Larry Niven - The Moon Maze Game

But the impossible tableau both disoriented and steadied him.

He reached out to touch. Certainly, this was all visual field manipulation…?

No, it wasn’t. He touched a nearby plant, half thinking that his fingers would pass right through the leaf, and was pleased to feel the pebbled texture. He bent, and sniffed: a hint of mint. Marvelous.

Behind them, the Cavorite sphere was buried to its equator in greenery. The door opened again, and another clutch of gamers and NPCs exited. Asako Tabata rolled out last, although he supposed that she could have emerged first, considering that she had her own independent air supply.

Angelique Chan threw her shoulders back, posing for invisible cameras beneath the deep blue of a lunar sky. She planted her Union Jack into the ground. “I claim the Moon for Great Britain,” she said, to unanimous applause.

“All of this,” Ali said. “It has to grow, and feed, and mate-whatever it is going to do, in fourteen days.”

Wayne examined the soil, then stood and gazed out at the horizon. “I have a suspicion that our sense of time might be distorted here.”

Mickey and Maud Abernathy exchanged a brief glance. “Yes, that would make sense. We need to be careful not to let night fall before we return to the ship,” Maud said.

“And I can see just how an accident like that could happen,” Mickey said.

So could Scotty. If they couldn’t trust their subjective sense of time passage, they could end up breathing vacuum.

“What now?” Scotty asked.

Ali grinned at him. “What now?” he asked. “And now… this!”

And without another word, Ali crouched and exploded up into the air. He went up ten, fifteen… twenty feet, sailing in a stupendous arc before he glided back down once again.

Scotty stared. In all his time on the Moon, he had never really done that. He had been so worried about not looking like a stupid tourist or a greenhorn in front of his wife or their coworkers. Where was the simple joy!

How had he cheated himself?

When hyper-competitive, all-business Angelique Chan leaped into the air, sailing like a ballet dancer in slow motion, higher and farther than any Bolshoi prima ballerina had ever dreamed of…

Scotty threw caution to the wind, gathered himself and jumped.

The ground receded below him, a half-dozen gamers staring up at him in stunned surprise… and then suddenly the air was filled with bouncing, bounding gamers, sheer joy in stupendously magnified motion.

Lunies didn’t do this because there was never enough room. Somersaults, handsprings, flying kicks and jumps that made world-class martial artists out of neophytes, Olympic gymnasts from couch potatoes.

Even Asako was gunning her capsule around like a little go-cart, tearing up plants and dirt as she spun and raced about.

The redheaded guide was airborne, too.

And then Angelique screamed: “Where the hell is our sphere?”

In a moment, Scotty’s joy bled out through his fingers and toes, and a sick sinking feeling hit him like a fist in the belly.

It took him three bounces to slow himself down to a walk, and then stand still. All about him, up to his knees, were the red and pink flowers, covering a plain as far as the eye could see.

No sphere. The other gamers were bouncing to a halt as well, and now the nine of them stood in a rough circle, scratching their heads.

“Damn,” Wayne said. “I’d swear it was right over there, to the left. South?”

“I have no idea. What in the world…?”

Angelique closed her eyes, her expression tight with disgust. “We were so busy jumping for joy that we lost track of where we were,” she said. “We lost the sphere. Just like in the original story. Dammit!” She smacked her fist into her palm. “I should have known.”

“What do we do?” Ali asked. “Spread out? Search?”

She shook her head. “We won’t find it. They didn’t.”

Scotty searched his memory, trying to find a wisp of the Wells book, but couldn’t. He unearthed a vague memory of a BBC production, and one of an old herky-jerky stop-motion movie-not one of Harryhausen’s best-but those traces couldn’t be trusted. Could anything? Dammit, why hadn’t he kept up his reading more faithfully?

“What do we do?” Scotty asked.

Angelique held up her hand. “Wait. What’s that sound?”

For a moment he wasn’t sure what the Lore Master was talking about. Her slender, aristocratic Chinese face was intense, momentarily resembled a painting he once saw in the Louvre of a Buddhist nun in prayer.

The air was thin, and slightly cool. There, faintly, the sound of a weak wind fluttering its way through the flowers. What was that? The ground shook… not a single thump like something heavy tumbling down, but almost like a drum stroke.

What?

“I hear it,” Mickey said, and Maud nodded in synchrony.

And now there was more than that thump. A very distant insectile sound, like bees buzzing, or crickets chirping.

Growing closer by the moment. “It might be best,” Angelique said, “if we hide.”

That suggestion required no show of hands. They dove into the flowers, Scotty making sure that Ali got down safely before he hid himself. Chin in the lunar soil, he had to chuckle to himself: Whatever came next, they were in just about the safest place in the entire solar system. If ever he had been paid good money to take a vacation, this was it.

Whatever came next, he was determined to enjoy it.

0827 hours

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The ground beneath Wayne shook as with the strokes of a giant hammer, as regularly as clockwork.

The sun was nearing the western horizon. How could they not have noticed that before? The sound seemed to originate not merely beneath them, but off to what Wayne took to be the north. There were jagged mountains in that direction, and he thought that they would be easy to recognize, and that was as good a reason to choose an orientation as any.

They’d already lost the sphere… he could imagine that Xavier had just waited until they were busy bounding, and then distorted the visual field to “disappear” the sphere, a simple magician’s trick aided by their dizziness and disorientation.

Damn. It had happened in the BBC version, as well as the Harryhausen film. Take it as part of the script.

Now the ground itself seemed to be protesting their presence.

Angelique Chan raised her arm, poking it up from under the tangled flowers to Wayne’s left. “Head toward the sound,” she said, and they started to crawl.

Mickey whispered, “I haven’t been able to get down on all fours like this for donkey’s years. This lunar gravity is great for my back!”

Maud chuckled, and then went back to serious crawling.

Mickey was right, of course. Wayne barely felt any pressure on his palms or wrists at all. The slightest flexion of his wrist sent his hands and knees springing up off the ground, thumping back down so lightly it was a joke.

The plants were waxy to the touch. A closer inspection revealed that they had little or no scent, and rooted into some kind of web just beneath the dirt. Were they all part of one life-form, like the mycelial mass beneath a clutch of mushrooms?

Or were they perhaps just manufactured en masse and rolled out like an artificial lawn by the wizards of Dream Park?

He giggled to himself, and concentrated on what he was doing.

Boom… boom… boom…

The ground beneath them trembled. The gigantic circular plate beneath their feet first revolved, then began to slide away.

Gamers crawled backward away from the opening as fast as they could, as the lid retracted like the lens of a crocodile’s eye.