Timothy Zahn - The Icarus Hunt

Yet there the mesh was, sitting a good five centimeters outside my best reach.

I knew I hadn't bumped the mesh, which might have given me the necessary push, and any air current strong enough to account for this much movement ought to havebeen whistling in my ears, which it wasn't. Muttering a curse, I reached to mytool pouch for the longest probe I had with me. The patented McKell luck wasrunning true to form, gumming up my life with complications I didn't need, didn't want, and most certainly didn't have time to deal with. I got a goodgripon the end of the probe and stretched it out to the mesh.

It didn't reach.

I stared at the gap between mesh and probe, a bad taste suddenly tinglingagainst my tongue. I was moving away from the mesh, all right. Slowly andsubtly, but now that I was looking for it I could definitely see the meshreceding. And the only way I could be moving like this was if the small spherehad suddenly developed a gravitational field like its big brother beside it.

I looked around again, paying special attention to the loops of cable hangingthrough to my side of the mesh. No, the field wasn't exactly like that of itsbig brother, I corrected myself. It was, instead, an exact inverse of it.

Instead of pulling everything toward the outer wall, this one was pushingeverything toward the center. I tried to think how it could be pulling thatone off, but my mind wasn't up to it.

Besides, I had more urgent things to think about at the moment. If the fieldwas focused toward the center of the sphere—and that was certainly how it lookedfrom the way the hanging cables were now pointed inward—then once I hit thezero mark I would be pretty well stuck there. Any direction I turned I would belooking uphill; and with absolutely nothing available to kick or push offagainst, I would be as solidly pinned as a mosquito in a spiderweb.

I picked another curse out of my repertoire, a heavy-duty one this time, as Iswung my light around looking for inspiration. There were the hanging cables, of course, now resembling Spanish moss more than they did floating seaweed. Butwithout knowing what any of them were for I would have to be pretty desperatebefore I'd risk damage to either the Icarus or myself by tugging at them.

Besides which, a second look showed that I wasn't going to get anywhere withingrabbing range of any of them.

Still, once I'd choked down the panic reaction and forced myself to thinkrationally, I realized that I was hardly in dire straits. Tera knew I was inhere, and once I failed to emerge it would only be a matter of time beforeIxil or one of the others ventured in to find out what had happened to me. A ropebelayed outside and carefully threaded in through the tangle of wires, and Icould pull myself to the mesh and ultimately to safety. Tera's insistence thatI bring food and water in here might turn out to have been a good idea afterall.

I seemed to be drifting faster now, though it was difficult to tell for sure.

A

sudden yellow glow appeared from the corner of my eye, and I turned to seethat one of the flat displays that had been showing the same red symbols as all theothers had suddenly changed to a grid pattern of yellow-and-black squares.

Even as I studied it another of the displays also changed, this one to squares of orange and black. For a minute I glanced between them, trying to see if therewas any pattern in the layout of their colored squares. But if there was itwas too subtle for me to pick out.

I was about two meters from the center, still drifting at a leisurely pace, when it suddenly occurred to me that if I kept on this same course I was going torun directly into the articulated arm angling across my path.

I played my light over the arm, feeling a fresh batch of sweat leaching ontomyface as I did so. I'd already noted that the arm was composed of analternatingseries of black-and-silver bands; what I hadn't noticed until then was that atthe very tip of the arm the color scheme changed to about twenty centimetersof a disturbingly luminescent gray. My field sensor wasn't picking up anythingfrom it yet, but I was still too far away for any current less than a couplehundred volts to register. The arm didn't look like any of the power cables I'd had tosneak through on my way in, but considering the alien origin of this placethat didn't give me much comfort.

What was clear, and of no comfort whatsoever, was that even if the armsuddenlycame to life with enough power to light up New Cleveland, there was still nowayin space for me to miss running into it. About all I could think of to do wasto try to get a careful grip on it as I approached and use it as a fulcrum toswingthe bulk of my body around it instead of hitting it full force.

The problem with that idea was that if it didn't have the structural strengthnecessary to handle that kind of sudden stress, the gray end was probablygoingto break off in my hand. On the other hand, if it was that weak and I didn'tgrab it, it would probably break anyway as I slammed into it.

And as my train of thought reached that depressingly no-win conclusion, I wasthere. Clenching my teeth, feeling rather like someone trying to sneak up andgrab a sleeping pit viper, I reached out with my right hand and got a carefulgrip on the arm.

Too careful. The material was far more slippery than it looked, and before Iknew it my hand was sliding straight down the striped section toward the grayend. I squeezed harder, simultaneously trying to swing my body around as I'doriginally planned. But my lack of purchase on the arm meant I had no leverageat all, and I found myself instead sliding along the arm in a sort oflow-gravity version of a fireman and his pole.

It was hardly the way I'd planned things, but at least the arm was clearlystronger than my worst-case scenario had anticipated. Even with my full weightpressing on it via my one-handed grip, it was showing no sign of breaking oreven bending. Maybe even strong enough that I'd be able to use it to climbback out to the mesh.

Assuming, of course, I could figure out how to get a solid grip on the damnthing. Swinging my body partially around, I got my other hand in place andgrabbed as hard as I dared.

The two-handed grip helped some, but not enough. I was still sliding serenelydown the arm, now almost to the gray section at the end. If I couldn't stopmyself, I knew, my momentum would cause me to overshoot the end of the arm andgo straight through the sphere's center. Hardly a catastrophe, since there wasnothing over there for me to crash into, but it would cost me more of ourincreasingly precious minutes while I waited for the gravitational field toslow me to a stop and bring me back to the center again.

And then I was to the gray section of the arm. Clenching my teeth, knowingthis was my last chance to stop myself with a modicum of dignity, I squeezed ithard.

It was as if I'd grabbed hold of a live hundred-volt wire. Suddenly my wholebody was tingling, the hairs on my neck and arms standing straight up, myclenched teeth trying to vibrate against each other. And on top of all of itwas the chagrin that after all of my exaggerated caution and borderline paranoia, I'd finally hit a live wire. What made it even worse was that I'd even hit itentirely on purpose.

And yet, at the same time, the small part of my mind that hadn't gone intoinstant panic mode was noticing that if this was an electric shock it was likenone I'd ever experienced before. There was no pain, for one thing, and noneof the subtle promises of future pain, either. In addition, the tingling wasrunning uniformly through my entire body, not simply along my arms and chestas a normal current ought to flow. There was a distant sound like the awfulrippingthunder crack from a too-close lightning strike, and everything went black.

It didn't stay black long. Almost before the darkness had a chance toregister, the lights came back on again. Not the harsh, sharp-edged beam of myflashlight, but a softer, much more muted glow. For a second I wondered if I had blackedout, but both the darkness and the light had come without any of the normalcues and sensations of a loss and regaining of consciousness.