Morrow pushed himself to his feet and stumbled away from the ramp.
The elevator shaft was a cylinder of metal ten yards across; it rose from floor to ceiling, a hundred yards above them.
Spinner-of-Rope, blood soaking through her dark bandage, leaned against the shaft. She looked tired, scared, subdued. She really is just a kid, Morrow thought.
But she said defiantly, “You Undermen aren’t used to fighting, are you? Maybe those four weren’t expecting us to fight back. So they’ll be scared. Cautious. It will slow them down — ”
“But not stop them,” Arrow Maker murmured. He was running his hand over the surface of the shaft, probing at small indentations in its surface. “So we haven’t much time… Morrow, how do we get into — Oh.”
In response to Arrow Maker’s random jabs, a panel slid backwards and sideways. A round-edged doorway into the shaft was opened up, about as tall as Morrow and towering over the forest folk.
Within the shaft, there was only darkness.
Arrow Maker stuck his head inside the shaft, and peered up and down its length. “There are rungs on the inner surface. It’s like a ladder. Good. It will be easy to climb. And — ”
Spinner touched his arm. “What about Uvarov?”
Arrow Maker turned to the old doctor, his face creasing with concern.
Morrow looked with dismay at the gaping shaft. “We’ll never be able to carry that chair, not down a ladder — ”
“Then carry me.” Uvarov’s ruined, crumpled face was deep in shadow as he lifted his head to them. “Forget the chair, damn it. Carry me.”
Morrow heard footsteps, echoing from the bare walls of Deck One. “There’s no time,” he said to Arrow Maker. “We have to leave him. We can’t — ”
Maker looked up at him, his face drawn and haughty beneath its gaudy paint. Then he turned away. “Spinner, give me a hand. Get his blanket off.”
The girl took hold of the top of the black blanket and gently drew it back. Uvarov’s body was revealed: wasted, angularly bony, dressed in a silvery coverall through which Morrow could clearly see the bulge of ribs and pelvis. There were lumps under Uvarov’s tunic: perhaps colostomy bags or similar medical aids. Although he must have been as tall as Morrow, Uvarov’s body looked as if it massed no more than a child’s. One hand rested on Uvarov’s lap, swaying through a pendular tremble with a period of a second or so, and the other was wrapped around a simple joystick which — Morrow presumed — controlled the chair.
Arrow Maker took Uvarov’s wrist and gently pulled his hand away from the joystick; the hand stayed curled, like a claw. Then Maker leaned forward, tucked his head into Uvarov’s chest, and straightened up, lifting Uvarov neatly out of his chair and settling him over Maker’s shoulder. As Arrow Maker stood there Uvarov’s slippered feet dangled against the floor, with his knees almost bent.
Uvarov submitted to all this passively, without comment or complaint; Morrow, watching them, had the feeling that Arrow Maker was accustomed to handling Uvarov like this — perhaps he served the old doctor as some kind of basic nurse.
As he studied the tough little man, almost obscured by his dangling human load. Morrow felt a pang of shame.
Spinner-of-Rope picked up Uvarov’s blanket and slung it over her shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said anxiously.
“You lead,” Arrow Maker said.
Spinner took hold of the frame of the open hatch and vaulted neatly into the shaft. She twisted, grabbed onto the rungs beneath the door frame, and clambered down out of sight.
“Now you, Morrow,” Arrow Maker hissed.
Morrow put his hands, now sweating profusely, on the door frame. Damn it, he was five hundred years older than Spinner. And even when he’d been fifteen he’d never been lithe…
“Move!”
He raised one leg and hoisted it over the lip of the door frame. The frame dug into his crotch. He tried to bring his second leg over — and almost lost his grip in the process. He clung to the frame with both hands, feeling as if the entire surface of his skin was drenched in cold sweat.
He tried again, more slowly, and this time managed to get both legs over. For a moment he sat there, feet dangling over a drop whose depth was hidden by darkness.
If the shaft was open all the way to the bottom of the life-dome, there was a mile’s drop below him.
He thought, briefly, of climbing back out of the shaft. Could he really face this? He could try surrendering, after all… But, oddly, it was the thought of the consequent shame in the face of Arrow Maker and Spinner made that option impossible.
He reached out and down, cautiously, with his right foot. It seemed a long way to the first rung, but at last he caught it with his heel. The rung felt fat and reassuringly solid. He got both feet onto the rung and straightened up. Then, still being minutely careful, he turned around, letting the soles of his feet swivel over the metal rung.
He bent his knees and reached out for the next rung. It was about eighteen inches below the first. Once he’d gone down two or three rungs and he started to settle into a routine, with both hands and feet fixed to the rungs, the going got easier -
Until he suddenly became aware that he was climbing down into the dark.
He couldn’t see a damn thing, not even the metal shaft surface before his face, or the whiteness of his own hands on the rungs.
He stopped dead and looked up, suddenly desperate even for the dim light of Deck One. Instantly he felt warm, bare feet trampling over the backs of his hands on the rungs, and the clumsy pressure of Arrow Maker’s legs on his shoulders and head; something clattered against his back — Uvarov’s feet, presumably.
Spinner’s voice drifted up from the shaft. “What’s going on?”
“What in Lethe are you doing?” Arrow Maker hissed.
“I’m sorry. It was dark. I — ”
“Morrow, your friends are going to reach the shaft any moment — ”
Something metallic rattled from the walls of the shaft, the resounding bounces coming further apart as it fell.
Uvarov’s voice sounded from the region of Maker’s upper legs. “Correction,” he said drily. “They have reached the shaft…”
Desperately, urgently, Morrow began to climb down once more.
Lieserl lay back in the glowing hydrogen-helium mix with arms outstretched and eyes closed, and felt fusion-product photons dance slowly around her. Following their minutes-long orbits around the core of the Sun, the long, lenticular forms of the photino birds flowed past Lieserl. She let the swarming birds cushion her as she sank into the choking heart of the Sun, floating as if in a dream.
And, at last, she came to a region, deep inside the Sun, in which no new photons were produced.
She and Scholes had been right, all those years ago. The core had gone out.
The persistent leeching-out of energy from the Sun’s hydrogen-fusing core, by the flocks of photino birds, had at last become untenable. A long time ago — probably before Lieserl’s birth — the temperature of the core had dropped so far that the fusion of hydrogen into helium flickered out, died.
Now, its heart already stilled, the Sun was working through its megayear death throes. Despite the slow, continuing migration of the last photons outward from the stilled fusion processes, there was little radiation pressure, here at the heart of the Sun, to balance the core’s tendency to collapse under gravity. So the extinguished core fell in on itself further, seeking a new equilibrium, its temperature rising as its mass compressed.
Lieserl knew that in the heart of every star of the Sun’s mass, these processes would at last take place — even without the intervention of an agent like the dark matter photino birds. Once the core hydrogen was exhausted, hydrogen fusion processes would die there, and this final subsidence, of a helium-soaked core, would begin.