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carry
the news with no aid from him. He gulped and began again. "Voy a it. El Senor
Andy was kind to me. Perhaps he needs me now."
Cruzet had been another man of science, who spoke the language of mathematics,
lived in the vast cosmos where worlds were only atoms, and who sometimes spoke
of mankind as only one more species in danger of extinction. Yet his voice
broke
now, and tears filled his eyes.
"If you would --" he whispered hoarsely, and paused to frown in thought. "He
will be in trouble when his air cell fails. It's already had seven or eight
hours of use. You might follow with a spare."
"!Hecho! Hecho. Anything I can."
Cruzet found the spare and showed him once more how to fit it to the airskin.
Carrying it slung over his shoulder, he left the scout and followed around the
rubble and into the tunnel. That eroded metal barrier showed no damage when he
reached it, but Andersen had gone on beyond the ragged gap the blast had tom
in
the stone. Climbing through the gap, he stabbed his light into blackness
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beyond.
"?Senor?" He tried to shout, but the weight of darkness and la potencia of the
ice gods had crushed his voice to a rusty quaver. "Donde -- ? Where are you?"
No answer. He called again, listened again, pushed on again, trying to shut
his
mind to el miedo y los demonios of the dark. The tunnel here sloped sharply
upward. Shivering from something more than cold, from the dead stillness of
many
billion years, he listened and climbed again until a tiny square of blue light
glowed and brightened far ahead, Andersen's angular frame outlined for a
moment
against: it.
Breathing faster, he pushed to the top of the slope and came out of the tunnel
into a space so great that the shock of wonder stopped him. The floor was a
wide
field of some dull gray stuff, a full kilometer long. The walls towered sixty
meters high. They were pocked with row on row of dark triangular pits.
Hundreds
of small holes, thousands, rising in row after row. The ceiling was an endless
arch, shining with the cold blue glow.
Andersen was lost for a moment in that dim vastness. Tiny in the distance, he
was already halfway down the endless floor, stalking stiffly on toward a wide
stair that led up to a long platform against the far wall.
"!Senor!" His shout was a hoarse bark. "!Un momentito! !Un momentito por la
humanidad!"
Andersen lumbered on, ignoring him. Mondragon tried to run, and lost his
breath.
A yellow light flashed in his helmet, and he heard the computer's urgent
female
voice: Warning! Cycler overload. Reduce air demand.
He stumbled on, but Andersen reached the stair two hundred meters ahead,
climbed
it to the great stage, and marched on toward a huge black cylinder half
embedded
in the wall. It revolved as he approached. A deep niche moved into view.
Andersen reeled into it. The cylinder turned again, and the platform was empty
before Mondragon reached it.
A doorway? Into what?
He waited, hoping it would open again for him, or perhaps to let Andersen
return. It didn't open. He set his helmet radio to its greatest power and
called
again. No response. He hammered his fists against the cylinder's slick black
face. As useless, he thought, as pounding on a steel bank vault.
"!Socorro!" he appealed to los santos y la Madre sagrada. "Make them set El
Senor free, and I'll believe forever."
Did he expect his mother's useless santos to rulelos demonios de hielo? He
tried
to laugh and blundered blindly around the empty platform till a red light
flashed in his helmet. A gong rang, and he heard the anxious female voice.
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Warning! Air cartridge low. Terminate activity.
He could only clench his fists. His time here was up. Andersen was gone. Hinch
was dead. The gods of ice had left them nothing. Nothing except the duty to
carry their report back to the ship. Yet what could they report? No good news
for la rubia. Only that they had found the ice gods as unknowable and
implacable
as all gods were, using dreadful powers to protect the secrets of their
temple.
The best he could do was to leave the spare cell where Andersen could find it,
if they ever let him out. Mondragon laid it outside the door. Time to go, yet
still he waited, calling with his helmet radio at the cylinder's blank black
face and listening to the dreadful stillness until the red light flickered
again
and the computer chirped with its synthetic concern: Warning! Terminate
activity
now!
He walked back down the stair but stopped to look at those thousands of holes
in
the walls. They were a meter wide at the bottom, nearly twice as high. Each
held
a little pile of oddly shaped objects half buried in fine gray dust.
Curious, he reached for a narrow strip of something like plastic or thin
glass.
It was nearly two meters long, curved and tapered to a point at one end. Dully
translucent when he held it: toward the glowing ceiling, it had a faded amber
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