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He opened his eyes in surprise. He was lying on his side in utter darkness, and in his nostrils was the rich odor of growing wood. It was a familiar, heavy scent, but it took Gosseyn a long moment to make the enormous mental jump necessary to grasping the reality of it. The odor was the same as had assailed him on his futile journey into the tree tu
Gosseyn scrambled to his feet, almost fell as he stumbled over something metallic, and then groped against first one upcurving wall, then the other. And there was no doubt. He was in a tu
XXVI
Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows.
The burst of energy that had galvanized him into verifying where he was subsided. Gosseyn sat down heavily. It was not altogether a voluntary action. His hands were shaking; his knees felt weak.
He had already noticed it was dark. Now he realized it with a new intensity. Darkness! Shadowless, unrelenting darkness. It pressed against his eyes and into his brain. He could feel his clothes against his skin, and the pressure of the wood floor. But in this night they could have been vagrant titillations experienced by a bodiless entity. In this unrelieved blackness, substance, human or unhuman, was almost a meaningless term.
“I can,” Gosseyn told himself, “last two weeks without food, three days without water.”
He recognized that he didn’t feel as hopeless as that, in spite of his memory of miles of black tu
He was about to climb to his feet when he realized for the first time the magnitude of what had happened. A few minutes ago he had been on Earth. Now he was on Venus.
What was it Prescott had said? “If two energies can be attuned on a twenty-decimal approximation of similarity, the greater will bridge the gap of space between them just as if there were no gap, although the juncture is accomplished at finite speeds.”
The finite speeds involved had been infinite for all the practical purposes of solar distances. Gosseyn began to feel better. The Distorter had attuned the highly organized energy compound that was his body to this small section of tree tu
Gosseyn stood up and thought, “Why, I’m on Venus-where I wanted to be.” His spirits lifted higher. In spite of all his mistakes, he was still safe, still progressing. He knew many things, and even what he did not know suddenly seemed attainable. He had but to see more deeply, make a few more abstractions from reality, refine his observations another decimal place, and the veil would be torn aside, the mystery comprehended by his senses.
The thought in its implications was wide enough in scope to actuate the integration “pause” of his nervous system. He grew even calmer.
He remembered the metal on which he had stumbled when he had first tried to get to his feet. Even in that darkness, he found the object within seconds. It was the Distorter, as he had half anticipated. Cautiously his fingers touched each of the four corner tubes in turn. It was the fourth tube that was depressed, still depressed. Gosseyn hesitated. The Distorter had been “set” by people who had their own purposes and destinations. Some of the tubes were designed to “interfere” with the Games Machine, but a few surely could transport nun to other parts of the solar system, possibly to key centers of gang activity-military headquarters, the secret galactic base, storehouses of atomic torpedoes.
The potentialities startled him. But they weren’t for now. This was not the time to take risks or conduct experiments. The sooner he got away from here the better.
Gingerly, he picked up the Distorter and began to walk along in the darkness.
“I’ll walk a thousand steps in one direction,” he decided, “then come back and walk a thousand in the other direction.” That should bring him to the gang center near his point of “landing.” They wouldn’t have put it further away that that.
As he rounded a sharp bend in the tu
Cautiously he moved forward. At the last moment, he dropped to his hands and knees. An instant later, he was staring between the bars of the fence. There was a metal pit below him. The metal gleamed dully from scores of atomic lights that blazed at set intervals from the enormous, downcurving walls. The pit was about two miles long, a mile wide, and half a mile deep. And, occupying one half of the far end, was a ship. It was a ship such as Earth men might have dreamed about in their wilder imaginative soarings. Spaceship engineers, plan-happy after weeks of poring over ninety-foot draft plans of normal solar spaceships, might have gone home and babbled to their wives, “Now I’m going to take off five hundred years and start a million draftsmen drawing plans for an interstellar ship two miles long.”
The ship in the pit was just under two miles long. Its ridged back reared up sharklike to within what seemed a hundred feet of the ceiling. Another ship of its own size could have lain beside it, but if it had, the two of them would have crowded the mile width of the pit.
Distance obscured details, but even so Gosseyn could see tiny figures swarming on the metal under the great belly of the ship. They seemed to have contact with something below the floor, for every little while great batches of little shapes scurried from a long line of humps that projected from the floor—as if elevators had come up loaded from floors lower down and disgorged their cargo. In the diagonal way Gosseyn was looking down at them, they must have been at least two-thirds of a mile away, little dark things crawling over the metal.
Gosseyn saw with a start that the ship was getting ready to leave. The minute figures below were clambering up steps into it. There were a hundred dark moving shapes—a dozen—none. A vague throb of sound had come from them, movements, a whisper of conversation. Now silence settled over the blazing vastness of the pit. Gosseyn waited.
It would be complete night outside. They’d need night for the movement of such ships. In a moment the ceiling would start opening. There’d be a meadow above, camouflage for the hangars below. It would be pushed up somehow.
As he watched, all the lights went out. That, also, fitted. They wouldn’t want a light shining up into the night. Sensitive detectors must be probing the skies, to make sure no roboplanes or other solar craft were passing overhead. But it was the ship that took on life, not the ceiling.
The ship began to glow. A weak, all-over radiance it was that outlined every square foot of its body; a vaguely green light, so dun that Earth’s moonlight would have been sun-bright beside it. It began to shimmer. Abruptly, it hurt his eyes.
Gosseyn recalled that the Distorter had affected him the same way. He thought, “The ship! It’s being attuned to a planetary base of some other star. There isn’t any ceiling opening.” As swiftly as it had started, the mental and visual strain ended. The green haze jerked and winked out.
The great ship was gone.
Below, in the pit, four of the lights came back on. They were as bright as miniature suns, but their white fire was only a partial match for the normal darkness of the pit. Near them, everything was brilliantly illuminated. But the glare dimmed as the glow spread out through the cubic vastness of the hangar. Hundreds of acres in the center and between the wall lights were deep in shadow.