The only other features on the airless surface were piles of rocky rubble that outlined what were once walls. The moon had never had an atmosphere; it was likely that the natural regolith had once protected an underground compound. No doubt the ruins would be worth digging up, but for now, the prize hovered half a meter above the contemporary lift system.
Even with two lights blazing into the tube, Flex couldn’t see a thing inside. “After you,” he said to Jarko-S’larbo through his com unit.
“I don’t trust Jinxians,” S’larbo said, and Flex didn’t blame him. “For example, those protrusions on your helmet look like weapons. Then again, since you are a coward, they are probably antennae, linking you to your precious Institute of Knowledge.”
He was referring to the horns. Flex had a horn affixed to his helmet’s forehead, and a smaller one just above it. The horns represented the weapons of Flex’s self-adopted totem, the rhinoceros. They also contained not a link to Jinx, but a complete data set from the Institute, bootlegged, of course. S’larbo was more right than he knew.
“Bad guess,” said Flex. “Are we going in there, or not?”
“After you,” said the ratcat-in-a-can.
Maybe not such a bad idea, thought Flex, depending on what was inside. If the earlier expedition lay dead in there, the disarmed S’larbo might find a weapon. On the other hand, he would be foolish to go in alone.
“We go together.”
They climbed a portable stair that had been erected at the left end of the metal cylinder. One long stride from there, and they were inside the cylinder. Its surface was a charcoal gray, so that helmet lights revealed no internal detail. Flex expected to at least see the star glow at the far opening, but it was blackness.
They continued ahead, walking cautiously down the inner length of the alien artifact. It seemed safe enough, and there was no trace of the prior expedition. They reached the far end, at which point they could see outside. The nearby midden heaps had blocked most of the light from that side.
“It’s inert,” S’larbo said. “There’s no stasis box here!”
Stasis box? Now that’s a rather important bit of information to have missed, Flex thought. “Maybe someone beat you to it.”
“You!” shouted S’larbo.
Flex was about to deny that when the great cat made his move. Kzinti were notorious for announcing their attacks with a scream, but evidently this fellow had enough sense to attack first, and scream later. He went for Flex’s rifle, but only succeeded in knocking it to the curved floor. Fighting in a spacesuit usually had less than satisfactory results.
Flex scrambled for the weapon, and once the kzin realized he would get it, the cat bounded away down the corridor. By the time Flex raised the rifle, S’larbo was nearly out of the artifact. He would undoubtedly return, with a weapon from his lander. Unable to catch him, Flex opted to stay put, saving his strength. In this gravity, the kzin would tire out quickly. Besides, by staying at the far end of the corridor, Flex could fire, while maintaining an escape route at his back.
He kept an eye on that opening, in case S’larbo tried to sneak in that way, but there were no stairs to allow an easy approach.
After a while, Flex heard a blip from his warning system. His sensor had detected the priming of a beam rifle. Flex could see S’larbo silhouetted at the far opening of the tunnel. He cut off his lights and stepped up the curving wall to his right, to get out of the line of fire. He left his data display up, but covered the lower part of his visor with an arm, to block the light.
“What’s wrong, you hairless coward?” S’larbo was gloating.
“Is that the honor of the kzinti, to hunt with overwhelming force? I thought you hunted with bare claws.”
“Your gibbering spews like bandersnatch dung. Too long have my people faltered at the lies of you bony worms.”
Flex could not keep his position so high up the wall, and slid down. As he sought better footing, two strange things happened. First, he felt the entire cylinder roll slightly under his foot. While the cylinder hung stable over the ground, it was free to rotate on its long axis without friction. And Flex’s weight was enough to set it in motion. Second, as it moved, some hidden mechanism must have awoken, because a dull amber light emanated from an area at the center of the structure.
Jarko-S’larbo grunted with surprise, not knowing that Flex had triggered the device. Flex stepped higher up the rounded wall, and the tube cooperated, rolling down under his weight.
Time to shake things up a bit, Flex thought.
S’larbo fired two bolts down the center of the tube, missing Flex, who continued to climb up the wall. He heard the kzin grunt again, and guessed that the ratcat had momentarily lost his balance.
“Is it true,” said Flex, stopping the roll and reversing it as hard as he could, “that cats always land on their feet?”
“Grrraaarr!”
Flex again turned around and treaded hard up the opposite wall. Once the tube got going, he stopped it, and ran the other way. More bad shots from S’larbo, but they were getting better. Sooner or later, one would connect, and that would be it. Not content to die at the hands of this fur ball, Flex pounded full-bore up one wall, to get the cylinder spinning as fast as he could. It was more fun getting the kzin dizzy, storming him, and fighting hand-and-claw. He wanted to beat the shit out of that bastard before boring a hole in him.
The cylinder rolled at a good clip, so that if Flex stopped too long, his feet would be swept out from under him. Not a problem; at a mere meter and a half, he’d have a better time of it than a knock-kneed feline twice his height.
“Let’s go even faster!” he said.
“You’re doing this?” S’larbo hissed, unable to suppress his astonishment.
Flex worked his way to the center, but slowly, because he wanted to reverse the direction at unpredictable intervals. An image from history formed in his mind: that of two men rolling on a floating log, until one fell into the water. No doubt a competition from the Olympic games of ancient Greece.
Meanwhile, the light at the center of the tunnel was growing, and Flex feared that the keen eyes of the kzin would have no trouble seeing him now. Yet, in the growing light, an object seemed to descend from the ceiling, blocking most of the tunnel at its center. It made no sense, since the “ceiling” was constantly rolling around. When the object-or group of objects, as they now appeared to be-reached the “ground,” the light shot back upward. The beam seemed to reach through the cylinder, forming a shaft of light reaching up at a right angle to the tunnel, extending beyond it, where there was once a curved ceiling. The new shaft appeared to be another cylinder like the first, but Flex could see only a little way up into it.
The objects under the new tunnel were bathed in the amber light. They were solid rectangles of differing sizes, open on their tops. Where the two tunnels joined above, a series of armatures hung, perhaps waiting to re-hoist the empty boxes, or to bring new ones.
“Hey, Slobbo!” Flex said, to see if the kzin saw what he was seeing. No answer. He tried again, but the changes to the cylinder seemed to have cut off their communication.
Flex stopped revving up the cylinder, letting it coast. He had to keep walking up one side, or side-stepping to avoid falling down. He turned his lights back on and did a quick query of his knowledge well. Nothing was forthcoming until he correlated “Zeno’s Wormhole” with “stasis box.” This produced an obscure monogram with the intriguing title: “The Spontaneous Generation of a Quasi-Quantized Stasis Field inside a Rotating, Non-Traversable Wormhole: A Proposal on How the Slaver Stasis Boxes Might Have Been Manufactured.” It was not a quick read.
Wisely, Flex had been studying related material, and as a professional collector and collator of information, he got the gist of it while skimming his display and side-stepping at the same time.