Constance felt a sudden rush of rage, like a wall of fire that washed over her face, searing her tears away. It took all of her self-control not to lunge at the doll-faced interloper.
The strawberry-haired medic was standing several paces away on one of the winding paths that looked like they were made of subtly-illuminated, frosted glass flagstones. She was wearing the olive green lab coat that so perfectly matched her eyes and carrying her black medical satchel in one hand. How long had she been standing there? Constance wondered. How long had she been listening?
Lamont looked at Rosemary and then lifted his wristwatch. “Blimey,” he said. “Time does fly, doesn’t it?”
“In the right company,” Rosemary smiled. “I’m sorry for interrupting. I’m just bonkers enough that I’d like to sleep in my own bunk tonight, and there’s a rule about not going anywhere alone.”
“You’re not interrupting anything,” Lamont assured her mildly, picking up his recorder, which had been placed on the outcropping.
Constance felt a sudden rush of rage, like a wall of fire that washed over her face, searing her tears away. It took all of her self-control not to lunge at the doll-faced interloper.
Slinging his recorder over his neck, Lamont turned back to Constance. Something in his expression indicated that he perceived her sudden shift in mood. His eyes clouded. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he assured her. “And this time I won’t get distracted. Meanwhile…”
He stepped closer to her, lightly brushing her sleeve with an outstretched hand. “I’d consider it a favor if you stayed away from that grove.”
Constance nodded, clenching her jaw. “I’ll think about it.”
Lamont smiled disarmingly. “And try not to break anything, love.”
Constance laughed, snorting, hating herself for it. “No promises.”
His smile turning into a grin, Lamont lifted a hand to his eye, his thumb and forefinger pinched together. “Be seeing you.”
“Try not to break anything?” Rosemary asked as they strolled back toward the center of the garden.
“So you weren’t listening the whole time,” Lamont speculated. Drawing his cigarette case from his pocket, he flicked it open, looked at the contents, and closed it again.
“What do you take me for?” The medic asked with a wounded tone.
“Chief foreman of the rumor mill, last I checked,” Lamont half-smiled.
“I just say that to keep you in line,” Rosemary smiled. “But what did she break?”
“Nothing,” Lamont shrugged. “She was telling me that she’d had half a mind to try toppling that statue. Until she actually touched it, that is.”
“She’s got a temper, that one,” Rosemary acknowledged.
“Even so,” Lamont admitted, “I don’t know what would have inspired her to take it out on the—whatever it is.”
Rosemary stopped, turning to Lamont. “Everyone wants to be adored,” she said.
Lamont looked at her quizzically. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“God, but you’re daft,” Rosemary rolled her eyes theatrically. “Can’t you see she was jealous?”
The awkward silence that followed Rosemary’s rather uncalled-for assertion, as Lamont saw it, was mercifully short. Lamont found himself in the unusual position of feeling a desperate need for a biting witticism to undermine the medic’s observation, and yet finding one apparently unavailable. He was merely troubled. His preoccupation was such that he was startled when the curved doors of the lift snapped open to reveal the landing bay from which they had arrived some hours earlier.
Rosemary stepped out first, followed by Lamont. Their eyes scanned a scene that had grown no less astounding for its familiarity; the cavernous, wedged-shaped space with opalescent walls and floors joined by gentle curves. It was large enough to contain a half-dozen strangely-shaped objects that were presumably vessels for space travel, if the additional presence of Westward’s asteroid pod was any indication. It was remarkable to Lamont that, among the strange combination of shapes and textures represented in the other mechanical occupants of the bay, the vaguely menacing cicada-like silhouette of the asteroid pod looked almost normal. It at least had recognizable components with its bulbous windows, pistons, rivets and supply ports. Most of the other vessels, if that’s what they were, lacked a single feature that Lamont could clearly identify on cursory inspection.
“Ed has his work cut out for him,” he remarked.
Rosemary gave a nod of agreement and then cupped her hands around her mouth before shouting: “Oy! Spratt, you here?”
The call echoed briefly around the large chamber, but was not met with any reply. The two glanced at each other.
“Our radios might work at this range,” Lamont suggested, “If they’re anywhere nearby.” He lifted his wrist radio, pressing a button on its side to activate the microphone. “Townsend here. We’re at the asteroid pod. Anybody copy?”
He released the transmit button and they waited for what felt like a long moment. Then, Ed’s voice sounded from the small speaker, recognizable through intermittent waves of static. “Spratt here. If…chamber is North…in the East one.” Another pause, and then: “Looking for…Ashton…”
Lamont felt his brow furrow. Rosemary bit her lower lip and lifted her own wrist radio. “Your signal’s weak, Ed. Can you repeat that last bit about Clifford?”
Ed’s voice answered a few seconds later, but not through the wrist radio’s speaker. Instead, it was behind them. Turning around, they saw Ed Spratt emerging from the shuttle they had just exited. The collar of his coveralls was open and his sleeves were rolled up. “I said that I’ve been looking for a promising reverse-engineering candidate with Ashton. Say, why do you two look so spooked?”
“Through the static, it sounded as if you said that you were looking for Ashton,” Rosemary explained, pressing a palm to her chest in relief.
“How’d you do that?” Lamont asked. “We just got out of that lift.”
“No you didn’t,” Ed assured him. “It’s in the same place as the shuttle you were in before, but it’s a different one. Here, I’ll show you.”
Ed made a loose gesture toward the elevator entrance, which snapped open again as he stepped toward it. Exchanging curious glances, Lamont and Rosemary followed the Chief Technician back into the curved interior of the shuttle. When they had pressed themselves against the padded walls, the silvery control sphere descended predictably from its nest, its polished surface expanding to display their section of the tower. With deft precision, Ed used his hands to rotate the map toward them, so that they were seeing something like a plan view, from the top of the tower.
“See, the landing bay is divided into four quadrants,” Spratt explained. “The other sections of the tower we’ve visited so far have all taken up the entire circumference of the structure, with the shuttle column visible in the center. But most of the tower is more like this, divided into wedge-shaped sections. Now watch the middle.”
Holding the glittering map steady with one open hand, he tapped one of the four wedges. In the middle of the map, they could see several pill-shaped objects, one of which was glowing red. Lamont knew from experience that this represented the shuttle which they occupied. While he watched, the glowing marker slid around the perimeter of the tiny circular representation of the central column. At the same time, another pill-shaped shuttle, this one the same silver-white as the rest of the map, slid aside to make way for it. Ed dropped his hands, and the map shrank back into the surface of the spherical control, which ascended back into its nest before the door snapped open again. Once more, they were looking out into the landing bay, but it was a different landing bay, containing another assortment of strange-looking vessels and no asteroid pod.
“Of course!” Lamont exclaimed. “Now that I think on it, it would have to work this way. In a structure of this size, it wouldn’t make sense for the lifts to just go up and down.”
“Right,” agreed Ed. “The shuttles are isolated units that can change places with each other as needed. The column itself can hold up to four units on a level, and—I don’t know—maybe dozens or hundreds of them in total. It’s pretty ingenious.”
“But how does it work?” Lamont asked. “How do they keep from getting tangled up?”
“Look at the navigation ball,” Spratt said, cocking his head up toward the ceiling of the shuttle. “I don’t think they’re attached to anything. There’s nothing to get tangled.”
Lamont stepped hastily out of the shuttle.
Rosemary rolled her eyes, all but shoving Lamont aside as she stepped out into the landing bay. “You lads get distracted by the silliest things,” she sighed. “Can we just get one with it? I’m clammed.”
The shuttle’s threshold snapped silently shut as Ed followed Rosemary into the landing bay. Lamont found himself momentarily reeling at the scale of it all. Each bay occupied only a quarter of the tower’s circumference, and yet it was large enough to contain at least half a dozen inscrutably-shaped vessels, some of them twice as big as the asteroid pod, with plenty of space between them. The vessels were an eclectic mix of bulbous, angular and smooth shapes. Metallic surfaces glinted softly, juxtaposed with swaths of matte black composite. Some ships resembled abstract sculptures - collections of cubes, pyramids and spheres fused together in asymmetric configurations. Another had a long teardrop-shaped body sprouting an array of thin fins.
One vessel near the curved outer edge of the chamber stood out from the others. About forty feet long, it resembled nothing so much as an uncut cigar, its hull a nearly featureless metallic surface that looked purplish in the ubiquitous, opalescent glow of the bay. Clifford Ashton sat cross-legged beneath the ship, inspecting an open panel studded with crystals and filaments. Surrounding him was a collection of equipment that Lamont recognized as coming from Westward; tool boxes and instruments in cases or on wheels. He sprang to his feet as the group approached, nearly hitting his head on the underside of the ship.
"This one shows some familiar design principles," he explained eagerly. "There’s a definite electrical system, at any rate. It’s only a matter of time before we find a way to get into it."
“Brilliant,” Rosemary yawned, her eyes skeptically tracing the length of the perfectly symmetrical vessel. “Which end’s the front?”
Lamont gazed up at the monolithic walls enclosing them. "This tower is miles high," he mused. "It could hold thousands. Tens of thousands even."
He turned to Ed Spratt. "Why are we so certain this place is abandoned? We’ve seen so little of it, maybe it’s just a coincidence that we haven’t run into anybody. What if these ships still belong to someone? We could be stealing a vehicle that's still in use."
Ed shrugged. “We’ve been using everything from screwdrivers to welding torches on these things for hours. As advanced as they are, you’d think that if anybody cared about them, we would have had company by now.”
“Fair point,” Lamont agreed, looking at the weird artificial viscera that was hanging out of the panel Clark had managed to open in the side of the vessel. Their situation was desperate enough to warrant a bit of moral flexibility. Still, he hoped fervently that the tower's original builders were not somewhere nearby, watching this act of technological larceny unfold.
Ed glanced at his wristwatch. “We’re running late,” he observed. “I need to get back and see how the repairs are progressing. Let’s go, Ashton.”
“Let’s hope for your sake that they’ve got the showers working,” Rosemary noted.
“I really feel like I’m on the verge of unlocking this thing,” Clifford objected, his eyes wide and sincere. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather stay here and keep working for a while.”
Lamont and Ed regarded each other questioningly. Spratt’s eyes were typically inscrutable behind the thick lenses of his glasses.
Rosemary looked at the two men with an expression of disbelief and put her hands on her hips. “It ain’t all the same. No way you’re staying here by yourself.”
Clifford turned appealingly to Ed. “You were just telling me how frustrated you are that the repairs are going to take so long. If we can get another way of moving materials to Westward, we might be able to cut that time in half. I’m just asking to do my bit.”
Ed rubbed the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “We wouldn’t be doing this at all if we weren’t badly bottlenecked. The payoff is worth a few calculated gambles as far as I’m concerned.”
“I don’t think you are concerned,” Rosemary replied pointedly. “Clifford’s undergone a psychological shock—he needs rest and observation.” She turned her attention back to the mousy engineer. “Come along, lad. Doctor’s orders.”
“I hate to point it out,” Ed smiled thinly, “But you’re not a doctor. You’re just a medic.”
Rosemary lowered her hands from her hips, balling them into fists. Her green eyes were flashing dangerously.
“How about captain’s orders?” Lamont interjected. “No one’s to be by themselves in this tower for any amount of time. That comes from the top.”
Ed made a gesture of exasperation. “Okay, you’ve got me there.”
“That’s a good rule,” Clifford agreed. “There must be someone who can stay here with me.”
“I sure as hell can’t,” Ed said, glancing at his watch again.
“Nor I,” agreed Rosemary. “I’ve been up for eighteen hours.”
Lamont looked at Clifford, and then at Rosemary. Both were returning his gaze with pleading expressions. He licked his lips.
“Rosemary’s right,” He finally decided. “As urgent as the situation seems, we all need to get rest and not take undo chances. I’m for going back.”
A few minutes later, they were filing back into the asteroid pod, a slightly dejected-looking Clifford trailing in the rear.
“Thanks, mate,” Rosemary whispered to Lamont as they settled into their bucket seats in the cockpit behind Ed.
Lamont sighed and flipped open his cigarette case. “I never could bear up very long under a woman’s scorn,” he admitted.