Hominids

Adikor and Jasmel ran over to join Dern, who was now sitting on the floor, the robot, toppled over, next to him. It seemed no more damaged than it had been before it had gone through. But Dern was staring at his own left hand, a dumbfounded look on his face.

“Are you all right?” asked Adikor.

“My hand …” said Dern.

“What about it? Is it broken?”

Dern looked up. “No, it’s fine; it’s fine. But—but when I first grabbed hold of the robot … when the cable came loose, and the robot fell backward, my hand passed through. I saw half of it disappear through … through whatever that was.”

Jasmel took Dern’s hand in hers and peered at it. “It looks all right. What did it feel like?”

“I didn’t feel anything. But it looked like it was cut off, right behind the fingers, and the edge was absolutely straight and smooth, but there was no bleeding, and the edge kept moving down my fingers as I pulled my hand back.”

Jasmel shuddered.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” asked Adikor.

Dern nodded.

Adikor took a half step forward, toward where the opening had been. He slowly stretched his right arm out and tentatively swept it back and forth. Whatever door had been open appeared to be closed now.

“Now what?” asked Jasmel.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Adikor. “Could we get a lamp to put on the robot?”

“Sure,” said Dern. “I could take one off a head protector. Bo you have extras?”

“On a shelf in the little eating room.”

Dern nodded, then held up his hand and rotated it from the wrist, now palm up, now palm down, as if he’d never seen it before. “It was incredible,” he said softly. Then, shaking his head slightly to break his own reverie, he headed off to get the lamp.

“You know what happened, of course,” said Jasmel, as they waited for Dern to return. “My father went through whatever that was. That’s why there’s no trace of his body.”

“But the other side isn’t at ground level,” said Adikor. “He must have fallen and—”

Jasmel raised her eyebrow. “And maybe broken his neck. Which … which means what we might see on the other side is …”

Adikor nodded. “Is his dead body. That thought had occurred to me, I’m sorry to say … but, actually, I’d expected to see him drowned in a tank of heavy water.” He reflected on this for a moment, then moved over to the robot, which was bone dry. “There was a reservoir of heavy water on the other side when Ponter went through, and—gristle!”

“What?”

“We must have co

Jasmel’s lower lip quivered.

Adikor hoisted the robot onto its treads. He checked out the cable co

At this point, Dern returned with two electric lamps and the spherical battery packs that powered them. He also had a coil of adhesive tape, and he used this to firmly attach the lamps on either side of the robot’s camera eye.

They repositioned the robot exactly as it had been before, right beside register 69, and then the three of them headed back into the control room. Adikor got some equipment boxes and stood on them so that he could simultaneously operate his console and look back over his shoulder onto the computing floor.

He called out the countdown once more: “Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”

This time, Adikor saw the whole thing. The portal opened like an expanding hoop of blue fire. He heard air rushing around again, and the robot, which seemed to be right on the lip of a precipice, tottered over and disappeared. The control cable went taut, and the blue hoop contracted around its perimeter, then disappeared.

The three of them turned as one to the square video monitor. At first it seemed again that there was no video signal at all, but then the light beams must have caught something—glass or plastic—and they briefly saw a reflection bouncing back at them. But that was all; whatever space the robot was dangling into must be huge.

The lights played across something else—intersecting metallic tubes?—as the robot swung back and forth like a pendulum.

And then, suddenly, there was illumination everywhere, as if—

“Someone must have turned on the lights,” said Jasmel.

It was now clear that the robot was actually twirling at the end of its tether. They caught glimpses of rocky walls, and more rocky walls, and—

“What’s that?” exclaimed Jasmel.

They’d only seen it for an instant: a ladder of some sort, leaning against the curving side of the vast chamber, and, scuttling down the ladder, a slight figure in some sort of blue clothing.

The robot continued to rotate, and they saw that a large geodesic latticework was sitting on the floor, with things like metal flowers at its intersections.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Dern.

“It’s beautiful,” said Jasmel.

Adikor sucked in his breath. The view was still swinging, and it showed the ladder again, two more figures coming down it, and then, maddeningly, the figures disappeared as the robot turned away.

Its rotation offered two more tantalizing glimpses of figures wearing loose-fitting blue body suits, and sporting bright yellow shells on top of their heads. They were way too narrow-shouldered to be men; Adikor thought perhaps they were women, although they were thin even for females. But their faces, glimpsed ever so briefly, seemed devoid of hair, and—

And the image jerked suddenly, then settled down, the robot no longer rotating. A hand had reached in from the side, briefly dominating the camera’s field of view, a strange, weak-looking hand with a short thumb and some sort of metal circle wrapped around one finger. The hand had clearly clamped onto the robot, steadying it. Dern was working frantically with his control box, tipping the camera down as fast as it would go, and they got their first good look at the face of the being now reaching up and clutching the hanging robot.

Dern gasped. Adikor felt his stomach knotting. The creature was hideous, deformed, with a lower jaw that protruded as if the bone within were encrusted by growths.

The repulsive being was still holding on to the robot, trying to pull it down, closer to the ground; the robot’s treads seemed to be about half a bodylength above the floor of the vast chamber.

As the robot’s camera tilted, Adikor could see that there was an opening in the bottom of the geodesic sphere, as if part of it had been disassembled. Lying on the chamber’s floor were giant, curved pieces of glass or transparent plastic piled up one atop another; they must have been what had originally caught the robot’s lamps. Those curved pieces of glass looked like they might have once formed a huge sphere.

They could now intermittently see three of the same beings, all equally deformed. Two of them were also devoid of facial hair. One was pointing directly at the robot; his arm looked like a twig.

Jasmel placed her hands on her hips and shook her head slowly back and forth. “What are they?”

Adikor shook his head in wonder.

“They’re primates of some sort,” said Jasmel.

“Not chimpanzees or bonobos,” said Dern.

“No,” said Adikor, “although they’re scrawny enough. But they’re mostly hairless. They look more like us than like apes.”

“It’s too bad they’re wearing those strange pieces of headgear,” said Dern. “I wonder what they’re for?”

“Protection?” suggested Adikor.

“Not very efficient, if so,” said Dern. “If something fell on their heads, their necks, not their shoulders, would take the weight.”