"How is it possible, Captain?" Vardia asked, awed for the first time in her life—and not a little scared.
"There
must
be an explanation. It's a freakish thing—but I'd believe almost anything after all we've seen. I'm sure we'll find their prints continue farther on. Let's see."
They all walked onto the gray area for some distance. Vardia suddenly looked back to make certain that
they
were making footprints, and was relieved to see that they were. Suddenly she stopped short.
"Captain!" she exclaimed, that toneless voice suddenly tinged with panic and fear. The rest caught it, stopped, and turned. Vardia was pointing back at the ships from which they had come.
There were no shuttlecraft. There was no lifeboat. Only a bleak, unbroken orange plain stretching off to the mountains in the distance.
"Now what the hell?" Brazil managed, looking all around him to see if they had somehow turned around. They hadn't. He looked up to see if he could spot anything leaving, but there was nothing but the cold stars as darknesss overtook them.
"What happened?" Hain asked plaintively. "Did our murderer—"
"No, that's not it," Brazil cut in quickly, a cold chill suddenly going through him. "No one person—not even two—could have managed all three craft, and nobody but me could have lifted that lifeboat for another two hours."
There was a sudden vibration, like a small earthquake, that knocked them all off their feet.
Brazil broke his fall and held on in a crouch on his hands and knees. He looked up suddenly.
The whole area seemed bathed in eerie flashes of blue-white lightning, thousands of them!
"Damn me for an asshead!" Brazil swore. "We've been had!"
"But by whom?" Vardia called out.
Wu Julee screamed.
Then there was nothing but darkness and that weird, blue lightning, now laced, it appeared, with golden sparks. They all felt the sensation of falling and turning and twisting in the air, as if they were dropping down some bottomless pit. There was no up, no down, nothing but that dizzy sensation.
And Wu Julee kept screaming.
Suddenly they were lying on a flat, glassy-smooth black surface. Lights were on around them, and there seemed to be a structure—as if they were in some building, like a great warehouse.
Things didn't stop spinning around for a while. They were dizzy, and sick. All but Brazil threw up into their helmets, which neatly and efficiently cleared the mess away. A professional spaceman, Brazil was the first to recover his equilibrium. Then he steadied himself, half sitting up on the black, glassy floor.
It was a room, he saw—no, a great chamber, with six sides. The glassy area was also a hexagon, and around it stretched a railing and what appeared to be a walkway. A single great light, also six-sided, was suspended above them in the curved ceiling. The place was huge, Brazil saw, easily large enough to house a small freighter.
The others were there. Vardia, he saw, was already sitting up, but Wu Julee, it appeared, had passed out. Hain just lay on the floor, breathing hard. Brazil struggled to his feet and made his way unsteadily to Wu Julee. He checked and saw that she was in fact still breathing but unconscious.
"Everybody all right?" he called. Vardia nodded and tried to rise. He helped her to her feet, and she managed. Hain groaned, but tried, and was game about it. He finally managed it.
"Just about one gee," Brazil noted. "That's interesting."
"Now what?" asked Datham Hain.
"Looks like some breaks in that railing—the closest one is over there to your right. We might as well make for it." Taking their silence for assent, he picked up Wu Julee's limp body and they started off. She weighed hardly anything, he noted, and he wasn't a particularly strong man.
He looked down at her, sorrow in his eyes.
What will happen to you now, Wu Julee? But I tried! God! I tried!
Her eyes opened, and she looked up into his through the tinted helmet faceplates. Perhaps it was the gentle way he carried her, perhaps it was his expression, perhaps it was just the fact that she saw him and not Hain, but she smiled.
She got much heavier about halfway there, he noted, as his body was drained of the adrenalin that had pumped into him during the—fall? Finally he was straining at the weight, although she weighed no more than half what she should. He finally admitted defeat and had to put her down. She didn't protest, but as they continued to walk she clung tightly to his arm.
No matter what, Hain no longer owned her.
Steps of what looked like polished stone led up to the break in the rail—six of them, they noted. Finally they were all up on some kind of platform from which a conveyor belt stretched out. But it was not moving in either direction.
They all looked to the captain for guidance. For the first time in his life, Nathan Brazil felt the full weight of responsibility. He had gotten them into this—never mind that they had talked him into it, it was his responsibility—and he didn't have the slightest idea what to do next.
"Well," he began, "if we stay here we starve to death, or run out of air—or both. We may do so anyway, but we at least ought to see what we're into. There has to be a doorway out of this place."
"Probably six of them," Hain said caustically.
Brazil stepped out onto one of the conveyors, and it suddenly started moving. The movement was so unexpected that he found himself carried along farther and farther away from the rest before anyone could say anything.
"Better get on," he called back, "or you'll lose me! I don't know how to stop this thing!"
He was receding farther and farther, when Wu Julee stepped on. The other two immediately did likewise.
The speed wasn't great, but it was faster than a man would walk briskly. A larger, broader platform loomed ahead before Brazil could see it. So he slid off onto it, stumbled, fell down, and rolled halfway across.
"Watch out! Platform coming up!" he warned. The others saw the platform and him in time to step off, although each one nearly lost his balance in the attempt.
"Apparently you're supposed to be walking on the belt," Vardia said. "That way you just walk onto the platform. See? There are actually several belts just before the platform, each one going at a slightly slower speed."
The belt suddenly stopped.
"No doorway here," Hain noted. "Shall we press on?"
"I suppose
so—whoops!"
Brazil exclaimed as he was about to step out. The other belt had started in the reverse direction!
"Looks like somebody's coming to meet us," Brazil said jokingly, a tone that didn't match his inner feelings at all. Even so, he pulled and checked his pistol, noting that Hain was doing the same. Vardia, he saw, still held onto that sword.
They could see a giant figure coming toward them, and all stepped back to the rear edge of the platform. As the figure came closer, they could see that it was like nothing in the known universe.
Start with a chocolate brown human torso, incredibly broad, and ribbed so that the chest muscles seemed to form squarish plates. A head, oval-shaped, equally brown and hairless except for a huge white walrus mustache under a broad, flat nose. Six arms—in threes, spaced in rows down the torso—extremely muscular but attached, except for the shoulder pair, on ball-type sockets like the claws of a crab. Below, the torso melded into an enormous brown-and-yellow-striped series of scales leading to a huge, serpentine lower half, coiled, but obviously five or more meters in length when outstretched.
As the creature approached the platform, it eyed them with large, human-looking orbs punctuated with jet-black pupils. As it reached the edge of the platform, the lower left arm slapped the rail. The belt stopped just short of the platform. Then, for what seemed like forever, they just stared at each other—these four humans in ghostly white pressure suits and this creature of some incredibly alien spawning.
The alien finally pointed to them, then with its top pair of arms made a motion to remove their helmets. When it saw they made no move, it pointed again to them, then did what appeared to be a deep breathing exercise.
"I think it's trying to tell us we can breathe in here," Brazil said cautiously.
"Sure,
he
thinks so, but what does he breathe?" Hain pointed out.
"No choice," Brazil replied. "We're almost out of air anyway. May as well chance it."
"I do," came the unexpected voice of Wu Julee, and, with that, she unfastened her helmet—not without some trouble, for her coordination was shot. Finally the helmet fell to her feet, and she breathed in.
And continued breathing.
"Good enough for me," said Vardia, and she and Brazil did the same. For a short time Hain continued to resist. Then, finally assured that everyone was still breathing, he removed his as well.
The air seemed a bit humid and perhaps a little rich in oxygen—they experienced a slight light-headedness that soon passed—but otherwise fine.
"Now what?" Hain asked.
"Damned if I know," Brazil replied honestly. "How do you say hello to a giant walrus-snake?"
"Well I'll be goddamned!" exclaimed the walrus-snake in perfect Confederation plain talk, "if it ain't Nathan Brazil!"
ZONE (Enter Ghosts)
None of the group could have been more stunned than Nathan Brazil.
"Somehow I knew you'd wind up here," the creature continued. "Sooner or later just about every old-timer does."
"You know me?" Brazil asked incredulously.
The creature laughed. "Sure I do—and you know me, too, unless you've had one too many rejuves. I know, had the same problem myself when I dropped through the Well. Let's just say that people really change around here, and let it go at that. If you'll follow me, I'll make you more comfortable and give you some orientation." With that the creature uncoiled backward, then recoiled at a length about two meters back on the belt. "Step aboard," it invited.
They looked at Brazil. "I don't think we have much choice," he told them. Then, noticing Hain's pistol still drawn and pointed, he said to the fat man: "Put that popgun away until we find out the lay of the land. No use in getting popped yourself."
They stepped onto the belt, which started not when they boarded but only after the rail was given another slap by their alien host. For the first time they could hear noise—giant blowers, it sounded like, echoing throughout the great hall. The belt itself gave off its own steady electric hum.
"Do you—eat what we eat?" Hain called out to the creature.
The alien chuckled. "No, not anymore, but, don't worry, no cannibals around, either. At least, not Type Forty-ones like you. But I think we can round up some food—some
real
food, maybe the first in everybody's except Nate's whole life."
They rode around three belts until they came to a platform much larger than the others. Here the walls curved and twisted away from the Well. Brazil could see why the configuration hadn't been visible from afar.
Then they followed the snakeman—no mean trick, they found, with its enormous serpentine body—down a long corridor. They saw other corridors branching off, but they traveled over a thousand meters before they took one.
It led into a very large room set up something like a reception area. Comfortable, human-style chairs with plush cushions abounded, and a plastic wall covering was decorated with flowers. Here, such amenities seemed as incongruous as the alien would seem to their worlds. The creature had a sort of desk, semicircular in shape and seemingly form-fitted for him to coil comfortably behind. It held only a very ordinary-looking pen, a small pad of paper, and a seal—hexagonal of course—seemingly solid gold cast in clear plastic. The seal featured a snake coiled around a great cross, and it had a superscription around the edges in a script unfamiliar to any of them.
The snakeman lifted up a small part of his desk top to reveal an instrument panel underneath of unfamiliar design and purpose. A large red button was most prominent, and he pushed it.
"Had to reset the Well," he explained. "Otherwise we could get some nonoxygen breathers in and they'd be hung up in storage until somebody remembered to press the button. Let me also punch in a food order for you—you always were a steak-and-baked-potato man, Nate. So that's what it'll be." He punched some buttons in sequence on the console, then closed it. "Ten or fifteen minutes and the food will be here—and it'll be cooked right, too. Medium, wasn't it, Nate?"
"You seem to know me better than I do," Brazil replied. "It's been so long since I had a steak—maybe almost a century. I'd just about forgotten what one was. Where did you know me, anyway?"
A broad yet wistful smile crept across the creature's face. "Can you remember an old bum named Serge Ortega, Nate? Long ago?"
Brazil thought, then suddenly it came to him. "Yeah, sure, I remember him—but that was maybe a hundred years ago or so. A free-lancer—polite name for a pirate," he explained to the others. "A real rascal. Anything for a buck, was wanted almost everywhere—but a hell of a character. But you can't be him—he was a little guy, from Hispaniola, before they went Com and changed the place to Peace and Freedom."
"I'm sorry to hear that," the creature responded sadly. "That means my people are dead. Who was the mold? Brassario?"
"Brassario," Brazil confirmed. "But all this explains nothing!"
"Oh, but it does," the snakeman replied. "Because I
am
Serge Ortega, Nate. This world changed me into what you see."
"I don't see what's wrong with factory worlds," Vardia interjected. They ignored her.
Brazil looked bard at the creature. The voice, the eyes—they
were
dimly familiar, somehow. It
did
remind him of Ortega, sort of. The same crazy glint to the eyes, the same quick, sharp way of talking, the underlying attitude of amused arrogance that had gotten Ortega into more bar fights than any other man alive.
But it had been so long ago.
"Look here!" Hain put in. "Enough of old home week, Ortega or not Ortega. Sir, or whatever, I should very much like to know where we are, and why we are here, and when we shall be able to return to our own ship."