Incredible. And all of it built God knows how just to house the thing, the Wheel under her feet. The survey teams were just starting to explore the whole Wheel, but the drillings and sounding and excavations they had done so far suggested that most of it had the cross-section of a rounded-off oval about forty meters side to side and thirty top to bottom. In places it bulged out vertically or horizontally, the tunnel enlarging to accommodate it.
This one thing, this one object, went clear around the world. She had to look down at it, stare at it, marvel at it every time she came down here. Maybe that was why lately she came down so rarely. Hell, we built the Ring of Charon, and that’s practically the same size, Marcia told herself. The difference was, of course, that the Ring had been built in open space. Digging a tunnel clear around a world was far beyond human capability—or, for that matter, human necessity. There had been no reason to hide the Ring of Charon. There was the question that nagged at the back of everything: what the devil had the Lunar Wheel been hiding from? It had taken tremendous effort to hide it. What could be so powerful that something as huge and mighty as the Wheel feared it, hid from it?
The surface of the Wheel was a dark, hard, flaky brown substance. It was, in effect, the thing’s dead, dried-out skin. When the first teams had come down here, the area at the base of the Rabbit Hole had been covered in a layer of thin, flat, broken-up pieces of the stuff, with a consistency like that of dried leaves that crunched when you walked on them. The surface had been littered with bits of Charonian junk. Bits of dead carrier bug, carapaces from unknown Charonian forms, broken pieces that seemed a cross between the mechanical and the biological.
All of that had been cleared away, leaving the lower epidermal layers exposed. Bit by bit, those were drying up and flaking away as well. Bits of dead wheelskin were constantly drifting in from the tunnel. It was a struggle to keep the area clear.
One of the several well-worn paths in the epidermal layer led toward the east entrance to the tunnel. Marcia stood and stared at that entrance. Just over five years ago, a strange, wheeled Charonian had grabbed Lucian Dreyfuss off his feet and raced away with him in that direction. No one knew what had happened to him after that. Lucian Dreyfuss’s personal abduction had become the stuff of legend, of folklore, a mystery that intrigued everyone—in part, no doubt, because it bore similarities to the real Abduction, but on a small enough scale that people could understand it. You could imagine one man being kidnapped, even if you couldn’t imagine a whole world being snatched away. It had inspired all sorts of theories and search parties and explorations—but none of them had come to anything.
“Come on, now, Marcia,” Selby said from up ahead. “Don’t be a lollygagger. Off we go.”
She nodded agreement and followed along behind. Work lights had been strung in the tunnel, affording a fairly bright illumination. A line of small white runcarts sat parked not far inside the entrance. Selby went to the first one in line and sat down at the controls, Marcia trailing a step or two behind, still more than a little reluctant to deal with all of this. Best to plunge on. “All right, Selby,” she said. “Let’s go get a look at this mystery of yours.”
“Right,” Selby said, her face set and determined. She grabbed the car’s steering wheel, jammed her foot on the accelerator, and took off.
The runcart lurched forward with a jolt before Marcia could attach her seatbelt. The cart took off at speed, Marcia hanging on for dear life. At least this time Selby was driving on the right-hand side of the road. When she forgot herself and reverted to driving on the left-hand side, as was the English habit, the ride was just that much more exciting.
Selby’s driving settled down after a moment, and they moved down the tunnel at a steady clip. Marcia released her grip long enough to get her seatbelt fastened.
They drove out of the overhead lighting a minute or two after starting out, and plunged into the darkness with disconcerting abruptness. Selby flicked on the headlights and the car rushed into the tunnel, its wall looming up out of the darkness into the glare of the lights as they hurtled down the road.
The Wheel Tunnel moved ahead, seemingly straight as an arrow. So far as Marcia could tell, they were moving down a perfectly straight, infinitely long road.
But there were plenty of side caverns that were anything but straight. Here and there they passed lighted signs, each with a number on it. Each indicated a side cavern off the main Wheelway. The runcart rushed past them, past the entrances they marked, huge gaping holes to one side or the other of the tunnel, and one or two from its top. The glow of work lights was visible from some of the entrances. Some side caverns were little more than widenings in the main tunnel, or were simple, straight cul-de-sacs. Others led to absolute mazes of chambers and side tunnels wandering off in all directions—up, down, east, west, north, south—all at once.
The survey teams could easily be kept busy for the next several centuries exploring all the twisting labyrinthine turns of the side caverns. Some were mere empty holes in the rock. Some held nothing but a few bits of the ubiquitous flakes of the wheel’s epidermal layers.
But others were filled with things. Bits of strange machines, dead Charonians of all sorts. Other chambers held God only knew what. One chamber was full of cubes of an unknown material somewhere between a metal and a plastic. There was a deep pit filled with some sort of tarry liquid. Another pit was half-filled with coils of some sort of rather flimsy rope or cable. Were the chambers maintenance depots? Kitchens? Medicine cabinets? Storehouses for art supplies?
But perhaps the most disturbing finds were the most recognizable and least mysterious—chambers full of bones and desiccated corpses. The remains of terrestrial animals.
Dinosaurs, to be exact.
It was more shocking, more disconcerting, than it was surprising. There had been direct evidence early on that the Charonians had visited Earth and taken some biological samples. There were strands of terrestrial DNA and RNA in the cell structure of a number of Charonian forms. But no one had expected the Charonians to do their lab work in a tunnel under the lunar surface.
The runcart rushed past a particularly bright-lit side cavern. Marcia spotted the number over the entrance. Chamber 281. In there, inside a huge, high-ceilinged cavern three kilometers across, the survey teams had found a half-dozen tyrannosaurs—some merely skeletal, the others desiccated whole remains. They had been tucked away since the end of the Cretaceous, along with dozens of what were either some kind of thescelosaurids, or perhaps orthinominids— ostrich-like dinosaurs—of some sort. There were twenty or thirty other, smaller types no one had been able to identify even that closely. No one on the Moon knew enough about dinosaurs to say more. If there had not been much need for archaeologists on the pre-Abduction Moon, there had been even less call for paleontologists.
But then Chamber 281 swept past, and they were off again into the darkness.
“Marcia?” Selby said, breaking the silence at last. “I know you don’t feel like talking just now, and neither do I, but I want to tell you something anyway. You won’t be prepared for this unless you get ready first.”
Marcia smiled, her expression hidden behind her pressure suit helmet and the darkness. Say what else you might about the emotions of the moment, or about the woman herself, Selby brought incomprehensibility to a fine art. “All right, Selby, what is it you have to tell me?”
“The dinosaurs, love. The dinosaurs. New information since the last time you paid a call. The chaps working on them think they died here instead of being killed on Earth. Found Lunar rocks in their gizzards, or some such. I didn’t understand, exactly, but the point is they were alive here for quite a while. Like fifteen million years.”