“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.”
“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.