Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“ Why ? And who? Who is doing this? Are the Lander creatures the ones running the show, or is it the Wheel— or something else?”

“Answer those questions, and you’ll be earning the really big money,” Larry said, a forced and frightened smile on his face. The tension between the two of them was eased, at least for the moment.

“Any update from the drilling crew?” Lucian asked.

“Got a call just before you came in. Confirmation just a minute or two ago: we’ve drilled down into a hollow cavity. They dropped a camera on a cable—and found the top of a hollow shaft fifty meters across, six hundred meters under the surface. Now they’re using a heavyweight Gopher shaft borer to widen the drillhole. Crew boss said it’s strictly routine tunnel-cutting procedure.”

Lucian nodded woodenly. “Except that the next step is to hang me on a cable and lower me down a hole forty kilometers deep,” he said.

Larry shivered at that thought as the suit tech made the last hookups to the armored suit. But what else could they do? Fly a spaceship down?

There had even been some serious thought about doing just that, and a small rocket-powered lander had been flown to the pole just in case—but the dangers were simply too great. Lowering Lucian on a cable seemed risky, but flying a lander inside an enclosed and pressurized area seemed insanely dangerous, all but suicidal.

But suppose the cable broke? What if one of those scorpion robots was down there, and decided to snip it in two?

Given time, Larry had no doubt they could have come up with a better way to do it. But there was no time. Those damn pyramids were going up on every world except the Moon. Humanity needed to know what they were for.

And they had a deadline. The Saint Anthony , traveling inert, on a leisurely course that was supposed to keep the Charonians from noticing it, would be at Earthpoint in another day. There was no way to stop, or even delay, the probe. Nor was there a desire to do so. Delay might mean detection. But once the Saint Anthony went through the Earthpoint wormhole, the game might well be up.

The Charonian leaders—whoever and whatever they were—would very likely prevent any further contact. Earth would need every scrap of data it could get, every scrap the investigators in the Solar System could relay to the Saint Anthony before the probe went through the hole in search of Earth.

And it was a pretty good bet that what answers there were waited at the bottom of the Rabbit Hole. Down the hole . Larry shivered at the very thought.

Larry blinked suddenly, and came back to himself. “There’s one other thing that comes out of the news from Mars. Now we know how to listen in to their gravity-wave transmissions. The machine shop is rigging up induction taps for us to carry down. They should be able to pick any signals the Wheel sends, convert them to radio signals, and relay them up the Rabbit Hole to the surface. Trouble is, for the induction taps to work, they have to be physically attached to whatever they are tapping.”

Lucian looked grimly at Larry. “And I’m the guy who has to put them there. Great.”

The elevator cage was an open box-girder frame about three meters on a side, the whole affair welded together on the spot and then wrestled through a cargo lock into the pressure dome. Lucian, encased in his armored suit, stood on the far side of the shaft opening and looked at the cage a bit uncertainly. It sat on the ground, right at the edge of the pit.

The transparent pressure dome held the greenish gas in, making the dome interior just hazy enough to dim the outlines of the cold gray landscape outside, causing the Moon’s surface to look sickly and sad. The Gopher borer sat hunched down on the surface outside the dome, and the dozers were still clearing the huge masses of pulverized rock the Gopher had heaved back toward the surface.

Lucian stepped into the cage, sat in his crash couch, and turned his head to regard his companion for this little jaunt. It sat there, motionless, on a packing case full of radio relay gear. A humanoid teleoperator. And an ugly one, too: all angles and cameras, wires and servos, more closely resembling a human skeleton than a human. Its dark metal frame was gaunt and wiry, and the object above its shoulders could be called a head only because of its position.

Two primary television camera lenses were more or less where the eyes should go, and two strangely sculpted mikes where the ears should go. But half a dozen other auxiliary camera lenses, and boom and distance mikes, augmented its operator’s senses. For the moment, it was on standby, and Lucian was grateful for that. It gave him some feeling of privacy.

He did not like being stuck with a teleoperator. Most people would have called the thing a robot and been done with it—it certainly looked like a humanoid robot—but then most people weren’t going deep into the Moon with it. Lucian needed to keep the difference in mind. A true robot does its own seeing and doing, its own thinking , right on the spot. Unfortunately no robot was quickwitted enough, or smart enough, to be trusted in a situation like this.

Lucian felt a wave of anger pass over him. Larry was going to stay up here, topside and safe, enjoying the vicarious thrills of virtual reality while Lucian went below for real. But that was unfair. Larry had wanted to go, but Daltry had prevented him when Lucian himself kicked up a fuss. Perhaps it was Larry Chao who had brought this disaster down on all their heads with his damn-fool experiments, but Lucian was honest enough with himself not to label Larry a coward.

The teleoperator was there to make things easier on Lucian. All communications between Lucian and the people topside would go through Larry and the T.O., so that Lucian would have to deal with only one voice. The T.O. would have all its cameras going, recording everything, so that Lucian would have no need to take pictures.

But most importantly, Larry was in that teleoperator control rig to watch Lucian’s back.

The winch operator powered up his gear, drew in the slack and then lifted the cage clear of the ground. It swayed back and forth for a moment before the momentum dampers cut in, and then the winch operator swung the cage into place over the top of the shaft.

Lucian looked up. The cage hung from four slender cables, each capable of holding the entire weight of the cage, set in a sophisticated rig that would automatically shift the load if a cable snapped, adjusting the lines to keep the cage level at all times. The winch operator would hang momentum dampers on the cable set every five hundred meters, in the hopes that they would prevent the whole rig from swinging like a pendulum. Considering the short time they had had to put it together, it was a pretty impressive job.

Lucian waved to the operator and to the small crowd of anonymous suited figures that stood there in the transparent dome. Strange to wave good-bye, not knowing which figure was which person. Was one of them Larry? Or was he already strapped into the T.O. controller? Why, Lucian wondered, did he care about that now of all times? The winch started to run. The cage began its descent into the darkness, the cold ground swallowing it up. Lucian switched on the cage’s running lights as the surface was lost to sight.

Lucian was keyed up. He wanted to be up and doing things, but the engineers had warned him to keep movement to a minimum on the elevator. The less random motion there was, the less chance of some movement catching just the right harmonic and setting the whole works swinging wildly back and forth. Knowing that didn’t make sitting still in the crash couch any easier on his nerves.