Chapter Two

PRESSURIZED
ENVIRONMENTS

BASEGLISTER
OSKARDESILVOSOPERATIONSCENTER
THEPLANETGLISTER
GLISTERSYSTEM

Admiral Anton Koffield, late of the Chronologic Patrol, long-ago and faraway master of the Chronologic Patrol ShipUpholder, a ship long since sent to the breaker’s yard—Anton Koffield, marooned twice in time, and now, perhaps, a captive as well—Anton Koffield glared out the viewport of the buried habitat and moodily watched the earthmoving equipment outside. The robotic machines were busily erasing all the external evidence that this place even existed.

Koffield had his doubts that they could possibly succeed in hiding it, but their host—or was he their jailer?—had not asked for Koffield’s opinion.Best to think of him as host, Koffield decided.If I think of him as jailer, it will just get my anger that much closer to the surface.

“What was it your people named this place?” his host inquired. Oskar DeSilvo stood next to him, watching the same view, and no doubt seeing something completely different. Koffield saw the trap being taken down, hidden away, now that it had served its purpose in catching him. Probably DeSilvo was simply enjoying the site of robotic tractors and bulldozers moving dirt and rock and ice around the frozen hell outside, an overgrown small boy watching his toys moving around in his very own giant sandbox.

“DeSilvo City,” Koffield replied, knowing full well that DeSilvo knew the answer. The man just liked hearing the name. “It looked something like a city from orbit when we came in. At any rate it looked big enough.” It had, in fact, resembled nothing so much as a giant bull’s-eye, made up of concentric circular walls of loose rock and ice, surrounding a central dome, with a complete midsize spaceport landing field in the dome. The moment DeSilvo had detected their ship, he’d lit the place up like a near-ancient Christmas tree. Now the lights were gone, the dome was already half-buried, and the dozers were hard at work flattening the loose-rock walls as well.

“That was the idea,” DeSilvo said, plainly pleased with himself. “But now that DeSilvo City, as you call this station, has done the job of attracting your team, it is time to hide.” He gestured out the window. “The robots should have completely erased all outward sign of this place in another week or so. They will return the surface to its prestation appearance, as recorded before I started construction.”

“They won’t get it perfect,” Koffield observed. “Anyone walking the surface will be able to tell there’s been recent activity.”

“Quite likely,” DeSilvo conceded cheerfully. “Perhaps even a low-level flyover would be enough to detect us, though I think not. But the robots will be thorough—and there is frequent violent weather that will serve to blow sufficient dust and dirt around so that the activity won’t look recent for long. The winds scour this whole landscape, as well. It will be difficult, from any range at all, to distinguish what we have done from the effects of weathering. The odds are very much against your pursuers electing to do a surface search in this place.

“Nor are your potential pursuers likely to have brought along long-duration search aircraft capable of flying in the sort of frozen low-pressure environment we have outside—and I might add Glister’s surface is a most difficult environment to work in. Furthermore, the planet Glister is a large place, nearly all of it frozen, abandoned, wild, and littered with abandoned equipment and habitats. That is our chief protection. We are a needle, and my robots are busy at work piling up the haystack around us.”

He reached out and pressed a stud set into the frame of the viewport. The camouflaged blast shields swung back into place, concealing the outside view from Koffield, and any outward sign of the viewport from the exterior.

“But being hidden from view changes very little for us,” DeSilvo went on. “Most of the station is underground anyway, and the aboveground portions we will simply bury. We shall continue doing business as usual during and after the concealment operation. Come, my dear Admiral,” he said, and led Koffield down the corridor.

Business as usual,Koffield thought as he followed along.He makes it sound as if we’ve all been working along down here for months, or years. In point of fact, Koffield’s party had arrived only a few days before—and the first day had not gone well. DeSilvo had managed, quite accidentally, to goad Yuri Sparten into an attack that had left DeSilvo and Sparten both injured and both sedated.

DeSilvo was wearing workers’ coveralls again today, with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open. The bandages at his throat and his right forearm were plainly visible, yet DeSilvo himself strode purposefully past the point in the corridor where Sparten had attacked him, past the bullet hole in the corridor and the spatters of blood on the walls and floor that the robot cleaners had not quite managed to clear away.

Apparently a near-miss gunshot and a knife at his throat were not sufficient to remind the man of his own mortality. Probably nothing but his own demise would be enough, given how long the man had lived and the number of times and ways he had cheated death already.

But some hint of age, of well-hidden weariness, shone out from underneath that youthful aura. His eyes and teeth and hair were too perfect, too unmarked by time. A very slight yellowish cast to his skin hinted that his last regeneration treatment was wearing out—and that the next was not likely to work well.

Oskar DeSilvo was of medium height, with a lean, wiry frame. His face was square-jawed and high-cheekboned, with piercing blue eyes and thick black eyebrows. He looked fit. Back in the old days, he had been clean-shaven, and had worn his jet-black hair in a very dramatic shoulder-length cut. Now it was trimmed back to a crew cut, and he sported a small neat black goatee with a streak or two of grey running through it. For the moment at least, he had turned in his scholar’s robe for much more utilitarian garb. Whether the change in clothes and appearance was meant to be significant, Koffield had not the slightest idea.

DeSilvo arrived at the doors of the lift, which opened at his approach. The doors slid shut, and the lift car descended rapidly, a hundred meters down at least. The doors opened, and DeSilvo led Koffield out into a corridor that was a near duplicate of the one they had just left. The temperature was a bit higher, and the walls and floors were a bit more scuffed and worn.And there aren’t any bloodstains or bullet holes, Koffield thought.Maybe that’s why we’re on this level today . Koffield could think of no other reason for meeting below ground, rather than above. Unless it was to hide, just that much more completely, from the outside world.

DeSilvo led him through the shabby warrens of his buried kingdom. Koffield had explored at least part of that kingdom already—and had been astonished by its extent. The tunnels and chambers went on and on, corridor after corridor, level after level. The eerie caverns were just starting to come out of the centuries of frozen sleep.Half-frozen and buried alive, Koffield thought. Knowing what Koffield did about DeSilvo, it seemed an oddly fitting circumstance for a meeting with his enemy—and ally,Koffield reminded himself. It was still most difficult to think of the man that way—but there was no doubt but that his people needed DeSilvo’s help—or that DeSilvo would need theirs.

Oblivious to the thoughts of the man behind him, DeSilvo led the way into the SubLevel One conference room—itself a close copy of the conference room on the surface level. At the moment, it had been pressed into use as a dining hall. Luncheon was just about to be served by DeSilvo’s robotic staff.

DeSilvo’s guests had already learned that their host’s ideas of proper service, as taught to the machines, were eccentric. Nor was the food remotely like what they were used to. But travelers, especially interstellar travelers, had to be adaptable, and this group had certainly dealt with greater challenges than odd seasoning on their food.

Koffield scanned the room as he took his place. The others—except Sparten—were already there. Anton Koffield sat at the opposite end of the long table from DeSilvo, considering his companions.

Felipe Henrique Marquez, captain of theDom Pedro IV, the ship that brought them here. Dark-haired, olive-skinned, short, stocky, with a face that tended naturally to extremes—the fiercest scowl, the brightest smile, with no room in between. His thick eyebrows, bushy moustache, and well-trimmed beard only served to accentuate the effect. One way or the other, all the people around the table had suffered injury, deliberate or incidental, at the hands of DeSilvo. But, apart from Koffield himself, perhaps no survivor of theDom Pedro IV ’s journey had endured more harm than Marquez.

Marquez might still be the ship’s captain, but he was, perhaps, no longer ship’s master. A veritable cloud of robotic spacecraft controlled by DeSilvo had descended on theDP-IV almost as soon as the ship’s company were aboard the lighterCruzeiro do Sul and en route to the surface.

DeSilvo claimed his robots were only installing upgrades and improvements—including, just by the way, a true faster-than-light drive—but there was no way to know for sure what he was doing with the ship, or what his real plans for it were.

Koffield looked next to Norla Chandray, second-in-command of theDP-IV, and the closest friend Koffield had—or had ever had.Or would it be fairer to say “closest thing to a friend”? he asked himself. Koffield was well aware that he was not an easy man to get to know, let alone understand. He might be flattering himself to assume that she considered him a friend.

Norla was a far from ordinary woman, for all of her ordinary appearance. She had not yet spent so much time in temporal confinements and timeshafts and relativistic velocities as to make it too difficult to compute her self-chronologic, her bio-chron age. She was roughly thirty-three, and looked it. A bit above average height, well proportioned, the privations of the last few years having burned away any excess weight—and perhaps a bit more. She had the pale-skinned complexion of many star travelers. Her hair was light brown, cut short. Her solemn brown eyes were set in a round face with a snub nose and a mouth that smiled only rarely, but did so very well.

Norla, more than anyone else, had stood by him, had kept him moving forward. He—none of them—would have gotten this far, if not for her.

Jerand Bolt, Dixon Phelby, and Sindra Chon—the last remaining crew of theDom Pedro IV . Bolt and Chon were replacements. Of the crew that had started the seemingly routine journey to Solace, all those long decades ago, Phelby alone remained. All the other original crew were gone. Some had illegally jumped ship, unwilling to risk staying longer on a ship that must have seemed under a curse. Some departed legally, even honorably. Four had been killed, and at least some blame for all four deaths could be laid at DeSilvo’s door.

Finally, Wandella Ashdin, the historian and expert on DeSilvo who had finally gotten her wish and met the object of her study, who she had thought was long since dead. She had been somewhat disappointed by the experience. Wandella Ashdin was old and allowed herself to look that way, with grey hair, wrinkles, and all. Her watery pale blue eyes were set in an angular, square-jawed face. She was perhaps the most disorganized scholar Koffield had ever met—but she was capable of hard and serious study as well, and her results were solid, even if her notes were often illegible, or misfiled. The journey to this place had wrought great changes in her—or perhaps merely brought forgotten, tougher-minded parts of her back up into the light. Gone was the fuzzy-minded academic, breathless at the chance to learn more about her hero. In her place sat a determined and professional scholar, dispassionately studying her subject, passionately seeking the truth.

And, not present: Yuri Sparten, witting spy and unwitting pawn of the SCO Station Security Force, assigned to watch Koffield on behalf of the SSF—and on behalf of other services, probably including Koffield’s old outfit, the Chronologic Patrol’s Intelligence Service. Koffield did not know or care why Sparten was not present, or what Sparten was doing.

If the lad chose to stay away from a meal or two, then it would help everyone else’s digestion. He wouldn’t be likely to offer much in the way of interesting or useful conversation if they forced him to attend. If he wanted to play the part of the surly teen who refused to come out of his room, then so be it.

DeSilvo took his seat and looked around the room. “Greetings to you all,” he said. “Before we begin the meal proper, an announcement. The project to light the NovaSpot over Greenhouse is proceeding according to schedule. They are within a week of Ignition Day—the day they will actually ignite the NovaSpot. All seems to be going well.”

DeSilvo was telling them a great deal more than he was saying. They all knew that the “report” he had received had come from one of the covert listening devices he had built into any number of facilities in the Solacian system—and that the report had been sent to him via a true faster-than-light communications system.

The FTL drive, the FTL communications system, and any number of other wonders were among the technologies DeSilvo had stolen—or perhaps, more accurately, excavated—from the wreckage of the Dark Museum, the Chronologic Patrol’s storage place for suppressed technology. He was telling them all what marvelous toys he had, toys he would be willing to share—if only they all cooperated.

And he was saying more beyond even that. The Ignition Project had, after all, been DeSilvo’s idea. It had been his doodle on a slip of paper that had set it all in motion, albeit a century after he had made the drawing. He had managed to remind them all of the project a half dozen times already. A reproduction of the doodle hung on the wall behind him.

It was clear that, in his mind at least, the sketch on the back of an envelope was the thing that mattered, and not the herculean efforts, or the massive engineering projects, that had made it all possible. The man had a sure instinct for claiming credit—just as sure as his instinct for demonstrating his power.

And, it would seem, a fairly good instinct for moving on when a performance was falling flat. He might be oblivious to many things, but Oskar DeSilvo could tell when an audience wasn’t happy. He glanced around the table, cleared his throat, and looked down at the datapad in front of him. He went on hurriedly. “Right now I believe that luncheon is the matter at hand.”

The meal went about as well as it might under such circumstances, with chitchat in low voices between various pairs of diners, very little general conversation, and no conversation at all that involved Oskar DeSilvo—or Anton Koffield. Koffield could only hope he was being excluded for somewhat different reasons than DeSilvo. He was seated between Wandella Ashdin and Norla Chandray, and he knew both of them had a lot on their minds.

There was to be a general meeting the next day, and Wandella was supposed to do a presentation. It was a summing-up of the events that had brought them all here. Koffield had the impression that it was going to amount to a criminal indictment of their host, the man whose food she was eating, the man who held their lives in his hands. The task would be enough to leave anyone preoccupied. No wonder the woman was doing little more than toying with her food.

Koffield had considered the idea of taking on the presentation himself, but had soon realized it would be self-indulgent to do so, and bad leadership besides. If Wandella’s presentation was the case for the prosecution, and if DeSilvo spoke for himself, then it was all but inevitable that he, Koffield, the group’s leader, would be something between jury foreman and judge—and executioner, too?he asked himself with grim humor.

Besides which, quite a strong case could be made that Koffield was one of DeSilvo’s main victims. That, too, made it inappropriate for him to present the case against. Certainly the group would look to him for guidance in deciding what to do. Assuming they could do anything. After all, to stretch the analogy completely out of shape, their sort-of defendant was also the absolute ruler of this place. He was their jailer, not their prisoner.

All in all, Koffield was quite happy to get out from under the duty of reciting DeSilvo’s history to the group. Koffield shoved his plate away from him, barely aware that he had eaten anything. What was wrong with him, that made him fret over such trivial decisions and leadership choices? “Captain Marquez,” he said, speaking down the length of the table. “You said something earlier about doing some work on theCruzeiro do Sul after lunch. Could you use an extra pair of hands?”

“Absolutely, Admiral. I was going to ask for your assistance in any event. I believe the bomb you disarmed is still aboard. It makes me nervous having it there. Could you help me remove it?”

It was a remarkably offhand way to discuss a booby-trap bomb on a spacecraft, but then, in the larger scheme of their situation, a deactivated bomb in the engine room seemed a minor nuisance at best. “I’d be delighted,” Koffield replied, standing up from the table. “If you’ll all excuse us?”

There was a murmur of assent from the rest of the party.

Koffield looked to their host at the other end of the table. “Thank you for a splendid lunch,” Koffield said. It was close to the first remark anyone had addressed to DeSilvo since the meal had started.

“My pleasure, Admiral. Please, both of you, go and do your work.” Marquez stood up as well, bowed absently to the ladies at the table, pointedly did not acknowledge DeSilvo, and led Koffield out of the room.

The two of them had not gone ten meters down the hall when Marquez chuckled and turned to Koffield. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to feel more relaxed taking that bomb out than I have so far taking my meals with that son of a bitch.”

Koffield smiled. “I was just thinking the same thing,” he said. “Living and working with him is going to take some getting used to.”

“To put it mildly. But I sure as hell don’t see any way out of it.”

“Nor do I,” Koffield said. Even if there had been some way to escape, it seemed possible that the fate of worlds—perhaps of every inhabited world—might hinge on what happened here, now, on Glister. Koffield was willing to hand off a few presentations, but walking away fromthat duty,that responsibility, would be as grave a crime of omission as any that DeSilvo had committed. They had to stay, and do what they could.

 

Captain Marquez led the way through the corridors and walkways to the main airlock center. At Marquez’s request, DeSilvo had rigged a Personnel Access Tunnel between the airlock center and theCruzeiro do Sul, eliminating the need to use the personnel carrier that had first brought them from theCruzeiro into DeSilvo City. There was pressure in the PAT, but, as a safety precaution, all the airlock doors were sealed at both ends when the airlock center and ship were untended.

Marquez started the lock cycling and stepped to a large viewport set in one side of the airlock center. It offered an excellent view of the lighterCruzeiro do Sul, still sitting where she had landed, dead center in the middle of the domed-over landing field.

TheCruzeiro do Sul was not much to look at. She was a fat grey cylinder, fifteen meters high and twenty across, standing on four stumpy landing legs. She was the largest of theDom Pedro IV ’s three original auxiliary craft, and the only one of the three to survive the visit to Mars. Now she stood at the center of DeSilvo’s landing field, with any number of jacks and plugs and umbilicals plugged into her—along with the PAT. She was tied down tight, with a lid, in the form of the dome over the landing field, slammed down on top of her.

The PAT ran for two hundred meters between the city lock and theCruzeiro, and was as worn-out and shabby as most everything else in DeSilvo City; cobbled together from salvage and whatever parts were at hand. It was designed to hang from suspension supports that looked like giant inverted U’s. The PAT hung from the centers of the U’s, the two legs holding the tunnel up. There should have been supports every twenty meters or so. Instead, there were three for the whole length of the thing.

The dome had closed over the lighter almost before she had come to rest. The dome, DeSilvo assured them, was already well camouflaged, but could and would be opened when the time came to launch theCruzeiro —whenever that time might be. The earthmovers would then bury the dome to hide it even more effectively. Marquez was not in the least assured by DeSilvo’s assurances that theCruzeiro do Sul would fly again.

TheCruzeiro was in takeoff position, but he knew full well that, if need be, the landing field’s automated lifters and transporters could move theCruzeiro to one side of the dome in order to launch another craft—then leave her there for good. The prospect of having his ship literally shoved to one side was not one Marquez enjoyed contemplating.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

Koffield put his hand on Marquez’s shoulder and nodded. He had no need to ask what Marquez meant. “None of us do,” he said. “And the rest of us know it’s worse for you in a lot of ways. He’s seized your ship—your ships.”

Marquez nodded without speaking. TheDom Pedro IV was even less under his control than the poor oldCruzeiro .

“For what it’s worth,” Koffield said, “I think at least most of the others have some idea how much that means. We’ve all lost our homes. But you’ve lost something more than that.”

A bit of my manhood,do you mean? Marquez said to himself.A captain who allows his ship to be taken from him . . . Out loud, his words were scarcely less harsh. “But who knows?” Marquez asked bitterly. “Maybe if I’m a good little boy—if we’re all good little boys and girls—he’ll give me back my spacecraft.”

And there’s the question of what all this has cost you, my friend,Marquez thought, looking at his companion. But, as always, Anton Koffield showed very little sign of the stress and strain of his situation—or much of anything else, if it came to that.

Koffield was of average size, but his slender, well-muscled build made him look smaller than he was. His long, lean face and slightly olive complexion set off his expressive, deep-set brown eyes. Those eyes could tell you a lot—but they rarely did. Koffield kept himself under tight control. His close-cropped brown hair had thinned a bit more over the years, and even acquired a touch of grey—but for all of that he looked, if anything, younger than his years, his obvious vigor and quick, careful intelligence plain to see.

A signaler beeped over the airlock door, indicating that there was a pressure match. Marquez opened the lock door, and both men stepped inside. Marquez closed and sealed the city-side lock door, checked for a pressure match with the PAT, and then opened the PAT-side door.

If the PAT’s exterior was unimpressive, one look at the inside of the Personnel Access Tunnel was doubly so. It was a worn, even shabby old thing, little more than a semiflexible plastic pipe. It was square in cross section, with the corners deeply rounded-off as a concession to the physics of pressure control. The sides of the PAT were scuffed and dirty, and the floor’s rubbery hexagonal walkway grid was half–worn away, making the footing very tricky in places—especially in the stretches far away from the supports. The PAT tended to move around as one walked through it. Toward the center of the longest span, it was a little like walking on a trampoline.

“I wonder where the hell he scavenged this from,” Marquez muttered as he grabbed again for the flimsy handrail and struggled to stay on his feet.

“I’m not sure I want to know,” Koffield said.

Somehow, the two of them managed to stay on their feet all the way to the outer hatch of theCruzeiro . Marquez examined the hatch’s seals and settings carefully before he set to work opening the security locks. “DeSilvo or his robotscould have gotten in here,” he said. “He’s gotten past a lot tougher security than the locks on this door. I can’t swear to it, but Ithink that no one and nothing has come through here since the last time I was in theCruzeiro .”

He opened the security locks and bled the pressure off the lock interior. The two men entered and moved quickly through the lock chamber to the ship’s interior.

Marquez looked around the cabin, checked the displays by the inside of the inner lock door, then stepped back into the lock compartment, and locked down the outer door from the inside, setting the security locks as well as the pressure seals. Then he stepped out of the lock, and back onto the main deck of theCruzeiro . He sealed the lock’s inner door, then repressurized the airlock chamber itself, up to 150 percent of standard. He then set the inner controls so that the lock could not be operated at all from the outside control panel.

With that much overpressure forcing the doors shut against their seals, it would be all but impossible to open the outer hatch with anything short of explosives, or else by drilling a hole through the outer lock door to bleed the pressure. Setting the doors that way would greatly slow their escape from the lighter in an emergency, and it would make it a virtual certainty that no rescuers could get in quickly enough to be of any help.

Koffield watched what Marquez was doing, and did not say a word.

Satisfied with the airlock settings, Marquez knelt on the deck and opened the flush-mounted hatch that led to the bottom deck and the engine room. He went down into the cramped confines of the engineering spaces, Koffield following behind.

It was dark and hot belowdecks. With the ship on standby, the ventilation system was set to minimum, and there were only dim marker lights to lead the way. Marquez broke a sweat almost instantly as he led Koffield through a tight maze of installed equipment and storage lockers. At last he came to the narrow engine-room hatch. The hatch slid open and shut, the door itself fitting into the space between the engine room’s inner and outer bulkheads.

The shielded hatch was heavy, and it took a good solid shove to slide it sideways out of the way. He stepped inside, and Koffield followed. There was barely room for both men at once in the cramped compartment. The ship’s reactionless thrust generator took up the bulk of the space, along with the plumbing and compressors for the auxiliary rocket propulsion system.

He pulled the engine-room hatch to and used the manual clamping lever to seal it down tight. He powered up the compartment’s lights and ventilation system, then switched on every diagnostic and display system, cranking them all up to full. He turned on the intercom system, but set the system into full monitor, focused on the main deck with maximum gain and an open loop circuit. If any third intercom station keyed in—or if anyone tried to tap in from outside the circuit—it would close the loop and set up a audio feedback that ought to produce a head-splitting squeal—and no sound at all from the engine room.

“All right, then,” Marquez said, speaking in a low voice. “There are so many fields and circuits running now, that we ought to be jamming just about any frequency that could penetrate through the hull and the shielding on this compartment.”

Koffield nodded. “Good. I was hoping you’d say that. I’ve been on the lookout for how we might get a chance to talk. Long ago and far away, I had some very nice pocket jamming gadgets with me—but I’ve lost my luggage a few times since then.”

“So let’s talk.”

“Let’s. But bear in mind hecould still be listening in—or his ArtInts could be listening for him, more likely. The technology he’s had a chance to play with—the odds are very good that he’s got some sort of spy gear we wouldn’t even know how to detect, let alone jam.”

“Yeah, but we’ve done the best we could, and the odds on privacy aren’t going to get any better. If what we do say offends him, screw him if he can’t take a joke. So what have you spotted?”

Koffield shook his head. “Whathaven’t I spotted? This place isbig. There are at least five levels below where we were having lunch, and there could easily be more with the entrances hidden away. It’s too big a place for one or two men to do more than a rough survey. Most of what I’ve found so far is hardware and workshops and supply stores.”

“Yeah. That matches up pretty well with what I’ve managed to see.”

“I’m going to have one last look around tonight, before I give it up.”

“Should I head out?”

“Probably not,” Koffield said. “We’ve been at it pretty hard. One more one-man search tonight will be far enough to push our luck. If we keep snooping too long and too much, DeSilvo might not be very happy about it. I don’tthink DeSilvo is likely to have left the crown jewels out in plain sight, but I just want one last chance to see if I can come up with any interesting surprises. Which reminds me, not a surprise, but it’s something odd: Half the gear I’ve seen looks as worn-out as the Personnel Access Tunnel, and half looks like it’s never been used.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that too.”

Koffield nodded. “And I couldn’t even tell you what half the new-looking equipment is for. I think we’re looking at what his robots scavenged from abandoned cities on Glister, mixed in with whatever machines he removed from the Dark Museum, or else what he’s built from Dark Museum plans.”

Marquez frowned and thought for a minute. “Now that I think about it, some of the never-been-used stuff kind of looked new and old at the same time. Gear that’s never been operated, but has been sitting around for a long time.”

Koffield nodded. “Mostof what’s around here has been sitting for a long time. This whole place has been mothballed for a century or more. A lot of the lower sections are still powered down, no heat or ventilation. From what I can see, it all fits with the story he told us.”

“I agree. Even if the story was nuts. Which brings me to my main question—ishe nuts? What do you think—is he sane, or not?”

Koffield shook his head. “I don’t even think it’s a meaningful question. If sanity is having more or less the same perception of the outside universe as those around you—then no, not by a long shot. But DeSilvo isn’tlike those around him—not anymore. Maybe because there hasn’t been anyone around him. He’s lived in one form or another of isolation for a long, long time. He’s had the power of a god for longer than that. He made aworld —even if it’s a world that’s falling apart.”

“And he’sstill a god,” Marquez grumbled. “The robots around here do whatever he wants, almost before he knows that he wants it. He’s got absolute control over this place—and damn near absolute control over us.”

“He might have the power,” Koffield agreed, “but I get the impression that he doesn’tuse it much. Maybe he doesn’t want to use it—even doesn’t dare use it.”

“Why not?”

“For starters, watching all of us constantly would just take too much time, even if he handed most of the job off to ArtInts. The ArtInts would still have to report to him in some fashion—and he couldn’t trust the ArtInts to know what was and wasn’t significant, at least at first. These ArtInts are here to keep the machine running and the base clean. They aren’t programmed for spy work, and for the most part aren’t sophisticated enough to do it well. He’d have to get hugely detailed reports to be sure they didn’t miss anything. It would be close to a full-time job for him just to keep up to date on the reports. Controlling us,using what he knows from spying on us, would be even worse. But it goes beyond that. He doesn’t dare try and control us, for fear of getting us angry—or angrier, I should say. Because, on some level, he knows he needs us. He needs our free and willing cooperation.”

“For what?” Marquez demanded. “Aswhat? That’s what I’ve been sweating over. To use us as lab animals, running his giant underground maze?”

Koffield shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think it’s to ask us our opinion of his research—and his plans, whatever those turn out to be. He brought us here so he could ask us if we think he’s crazy.”

“What?”

“Think about it—he’s in worse shape to judge than we are. We just got through agreeing that he’s been cut off from human society for a long, long time—and been a power answerable to no one but himself for even longer. It’s enough to turn anyone’s head around. Ifwe can see that, so can he.”

“So he needs us around just to be sure he hasn’t gone around the bend?”

“Among other reasons,” Koffield said. “Which reminds me, we had another reason for coming down here. I’d still like to get this bomb removed.”

Marquez looked startled. “I’d almost forgotten about it. Where the hell is it?”

“Right where Sparten left it,” Koffield said. “Or rather, whereI put it back after I removed it to disarm it.” He knelt and pointed to a small blue cylinder, about ten centimeters long and three wide, taped to one of the propellant surge tanks.

Marquez let out a low whistle. “It’s not big, but it wouldn’t have to be, right there. Set that off, and you’d blow all the propellant in that tank. Might or might split the hull, but at the very least it’d make sure neither set of engines ever fired again. Ah—youdid disarm it, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Koffield said. “But then I put it back in place, just in case Sparten decided to check on it.” Moving very slowly and carefully, he reached down and peeled back the two thin strips of very ordinary adhesive tape that held it to the tank. He pulled the bomb away, and handed it up to Marquez.

“It’s safe now, right?” Marquez asked, feeling nervous holding even a small amount of high explosive in his hands.

“It’s a bomb,” Koffield said calmly. “It’s safe enough if you’re careful, but it won’t everreally be safe, until we blow it up out where it won’t hurt anyone.”

“Do you think he’ll let us out on the surface to do that?” Marquez asked. He had imagined that they’d all be forced to stay underground for good.

“Why not? There’s no breathable air. There’s barely any atmospheric oxygen left. Besides, it’s cold enough that all the carbon dioxide’s frozen out and fallen like snow,” Koffield said. “It’s a dead world. He’s got the only light and heat, perhaps for light-years around. Where could we go?”

“Light-years?” Marquez suddenly realized he was in the very rare position of knowing something Koffield did not. “It’s not quitethat far to light and heat. Try about seven hundred kilometers south,” he said triumphantly.

What?A settlement?”

Marquez had actually managed to surprise Koffield. That was a most rare accomplishment. “Bunch of diehard types,” Marquez said, quite pleased with himself. “Probably buried so deep and insulated so well our scans missed their base on the way in. DeSilvo let it slip.”

“Unless he let it slip on purpose,” Koffield said.

Koffield stood up and held out his hand for the bomb. Marquez handed the deadly little thing back to him. Koffield carefully took it and twisted one end of it until the end cap popped free. He slipped the cap into one pocket of his trousers and tucked the rest of the cylinder into the breast pocket of his shirt. “That should make it just a bit less unsafe, anyway. But, getting back to this settlement—what more did he say?”

“Not much at all. I was at the viewport with him this morning, watching the bulldozers and earthmovers taking the outside of this place apart. I said something like it was a mighty cold world out there. And he said, ‘Not all of it is quite so cold as you think.’ I asked what he meant. He hesitated, like he’d said too much. Then he pointed sort of to one side of the viewport, off toward the south, and said, ‘Why not tell you? That way, about seven hundred kilometers. They call it Last Chance Canyon. But I think you’ll find the accommodations more comfortable here.’ After that, he shut up.”

Koffield leaned his back against a convenient bulkhead, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and let out a weary sigh. “Wonderful. He’s been playing games with us so long, so why not play same more? Was he lying or telling the truth? Was what he said spontaneous or planned? Is it important or not?Are we supposed to act on it—or not? All that just for starters.”

Marquez shook his head. “All I know for sure is we don’t know anything for sure. But Ithink it was just a bit of trivia to him.”

“So assuming the place is even there, you have no idea how many people, what they’re doing there, if they know about this place—or about us?”

“I’ve told you all I know,” Marquez replied. “I don’t know if they could help us.”

“Help us do what?” Koffield asked.

“Escape, obviously,” Marquez replied.

“Do wewant to escape? We just went through a hell of a lot of effort toget here,” Koffield pointed out. “There are a lot of reasons for staying here. Besides, it’s much more likely thatthey would need help fromus. With all the equipment in this place, there’s bound to be something they could use. Do we want to let them know we’re here?”

“I grant all that,” said Marquez, “but still we need to think it all through. We can’t just dismiss the thought of leaving out of hand.”

“Even if wedid want to escape, how could we?” Koffield ticked off the difficulties on his fingers. “A habitat seven hundred kilometers away, when we don’t have any transport, we don’t know where it is, we don’t know if they’d let us in, and we can’t survive on the surface without our suits for heat and oxygen. We’d have to walk, carrying supplies that we could use without having to take the suits off for more than a few minutes at a time. Plus it would have to be all of us or none of us. We couldn’t leave behind hostages. The thing’s impossible in so many ways, I can’t imagine DeSilvo even worrying about it.”

“Granted, I suppose,” Marquez said.

“And there’s another issue we’d have to consider. A diehard hab that’s hung on this long hasgot to be on the knife edge of survival as it is. Eight more bodies breathing air and eating food and giving off body waste and heat and sweat could easily be enough to collapse their ecostructure. We could be sentencing them to death just by walking through their front door.”

Koffield frowned, and went on. “Plus, they’d know how much risk extra bodies would mean to them just as well as we do—probably better. They’d have to regard our showing up and endangering them as deliberate. We might be found guilty of attempted murder just because we arrived—and diehard habs can’t afford to run nice, humane prisons. They tend toward capital punishment for most offenses, even minor ones. And they tend to be terrifyingly good recyclers. Alive, we’d be a threat to their survival. Once we were tried, convicted, and sentenced, we’d be a welcome input of fresh resources.”

Marquez felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. “That part I hadn’t considered,” he conceded. “So, we stay away from Last Chance Canyon. Fine. And DeSilvo shouldn’t have any problems letting us go outside long enough to dispose of the bomb. I don’t think DeSilvo will want us to keep it—and we won’t wanthim to have it—not that it really makes any difference.”

“Agreed. Who needs a bomb for a weapon when all you have to do is cut off food, water, and air?”

Marquez nodded, then checked the time. “We’ve probably taken as long as we can get away with on this. Anything else we need to cover?”

“Two things,” Koffield said. “One: Everything I’ve seen so far tells me that DeSilvo can copy advanced technology all day long, but he can’t create it or modify it. Two: There are some things that take more than two or three people to do—not one man and a crowd of robots.”

“What do you mean he can’t create high tech?” Marquez asked.

“I mean the faster-than-light drive, the FTL communicator, the improved temporal confinement system—the robots themselves, for that matter. DeSilvo didn’tinvent any of those things. I doubt he understands all of them completely—some of them he may not understand at all. People use tools all the time without knowing how they work, so long as they get the results they want. And what I’ve seen around here tells me he’s got some sort of autofac—possibly a number of them, in various sizes.”

“Neither of us has spotted one—and we’ve both been exploring,” Marquez objected.

“I doubt we will see one. He’d be sure to keep any automatic manufacturer very carefully tucked away from the likes of us,” Koffield said. “Still, he might have gotten sloppy. That’s the main reason I want to risk having one more look around tonight: to see if I can locate any autofacs. If I can find it, and get an idea of its capabilities, we’ll know a lot more about what DeSilvo can do.”

“Or maybe we haven’t found an autofac because there isn’t one,” Marquez pointed out.

“There’s an indirect clue that hedoes have one. Nearly everything we saw in the Dark Museum had an autofac datastore included as part of the documentation. He’d be able to build copies of virtually everything in the museum. But, even so, an autofacwould limit him in very distinct ways. It could do lots of things—but it couldn’t let him doeverything.

“What you’re saying is that he can only make what a good autofac can make.”

“Right. There must have been some sort of small abandoned landing field or service field or something here, and he built up around that. He must have an autofac, and must have used it to build everything here that he didn’t already have. Subtract the equipment he found in place and reused, subtract what’s obviously been scavenged from somewhere else and brought in, subtract whatever else was made in an autofac—and there’s very little left over.”

“So if he doesn’t have the autofac documentation for a left-handed frangus—”

“He’s got no other way to make one, unless he can give a robot explicit enough instructions, or else make it himself. Itmust limit him in particular ways. If he needs a bicycle, but the autofac only knows how to make a truck, then he has to use a truck instead of a bicycle. And there’s more. He can’t modify.”

“What do you mean?”

“He isn’t able to tell the autofac to change what it builds. If it knows how to build a five-liter bucket, he can’t tell it to build a ten-liter bucket.

“My second point is that I think he’s reached the limits of what one man can do, even with unlimited assistance from robots and ArtInts and autofacs. He can only do large-scale jobs that can be done with all-robot labor, with most of it ArtInt-controlled. I think if he’s going to move forward with—with whatever it is he’s doing, he going to need people—lots of them. Wandella Ashdin’s been working on her presentation. She’s interviewed him several times since she got here. She mentioned something to me this morning: His plan at one point, long ago, long before we came into the picture, was to bring a large staff here. The facility is certainly big enough—far too large for one man, even a megalomaniac. The place could support a staff of hundreds. Maybe we’re just the first recruits.”

“And I’ve been wondering if we were prisoners or guests. You make me think maybe we’re employees—or slaves.”

Koffield smiled. “Let’s try and think of ourselves as independent contractors. A temporary arrangement.”

“Wait a second. If he needs people, warm bodies, so badly—why not just go over to Last Chance Canyon?”

“Maybe we have skills they don’t. Maybe he was lying about Last Chance Canyon, and it’s not there at all. Maybe he thought they were a security risk—or were just likely to come at him with all guns blazing, and snatch everything here, if they knew he existed. Or maybe hehas tried recruiting them, and been told no. Or maybe it’s something totally different, something we haven’t thought of.”

Marquez shrugged and checked the time again. “Now we really have to go,” he said. He powered down the equipment he had activated, set the intercom back to normal function, and slid the hatch open. Koffield followed him out of the engine compartment, and they sealed the engine-room hatch behind them. They made their way back to the upper deck, and Marquez punched a command into the airlock controls. They heard the whir of hidden pumps as the excess pressure was pulled out of the lock chamber.

Excess pressure,Marquez thought as he watched the lock indicators.Yes indeed. He glanced at his companion. That was something, he felt sure, that Admiral Anton Koffield knew all about.