When Stella excused herself to go powder her nose, Turner’s eyes followed her, caressing that slinky red dress from the outside just as lovingly as Stella was caressing it from the inside.
“Where the hell did you find her, Kirk? She’s gorgeous!” So much for sober, unimpressionable, analytical Dr. Turner.
I really didn’t have much to say to him. He hovered around, suddenly all buddy-buddy. Stella and I mingled, getting slack-jawed looks whenever I introduced her.
The next day she left on another land deal. The image of her bouncing around in a four wheel drive out in the middle of nowhere, showing some land speculator or filthy rich dude the desert ranch of his dreams—that didn’t bother me as much as the memory of her and Turner in polite conversation when I had returned to the party after taking a leak. It was like they were old friends, or as if they were speaking a language no one else could understand.
Jealousy? I asked myself. Imagination, I answered.
Three days later supernova SN2097A lit up the late afternoon eastern sky, and changed everything.
God, it was awesome! It was like getting a full Moon’s worth of light from a shiny new dime in the sky.
Almost as unbelievable was how quick things went back to the way they were during the Anti-Christ days.
Worse.
Somehow security got saddled with answering the panic calls—people worried about radiation and cosmic rays. We’d tell them not to worry about wearing their lead-lined pith helmets for another 5,300 years, and have a nice day.
I called back all the guys we had laid off. Turner being on vacation didn’t help. What with dealing with all the press goons clamoring for interviews and instant science, and all the scientists arriving to do real, slow brewed science, me and a lot of other people were busier than left-handed paper hangers. I hardly gave a thought to Stella. Strange, now that I remember it.
When she stormed into the observatory four days later, and demanded to talk to someone in mapping, I took her. After some upset questioning of Shapiro, the bewildered star jockey, she got kind of sad and angry at the same time. Then she charged out, me in tow. I tried to get her to talk.
“Why do you want to know exactly where the supernova is?” Jaw clenched, she walked faster. “Where are you going?” A quick glance my way, like she was being torn in two. “Let’s get some coffee and talk,” I said.
“No, Kirk. I can’t,” and, presto, she was in her red sportster, screeched raggedly from the curb and headed north.
It was almost end-of-shift, and my car was parked nearby. Without a thought I took off after her.
When Stella got to the boonies beyond town it occurred to me to turn off my headlights so she wouldn’t know I was following her. We used to do that all the time when I was a teen. The desert is hardly ever completely dark. Even on moonless nights, the air being so clean, you can actually drive by starlight. The roads are straight and, by killing the dash lights, your night vision gets pretty good. Of course the light from the supernova made this night’s ride easier.
Stella drove on and on. I began to sweat running out of gas when I saw her turn onto a dirt road. The dust she kicked up was lit by her taillights, twin nebulae that looked like a pair of red ghosts following her.
We were about as far from civilization as it’s possible to get in the area. About ten miles north of Pinon she turned west. After twenty miles or so of washboard she slowed down, and I closed the gap to about a hundred yards. She rounded some boulders. Her headlights were like twin cones of warmth in a landscape of cold, dark grays. They lit up a strange, unnatural looking rock formation for an instant before she stopped the car, cut the engine, and doused the lights.
I pulled up next to her and jumped out, grabbed her arm as she got out of her car. Scared her good.
“Stella, what the hell’s going on?”
She sounded like she’d been crying. “I can’t tell you, Kirk. Go home.”
“No! How do you know so much about astronomy? What is this place? One of your ‘land deals’? Talk to me, Stella!”
Before I knew what she was doing, she about crushed me in a desperate hug, sobbing miserably.
She repeated over and over something about not being properly prepared. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it—in fact, the whole damned evening seemed to be going over my head, with about a meter to spare.
She calmed down after a minute, took my arm and said, “Come on.”
We walked toward the strange rock pile I had noticed on our arrival. When we got to the rocks they began to glow, faintly green, just enough to show details. It was a huge boulder, trapezoid shaped, with a large, flat, smooth recess in the side facing us. The flat spot had a depression in it, like the silhouette of a big wine barrel on end. In about the middle of that there was an image of a hand, glowing green like some spook’s amputated, ectoplasmic limb.
Stella put her hand on it. A perfect match (why wasn’t I surprised?). As she removed her hand, a line of brighter green, almost white light appeared and traced the edges of the barrel-shaped depression. The whole area inside the line of light began to glow a little. Then I realized that what I was seeing was light from inside the boulder coming out through the surface as the recess became invisible.
She stepped into the opening and I suddenly knew that the depression in the rock had not been rock at all, but an opening, like the mouth of a tunnel. So what had made it look like stone at first? A projection? A hologram? Some security system! I thought.
I jumped into the opening after her, taking her hand like a child. She seemed to be holding onto me for strength too, which was odd, but felt good.
We were in a long tunnel sloping down to a brightly lit room that I figured had to be 100 feet underground. The tunnel kept its wine barrel shape, but the room at its end was mind boggling.
It wasn’t a cube, or any variation of it I could imagine. I couldn’t see what its shape really was—couldn’t get my mental arms around it, so to speak. It was more like an underground cavern; floor, walls and ceiling curving into one another, studded with all kinds of unnatural shapes. I couldn’t recognize any of those things, and so they all looked the same to me, interchangeable; like stalactites and stalagmites. Or crystals. I felt like an ant inside a geode.
It bothered me to look around. I couldn’t even guess at sizes or distances. There wasn’t anything familiar to use as reference, so my confused brain was thrashing around, unfocusing and refocusing my eyes like a video camera pointed at water.
We were a few steps into this idiotic place when I turned to look at Stella, just to give my own overworked flesh-and-blood auto-focus system a rest. Stella was unaware of me. She had this haunted look, like there was something she badly needed to do and couldn’t.
Then I noticed movement behind her. Someone walking toward us, smiling.
Turner!
“Hello, Kirk. Welcome to the ‘Fortress of Solitude.’ ”
That snapped Stella out of her trance. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “Tim will explain. I have to talk to my father right now.” Questions were logjammed at the back of my throat. Turner was going to have his hands full when that gridlock broke loose. I watched Stella cross the “floor” of the cavernous underground bubble. When she began to walk up the curve of it, her body eventually sticking out at ninety degrees to the “wall,” I found my voice.
“Turner… what the hell?”
“They’ve quantized gravity, Kirk!”
“Oh, that helps a lot.”
“You see that stalk with the silver sphere at the end?” He pointed to something that looked like a sailboat mast sticking up toward the center of the chamber. Although distance and the angles made it hard to be sure, the silver globe on top seemed to be exactly at the center of the place. Turner began his lecture as we slowly followed Stella, who had turned a corner and disappeared behind some “stalactites.”