For a moment he had an illusion that he was in London or New York. Then he saw that the vast, towering structures that had reminded him of skyscrapers were in fact giant columns that stretched from floor to ceiling. The scale was breathtaking. The nearest column, a hundred yards away, could have been the size of the Empire State Building; he guessed its height at well over a thousand feet. It was circular in shape, and fluted; the top, he could see, spread out like the branches of a tree. He shone the beam along the hall. It was like looking down the aisles of a giant cathedral, or into some enchanted forest. The floor and the columns were the colour of frosted silver, with a hint of green. The wall beside him stretched up without any visible curve for a quarter of a mile. It was covered with strange coloured shapes and patterns. He backed up gently towards the nearest column — in spite of his lightness, violent collisions could damage the spacesuit — then propelled himself into the air. He widened the beam of light so that it covered an area of twenty or thirty yards. His mind had become numb to astonishment, or he might have called out.
Craigie’s voice said: “Everything all right, Skip?”
“Yes. This is a fantastic place. Like a huge cathedral, with great columns. And the wall’s covered with pictures.”
“What kind of pictures?”
Yes, what kind of pictures? How could he describe them? They were not abstract; they were of something; that was clear. But what? He was reminded of lying in a wood as a child, surrounded by bluebells, and the long whitish-green stems of the bluebells vanishing into the brown earth. These pictures could have been of some kind of tropical forest with strange vegetation, or perhaps of an underwater forest of weeds and tendrils. The colours were blues, greens, white and silver. There was a haunting complexity about it. Carlsen had no doubt he was looking at great art.
Other torches stabbed the darkness. The other three floated down gently, propelling themselves as if swimming under water. Murchison floated up to him, and drove him fifty feet further along with his weight.
“What do you make of it, Skip? Do you think they were giants?”
He shook his head, then remembered that Murchison could not see his face. “I don’t even want to guess, at this stage.” He spoke to the others. “Let’s keep together. I want to investigate the far end.” With the camera running, he moved gently down the hall. To the right, between the columns, he could see something that looked like a huge staircase. He kept up a running commentary for the benefit of those back in the Hermes , at the same time aware that his words conveyed nothing of this mind-staggering scale of construction.
A quarter of a mile further on, they passed an immense corridor leading off towards the centre of the ship; its roof was vaulted like a mediaeval arch. Everything about these surroundings was at once alien and curiously familiar. He heard himself telling Craigie: “If earthmen had built this, they’d have made it all look mechanical — square columns with rivets. Whatever creatures built this had a sense of beauty.” Far in the air, on the left-hand wall, there was a circular grid that reminded him of a stained-glass window. He floated towards it. At close quarters, he could see that it was functional. It was a hundred feet high and five feet thick, and the holes in the grid were several yards wide. Carlsen alighted in one of these and shone the searchlight beyond. The camera, strapped to his chest now, was working automatically, recording everything he saw.
He said: “Christ.”
“What is it?”
The space beyond had the appearance of a dream landscape. Monstrous flights of stairs stretched up into the darkness and down into the depths of the ship. There were catwalks between, and curved galleries whose architecture made him think of swallows’ wings. Beyond these, stretching upwards and farther into the blackness, more stairs and galleries and catwalks. When Craigie’s voice said: “Are you all right?” he realised he had not spoken for several minutes. He felt dazed and overpowered, and in some way deeply disturbed. The place had the quality of a nightmare.
“I’m all right, but I can’t describe it. You’ll have to see it for yourself.” He launched himself outward, but the immensity made him feel weary.
Ives said: “But what purpose could it serve?”
“I don’t know that it serves a purpose.”
“What?”
“I mean a practical purpose. Perhaps it’s like a painting or a symphony — intended to produce an effect on the emotions. Or perhaps it’s a map of some kind.”
“A what?” Dabrowsky sounded incredulous.
“A map… of the inside of the mind. You’d have to see it to understand.”
“Any sign of the control room? Or of engines?”
“No, but they might be at the back, towards the jets — if that’s how it’s driven.”
Now he was hovering over one of the stairways. From a distance, it looked like a fire escape, but at closer quarters, he saw that the metal was at least a yard thick. It was the same dull silver as the floor. Each step was about four feet high and deep. There were no handrails. He followed them upwards, to a gallery supported by pillars. A catwalk, also without rails, ran across a gulf at least half a mile wide.
Craigie said: “Can you see a light?” He pointed.
Carlsen said: “Switch off your lights.” They were in blackness that enclosed them like a grave. Then, as his eyes adjusted, Carlsen knew Craigie was right. Somewhere towards the centre of the ship, there was a greenish glow. He checked his Geiger counter. It showed a slightly higher reading than usual, but well below the danger level. He told Dabrowsky: “There seems to be some kind of fault luminosity. I’m going to investigate.”
It was a temptation to thrust powerfully against the stairs and propel himself forward at speed across the gulf. But ten years in space had made caution second nature. Using the catwalk as a guide, he floated slowly towards the glow. He kept one eye on the Geiger counter. Its activity increased noticeably as they drew closer, but it was still below the danger level, and he knew his insulated suit would protect him.
It was farther than it seemed. The four men floated past galleries that looked as if they had been designed by a mad Renaissance architect, and flights of stairs that looked as if they might stretch back to earth or outward to the stars. There were more immense columns, but this time they broke off in space, as if some roof they had once supported had now collapsed. When Carlsen brushed against one of these, he noticed that it seemed to be covered with a fine white powder, not unlike sulphur dust or lycopodium. He scraped some of this into a sample bag.
Half an hour later, the glow was brighter. Looking at his watch, he was surprised to see it was nearly one o’clock; it made him realise that he was hungry. They had switched off their searchlights, and the green glow was bright enough to see by. The light came from below them.
Dabrowsky’s voice said: “That was moonbase, Olof. He said your wife had just been on television with the children.”
At any other time, the news would have delighted him. Now it seemed strangely remote, as if it referred to a previous existence. Dabrowsky said: “Zelensky says there are four billion people all sitting in front of the televisions, waiting for news. Can I send an interim report?”
“Wait ten minutes. We’re getting close to this light. I’d like to find out what it is.”
Now at least he could see that it was pouring up from a chasm in the floor. The greeny-blue quality reminded him of moonlight on fields. He experienced a surge of exultancy that made him kick himself powerfully downwards. Ives said: “Hey, Skip, not too fast.” He felt like a swallow skimming and gliding towards the earth. The edge of the gulf lay a quarter of a mile below him, and he could see the full extent of the immense rectangular hole that was like a cloud-filled valley among mountains. The Geiger counter had now passed the danger point, but the insulation of the suit would protect him for some time yet.
The hole into which they were plunging was about a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. The walls were covered with the same designs as the outer chamber. The light seemed to be coming from the floor and from an immense column in the centre of the space. He heard Murchison say: “What in hell’s that? A monument?” Then Craigie said: “It’s made of glass.” Carlsen stretched out his hands to cushion his impact against the floor, rolled over like a parachutist, then bounced for a hundred yards. When he succeeded in standing upright, he found himself at the base of a pedestal that supported the transparent column.
Like most things on this ship, it was bigger than it looked from a distance. Carlsen judged its diameter to be at least fifty yards. Inside, immense dim shapes were suspended. In the phosphorescent light, they looked like black octopuses. Carlsen propelled himself upwards until he was opposite one of them, and then shone his searchlight on it. In the dazzling beam, he could see that it was not black, but orange. At close quarters, it looked less like an octopus, more like a bundle of fungoid creepers joined together at one end.
Close beside him, Ives said: “What do you make of that?”
Carlsen knew what he was thinking. “I don’t think these things built this ship.”
Murchison pressed the glass of his space helmet against the column. “What do you suppose they are? Vegetable? Or some kind of squid?”
“Perhaps neither. They may be some completely alien life form.”
Murchison said: “My God!”
The fear in his voice made Carlsen’s heart pound. When he spoke, his own voice was choked. “What in God’s name is it?”
Something was moving behind the squidlike shapes. Craigie’s voice said: “It’s me.”
“What the hell are you playing at?” The shock had made Carlsen angry.
“I’m inside this tube. It’s hollow. And I can see something down below.”
Cautiously, Carlsen propelled himself upwards, braking himself by pressing his gloved hands against the glass of the column. He was sweating heavily, although the temperature of the spacesuit was controlled. He floated past the top of the column, made a twist in the air and managed to land. He could then see that, as Craigie had said, it was hollow. The walls containing the squidlike creatures were no more than ten feet thick. And when he looked into the space down the centre, he noticed that the blue glow was far stronger there. It was streaming up from below the floor. “Donald? Where are you?”
Craigie’s voice said: “I’m down below. I think this must be the living quarters.”
Carlsen reached out to grab Murchison, who had propelled himself too fast and was about to float past him. Without speaking, both launched themselves headfirst into the hollow core. Since space-walking had become second nature, they had lost their normal inhibitions about this position. They descended gently towards the blue-green light. A moment later they were floating through the hole into a sea of blue that reminded Carlsen of a grotto he had once seen on Capri. Looking up, he realised that the ceiling — the floor of the room they had just left — was semi-transparent, a kind of crystal. The glow they had seen from above was the light that filtered through this. Down the wall to the right, another great staircase descended. But the scale here was less vast than above. This was altogether closer to the scale on the Hermes. The light came from the walls and the floor. There were buildings in the centre of the room, square and also semi-transparent. And at the far end of the room, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, Carlsen could see stars burning in the blackness. Part of the wall had been ripped away. He could see the immense plates twisted inwards and torn, as if someone had attacked a cardboard box with a hammer. He pointed. “That’s probably what stopped the ship.”
The fascination of violent disaster drove them towards the gap. Dabrowsky was asking for further details. Carlsen stopped at the edge of the gulf, looking down at the floor, which was buckled and torn under his feet. “Something big tore a hole in the ship — a hole more than a hundred feet wide. It must have been hot: the metal looks fused as well as ripped. All the air must have escaped within minutes, unless they could seal off this part of the ship. Any living things must have died instantaneously.”
Dabrowsky asked: “What about these buildings?”
“We’ll investigate them now.”
Ives’s voice said: “Hey, Captain!” It was almost a shriek. Carlsen saw that he was standing near the buildings, his searchlight beam stabbing through transparent walls and emerging on the other side. “Captain, there’s people in there.”
He had to check the desire to hurl himself across the quarter of a mile that divided him from the buildings. His impetus would have carried him beyond them, and perhaps knocked him unconscious against the far wall. As he moved slowly, he asked: “What kind of people? Are they alive?”
“No, they’re dead. But they’re human, all right. At least, humanoid.”
He checked himself against the end building. The walls were glass, as clear as the observation port of the Hermes . These were undoubtedly living quarters. Inside were objects that he could identify as tables and chairs, alien in design but recognisably furniture. And two feet away, on the other side of the glass, lay a man. The head was bald, the cheeks sunken and yellow. The blue eyes stared glassily at the ceiling. He was held down to the bed by a canvas sheet, whose coarse texture was clearly visible. Under this sheet, which was stretched tight, they could see the outlines of bands or hoops, clearly designed to hold the body in place.
Murchison said: “Captain, this one’s a woman.”
He was looking through the wall of the next building. Craigie, Ives and Carlsen joined him. The figure strapped to the bed was indisputably female. That would have been apparent even without the evidence of the breasts that swelled under the covering. The lips were still red, and there was something indefinably feminine about the modelling of the face. None of them had seen a woman for almost a year; all experienced waves of nostalgia, and a touch of a cruder physical reaction.
“Blonde too,” Murchison said. The short-cropped hair that covered the head was pale, almost white.
Craigie said: “And here’s another.” It was a dark-haired girl, younger than the first. She might have been pretty, but the face was corpselike and sunken.