“Good luck hanging onto logic very long in this place, though. What’s any of that stuff for? It’s enough to drive you daffy.”
“We could keep at this for years,” Rosemary complained, “and never know if we got anywhere close to being in the same place as them.”
“What choice do we have?” Lamont asked rhetorically. They had just returned to the lift after spending nearly an hour winding their way through a series of curved corridors, each longer than the last. The sound of their voices reverberated strangely off the weird objects that occupied regularly spaced niches in the pumice-like walls. Each object was a uniquely shaped crystalline structure that seemed to grow in a treelike pattern inside its niche. As they called the names of Constance, Clyde and Rico, their voices were reflected back at them by the objects, but changed in pitch, like a mockery. At the same time, the glow emanating from the objects, which was the only source of light on this level, shifted constantly from vivid pink to poisonous green. Now, slumped against the padded wall of the lift after their fruitless search, they both felt nauseated.
“What if Jackson just took the lift all the way down so that they could put as much distance between themselves and the garden as possible, and work their way back up?” Rosemary proposed.
“Of course it’s possible,” Lamont admitted. “Or maybe they spun the map like a roulette wheel and picked a floor at random. But I doubt it. Jackson is a seasoned explorer—he would have been logical in his approach.”
“Let’s get on with it, then,” Rosemary sighed, pushing herself off the wall enough to summon the navigation sphere from its nest. “Good luck hanging onto logic very long in this place, though. What’s any of that stuff for? It’s enough to drive you daffy.”
“For all we know, that’s the point,” Lamont shrugged, and the motion had the effect of pulling him up a fraction of an inch against the sticky wall.
Brief seconds after Rosemary released the map, the door snapped open again. They were looking at a space that was more open than the level above, with slender glassy columns stretching from floor to ceiling in no apparent pattern. The columns reminded Lamont of something he had once seen in a shop window on Mars: A heated lamp in which globs of wax were suspended in constant, lazy motion. In this case, though, the globules themselves were phosphorescent, casting weird shifting shadows on raised shapes that seemed to grow organically from the soft floor.
“Right,” said Lamont, pushing himself off from the wall. “We’ll just take a quick turn around the center this time, unless there’s some other structure we can’t see from here.”
Rosemary stepped tentatively through the threshold of the lift, looking first to her right and then to her left. Suddenly, she exclaimed, “Oy! Monty!” Without waiting for his response, she dashed outside of Lamont’s view.
Lamont rushed to follow her. She had traversed about forty feet and was crouching down beside a human figure that was draped, prone, over one of the platforms that rose from the floor.
“Constance!” Lamont hissed.