Katerina rejoined her fiancé on level ground and said, “If this world really is the same size as Mars, the horizon should be the same distance on both planets—about three kilometers. We both have about eight hours worth of oxygen—plenty to reach the artifact and explore it! Maybe the aliens are there—or it might even be a way home!”

  “Thanks for the realistic mission appraisal, Pollyanna. Still, going exploring is better than waiting here to suffocate or get splattered. I—”

  He stared at the oxygen pressure gauge on Katerina’s plastisuit, then checked his own. “Oh, no.”

  “What’s the matter, Martin?”

  “You know that eight hours of oxygen you said we had? Make that about one hour for each of us.”

  The infant Earth gradually blotted out more of the sky as they trotted toward the artifact.

  Katerina sighed, “It doesn’t make sense. You weren’t in the artifact more than a few minutes, and it seemed I was transported here almost instantaneously. How did we each lose seven hours worth of oxygen?”

  “No logical reason for it. Probably just one more thing we can thank our extraterrestrial ‘friends’ for.”

  As Martin trudged ahead of her, Katerina stopped to rest for a moment. “That artifact ahead of us looks like the twin of the one on Olympus Mons. If that one could transport us here, maybe this one can get us home!”

  “Or it might send us somewhere even more dangerous. What did you see when you entered the artifact back on Mars, Katerina?”

  “It was a nightmare—like someone cut out chunks of space from all over the universe and threw them at me. Something like a three-dimensional shadow swallowed me—and then I was here.”

  “Same thing happened to me. It reminded me of ‘—And He Built a Crooked House,’ only scarier. If we were being manipulated through a fourth spatial dimension inside that unfolded tesseract it would explain a lot. Like why I could see through my arm and, with a big twist in time added to the mix, how we wound up here—”

  Martin staggered as the ground around him suddenly rocked and quaked. A terrifying vision of the planet tearing itself apart before they reached the possible safety of the artifact flashed through his brain. He dropped to all fours and pressed his knees and palms against the powdery soil—desperately hanging on to the bucking world.

  A scream crackled in his helmet. “Martin!”

  He twisted around until he saw Katerina—then crawled back toward her as fast as the convulsing landscape around him allowed. Her fingertips were dug into the shallowly ridged edge of a gaping rift where the planet’s tortured crust had just cracked. Katerina’s helmet bobbed above the surface as the rest of her body dangled over a wide deep chasm.

  As he neared her, a long thin fissure appeared parallel to and just over a meter from where she desperately clung to the rift’s edge. Katerina cried out as the slab of rock and packed dirt where her fingers maintained a tenuous handhold slowly buckled downward until it rested at a shallow angle with the nearby solid ground.

  The tremors subsided as Martin reached her. He laid his legs flat against the soil as best he could and stretched his right arm and torso towards her. “Grab my hand, Katerina!”

  Her left hand swept upward and he grabbed it with his right. As Martin started to pull her out of the dark deep pit threatening to swallow her, the meter-long plane of rock his upper body rested prone on collapsed to a nearly forty-five degree angle. A wave of dizziness rippled through him as his torso jerked downward on the hard shifting slab. His waist teetered precariously on the fulcrum formed by that tilted sheet of rock and the firm level ground his legs rested on.

  His free left hand clawed at the ground, trying to use it to brace himself so he could pull Katerina up. But his blunt gloved fingers couldn’t dig into the tightly packed soil covering the rock. Now her weight was slowly pulling him down toward the bottomless pit too—

  Katerina screamed, “Let go of my hand, Martin! We’re both going to fall!”

  “No! I’ve got to save you!”

  As he felt his body sliding gradually downward toward their mutual doom, the fingertips of his left hand clawed again at the dense soil for a firm grip it couldn’t find. Then something brushed against that searching hand. Martin glanced over and saw Katerina’s cross hanging from the chain he’d forgotten was still around his neck.

  Instantly he grabbed the cross and thrust its long end into the hard soil. The golden relic was narrow enough to act as a blunt stiletto yet thick enough that it didn’t bend as he used it to stabilize his body and pull Katerina closer to him without sliding down himself. He scooted back a little until his waist was back on firmer ground, then rapidly pulled his impromptu spike out and jammed it into the soil again closer to him. Several more cycles of pulling on Katerina and using the cross like a rock climber’s wedge finally brought them both back to firm flat ground.

  No more tremors rocked the landscape as they lay close together catching their breaths. “You should have let go of me, Martin!”

  “Well, excuse me for saving your life! It sure didn’t look like you were going to make it back up by yourself!”

  “No, I probably wouldn’t have made it. But you could’ve fallen too!”

  “Hey, it worked, didn’t it? And look, I didn’t even bend your cross—I think…”

  “Yes, Martin, I’m glad we’re still alive—but if we’d both fallen into that pit, who’d be left to save the Earth?”

  “If you died, I’m not sure I’d care if it were saved or not!”

  Katerina stared at him. Then she got up and said in a tight voice, “It’s time to go.”

  By the time they reached their goal each had about fifteen minutes of oxygen left. Martin walked up to the towering artifact’s closest gray metal wall. “No way to tell what we’ll find inside. Maybe we’ll see the same weird stuff we did at the other artifact. We could meet four-billion-year-plus-younger ancestors of the aliens—or maybe the same aliens—working inside. Maybe we should go in one at a time, like we did on Mars.”

  Katerina tapped her oxygen gauge. “No time for that, Martin.”

  They walked hand in hand toward the beckoning wall, prepared for anything that might happen—except what did. Their bodies bumped against a hard unyielding wall.

  Martin bounced back from that impenetrable barrier and stared at it. He ran his palms over the cold metal surface—then beat his fists against it. “It isn’t fair!”

  Katerina pressed her fingertips against the wall and examined it closely. “Maybe this wall has a hidden button you press to open a secret panel—”

  “Even if there were one, we don’t have enough time to find it! We’re each down to about ten minutes of oxygen!”

  Katerina frowned. “This bottom cube looks about one hundred meters on a side, like the one on Mars. Maybe there’s an opening farther along this wall, or on one of its other three sides. You go left and check this wall and the one around the corner. I’ll go right and do the same. We’ll meet at the wall on the other side of this one. Hurry!”

  Martin nodded. He walked away from Katerina, carefully examining the wall for a door he doubted was there. Then he turned the corner and did the same for the left side of the cube. But its featureless metal sheen gave no hint of any entrance either.

  He turned another corner and arrived at the side opposite where he and Katerina had started. She wasn’t there—no doubt still scrutinizing the right face of the cube with methodical precision. Martin jogged parallel and close to the wall—still seeing nothing that looked like an entrance. After traveling the wall’s entire length he peeked around the far corner to see if Katerina had been more successful.

  She wasn’t there.

  “Katerina! Where are you?”

  Only static crackled inside his helmet. Then Martin was racing along the side of the cube Katerina should’ve been exploring—panting as he turned another corner to view the empty space in front of the side they’d started from. Sweat beaded over his body and he knew he was using up his sparse oxygen supply more rapidly in this frantic search—but he didn’t care. The planet’s lower gravity helped him accelerate and bound at a dangerous speed along the rocky ground as he skidded around yet another corner to the side where he’d started his own exploring.

  Finally he stopped, standing and gasping for breath along the face of the cube where Katerina and he had agreed only minutes ago to meet. Martin gulped mouthfuls of precious diminishing oxygen and croaked out her name over and over. There was no answer.

  Katerina was gone. In these last few minutes of life before he suffocated, Martin impulsively grasped the golden cross still hanging from his neck and prayed that she was somewhere safe. For an instant he was tempted to fall to his knees and beg for a miracle for her sake. But instead he stared up to see the approaching Earth mocking him—and screamed his defiance at the uncaring heavens.

  Martin glanced at his oxygen gauge. “Running on fumes now,” he muttered to no one on the empty planet. He glared at the blank metal wall in front of him, curled his hands into fists, and flung himself forward to hit the artifact as hard as he could—

  Suddenly he plunged through an instant of blackness into an ocean of dazzling white light. He staggered and tried blinking away the pain in his eyes. His forehead throbbed like a pounding heart.

  Something he couldn’t see grabbed his left arm. He pictured a slimy tentacle attached to a hexadecapod from War of the Worlds yanking him towards its slobbering maw. He jerked away, dimly sensing a gray metal floor rushing up towards him as he fell. His head rattled inside his helmet as he struck the cold hard surface. Then a voice from beyond the grave echoed in his stunned mind.

  “Martin! Are you all right?”

  Two gloved hands helped him back to his feet and a lithe body embraced him. He glimpsed a tear-moistened smile through Katerina’s clear helmet.

  Martin stumbled a step back from her. “Where did you go? I thought you were dead!”

  He blinked his sight back nearly to normal in the brightly lit surroundings. “We aren’t dead—are we? All this light—if this really is Heaven, I wouldn’t mind if you rubbed it in and said ‘I told you so!’ for eternity.”

  “No, Martin. The first wall we reached on that other artifact was solid. So was the one on the side I checked. But when I reached the far side of that cube and touched its wall I felt myself pulled through it and back here. You must have reached it and went through too!”

  She pointed towards nearby objects on the floor. “We’re back in the aliens’ artifact on Mars. There’s the coil of rope you dropped before being transported to that other planet.”

  Martin squinted, following the trail of the end of the rope as it snaked across the floor and disappeared through the wall closest to them. Then his gaze swiveled around the chamber they stood within—scanning its walls and peering up into its heights with growing puzzlement. He gasped, “What the heck are those—”

  “Never mind that now, Martin! We need to get out of here and get to the two full oxygen packs we left outside!”

  Martin glanced at Katerina’s oxygen gauge and then at his own. Their ominous readings made his breath come quicker. “Right. Let’s go change our packs and then come back in for some more exploring. All least the aliens turned off those weird home movies they were playing inside here.”

  He trotted away following the path of the rope on the floor to the nearby wall—and bounced off it. Once again his fists pounded rigid unyielding metal.

  Several meters away on the other side of that barrier, two full oxygen packs lay waiting on the sandy cinnamon soil of Mars. But as one final joke the aliens had contrived the wall to allow passage only one way—and Katerina and he were trapped on the wrong side of it.

  “It isn’t fair!”

  Martin’s fists struck the wall one last futile time. The massive metal didn’t even vibrate beneath his blows. He wobbled with the same queasy wooziness he’d experienced during his first microgravity simulation on the latest iteration of the Vomit Comet during astronaut training. There was no point checking his oxygen gauge to see how many seconds of life he had left. If he died first at least he wouldn’t have to see Katerina suffer when her oxygen gave out too—

  Katerina scanned the floor, then picked up part of the rope halfway between the coil and the wall. “Even if we can’t get out, we were able to get in. And when you tugged on the rope before—help me, Martin!”

  He stumbled toward her and grabbed another section of the rope. They pulled it together and watched a growing length of the cord appear through the wall—until the two oxygen packs still tied on its other end clunked onto the floor.

  A moment later Martin took a deep breath of his replenished oxygen supply and felt his head clear. “Okay, the clock’s reset. We’re still trapped inside here, but we have eight more hours to figure out what’s going on.”

  Katerina nodded, refreshed by her own new full oxygen pack. She looked up and around, scrutinizing the intricate interior of the huge chamber they stood inside. Fluorescent-white light just bright enough to illumine their surroundings glowed softly around them from no obvious source. There was nothing on the gray metal floor except the rocks she’d thrown into this room ages ago and the few items they’d brought with them.

  The wall through which they’d entered the artifact was made of the same smooth metal. But about five meters above the floor the wall’s blank surface merged into what looked like a colossal cat’s cradle suspended above them and extending as high up as she could see. It was constructed of close-packed zigzagging gray metal planks that filled most of the huge structure’s volume. They formed an irregularly perforated ceiling obscuring what lay at the very top of the artifact.

  Each plank in this massive lattice was approximately one meter wide and about twenty centimeters thick. They ranged from five to seven meters long. The planks were joined together at their ends at odd angles—gently rising and falling as they crisscrossed and interlaced with each other like the skeletal beams of a skyscraper designed by M.C. Escher. They wound around an empty central metal shaft with a square opening eight meters on a side extending up into dark unseen heights.

  Katerina’s first impression was that this intricate framework resembled a gigantic metal version of the Gordian knot. But closer examination showed it was really a fiendishly elaborate spiral stairway. Several isolated planks were welded along one side of their narrowest dimension to each of the chamber’s three other walls. They formed shallow ramps leading up from ground level into the innermost recesses of that baffling maze.

  Martin shook his head at the spider web of beams above them. “Looks like somebody’s been playing with the biggest Erector Set of all time.”

  He peered up into the blackness of the vast structure’s square hollow central core. “That would’ve made a great shaft for an elevator—but then, the aliens always make us do things the hard way. Hopefully those planks really lead up to the top of this thing and aren’t like the recursive stairways in ‘Castrovalva.’”

  Katerina frowned. “What?”

  “No, Who—oh, never mind. We’ve got lots of climbing to do. Let’s go.”

  There were no handrails on the alien-made stairway. Martin took the lead while Katerina followed him single file. Each of the gently sloping planks they walked on held their combined weight easily. But they quickly reached the point in their steady climb upward when a fall over the side would result in bone-shattering injury or death.

  Fortunately the planks had short poles the length and greatest width of a baseball bat set into them that served as handholds. Those metal rods jutted vertically upward a bit off-center every one to two meters apart, like the posts for a wire mesh fence.

  Each individual plank angled mildly at its end to join with the next one or, more often, branched into two separate paths. Several times Martin and Katerina had to backtrack when the route they’d chosen turned out to be a dead end. One time the last plank in the path terminated in empty space, with only a wide chasm between it and the other planks. Another time the end of the final plank wound up welded into the wall of the artifact itself. But as their climb continued they became more adroit at picking out the path that kept them moving upward.

  Martin paused, adjusted the coil of rope circling his right shoulder, and tentatively glanced down. It looked like they’d reached the halfway point in their climb. He grabbed one of the nearby poles and tried to forget his memories of the movie Vertigo. Looking up, he still couldn’t glimpse what lay at the top of the artifact. Too many twisting planks still hid their goal from sight.

  Katerina came up behind him. “Anything wrong, Martin?”

  “I’m just wondering what’ll happen if we do find the aliens. Before we entered this artifact I hoped every ‘miracle’ they’d performed from terraforming planets to manipulating matter, energy, and gravity could be done if they only had sufficiently advanced technology and knew a few more laws of physics than we do.

  “I know it’s silly, but I fantasized we’d find the humongous superscientfic machine inside here they’ve been using to do all those amazing things. Then we could study it and learn enough about their science to turn it against them—like spunky earthlings routinely did in the old-time SF pulps. Or maybe we’d be like James Bond and his sexy Russian counterpart breaking into the secret citadel of the latest world-conquering megalomaniac, finding his doomsday device, and punching the big red button on it marked ‘Press This to Save the Earth.’”

  “That’s not realistic, Martin.”

  “Obviously. But if the aliens are so advanced they can send us back through space and time over four billion years, they’re way too powerful to fight. The only weapons we can use against them are our own words. But how do we figure out what to say when we don’t know how the aliens think—and when we can’t even be sure what their motives are or what they want from us?

 

1 2 3 4 5 6