“Loud and clear, Alyx.”

“Okay, we’re at the pit. Proceeding which way, George?”

“Turning right,” he said.

She relayed the information. But before they left, she took a handkerchief out of her vest, unfolded it, and lobbed it into the shaft. Unopposed by air, even at a half gee, it dropped like a rock.

“What are you doing?” demanded George.

“I wanted to see it work.” She checked the time.

Tor grinned, and George looked discomfited. “We should have some respect for this place.” He looked with great disapproval into the shaft. “That is almost vandalism.”

It took one minute four seconds. The handkerchief reappeared and dropped back into the darkness. “Incredible,” she said.

They moved into unknown territory, resisting the temptation to open doors until they had penetrated deeply enough to establish their base. They would do that, they decided, in one of the empty chambers, out of the way of anything patrolling the corridors. The signal began to fade, and Alyx planted the second of four relay devices she’d brought, reestablishing contact.

THEY WERE ABOUT a kilometer from the exit hatch when they stopped, looked into an empty chamber, and selected it as their base. They chose a spot off to one side so they wouldn’t be immediately visible to anything looking casually through the door.

Tor released the clips on the pack, they connected the nozzles from the air tanks, and Alyx stood back while the dome inflated.

They installed the life-support gear, seated a power cell, leaving the spare in its storage compartment, and turned the lights on. “Looks good,” said Alyx. In fact it looked absolutely inviting. They set the thermostat at a comfortable room temperature. The heater came on and began pumping warm air into the space.

Alyx knew that all the evidence so far indicated that whoever was running the chindi was inclined to ignore them, but she still felt safer inside the dome, not that it could have kept out any serious threat, but because it was part of a familiar world.

When they were finished they turned off the lights—there was no point wasting power—went back to the exit hatch, and collected their food and water, their sleeping pads, and a few other pieces of equipment. They paused at the Ditch to wait for Alyx’s handkerchief to reappear. Within a few seconds it did.

The conversation consisted mostly of the same remarks over and over, how empty the place was, how big it was, how there must be a control area somewhere. A captain’s bridge. A command center. Alyx was thinking how much energy it must take to get the chindi moving, to lift it out of orbit, or to stop it once it got started. She would have liked a chance to see the engines, but it would probably take weeks to find them.

They returned to the dome, buttoned up, and killed their e-suits. They stored their food, got the drinking water into the dispenser, and put the plumbing on-line.

When they’d finished, Alyx stood up, flexed her shoulders, and said, “Gentlemen, let’s go exploring.” Her apparent fearlessness surprised both them and herself.

GEORGE WAS ATTEMPTING to construct a systematic map. The exit hatch led onto Main Street. Parallel passageways would be named alphabetically. They were on Alexander. Next over would be Barbara. Argentina was on the far side of Main. People in one direction, places in the other. Cross corridors would be numbered from the hatch, streets moving forward, avenues aft. Thus the Ditch was located at the intersection of Main and First Streets. The chambers were numbered according to the corridor they were in. The werewolf occupied Main-6.

There were no chambers off the numbered corridors.

Most of the rooms, by far the vast majority that they looked at that first day, were empty. But not all. Alexander-17 had a display that resembled a chemistry laboratory except that the tables were all too low and there were no benches or chairs. Barbara-11 was a primitive armory, with bows and darts and animal-hide shields stored everywhere. Charlie-5 seemed to be a waiting room, a place with long benches and a ticket window and a framed photo of a creature that looked like a grasshopper wearing a hat.

Moses-23 was filled with a three-dimensional geometric design, a single piece of ceramic, covered with arcane symbols, that looped and dipped and soared around the chamber.

Britain-2 provided a chess game of sorts, a cluster of chairs, a game in progress on an eighty-one-square board set on a table, and a half dozen tankards lying about. The pieces, some on the board and others off to the side, looked nothing like the familiar knights and bishops.

There were chambers that simply defied interpretation. Solid objects with no imaginable purpose, arranged in no intelligible order. Chambers filled with electronic equipment, others with purely mechanical apparatus that might have been pumps or heating systems or water carriers. The feature that most, but not quite all, had in common was a sense of considerable age. The objects almost invariably appeared to be no longer functional, and occasionally to have collapsed. But if that was so, it was also true that they seemed to be well taken care of now, as if they’d been frozen in time, preserved for some unknown audience.

BILL COMPLETED BREAKING down the filings Hutch had collected on the chindi, and she forwarded the results to the Academy for analysis.

Nick spent most of his time on the bridge with her. He admitted that when this was over, he would never leave the ground again. “I don’t think I even want to fly,” he said.

Hutch was thinking the same thing. After they got back, she was going to find a nice quiet apartment and spend the rest of her life in wind, rain, and sunlight.

Traffic came in from Mogambo’s Longworth announcing an “imminent arrival,” which was in fact still more than a week away, and directing the Memphis to stay clear of any alien site until they were on the scene. Well, he was already a couple of days late with that demand. There was at present a ninety-minute delay in round-trip transmission time, so she wasn’t faced with a give-and-take conversation. Interstellar distances occasionally had their advantages.

A second message, a few hours later, wanted an explanation for her silence, and requested a detailed report on the Retreat. Hutch responded with a message stating that she’d relayed the request to the head of mission. Which she then did.

“Hutch, how much does he know?” asked George.

“About the chindi?”

“Yes.”

“He knows it’s there.”

“But he doesn’t know what we’ve found?”

“No. He doesn’t know we’ve been aboard at all.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

“Sure. Why? I mean, you’ll be out of there by the time he arrives, anyhow.”

“Hutch, you obviously don’t understand how these things work. Once he hears we’ve penetrated this thing, he’ll start issuing statements. Taking over.”

“But he’s not even here.”

“He doesn’t have to be. He’s a major player. What am I? A guy who made some money on the market.” He broke off for a minute, talking to one of the others. Then he was back. “I know it seems paranoid, but just do it for me, okay? Don’t tell him anything.”

Okay. He was right, she decided. She’d felt the same way, although she hadn’t thought it out. But she’d instinctively held back a running description of events on the chindi, information she would ordinarily have passed along. Maybe it was important who got the credit, because Herman and Pete and Preach and a lot of others had died, and this was why, this was the event people would remember when they’d forgotten Columbus and Armstrong and Pirc.

“I tell you what I’d like,” George said. “I wish we could get as much time here as possible, but that an hour before Mogambo shows up, the chindi would take off. Preferably just as he pulls alongside.”