“Is there any way to show me what Hak saw?”

“Not here,” said Ponter. “He is recording, of course, and we have added storage capacity to him, so that everything he sees here will be saved. But until we can upload his recordings into my alibi archive in Saldak, there is no way for us to view them, although Hak can describe them.”

Mary looked down at Ponter’s forearm. “Well, Hak?” she said.

The Companion spoke through its external speaker. “There were eleven sheets of white paper in the folder. The ratio between the page height and width was 0.77 to 1. Six of the pages seemed to be preprinted forms, with spaces in which some text had been written in by hand. I am no expert on such things, but it seemed to be the same script Enforcer Hobbes was using to make his notes, although the ink was a different color.”

“But you can’t tell me what the forms said?” asked Mary.

“I could describe it to you. You read from left to right, correct?” Mary nodded. “The first word on the first page began with a symbol made by a vertical line topped by a horizontal line. The second symbol was a circle. The third—”

“How many total symbols are there in the report?”

“Fifty-two thousand, four hundred and twelve,” said Hak.

Mary frowned. “Too many to work through a character at a time, even if I taught you the alphabet.” She shrugged. “Well, I’ll be curious to see what it says when we get to your world.” She looked at the dashboard clock. “Anyway, it’s a long trip to Sudbury. We’d better get cracking.”

The last time Mary and Ponter had taken a ride down this metal-cage elevator, Mary had tried to make him understand that she did like him—indeed, that she liked him a lot—but that she hadn’t been ready to start a relationship. She’d told Ponter about what had happened to her at York University, making him the only person to that point besides Keisha, the rape-crisis counselor, that Mary had told about it. Ponter’s emotions had mirrored Mary’s own: general confusion plus profound anger aimed at the rapist, whoever he might be. During that trip down, Mary had thought she was about to lose Ponter forever.

As they again made the long, long descent to the Creighton Mine’s sixty-eight-hundred-foot level, Mary couldn’t help recalling all of that, and she supposed the awkward silence from Ponter meant that he was remembering it, too.

There’d been some discussion about installing a new high-speed elevator directly down to the neutrino-observatory chamber, but the logistics were formidable. To sink a new shaft through two kilometers of gabbroic granite would be a major undertaking, and the Inco geologists weren’t sure that the rock could take it.

There’d also been talk about replacing Inco’s old open-cage elevator with a more luxurious, modern one—but that presupposed it would only be used for runs to and from the portal. In fact, the Creighton Mine was an active nickel-harvesting operation, and although Inco had been the soul of cooperation, they still had to move hundreds of miners up and down that shaft each day.

Indeed, unlike the last time, when Mary and Ponter had had the entire car to themselves, they were sharing this ride with six miners, heading down to the fifty-two-hundred-foot level. The group was evenly mixed between those who were politely looking at the muddy metal floor—there was no inside level indicator to watch studiously as one did in an office-building lift—and those who were staring quite openly at Ponter.

The elevator thundered down its rough-hewn shaft, passing the forty-six-hundred-foot level—painted signs outside revealed the location. Having been mined out, that level was now used as an arboretum to grow trees for reforestation projects around Sudbury.

The elevator then shuddered to a stop on the level the miners wanted, and the door rattled up, letting them disembark. Mary watched them depart: men she would have previously thought of as robust specimens, but who had looked positively feeble next to Ponter.

Ponter operated the bell that signaled the lift operator up on the surface, letting him know the miners were clear. The cab rumbled into motion again. It really was too noisy to talk, anyway—the conversation they’d had the last time had been mostly shouted, for all its delicate content.

Finally, the cab arrived at the sixty-eight-hundred-foot level. The temperature here was a constant, stifling forty-one degrees Celsius, and the air pressure was thirty percent above that on the surface.

At least here, the transportation situation had been improved. Instead of having to walk the twelve hundred meters horizontally to the SNO facility, a rather nifty all-terrain vehicle—a kind of dune buggy thing, with a sticker of the SNO logo on its front—was waiting for them. Two more such vehicles were stationed down here now, although the others must have been somewhere else.

Ponter gestured for Mary to take the driver’s seat. Mary suppressed a grin; the big guy knew a lot of things, but how to drive wasn’t one of them. He got in next to her. Mary took a minute to familiarize herself with the dashboard, and read the various warnings and instructions that had been affixed to it. It didn’t really look any more difficult than a golf cart. She turned the key—it was attached to the dashboard with a chain, so that no one could accidentally walk off with it—and they set off down the tunnel, avoiding the railway tracks used for the ore cars. It normally took twenty minutes to walk to the SNO facility from the elevator station; the cart got them there in four.

Ironically, now that it was being used for travel to another world, the SNO facility wasn’t being kept in clean-room conditions anymore. A visit to the shower stalls had been mandatory, and although they were still available for those who felt too grimy after the trip down from the surface, Ponter and Mary just walked right past them. And both doors were propped open to the vacuum chamber that used to suck dirt off of visitors to SNO. Ponter shouldered through, and Mary followed behind him.

They walked past all the Rube Goldberg plumbing contraptions that had once serviced the heavy-water tank, and made their way through the control room—which, as always now, had two armed Canadian Forces guards on hand.

“Hello, Envoy Boddit,” said one of the guards, rising from the chair he’d been sitting in.

“Hello,” said Ponter, speaking for himself; he had acquired a couple of hundred words of English by now, which he could use—assuming he could pronounce them—without Hak’s intervention.

“And you’re Professor Vaughan, aren’t you?” asked the soldier—doubtless, his rank was somehow indicated on his uniform, but Mary had no idea how to read it.

“That’s right,” Mary said.

“I’ve seen you on TV,” said the soldier. “First time through for you, isn’t it, ma’am?”

Mary nodded.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve been briefed on the procedure. I need to see your passport, and we have to take a DNA sample.”

Mary did indeed have a passport. She’d first gotten one when she went to Germany to extract DNA from the Neanderthal type specimen at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, and she’d renewed it since—why did Canadian passports last for only five years, instead of the ten that American passports did? She fished the passport out of her purse and presented it to the man. Ironically, she looked older in the photo than she did in life; it had been taken before she started dyeing her hair to cover the gray.

She then opened her mouth, and let the soldier run a Q-Tip along the inside of her right cheek—the guy’s technique was a little rough, thought Mary; you didn’t have to swipe that hard to get cells to slough off.

“All right, ma’am,” said the soldier. “Have a safe trip.”