Katerina frowned. “Then that structure is really a tesseract—a four-dimensional hypercube—that’s been unfolded into eight three-dimensional cubes. I remember Salvador Dali used that form in his painting Crucifixion.”

  “Yeah, I read about that painting in a classic turn-of-the-century SF novel. No telling why the aliens made their artifact in that shape—but I hope they haven’t been reading early Heinlein lately!”

  They moved their equipment and oxygen packs to the middle of the artifact’s nearest wall. Martin grumbled, “No sign of a doorbell or an entrance. Didn’t see any obvious door on the other sides either when I ran around this thing.”

  “Maybe there’s some hidden button on it we could push to make a secret panel slide open, like you thought there might be in that pyramid the other day.”

  “Could be. But I’m not going to touch this thing until I’m sure it’s safe to do it. Just because the aliens didn’t electrify their other artifacts to zap us like Emperor Ming tried to do to Flash Gordon in the third serial doesn’t mean they won’t do it this time. And I brought this tool chest with us because it has what I need inside it!”

  Martin extracted a multimeter, high-voltage probe meter, and a short metal rod. He placed the multimeter near the artifact and pushed the metal rod into the soil close to the tower’s side. Then he clipped the high-voltage probe’s ground lead to the rod, gripped the probe’s insulated handle, and said, “When the other end of this thing touches the artifact’s side I’ll see if there’s high voltage running through it. If the reading’s low enough, the multimeter will tell us exactly how much voltage and current is present.”

  The far end of the probe reached toward the artifact—

  Martin froze. He said, “Didn’t expect that!”

  “Let go of it, Martin!”

  Instead he retracted the probe, studying its apparently undamaged distal end. Before Katerina could warn him not to repeat his experiment, he thrust the probe like a rapier back at the artifact. Its point passed through the unscathed gray metal as if the wall in front of them wasn’t there. The end of the probe vanished from view—then partially reappeared as Martin worked it in and out of the artifact, as if he were using a fork to check the doneness of a juicy steak.

  Finally he extracted the probe completely and said, “The aliens have used illusions on us before—but not on this scale. Or maybe this wall is real but is permeable to solid objects … as if what I’m saying makes any sense!”

  “Let me try something, Martin.”

  Katerina walked a few paces back and picked up a baseball-sized rock. She lobbed it at the metal wall—and watched the rock disappear through it without a sound. Several more rocks thrown at the wall met the same fate.

  Martin said, “Pretty obvious what the next experiment is.” Before Katerina’s horrified gaze he passed his left arm up to the elbow through the wall, then extracted it.

  He wiggled the extremity. “No pain—still five fingers—looks okay.”

  Katerina shouted, “That was a stupid thing to do! What if that wall turned solid when your arm was inside or sliced it off like a guillotine blade!”

  Martin shrugged with nervous relief. “We came here to explore the artifact, Katerina. No point holding back now. And you know what comes next.”

  “Yes. We go inside and look for the aliens.”

  “Right—except for the ‘we’ part. I’m going inside and you’re staying here.”

  “No, Martin. We’re in this together. We succeed and live or fail and die as a team.”

  “Being a team doesn’t mean we should jump out of a plane together to see if the parachute we’re testing works. Better for one of us to test it—and if the parachute fails only that person gets splattered, not both. You jumped solo on that first artifact we found. We went into that second artifact together—and both got trapped. Now it’s my turn to go first—and if I strike out, there’ll still be one last out in the bottom of the ninth for you to try hitting a home run for our team.”

  Katerina’s face turned crimson behind her helmet. She stamped her boot and shouted, “I’m not interested in taking turns or your silly metaphors! If only one of us goes inside it should be me! I’m the one who made the aliens angry and put Earth in danger! I’m responsible, I should be the one who takes the risk first!”

  “No, you’ve just given the best reason why you shouldn’t go in there. If the aliens are still mad at you, they might zap you before you have a chance to play Portia and use your oratorical skills on them.

  “On the other hand, I didn’t give them any flak when they offered me their gift. I didn’t want to give up the power they loaned us—and they know I only did it because you tricked me. Even if they bring that up, I’ll quote Scripture and say, ‘The woman made me do it.’ I know that’s not an excuse, I take responsibility for what I did—but maybe it’ll mollify the aliens long enough for me to pretend I’m Perry Mason and save H. sapiens.”

  Katerina started to reply—but everything she tried to say tasted wrong. She knew her greatest objection to Martin’s plan was really based on her love for him and the fear she’d lose him forever. She was willing to die if it meant saving him and Earth. But if he really did have a better chance than her of saving the world—and she couldn’t honestly argue against his point—she’d be putting her own personal good over that of the entire human race.

  It’d be less terrible to die than to live without Martin—but even if it meant more pain for her, she couldn’t let others suffer because of her.

  Behind her helmet, tears trickled down her cheeks. Katerina murmured, “Let’s get you ready.”

  “It’s time, Martin.”

  Katerina checked the gauge on the full oxygen pack she’d just helped him replace on his back after he’d helped her replace the one on hers. “You have enough oxygen for eight hours—if you don’t exert yourself too much.”

  “Okay. Now let’s set up a backup communication system in case we lose radio contact once I go inside.”

  Martin unwound one end of the rope coiled around his shoulder. He knotted it tightly around the middle of the short length of rope connecting their two remaining full oxygen packs.

  “Remember, Katerina. I’ll play out the rope until I enter the tower. After I’m inside, I’ll put some slack in it. If I need you to come in I’ll give the rope a tug and you’ll see the oxygen packs move toward that wall. Hopefully I’ll find the aliens right away, get the answer we want, and leave without needing you to come in after me.

  “But if I’m not back or you don’t see the rope pulled by seven hours from now, come in with an oxygen pack. That’ll mean I’ll either need it soon—or I never will and it’ll be your turn to deal with the aliens.”

  Martin removed a flashlight from his tool chest and stuck it into the belt around his waist. “It could be dark in there, like it was most of the time we were in that pyramid. You’d think the aliens would put a few cheap fluorescent lights from Galaxy Depot in their artifacts—but I bet they don’t need them.”

  As he turned to go Katerina said, “Wait, Martin.”

  She opened a small pouch secured to the belt circling her waist and extracted her most precious possessions. “It wasn’t practical to wear these on the way here—but I didn’t want to leave them behind.”

  Katerina reached toward Martin and fastened her gold chain around his neck. He looked down at his chest and the two golden objects hanging from the chain—his fiancée’s diamond engagement ring and her three-barred cross.

  She said, “These will remind you that I’ll be thinking of you and praying for you while you’re gone. My grandmother in St. Petersburg sent me that cross before we left Earth to protect me here. I hope it’ll keep you safe too.”

  Martin fingered the cross—remembering how Grandma Slayton gave him a scapular for his First Communion back in second grade. She’d told him that if he died while wearing it he’d go straight to heaven.

  But though he knew his saintly grandmother gave him those bits of blessed cloth with the best intentions, he wasn’t a child anymore. “I don’t believe in magic, Katerina.”

  “I don’t either, Martin. But I do believe in love.”

  The plastisuits made their last hug awkward and a final kiss impossible. They exchanged a last “I love you”—and then Martin Slayton marched toward his fate.

  Martin didn’t dare turn around to look at Katerina again as he reached the gray gleaming wall and played out more of the diminishing coil of rope in his hands. Seeing her again for what might be the last time would hurt so much he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what he was risking his life to do. He calmed himself by imagining he was the Golden Age superhero Doctor Fate preparing to walk through the wall of his sealed tower in Salem.

  Then Martin plunged through the wall into darkness. He reached down to retrieve the flashlight in his belt—but stopped when he realized he wasn’t alone.

  For an instant Martin thought he’d found the aliens. Then the room exploded with light and the entire universe crumpled and turned inside out around him.

  He was surrounded by countless three-dimensional visions writhing and floating in every direction like an infinite cascade of manic macroscopic amoebas. Chaotic images in the form of undulating amorphous blobs and shapeless bubbles of kaleidoscopic colors saturated his sight as if he were trapped inside a monstrous lava lamp. They swelled and contracted like balloons being twisted into distorted animal shapes by an invisible insane clown—shifting with hyperactive energy from pinpoint size to that of Number Six’s nemesis Rover and everywhere in-between. Those surrealistic nightmares engulfed his mind—rapidly darting toward and away like a swarm of angry bees stinging the deepest recesses of his brain.

  To his oversaturated senses, existence was distorted into a hallucinogenic reality infinitely more intense than any psychedelic drug could induce. Every sound and noise in the entire cosmos seemed to murmur at once in his ears. He heard the voices of countless unseen creatures whispering their secrets to him. Martin felt himself drowning at the bottom of a crystal-clear ocean with gigantic polychromatic globules like immiscible oil swirling everywhere around him with superheated Brownian motion. His right arm swept out and frantically tried to bat them away—and then his mind recoiled at a new horror.

  He saw the muscles, bones, blood vessels, nerves, and other tissues in his arm simultaneously in a rapidly shifting series—as if an unseen hand were swiftly flipping the pages of an anatomy textbook in front of him. With the slightest effort his eyes could focus on each layer of that limb from the innermost cavities of its bones to the outer fibers of his plastisuit—as if he were wearing overpowered X-Ray Specs from a classic comic book ad. Closing his eyes did nothing to blot out these sights—this unwanted ability extended to seeing through his own eyelids.

  Martin lowered his arm and stared once more into the face and fury of infinity—teetering on the brink of madness. But his will power was just strong enough for his consciousness to adjust slightly to the chaos enveloping him. For fleeting instants the blurred hues of several floating scenes bobbing around him resolved into images he could almost understand—like the stream-of-consciousness happenings in a vivid dream.

  In one ballooning shape he glimpsed a brightly lit room loaded with archaic mainframe computers replete with jerkily rotating reels of magnetic tape. The next glob of scenery contained a reddish-orange desert reminiscent of the Martian plain near the habitation module he knew he’d never see again. Another pulsating blob showed a placid beach scene of the planet’s new Boreal Ocean that lazily rotated until its gently swaying waters were upside down without spilling. Yet another showed verdant fields of young wheat that reminded him of his boyhood farm.

  That montage of confusing scenes ranging from vaguely familiar to incomprehensibly alien flashed toward and away from him in a neverending deluge. Then his vision lingered on the image of a great spiral galaxy that might be the Milky Way viewed from far above its plane, like the last scene in Episode V—its hundreds of billions of stars whirling together like God playfully blowing an enormous pinwheel. In an instant his mind raced through its multitudinous jewel-like stars and dust mote planets—penetrating their knobbly surfaces and molten cores like an early twentieth-century watchmaker using his loupe to examine the exposed gears of a pocket watch.

  On some of those atom-like worlds he sensed countless tiny mites crawling on their crusts, wriggling in their oceans, and soaring in their skies in endless seething cycles of birth and death. Those planets and the animalcules living on them were all different yet all alike—except for one minuscule splotch of matter and energy dabbed into an unremarkable spiral arm. There a collection of creatures that resembled humanity in thoughts and aspirations though not in form occupied a small cluster of planets and solar systems. Slowly … tentatively … painfully, with enormous and difficult effort, they extended their presence, hopes, and dreams from one star to another in a continuing journey of exploration.

  But Martin’s fascinated study of that extraterrestrial race’s history suddenly stopped as a nebulous black shape eclipsed and blotted out those inspiring scenes. Unlike the colorful, formless blobs that still writhed randomly around him, this one sensed his presence—and somehow he knew he was its prey.

  The coil of rope in his hands jerked as he tried to sidestep the approaching menace coming to devour him. He dropped the rope and raised both arms to protect himself as the expanding ebony globule reached and engulfed him. Martin fell into an endless blackness that wasn’t filled with stars. Instead a bleak cratered landscape like the Moon’s rushed toward him head-on.

  If he’d had several more seconds to think, his last thoughts would’ve been of Katerina. But just before he struck that world’s jagged surface only two words formed in his brain.

  “The horror.”

  Martin sprawled face down and motionless on a desolate plain. Wisps of carbon dioxide and nitrogen wafted against his plastisuit beneath a cold ebony sky whose untwinkling stars gave no warmth. The puff of dust stirred up by his impact languidly settled back onto the surface of the shallow crater where his body lay.

  Rumbling tremors sporadically shivered the landscape as the faintest glow of sunlight peeked over the horizon. Here time had no meaning without anyone to measure it—then suddenly an invisible clock started…

  A clear helmet rose from the gritty ground and shook itself. Limbs creaked and stretched like an unfolding deck chair until Martin wobbled to his feet. He brushed dirt from his faceplate and studied his surroundings.

  The dim pockmarked landscape around him had a ruddy hue. Its low dunes and small scattered rocks suggested he was on some unexplored region of Mars. But the oddly sparse stars shining above him formed no familiar constellations. Still peering up at the heavens, he turned around—and knew he wasn’t on Mars anymore.

  The gibbous alien world overhead spanned nearly ten times the Moon’s angular diameter as seen from Earth. It was shrouded by sunlit featureless white clouds with a lemon tinge—like a monstrous Venus. That gigantic world seemed to grow gradually larger as he stared at it…

  Suddenly Martin realized where he was and how well the aliens could manipulate matter, energy, gravity—and time. He laughed with horrified appreciation at the karmic joke they’d played on him. The aliens had made him the only one of humanity’s doomed billions who wouldn’t have to wait a year to see what happened when Mars smashed into Earth.

  For the world high above him must be the Earth of over four billion years before his birth—and he was on the smaller planet rushing toward a Moon-making collision with it.

  From the corner of his eye Martin saw a puff of dust billow up behind a nearby dune. He wondered if a meteorite might’ve slammed into the ground there—and if one with his name on it might be streaking down through this world’s thin atmosphere even now.

  He grunted. It was already a race which would kill him first—suffocating when his oxygen supply gave out in around eight hours, or ending up as road kill in an interplanetary collision. What did it matter if another lethal danger beat them to the punch?

  Still—he wasn’t dead yet and wondered what produced that cloud of dissipating dirt. Fortunately this small world was too young and inhospitable to have produced life big enough to create a miniature dust storm that size. But maybe the aliens had transplanted some large predators here to make his last moments of life even more interesting. Hopefully they hadn’t plucked a memory about Coeurl from his mind—

  Martin stepped warily toward the summit of the nearby dune. As expected, this doomed world’s gravity seemed similar to the “old” Mars. He reached his new vantage point—and bounded down the dune’s far side toward the plastisuit lying prone at its base.

  Just before he reached Katerina she shook herself unsteadily to her feet. Martin cried, “Are you okay? How did you get here?”

  “I think I’m all right. But where’s here?”

  A brief survey of her surroundings and the looming death hanging high in the sky convinced her that Martin’s theory was all too plausible. She said, “A few minutes after you entered the artifact I saw the rope and oxygen packs get pulled partway to the wall. I followed you in, just as we agreed.”

  “It’s my fault! I must have accidentally yanked the rope just before the aliens shanghaied me here. Now we’re both trapped!”

  “Perhaps the aliens maneuvered us both here for a reason, like they’ve done before. We just have to figure out what they expect us to do.”

  “That’s obvious, Katerina. They expect us to die!”

  She ignored his pessimism and climbed to the top of the dune. There she surveyed the landscape in every direction. “I wish I’d brought our binoculars—but I wasn’t expecting to need them inside the artifact.”

  Then she pointed excitedly in front of her. “There! I saw a flash of light near the horizon! It looked like sunlight reflecting off metal—just like that pyramid you found the other day. It must be another artifact!”

 

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