain would be our tomb if we stayed. All the same, I hadn’t expected her to give the order to leave permanently. I had an odd feeling of security abandoned as we closed down the Cuchulain’s energy and life-support systems and went one by one into the cargo hold, adding our little packages of personal possessions to the pile of provisions in a cargo beetle; and soon I was piloting us clear, convinced that I was doing a better job of flying than I ever had before—with no one able to appreciate it.
“Stay together, or separate?” Doctor Eileen asked Jim Swift the next important question as we approached a dark part of the middle sphere, closing on what I hoped might be entry points.
“Both.” Jim Swift had thought it through. “We go into Flicker together, and divide up the interior search when we get there. We’ll check back at the entrance on a regular schedule. Anyone who finds something interesting waits at the beetle for the others.”
“And nobody”—Doctor Eileen was staring at me—“plays with something he finds that might be a drive, or anything else, until we’ve discussed it together.”
If anyone was likely to get in trouble with a new gadget, it wasn’t me—it was Mel. But there was no time for argument, because the middle section of the base was looming up in front of us like a great, smooth wall. The internal lightning flickered brighter. It showed three dark openings where we might be able to lodge the beetle. I headed for the biggest.
Our arrival was reassuring. The port contained a lock, little different from the airlocks at the other lobe, or even at Muldoon Upside Port. We had been in suits since we left the Cuchulain, so the pressure change didn’t affect us when the lock cycled us in.
“Close to Erin surface pressure,” said Jim Swift. He was examining a wall monitor. “But we won’t be breathing this one. Helium, neon, and xenon. Nice inert atmosphere to preserve things, but no trace of oxygen. Keep your suits tight.”
The inner door of the lock was opening. It revealed a featureless corridor, which thirty yards farther on branched into four.
“North, south, east, west,” Doctor Eileen said. “I guess that settles one question. Jay, how long do you have?”
I glanced at my air supply. “Thirteen hours, nearly fourteen.”
“Mel? Jim?”
“Sixteen hours.”
“Twelve.”
“So I’m lowest, I’ve got a bit more than eleven.”
“Back here in nine or ten, then?” Jim Swift was itching to get started, his eyes glinting behind his visor.
“No!” Doctor Eileen was in charge again. “What happens if one of us gets into trouble and can’t make it back? We have to give ourselves enough time to help.”
Gets into trouble, I thought. You mean we’re not in trouble already? But I didn’t say anything, and Jim Swift came back with, “All right. How about six hours? Don’t forget we may have to do a lot of looking before we find anything. And the longer we stay here talking…”
“Six it is.” Doctor Eileen was moving forward. “Prompt. Anyone who isn’t back here by then and hasn’t met some sort of problem will have one—with me. I’m talking to you, Jay, and you, too, Mel. I’ll skin you alive if you’re not on time. Let’s go.”
I hung back, making the final series of suit checks that Danny Shaker had drummed into my head time after time. I was the last to arrive at the corridor branch. The other three had taken the top, left, and right forks.
I was left with the bottom branch. The “south” branch. “Going south.” It was Uncle Toby’s favorite expression to describe dying. “Old Jessie, she just packed her bags and went south.” Let’s hope it didn’t apply to me on Flicker.
My branch of the corridor was plain walls, with no rooms or exits leading off it. It headed downward for no more than twenty or thirty yards before it leveled off to run parallel to the way that we had entered. That was puzzling, because I felt as though I was again moving straight toward the center of Flicker. Had I lost my sense of direction?
Soon I had a bigger problem. My corridor was ending. In nothing. Or rather, in a fish-eye circle of misty dark-grey, like the membrane that surrounded the Eye itself.
The gravity inside Flicker was too small to be useful. I had to use my suit controls to slow my forward progress, until I hung just a couple of feet from the dead circle. Ought I to try to go on through? It wasn’t just Doctor Eileen’s warning about taking risks with new things that held me in place. The circle itself scared me.
I reached out one suited arm and pushed my hand delicately into the darkness. I felt a slight, sticky resistance, but that was all. Unless it was very deep I should have no trouble passing through. I was not sure I dared to try.
The thing that persuaded me to enter the dark eye of the circle had nothing to do with courage. I realized that I was only a minute or two away from the airlock. I was not willing to go back and sit near the cargo beetle for the next five and half hours, then tell the others that my total achievement had been to “explore” less than a hundred yards of blank corridor. I knew how Jim Swift and Mel would react to that confession.
I moved back a few steps along the corridor. It might be difficult to get any traction from the walls or floor once I was within the circle itself. I turned the suit forward impulse to a medium level, built up speed, and plunged feet first into the dark center.
I didn’t close my eyes, but I might as well have. The darkness inside was total. It didn’t last long enough for my eyes to adjust, and that was fortunate, because before I knew it I was emerging into a light so intense that the suit’s visor lagged for a second before it could make a dimming adjustment.
Five seconds earlier I had been in a narrow corridor. Now I had emerged into a chamber so big that portals like the one from which I had emerged were no more than dark pinpricks on the distant walls. For a moment I thought that the interior itself was empty, except for flickering regions of light and dark. Then I realized that the interior patterns of dark and light formed moving shapes.
Familiar shapes. I recognized one that was far away from me. It was the figure of a man, gigantic and insubstantial. He was hundreds of feet high, but no more solid than a pall of light-grey smoke from a bonfire. Through him I could see the far wall of Flicker.