George hurried up behind Tor. “What happened?” he asked.

BUT HE KNEW. Knew as soon as he received Hutch’s warning, knew when he saw the shaft yawning before him. It was a very big hole. Why the hell would they have designed something like this? He sank down beside Tor and peered into the pit. “Lord help us,” he said.

But Nick was still screaming. How long would it take him to reach bottom?

In fact the reception was getting clearer.

“Nick,” he said, “where are you?”

“Don’t know.” His voice was stretched out, almost contralto.

A light appeared in the shaft. Deep down, but growing brighter.

“Falling,” he said.

Brighter.

“Help.”

“Hutch,” George said, “what’s happening?”

He got no answer. A superstitious chill ran through him as he watched the light rise. God help him, it was Nick, coming up the shaft, returning to them. But the light, Nick, was slowing down. Barely moving. And then he was only meters away, drifting to a stop, seeming to hang there, looking at them, his face framed in fear and the glow of their lamps. But they couldn’t reach him, and he began to fall again.

His screams ripped through George’s headset.

The shaft was enormous. It was a canyon. (How could they have missed it, even standing there in the dark?) Hutch stood twenty meters away from them, on the far side. It was almost as broad as the corridor, running flush against the wall on his right, leaving a rim about two meters wide on his left.

He looked across at her and wondered how she had gotten there. Her eyes were wide, saucer round, and her face was pale. Then, incredibly, without saying a word, she walked to the edge and stepped into the shaft.

ALYX HAD MADE a mistake. The moment she saw George and the others disappear down the hatch into the chindi, she knew it. She wasn’t sure exactly what the nature of the error was, but she knew she didn’t like being alone on the Memphis while the people she’d been so close to for the last few weeks dropped completely out of sight.

What if something happened? If they didn’t come back—and the vast bulk of the chindi looked horribly daunting, looked like a place that people routinely wouldn’t come back from—at what point did she tell Bill to take her home?

After six hours, after their air supply runs out.

When their voices dwindled, and the carrier wave died, it had felt like a premonition, a signal of things to come. Alyx was not superstitious, did not believe in such things, and yet this experience was frightening. She was in a horror sim, waiting alone while the musical score intensified, the beat picked up, the score went deep, as it always did when the shadows closed in.

She’d gone up to the bridge and sat in Hutch’s chair. It made her feel as if she could exercise some control over events. Bill kept an image of the exit hatch on-screen, and she watched it, waiting for someone to pop out of the little hole that they’d cut in the door.

She’d expected they would be down there for only a few minutes, take a quick look around, enough so they could say they’d done it, and come back out. But she should have realized that George would not let go easily. He was scared, every bit as much as she was, and had he been alone she thought he wouldn’t have gone near the thing. But he was committed, and maybe they’d not taken him as seriously as they should, and his manhood had gotten caught up in it. She wasn’t sure. But Tor had been encouraging him, and even Nick, who she thought should have known better.

Boarding the chindi had been dumb. There was no other way to describe it.

There’d been studies over the years supporting the proposition that groups composed exclusively of women usually made intelligent decisions, that exclusively male groups did a bit less well, and that mixed groups did most poorly of all, by a substantial margin. It appeared that, when women were present, testosterone got the upper hand and men took greater risks than they might otherwise. Correspondingly, women in the mixed group tended to revert to roles, becoming more passive, and going along with whatever misjudgment the males might perpetrate.

Alyx had once participated in a management exercise in which several five-person groups, of various configurations, were stranded in a jungle setting when their simulated aircraft went down. Although wisdom dictated they stay with the plane, the mixed group had inevitably voted to march off into the wilderness, where the tigers got them.

Replace the three men on the chindi with women, and Alyx knew they’d have waited patiently for the arrival of Mogambo and let him take the risks. If that entailed allowing him to claim the credit, that was okay. There would, she believed, be more than enough for everyone.

She could have Bill bring the lander back, and then she could use it to go over to the chindi, where she could kneel at the exit hatch—but not go in—and try to raise them on the link.

But there was always a possibility they’d need to get away from there in a hurry. And if that happened while the lander was in the Memphis’s cargo bay…

So she waited. And asked Bill what he thought might be happening. Unlike Hutch, she was prepared to accept the illusion that someone was really there amid the transistors and relays. But Bill, of course, knew no more than she did. And he admitted to being the last one who’d want to guess. Or for that matter who saw any point in guessing.

The lander floated near the exit hatch. It looked forlorn and abandoned. A light blinked forward, down low near the place which housed the now-retracted treads. And there was a dim green glow in the cabin, probably from the instruments. The airlock had been left open. No one had said anything, but it was obvious that was to facilitate a quick getaway.

She wondered if the chindi had weapons.

“How long since they went down?” she asked Bill.

“Twenty-seven minutes.”

She got herself a cup of coffee and set it down in the holder. She sipped it once, then forgot about it.

HAD SHE HESITATED, had she taken a moment to think about it, Hutch would not have done it. The act was simply too fearful. But the moment was fleeting, the window of opportunity already virtually shut, and there was no time. Do it now or forget it.

So she jumped into the dark and plummeted deep into the chindi.

She had tried to get into the center of the shaft, away from the walls, which were already hurtling past in the uncertain beam from her lamp.

In her link, she heard Nick’s desperate cries. And the frantic voices of Tor and George. Screaming at her.

Screaming after her.

She fell. The walls, rough and cracked and stained, dissolved into a blur. Do not touch. Other passageways flickered past. Her lamplight slashed into them, and once or twice she thought she saw lights that were not hers.

She fought down a wave of panic.

Hold on.

“Nick.”

He was trying to breathe.

“Nick, keep your light on.”

There was only one explanation for Nick’s reappearance. This was a gravity tube, like the one she’d descended in the Wendy. Gravity tubes, when they were powered up, negated artificial gravity. They were used to move cargo and people from deck to deck in zero gee.

But the chindi wasn’t the Wendy Jay. It was enormously larger, and that was why Nick had come back. The tube passed completely through the ship, top to bottom. Except there was no bottom.

In Academy ships, gravity generators were located on the lowest deck. But the chindi was too big. If she was right, there was a deck running through the center of the ship. And gravity was generated in both directions from that deck. Stand on either side of it and you could look up. The chindi had no below decks. Everything was up.