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FORTY-SEVEN Looking for Pellucidar

"Holy shit—" The voice was Danny's. Sheepish at his own outburst, he added, "—Batman."

It would have been pitch black without their helmet lights and the handheld lamps the scorpionoids had brought. In their yellow beams they observed that they'd entered a half-sphere forty meters in diameter, the hatch they'd come through set in the flat side. The curved surface underfoot was broken every few meters by a yawning trochoidal tunnel mouth, giving the impression that they stood within an enormous colander.

Perhaps "stood" wasn't the word. They found themselves half-swimming in the chamber, the local gravity they'd come to regard as normal no longer pulling at them. It was an indication of the density of the shell they'd penetrated, and how much it contributed to the total mass of 5023 Eris. In spite of that, it appeared that the asteroid wasn't hollow like a basketball, as they'd imagined. Each of them grimly visualized thousands upon thousands of kilometers of dark, twisted passageways worm-riddling what they still thought of as a natural body despite the fact, Danny realized, that it was as artificial as the battered ASF-issue Timex on his wrist.

It was cold, just above zero, Celsius. Nannel Rab and the scorpionoids (it amused Danny that they sounded like a rock group) carried instruments to sniff the contents of the chamber. They reported that it consisted mostly of vacuum—one millibar, about the same atmospheric pressure as Mars, a thousandth of Earth normal—but with traces of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, numerous hydrocarbons and, intriguingly, fluorocarbons.

Pulaski peering over his shoulder, Owen examined the walls, built, or at least lined, with a seamless plastic, ribbed for traction. A scratch with the Czech Army knife he always carried showed that it was almost as indestructible as the asteroid's surface. Others peered into each of the tunnels without entering any, shining their lamps down them until their vision was obstructed by a curve or the light was absorbed by sheer distance. Gutierrez and Eichra Oren conferred about the order of march and chose the entrance nearest the center.

They made an impressive party. Seven humans in bulky suits, who might appear frightening to a nonhuman race. Three outsized lobsters and a huge red-and-black spider in almost invisible outer skins. Despite every sign that the place had been deserted thousands of millennia, no one had tried to talk them out of arming themselves to whatever their respective species used for teeth. 5023 Eris had already presented them with too many surprises.

"We ought to leave some kind of markings as we go," Guillermo observed, "like bread crumbs or Huckleberry Finn's ball of twine."

"Tom Sawyer," Owen corrected, although no one could remember whether he or the geologist was right.

Eichra Oren chuckled. "Sam wouldn't let me come without these." From a suit pocket he extracted a package, took something out, and flattened it against the wall nearest the chosen tunnel. When he took his hand away, he'd left a glowing spot. "Powered by background radiation. They should last several centuries."

"I wish you hadn't said that." Through the glistening substance of Tl*m*nch*l's suit, Danny heard the speech-sounds he made, like an old manual typewriter. "I didn't know I was claustrophobic until now. Going down that tunnel will be like crawling through the intestines of some unspeakable giant."

"I wish you hadn't said that!" Pulaski told the scorpionoid.

There was no more reason to put it off. The general led the way, followed by Danny, Nannel Rab, and Eichra Oren. Tl*m*nch*l, his comrades, Guillermo, and Owen were the rear guard. Rosalind and Pulaski were sandwiched between, fear of the unknown prompting an unconscious return to chivalry. Danny noticed that both women gravitated toward Eichra Oren when the going was especially scary. It gave the man a look of distinct pain, even through his helmet. At the same time, mutual repulsion seemed to be at work between the women. It was almost as interesting as the physics of the asteroid itself.

The corridor they entered, like those they'd rejected, was low and wide, built for original occupants who'd been neither humanoid nor nautiloid. Nannel Rab, the giant among them, had a difficult time, but refused, given a chance, to return to the surface. After the first curve, a hundred meters from the entry, the path branched at a spherical junction. They had to choose from dozens of alternatives. Eichra Oren marked the tunnel they'd come from. Gutierrez chose another which seemed to lead toward the asteroid's center. The Antarctican slapped a glowing patch beside it.

Geometry dictated, Guillermo maintained, that it wasn't possible for all the tunnels to keep branching this way. As they made their way deeper, the atmosphere thickened, the temperature rose and, after several junctions had proven Guillermo wrong, they began to see what appeared to be pooled remnants of the same liquid fluorocarbon that filled Mister Thoggosh's office. To some of the explorers, that meant the previous occupants had been marine creatures.

"Hold on," Gutierrez argued, "is there any indication that the Predecessors needed fluorocarbons to deal with nonmarine sapients?"

Pulaski shook her head, the gesture lost until she spoke aloud. "There's little indication that other sapients even existed when the Predecessors did."

"Score a point for the ship theory, then," the general declared, picking his way around a large puddle clinging to the wall they'd arbitrarily decided was the floor. "This stuff, if it once filled the whole place, would have transferred momentum rather nicely, increasing the passengers' tolerance for acceleration."

"It might just have been a way of transferring garbage," Nannel Rab suggested. "It wouldn't be the first open sewer system I've heard of in so-called civilized realms. Who can outguess another species?"

Owen grunted. "Especially one that's been extinct a billion years."

"Whatever its original purpose," Rosalind stated, leaning over an instrument the giant spider carried, "over the time it's been here, it's lost any oxygen it ever carried and turned foul. This stuff has a nasty color. I'm glad we can't smell it."

According to Guillermo and Nannel Rab, the pools of artificial liquid shouldn't have grown larger and more frequent the way they did as the adventurers burrowed deeper. They also grew uglier in color and consistency, although the principal ingredient remained a fluorocarbon similar to the one they were familiar with. As they groped from one tunnel branch to another, they never knew what to expect. In some places the remaining chemical "atmosphere" lying on the "floor" (despite Nannel Rab's suggestion, that was what they continued to believe the stuff was) had deteriorated or become contaminated until it was opaque.

"Holy mother of God!" Gutierrez was the first to come across a chamber filled with the stuff. Its condition had awakened a childhood verbal reflex.

"What is it?" several voices responded at once.

"You have to see this to believe it," he told them in disgust, "and we don't have any choice about wading through it."

By that time, Danny had caught up to his father and saw what he was talking about. The once-liquid contents of the chamber had gelled into a mass into which Gutierrez had stumbled. He'd managed to back out, but it covered his suit in putrescent-looking brown slime marbled with streaks of black. Danny switched his transmitter off and risked touching his visor to his father's. "Dad, it looks like you've been spending too much time with the KGB."

His father chuckled. "I've been in deep shit before, but—"

"General!" Rosalind pushed past Danny, her helmet mostly hiding an expression of disgust which her tone betrayed. "I wanted to warn you about removing any part of your suit before its exterior is sterilized. There may be dangerous microbes here that have been multiplying and mutating for eons."

Gutierrez nodded. "Understood, Doctor. That goes for everybody, I want individual confirmation that you heard it, starting with you, Lieutenant."

"Yes, sir. What do we do, scrub down with peroxide?"

"We'll leave that to Rosalind. For now, we all have to slog through this gunk, and I want her warning understood. Hector? Corporal Owen?"

One by one they replied, including the nonhumans. Hoping this chamber wasn't the start of an entire asteroid filled with filth of the consistency of dirty Vaseline, Danny needlessly held his breath and took the plunge, following the senior Gutierrez. Crossing that chamber was the most revolting task he'd ever faced, but his worst fears failed to be realized. After twenty meters of it, his faceplate broke through, not into thin air, but into clear, healthy-looking fluorocarbon which quickly washed the slime from his suit. His father waited and the rest of the party soon emerged.

Once past that unpleasant chamber, the corridors widened as if intended by the original occupants to be gathering spots. Here the ancient ship or station appeared even better preserved. To their astonishment the walls glowed with a light rather like that of the contrastingly colored adhesive spots Eichra Oren was still leaving behind them.

"I guess," the general declared, "this is what we came to see."

* * *

After orienting themselves as best they could, the explorers got started by examining various rooms they had begun to find branching off from the corridors. All had heavy, tight-fitting triangular doors without anything like a lock. Some were clearly residential. Others might have been offices, laboratories, physical-plant control rooms, infirmaries, or eating places.

What might have been sanitary facilities they tentatively identified merely by endless ranks of grotesquely shaped low-standing ceramic objects bolted, without partitions or any other attempt at privacy, to the floor. If that was what they were, Danny wasn't sure he ever wanted to meet the creatures they'd been designed for. On the other hand, they could as easily have been the equivalent of slot machines or feeding troughs.

And what were they to make of a huge domed chamber in which there stood a construct over a hundred meters tall that called to mind a great radio telescope or directional antenna connected at its base to a lighthouse, complete with a glassed-in booth at the top, but which pointed nowhere but a curved, blank wall of solid, plastic-covered, super-dense metal?

Another find was even more peculiar. The room was the size of a football stadium. Its ceiling, however, was only a little over a meter high and they had to stoop to explore it. It was filled with precise rows of featureless solid metal cubes half a meter on a side, capable of sliding easily across a floor that seemed to Danny like greased Teflon—although it provided perfect traction for their booted feet. Any cube, once moved and released, glided sedately back into its place, others getting out if its way if necessary before resuming their own positions.

It was a frustrating experience. What was the purpose of the dozens of gimbaled, dust-filled cylinders they discovered, five-meter drum-shapes lying on their sides, embedded in the floor, and resembling a geologist's rock tumbler? (For all the explorers knew, they might have been car washes or torture chambers.) Pulaski shyly suggested that this was how the Predecessors cleaned and polished their (hypothetical) exoskeletons. If so, how they had kept from injuring themselves? And what had the polishing medium been, long since wasted away to nothing?

The great majority of rooms and fixtures couldn't be identified even that far, or guessed at credibly, either by the humans or the species accompanying them. "But what will future archaeologists make," Guillermo asked his companions pointedly, "of one of our rooms back on Earth, half-filled with brightly colored Ping-Pong balls?"

"Forget future archaeologists," demanded Tl*m*nch*l. "I'd like to know what humans do with a room half-filled with brightly colored Ping-Pong balls. Something suitably salacious, I trust."

"What sort of creature is a Ping-Pong?" Nannel Rab asked, "Poor things. Are they good to eat?"

In all their explorations, the fascinated, frustrated party discovered nothing like written records. Visible technology was sophisticated enough to have made the equivalent of a library or computer unrecognizable. Few of the smaller artifacts of the sort Mister Thoggosh collected seemed to have been left behind.

At the widest points in the passageways the walls were adorned with textured areas with raised borders. To human eyes, everything about them was a burnished golden-bronze. "Paintings or sculptures," Pulaski guessed, "maybe both."

"Abstracts," Rosalind agreed, "intended for senses different from ours."

Owen grinned. "I'll bet they all say `Eat At Joe's.' " Nobody laughed; it was as good a guess as any.

"Whatever they are," Eichra Oren observed after running his gloved hands over them, "they don't seem representational." He explained the tactile sculptures that Mister Thoggosh fancied. These were rather like certain items in the Proprietor's collection back at home, he said, perhaps intended to please and amuse those who passed by them in the corridors.

"General! Eichra Oren! Come look at this!"

In the center of the next "square," Nannel Rab had encountered a large representational metal statue. Struggling against the drag of the liquid fluorocarbon atmosphere, Gutierrez hurried. "Why, the damned thing's bronze-colored," he observed, puffing inside his helmet, "like everything else."

The others were close behind. The object was four meters long, three meters tall and about the same width. It squatted over a broad pedestal on what might have been a traffic island in a shopping mall. There was no way of telling whether it was realistic in scale or heroic, but judging from the corridors around them—if it portrayed the sapients who had made it—it had been rendered in true-to-life proportions. "It's possible," one scorpionoid observed, "that this indicates the physical nature of the Predecessors. It's consistent with the size and shape of the doorways."

"Otherhandwise," Owen argued, "a thing like this may tell us nothing."

"Beyond something of their aesthetic preferences," Pulaski noted.

"Right," the corporal continued. "Humans are fond of sculpture and a lot of it depicts other species. There was a famous sculpture of a seagull once in Salt Lake where the Beehive Commune later put up the statue of Geraldo Rivera. And a real good one of a moose," he added, "in St. John's, Newfoundland. And what about that Picasso thingamacallit in front of Communist Party Headquarters in Chicago?"

"Or all the renderings," added the paleontologist, getting into the spirit, "of seven-foot-tall mice in the Disneylands."

"A month ago," the general answered, running a glove over the sculpture, "I wouldn't have believed in nautiloids or hyperthyroid spiders." The thing depicted here was long, wide, flat, segmented, and possessed many short, jointed legs. In some ways it was rather like the sowbugs—roly-polies—children like to play with. "If this thing is representational, I won't have a lot more trouble believing in giant, sapient trilobites."

For want of better reaction, each of the explorers ran eyes and manipulators over the object, shrugged in his own fashion, and moved on. The ancient spacecraft may have been odd, but not completely incomprehensible. One by one, they managed to identify practical installations—life support, communications, and an impressive array of what looked like weapons systems—the appearance of which was dictated more by function than aesthetics. Although they'd yet to find the weapons themselves—or discover how they operated through the impenetrable barrier of the hull—it began to seem that 5023 Eris might have been a battleship of some kind.

"Yeah, but the Death Star," Danny muttered, "was supposed to have been fully operational." He gazed down from the "balcony" of what they believed was a fire-control gallery, a vast, dimly lit auditorium dwarfing any opera house he'd ever heard of. Only their spacesuits kept his voice from echoing.

"A good trick," his father observed, standing beside him, "since, so far, we've discovered nothing resembling any sort of engines or drive."

"It was a station, then, intended to cover the Predecessors' retreat. But from what? Maybe we could find out if we activated some of these systems."

"I agree," Eichra Oren offered. He leaned against a rail, his back to the endless stepped ranks of consoles far below. "Our first object might be to rid the ship of these stagnant fluorocarbons. I wouldn't be surprised if fresh liquid from reservoirs deeper down began to displace those that have spoiled."

"Neither would I," replied the general, "Still, would you be willing to take your helmet off and try breathing this stuff?"

The man was about to answer, but stared instead in the direction they'd come from. The implant look, Danny thought, although they'd already confirmed that radio wouldn't carry through the structure of the asteroid and their plan to string wires to the surface had been canceled by the way the air lock worked. "It's Sam," Eichra Oren told them, amazement in his voice. "He'll be here any second."

"I am here," the dog corrected, half-swimming out of the nearest corridor in a transparent suit. "A little out of breath. I wanted to surprise you, but you caught me swearing at that room full of gunge back there. My message'll be surprise enough. There's another party of `human interlopers'—Aelbraugh Pritsch's words—threatening to arrive on the asteroid. Seems there's been another change of policy following the recent shift of regimes, and a small fleet, cobbled together in haste, has taken off from the Soviet Union."

"Why the hurry, Sam?" Danny asked. "It'll take them a year to get here."

"Somebody's been keeping secrets, Lieutenant," the dog replied. "They're fusion powered, and constant boost. They're coming, they've announced for our benefit, to claim the United World Soviet's share of the fruits of a `joint cooperative mission.'

"The flagship, we're informed, the USSR Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, has somebody onboard that Juan Sebastiano calls `the Banker.' "

 

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