“Don’t let go, Zena,” I said carefully.
“I won’t,” she said. “I won’t move.”
I unclipped the light at my belt and then I leaned back as far as I could until I could see beyond her. It would take twenty minutes to go down the ladder — in her state, probably longer — and even if I could start her moving, I doubted she could hold on that long. I held the light up at arm’s length over my head. About forty or fifty feet above us I could see something black at the side of the duct. A cross-corridor, perhaps, but I couldn’t be sure. All I could do was hope that it was.
“I want to go down,” Zena said.
We couldn’t go down. We certainly couldn’t stay where we were. I didn’t know what was ahead of us, but it was the only direction in which we could go.
“You’re going to have to climb a little more,” I said.
“But I’m scared,” Zena said. “I’m going to fall.”
I could feel sweat on my forehead now. A runnelet ran down and caught in my eyebrow. I wiped my brow.
“No, you’re not going to fall,” I said confidently. “I just looked up above, Zena, and there’s a cross-corridor just thirty feet or so over your head. That’s all you have to climb. You can do that.”
Zena just screwed her face in against the metal even harder. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. I’ll help you. Keep your eyes closed. That’s right. Now, move your foot up one step. Just one step.” I pushed at her leg. “That’s right. One step. All right, now reach your hand up — no, keep your eyes closed. Now move your other foot.”
One foot, one hand at a time, I got her moving again. For the first time since I could remember, the darkness seemed oppressive, a place where anything could happen. It was the way it must have seemed to Zena all along.
In a minute, I said, “It’s not more than twenty feet or so now,” but Zena was blocking my view and I couldn’t do anything but hope I was right. “You’re doing fine. It’s only a little bit farther.”
I continued to urge her on, and she went up slowly, a rung at a time. It was more than twenty feet, but not too much more than that, when Zena gave a little cry and was suddenly no longer above me. I looked up, and in the beam of the light clipped at my waist I could see the cross-corridor just over my head.
All I could do, sitting on its floor, was try to catch my breath and calm my heart. My heart was thumping away, sweat was continuing to drip from my forehead, and now that I was safe my mind was thinking of all that could have happened in full detail. Beside me, Zena was sobbing soundlessly.
After a minute, in a voice filled with wonder, Zena said, “I did make it.”
I breathed through my open mouth, trying not to pant. Then I said, “I told you that you would, didn’t I? Now all we have to do is get you back down again.”
Zena said, in a determined tone that surprised me, “I can make it back down again.”
I said, “Well, as long as we’re here, we may as well have a look around.”
In a minute or two, we walked down the corridor until we came to the first grate opening. The opening was there, but not the grate, and there was no light shining into the duct from outside as there would have been in Geo Quad or Alfing. I snaked through the hole and then gave a hand up to Zena. And we were standing in a hall on the Sixth Level, the level that shouldn’t have been there.
I shone my light around and all was silent, and dark, and deserted. The corridor was bare. All the fixtures were gone. Anything that could be removed was gone, only the holes remaining after. There was a doorway showing in the beam of my light.
“Let’s go look at that,” I said.
There was no door — that was gone, too. Nothing had been yanked ruthlessly or broken off. Everything had simply been removed.
The room into which the doorway led was bare, too. It was a very long room, longer than anything else I had seen in any quad, short of a quad yard. Its closest resemblance was to a dormitory, but it was as though somebody had taken all the rooms in a dormitory and torn out all the walls in order to make one long room. There were holes bored in the walls at regular intervals, columns of holes. But the room was bare.
“What is it?” Zena asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
We went back into the hall. It was long and straight, without any of the dead ends, stairs, or sudden turns that you ordinarily expect to see in any normal hallway. It was straight as a string. That was strange and different, too.
I noticed the numbers 44-2 painted neatly on the wall by the door of the room. There was a red line that started at the doorway, moved to the center of the hall and made a sharp right turn to run beside green, yellow, blue, orange and purple lines that continued past, running down the center of the hall.
“Let’s see where the lines go,” I said, and set off down the corridor.
It was late, past dinner time, when we got back to Geo Quad. We came out of the ducts from our original opening just down the hall from Zena’s home. My stomach was starting to notice how long it had been since I had eaten and I had a healthy appetite.
Zena hesitated for a minute outside her door, and then she said, “You’re much nicer than I thought you were at first.” And then, rapidly, as though to cover that statement up, she said, “Good night,” and went quickly into her apartment.
When I walked in, Daddy was just getting ready to go out for the evening. He and some of his friends used to get together regularly and build scale models and talk. Models of machines, animals (bones and all), almost anything imaginable. This group had met on Sunday nights for as long as I had lived with Daddy, and he had a whole collection of the models he had made, though they hadn’t yet been unpacked since we had moved here from Alfing.
Actually, I had no fault to pick with his models. Daddy used to say that everybody needs to have at least one mindless hobby to occupy himself with, and I had several.
Daddy asked, “Where have you been?”
“Up on the Sixth Level,” I said. “What do we have on hand to eat?”
“There’s some Ham-IV in the kitchen, if you want that,” Daddy said.
“That sounds good,” I said.
I liked Ham-IV very much. It comes from one of the two or three best meat vats in the Ship, though some people find it too strong for their taste. Gamey, I think they say. Still they have to put up with it, because it’s one of the best producing meat cultures on the Ship. It doesn’t hurt to like the inevitable.
I started for the kitchen and Daddy followed.
“Isn’t the Sixth Level completely shut up?” he asked. “I didn’t know you could still get up there.”
“It’s not that hard,” I said, and started getting food out. “Just why did they tear everything out the way they did?”
“Nobody has ever told you why they closed it down?”
I said, “Before today, I didn’t even know that there was a Sixth Level.”
“Oh,” Daddy said. “Well, it’s simple enough. At the time they converted the Ship it was pretty Spartan living here. We had more space than we needed with all the colonists gone, but not enough of everything else. They stripped the Third and Sixth Levels and used the materials to fix up the rest of the Ship more comfortably. They changed the Third to as near an approximation of Earth as they could, and closed the Sixth down as unnecessary.”
“Oh,” I said. That seemed to make sense out of the tomb that we had seen.
Daddy said, “I guess I’d forgotten how barren the Sixth Level is. If you want to find out more about it, I can tell you where to look it up. Right now, though, I have to be on my way or I’ll be late.”
Before he got out of the kitchen, I said, “Daddy?”