That brought them both up short. Nagel looked at Queson in the eerie near-darkness, illuminated only by their lights, by a few other lights showing shutdown status on the command consoles, and by the soft glow from the power plant even in its most dormant stage beyond that protective picture window, and she looked back at him.
“Maybe we ought to take a closer look at the rest of this room,” she suggested, and he didn’t argue.
An examination through various light filters didn’t help. The only one that registered much was infrared, and that only because of the residual energy coming from the close proximity to the well-shielded reactor chamber. The lights, though, showed that at a point where the undershielding extended underneath the fifteen-centimeter-thick floor, there was some buckling.
“Jeez!” Jerry breathed. “That’s impossible! We go to space with shielding pretty much the same as this, and the interior of Stanley is made of this same calrithium compound. What kind of pressure short of a black hole would distort it so much?”
Randi Queson walked over close to the window, and, for the first time, looked down deep into the central power core and shaft.
“Jerry? I don’t think we can salvage this power plant.”
“Huh? What do you mean? I—” He suddenly saw her just staring down and went over to the window and saw what she was looking at.
“Holy Mother of God,” the most faithless of men breathed as he looked down.
II: RESEARCH AND RESCUE
Behind the window was a vast area that must have been impressive under any conditions. Always lit by its own glow, the shielding material was actually designed not only to trap radiation but to convert it into harmless light that did good rather than harm.
It was likely that the entire complex had been built into a natural cavern, although there were signs of some enlargement by laser construction trimmers. Still, the opening went down so far that it was only barely possible to see the reflected surface of a relatively warm body of water below, perhaps a vast underground sea. The water almost certainly wasn’t that warm, but it was liquid and that was good enough for anybody looking to develop a planet.
Rising up from the ocean to beyond their own viewing level was a huge core complex, roughly cylindrical but with walkways, robotic service tracks, and monitors all about. Catwalks and thin bridges containing magnetic tracks for the robots went in at various levels, allowing for service without obscuring the view of the entire complex. Bumps, hatches, burl-like bulges off and on through the structure, all provided access to various parts of its internal circuitry and systems, and around the outer walls of the cavern were oval dishes that captured output as required and transformed the energy into useful forms and sent them on to storage elsewhere in the complex.
It was a magnificent site, and all they expected to see, but what was about halfway down the center shaft between them and the dark waters below was not. It required magnification to bring into proper view, and, even with that, it wasn’t clear what they were looking at.
Both knew, however, that they were observing the most dangerous thing they’d ever seen.
It looked for all the world like some kind of cartoonish mouth, swallowing the shaft at that point like some kind of carnival sword swallower. You had to stare at it for a few seconds to realize that it was actually a mass, much the color of the surrounding limestone, and without much in the way of features, but a mass nonetheless of gigantic size wrapped completely around the shaft at, or perhaps from, that point. It hadn’t been immediately clear that it was a living thing rather than some kind of poured support, but the more they looked at it, the more they could determine slight undulations along the outer skin or whatever, and the clammier it appeared.
“Well, you guessed that the last one would eat up all the others,” Nagel whispered, although he didn’t really know why. They were talking over a radio inside sealed helmets, after all.
“Yes, but why is it still alive, let alone so huge?”
“Maybe it isn’t through digesting things yet. After all, it ate all the food for an entire city, plus the plants that grew it and even the people who would have consumed it. You ever seen anything like it?”
“No. Sleeping off a big feed, maybe, but I don’t think it ate the place recently. No, it’s getting the warmth from the shaft, but it’s not feeding on the energy. If it could do that, why attack the colony? There’s no sign they even had any big weapons, so it wasn’t self-defense. That leaves hibernation. It came up from the sea attracted to the warmth, and after a while it found things it could eat here. When it finished, it went to the warmest point and went to sleep.”
“How about letting it stay asleep and getting the hell out of here and back to the ship before it decides it wants a midnight snack?” Nagel said nervously.
“I doubt if we’d be worth much to it. Still, it would be totally instinctual. I agree. I think we ought to get out and leave the power down as it is. In fact, I think we ought to lift off when we get back and wave goodbye as we blast off.”
“We’ll see about the rest, but I agree about the first. Let’s go.”
They backed out of the place, and walked briskly down the hallway back towards the corridors to the greenhouses.
“We can’t get close enough in to pick you up from there right off,” An Li reminded them, “but we think we ought to extract as soon as feasible. At least until we can figure out what to do next. Let me run some figures and we’ll see what’s possible. In the meantime, get back into the greenhouse area quick so we can get individual tracking. It’s a little too hot in the cliffs for what you put out.”
They needed little argument, and stepped up the pace.
“Jerry? Are you sure this is the corridor we came in on?” Queson asked him.
“Probably not, but it’s to the greenhouses,” he responded. “I—”
He stopped abruptly, looking ahead into the darkness. His helmet light streamed ahead and caught what appeared to be several figures standing at one end of the corridor, near the first tube into the greenhouses. He was keyed up enough that it took him a moment before he realized that they were environmental suits quite similar to their own.
“Jerry! They’re not empty!” Randi exclaimed, approaching the nearest one.
Sure enough, as her filters popped into place, she could see inside the helmet of the yellow suit in front of her. It was the ghastly face of a partially decomposed human head.
“There’s another one like that in this blue one,” Nagel told her. “Huh! Looks like all but one of them. Wonder why they weren’t consumed?”
“This thing appears to be able to penetrate only organic material,” she told him. “Remember how perfect everything else was, even the clothes and boots? These are sealed suits. I bet you’ll find a tear or some other failure in the empty suit.”
“Yeah, but if that’s the case, how come they died?”
“Where do they go? What do they eat when the emergency rations in the suit run out? What about water? Recharge and it’s got you. It might even have engulfed them, just waiting for the air to run out or the power pack to run down. God! I don’t know how horrible it is to be dissolved, but I’ll bet you the ones it got had a cleaner and easier death than these poor people!”
“That’s us if that thing wakes up,” Nagel reminded her. “Let’s save the funeral for another day.”
As they went on, Queson commented, “Actually, death by oxygen deprivation’s supposed to be kind of peaceful, like drowning without the panic. You hallucinate, you feel you’re floating, and you slowly go out like a candle in a gentle breeze.”