“Damn it, you know what I mean. What’s the date?”
“Look there.”
He pointed to a sign glowing blue on the wall of the bay they were passing. Sandy remembered seeing something of the sort in the bays they had passed. It read, HOUR 10.23 DAY 73, YEAR 147.
“And before you ask,” continued Marius softly, “I cannot give you a terrestrial equivalent. We are no longer in that universe—the one that contains Earth, and the Milky Way, and nebulae and pulsars and all the rest of it. The dimensions here are completely independent of the ones you know.”
He had said before, “This Universe.” Sandy had not forgotten; she just had not assimilated what it implied.
“But… the gravity’s just the same —Oh. This is an alternate Earth—”
“No, this universe is not an alternative. It is artificial. We are inside an asteroid known as Donander; roughly a cylinder a couple of miles long. The gravity is artificial also. You may have felt a kind of disorientation for a minute or two. That is because the gravity is generated from a flat surface some distance below us, rather than being directed towards the centre of a sphere.”
“Artificial? But—”
“Donander was separated off from the Main Continuum—from the Universe with which you are familiar—a hundred and forty-seven years and seventy-three days ago.
“How—”
“The technology used was developed some centuries after I was born. How it works, I have not the slightest idea. All the inhabitants have been recruited from Earth, from between 1900 and 2800 a.d. Now stop asking questions, and come and see.”
The wheeled spider had turned suddenly at a right angle and rolled through a bay, then along a broad passage; halting finally in front of a formidably constructed, formidably fastened door. This bore a large notice in red characters and a language Sandy did not recognise.
Marius got down and approached the door. He took off his ring and pressed the black stone into a small cavity at the side of the door, which slid ponderously but quietly aside.
He withdrew the ring when there was space for one person to go through, and the door stopped moving. He beckoned Sandy to follow. Once through the door, he pressed a lever and it closed behind them.
More high-tech stuff on the walls—the place they had started from paled by comparison, if only because this was a much larger room. There was another door, heavy but smaller, in the far wall, and a padded bench beside it. Marius waved Sandy toward this and became engrossed in manipulating various controls, stopping frequently to consult one of the digital displays.
Finally satisfied, he beckoned Sandy up and opened the far door. Behind it was yet another grey blank. She went through it this time without hesitation and found herself in a glass-walled structure, rather like the viewing gallery in a wild-fowl sanctuary she had visited once. It looked out on a somewhat similar view, wet and marshy, with open water in the middle and trees on the far side.
Marius sat her down by one of the windows and pressed a pair of binoculars into her hand.
“The far side of the bayou. Over by that tall tree with the scaly trunk—next to the fallen log. No, the large fallen log, not that branch!—Now to the left of it. You see?”
Sandy had never been much of a bird-watcher. It took her some time to adjust the glasses to the width of her eyes, and longer to get them focused on the right spot. At least, she supposed it was the right spot. There was a fair-sized boulder there, basically brown in colour but greened over with what looked like algal slime. A triangular slab at the far end extended on to the bank, and… that must be what she was to look for… something like an outsize dragonfly, blundering from one clump of reeds to another—
The triangular slab moved. Slowly it reared up at an angle to the rest of the boulder. The dragonfly, which seemed not to be very well in control of itself, wavered towards it and disappeared beneath the overhang.
The slab dropped. Somewhere towards the mid-line Sandy caught, momentarily, the glint of an eye.
The paleontology course had been compulsory. She had taken it without much enthusiasm, but some of the more bizarre fossils had made an impression on her; such as a vast, flat, triangular skull with eye-sockets close together in the middle… She regained her breath, which seemed to have got mislaid, and yelled “It’s a labyrinthodont!”
“Certainly.”
“But, but—they were on Earth!”
“From the Late Devonian until the end of the Triassic, I believe.”
“But you said we weren’t in the same Universe as Earth!”
“When I said it, that was the case. We have just passed through an interface between Donander and a Carboniferous swamp. Donander maintains a contact with the main continuum—Earth’s Universe, that is—via the time-point at which it was twisted out, and this enables interfaces to be set up between the two. Once again, I have no idea why, or how; but as you have seen, it works.”
“Then, then—” Sandy was just catching up with the implications, “that’s what this place is for? You’re studying prehistoric life—?”
“No. Or rather, we are, but not for its own sake. Come along, I want to show you something else.”
This involved a journey to another room, at first sight identical to the one they had just quitted, where once again Sandy sat and watched Marius fiddling with controls. This time, however, what he wanted finally appeared in the middle of the room. It was a three-dimensional projection of some sort, far more solid-looking than any hologram Sandy had ever seen; although the great door was dimly visible at the top of it, behind the sky. The lower part consisted of wet black rocks under assault by an angry sea. Pools lay in the hollows, and the air was full of spray. Sandy ducked automatically, then realised that the waves were frozen in mid-surge and the spray hung unmoving in the air.
Marius did something else and the brightness of the ceiling receded to a thin line around the edge. The projection filled the room without competition. There was nothing to indicate its scale, except the apparent height of the waves in comparison with their evident force; on this basis, it was probably about half life-size.
“Do you see the meter?” Marius inquired.
It stood on the rocks at the front of the projection; if it had been as solid as it looked Sandy could have leaned forward and touched it. A squat pillar, with an oblong display in its upper part that read:
N2 79%
CO2 20%
O2 trace.
Marius let her look for thirty seconds. Then the projection darkened. The shape of the rocks did not alter, but the white edge of \the waves was farther away. Above, the sky was full of stars, in unfamiliar patterns. There were also two small crescents, one only a curving line, the other fatter and brighter, on opposite sides of the sky.
Marius heard her gasp.
“Good,” he said. “You have seen them.” He returned to the controls.
Presently it was daylight. The tide was out. The outline of the rocks had changed somewhat and the pools were placed differently. One, towards the edge was covered with a thick green scum.
The meter was still there. This time it read:
N2 79%
CO2 19%
O2 1.4%
Sandy drew a deep breath and tried to keep her voice steady.
“That’s another planet,” she said. “Not Earth. Not in the Solar System. You’re terraforming it.”
“Exactly right,” said Marius gravely.
“How long did it take? I mean, how long between the first picture and the second one?”