Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

At first we saw nothing. After our trip through the murky, glissador-haunted catacombs, the room’s bright midday glare struck at us cruelly. We squinted. We blinked. And then there was the inevitable resolution of detail (in itself a haunting experience) as our eyes came back to us.

We found ourselves in an environment immensely strange. We were in a cramped artificial foyer. The walls on the inside of the cubicle had been altered so that they formed an octagonal area of space rather than a square one. Moreover, just inside the cubicle’s doorway Newlyn and I stumbled upon a crude wooden step which we had to mount in order to see more than the tops of the wall sections opposite us. We climbed the step.

We stood then on a narrow dais, approximately one foot from the cubicle’s real floor, that made an octagonal circuit about the entire room and provided an odd catwalk for the unexpecting, and certainly unexpected, intruder into Miss Longhope’s splendidly insane sanctuary. It was a sanctuary unlike any that one would expect to find on the lower levels of the hive—or anywhere else, for that matter.

Banks of computerlike gadgetry, from which there emanated the faint and fitful winking of orange and red lights, stood against two facets of the octagonal wall Against two more sections—the two flanking us—we saw tall glass cylinders that were polarized so that we could not see into them; these cylinders could have been anything, from models of the city’s lift-tubes, to gigantic chemical beakers, to containers for space travelers in suspended animation. The mystery intrigued us, but something else drew our attention away. In the remaining four facets of the octagonal wall, directly across the room, we looked upon four distinct and different windows: view screens that permitted us to see panoramas that no living inhabitant of the Dome had ever gazed upon, unless he were possessed of a vivid clairvoyance.

Newlyn and I drank in these panoramas quickly.

From left to right these “windows” demonstrated a progression based on an expanding consciousness of the universe. The screen on the far left depicted a view of our own domed city, but from the outside, as if from a distant hilltop in the wilderness that we had so long ago fled; and darkness swirled over the Dome’s imposing hump like a disturbed gas, uneasily hovering.

The second window showed us the dead face of the Moon from about ten thousand miles away. No man had set foot there for more than eighty, ninety, perhaps one hundred years.

The third window gave us the ethereal aloofness of Saturn and its incandescent rings.

And the fourth window, the one on the far right, made us look into the cruel depths of outer space—where the glassy indifference of a thousand sharp stars somehow stung us back into the here-and-now, sucking away our breaths. And since the biomonitor units in the cubicle had begun to refrigerate the air to compensate for the onset of the old woman’s physical decay, our breaths were chill.

Newlyn reacted noisily: “What kind of place does this old woman live in, Mr. Ardrey? What’s it supposed to be?” As in the hallway, his body revolved out of the impulse of sheer wonder. “What the heck is all this stuff for?”

“I don’t think it’s exactly for anything.”

“Everything’s for something, Mr. Ardrey. What’s this stuff supposed to be? What’s it do?”

I tried to make sense of my suspicions. We had stumbled into what was evidently an elaborate mockup, and the octagonal room could have been a wide variety of things: the hall of planets in a second-rate surfaceside museum, some sort of wildly improbable computer chamber, or—

“—The command pit of a spaceship,” I said. “It’s supposed to be the command pit of—”

Newlyn cut me off with a cry that might have come out of the mouth of someone a great deal younger: “Look, there she is!” He pointed down into the pit which I had been trying to identify; he pointed at the back of the huge swivel chair that dominated this intriguing area. Visible above the back of this chair, the back of a woman’s head, matted over with frowzy iron-grey pleats, caught my eye and sent a cold wrinkle unwinding up my spine. Newlyn jumped from the dais, jumped into the command pit before I could say anything. As I had spun the glissador about in the hallway, he spun the arm of the chair and turned the ruined face of Almira Longhope, glassy eyes open, lower lip twisted, toward me—toward me!

I stared at the dead woman, feeling her accusation.

“She’s really dead,” Newlyn told me excitedly, running a finger over the silver lamé sleeve of her gown. “She’s really dead.”

“I know. I can see that.”

Newlyn turned impulsively around, forgetting the old woman. He did not spin the chair in the direction of his turn. Instead, he simply walked around the chair and paused momentarily at the semicircular panel of “instruments” over which the dead woman had been gazing before he had disturbed her. He looked toward the four viewing screens. Dome, Moon, planet, stars. The last three could have meant almost nothing to Newlyn, even though he had undoubtedly seen the night sky in visicom presentations and read about the “promise of space” in pre-Evacuation literature. Besides, the four windows had no reality. The stars on the far right were sharp and cold, yes, but they existed only as glossy points on a piece of lusterless mounted silk. Each window, in fact, was just such a piece of lusterless mounted silk. Despite this, Newlyn stared at the viewing screen on the far right for a long while. “Look at that,” he said before turning away. “Look at all that distance, all that space.” At last he did turn away. He brought his attention back to the semicircular console in front of the old woman’s command chair.

Reaching over it, he pushed buttons. One or two of them seemed to operate lights in the walls. He fiddled with levers. One of the levers controlled two mobiles that hung from the ceiling, seemingly as navigational devices, since each one represented a miniature spaceship moving gyroscopically inside a glass sphere divided into sections by thin blue lines. “Look at all this stuff,” Newlyn said over and over again. He made low whistling noises, articulations of pleased astonishment.

Meanwhile, the corpse of Almira Longhope continued to stare at me. I was certain now that the bitch’s stare was singlemindedly accusatory, even though her sunken features contained less malice than disappointment.

But for Newlyn’s oblivious duckings, the room was deathly still. And cold. The orange and red lights on the phony computers made no noise; none of the instruments on the semicircular panel hummed, or clicked, or whirred. I grew uneasy.

“Newlyn!”

He did not even look up. “What?”

“Get away from there. We’ve got things to do.”

“Just a second, Mr. Ardrey. This thing’s got a purpose, I can tell.” He was manipulating a dial on the command console. Soundlessly the scenes depicted in the four windows opposite us slipped into another continuum; to take their places there came the images of (1) an alien planetscape, (2) the craggy moon of a world not belonging to Sol, (3) an eerie double binary, and (4) a minute spiral galaxy as seen from the loneliness of open space. How far outward the old woman had permitted herself to venture! These new images—or perhaps simply the changes he had worked—exhilarated Newlyn. “Climbersguts!” he said; a bit of irritating slang.

“God damn it, Newlyn, will you get away from there!”

He looked up hurriedly and faced me, his chin tilted a little. I had never spoken to him like that before. His eyes betrayed his hurt and bewilderment.

“You were the one,” I reminded him, “who said we weren’t going to come down here to gawk. Do you remember that? You were the one who wanted to make sure the servo-units didn’t vacuum her up like a piece of dirt.”