Boundary 1: Boundary (52 page)

"So you think it's the same species, in other words." There was a note of disappointment in Madeline's voice.

"That'd be jumping to conclusions," Helen said. "I can think of other possibilities. To name one, this could have been built by a different species—including a hostile species—but one which had been in contact with the Bemmies long enough for their technological methods to have gotten largely shared. The way that, nowadays, an office building in Tokyo or New Delhi doesn't look that much different from one in New York or Barcelona. For that matter, if aliens had examined the Japanese planes that fought at the battle of Midway, they'd have had a hard time seeing much difference from the American ones."

"True," A.J. said, "provided the two species were physically similar enough. Even if we shared technology with Bemmie, there's still no way we'd design a lot of things the way they do. Or vice versa. That door's quite a bit taller than I'd expect a Bemmie door to be, for instance. Although it could've been a small cargo door, I suppose."

"How about getting it open?" Madeline asked.

"Brute-force it," Joe proposed. "You don't want to try anything involving arc-cutting in there."

"Why . . . oh."

"'Oh' is right, A.J. You want to find out what it's like to be on the inside of a giant neon light tube? At the least you'd probably fry your electronics, and at the worst you'd fry yourself. The pressure's slightly higher down there, but I don't know that it would make enough difference—and we sure don't want you to be the experimental guinea pigs. No way around it. You'll have to come back here and get some of the excavation equipment."

A.J. sighed. "Oh, now that's going to be fun. Even with the low gravity."

"Well, you could just come back and forget about it, and we all just sit around swapping jokes until the rescue shuttles get here in a couple months."

"I do not think so," Helen said firmly. "Okay, guys, let's head back. Tomorrow is going to be a big day."

Madeline's voice was resigned. "More like tomorrow and the day after, at least. I've done operations like this before—don't ask where or why—and I think you're underestimating the difficulty we're going to have getting that equipment down here."

Helen thought the security specialist was probably right. But she didn't really care. She was bound and determined to get into the base. If that meant dragging equipment deep into Martian caverns, well, it couldn't be that much worse than setting up a major dig.

She led the way, as they left, already working on the problem. "We'll need to set up a field camp and supply area for this operation. We don't want to have to travel all the way back to
Thoat
and main camp whenever we run short of a few items. The exotic location aside, this isn't fundamentally much different from any major dig. When you're out in the badlands, you don't hop in a vehicle and drive off every time someone's thirsty and wants a soda."

"Yeah, sure. But at least you didn't have to worry about bringing your own air supply."

"Shut up, A.J.," Madeline growled. "Besides, even that's really no big deal. I once spent four weeks in a camp so high up in the Himalayas we had to haul in oxygen. It was a pain, but not that bad."

She didn't start laughing until A.J. was choking audibly. "Just kidding. I didn't really spend four weeks on the slopes of Mt. Everest."

"Well, praise be for small favors," A.J. muttered.

"It was only eleven days—and it was on the slopes of Denali in Alaska, not Everest in Nepal, and it wasn't so high up that we needed oxygen tanks very often. I won't tell you which slope, though. That's still classified because my boss thinks someday the Athabascan Indians might—"

"I don't want to hear it, Madeline!"

"Okay, people," Joe said, several days later. "I think your best bet is to use the 'ripper' on the door."

He and Bruce were the only ones remaining topside. With the alien base discovered and the strong possibility of new writing being found inside, Rich was now on site with Madeline, A.J., and Helen. Joe hated being left behind, especially since as an engineer the alien base no doubt held as many exciting possibilities for him as it did for anyone else. But dragging a broken-legged man through tunnels didn't appeal either to the others or even to the broken-legged man himself.

Helen felt sorry for him, but at least it kept him in the safer area. She didn't feel very confident about the safety of these underground mazes, no matter how placid Mars' geology was supposed to be.

Neither, to her dismay, did Chad Baird. "Be very careful down there, Helen," he'd said. "Yes, Mars is geologically stable compared to Earth. But that's just an average, on a planetary scale. Any
particular
spot on Mars might be far more dangerous than most places on Earth. And while I'm fascinated by what you've found down there, I really don't like the looks of it, from an explorer's standpoint. Whatever the mechanism is that created those ice caverns, it has to be a fairly active one or the ice wouldn't still be there at all. And now you'll be introducing a new disturbance. So be careful."

Unfortunately, A.J. had been there to hear the conversation. For two days thereafter, he'd gone around periodically intoning lines from an old science fiction movie:
Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Joe thought it was funny.

Joe would.

So, Helen had insisted on delaying the operation until they could put whatever supports and braces they could design and make in that last run of tunnel that had cracks in the roof.

It wasn't much, since their material supplies were limited. Mars gave up no wood for timbering, of course. But at least they had a comparatively secure route from the door to their field camp and supply dump. They'd set that up at the base of "Melted Way," the odd path that led up from the large cavern.

Madeline and A.J. dragged the "ripper" towards the alien door. Unlike the sort of rolling-valve doors found on Phobos, this door seemed to be designed to split in the center and slide up and to the side. This made the "ripper," a bastard descendant of a forklift and the jaws of life and a few other gadgets, ideal for the job. It could insert its pair of flattened-tine lever arms into the crack in the door and pull it apart by main force, assuming the door wasn't stronger than a bank vault.

A.J. positioned the lever arms above and below the area where he believed there was a sort of bolt or other fastener according to his sensors. Then, he and Madeline braced the ripper—which he'd promptly nicknamed "Jack"—solidly against the rock walls with its built-in extensible supports.

"Okay, everyone clear back. We don't want to take any chances on being hit by something if either the door or Jack breaks."

No one debated that. All four of them returned to the top of Melted Way before A.J. sent the command.

"Okay, Jack—let 'er rip!"

They were able to watch the operation on a screen, from sensors left on site. The fuel-cell-powered ripper hummed, and there was a sudden screeching noise audible all the way down the corridor as the lever arms inserted themselves forcibly into the narrow crack between the door valves. The humming abruptly dropped in pitch and became louder as it began to force the doors open.

A.J. watched telltales on the sensors rising. The stress built up, started to edge towards the caution zone.
"Stop."

"No go?" Madeline asked.

"Bah. I have not yet begun to fight. I just don't necessarily see that I have to do it in one pull. Repetition and overstrain, that's the key. The same way you break a piece of metal by continually bending it back and forth. I'm betting that after umpteen million years, even that alien material is subject to being fatigued."

At A.J.'s direction, the ripper began a series of sudden, very high power pulls, none of which lasted long enough to endanger the machine. The ripper also began moving the tines up and down and trying to twist them, exerting force along most of the length of the opening.

Then A.J. ordered it to give another long pull.

With a suddenness that caused them all to jump, the door split wide open. The ripper emitted another high-pitched whine before shutting down.

"We're in!" A.J. announced exultantly.

Once they arrived at the door, they moved the ripper out of the way and retracted its supports. Then, slowly, they entered the alien base.

A gray-white chamber about ten meters wide greeted them, with another door directly opposite the one they had forced. This one was of a single piece, a sort of flat-bottomed circle, and seemed to open inward, towards the interior of the base. A wide construction that looked rather like a helicopter rotor whose two blades had been dented on alternate sides with sledgehammers stood out from the center of the door.

"That's a locking valve," Madeline said decisively. "Like the ones on some submarine doors, except it's much bigger."

"Don't tell me," A.J. grumbled. "You've spent time on submarines, too."

He raised his hand abruptly. "I know, I know. It's still classified because your boss thinks someday he might need to take our new ally the Sultan of Cumquat deep-sea fishing. I don't need to know the details, however. That's because I agree with you. This is an airlock, and that's why it opens inward. If someone left the outer door open, you can pull all you want and it'll still be held shut by the higher pressure in the base."

"I think you're right, A.J.," Rich said, pointing. "Those markings look the same as those we've found near airlock doors on the Phobos base."

Helen's trained instincts as a paleontologist were leaning her toward the same conclusion. The locking valve had confused her until Madeline identified it, because it was out of human scale. But now she could see that the bladelike extensions were well positioned for the long manipulating arms of a
Bemmius
.

"Yes. I think this was a Bemmie base, too, not that of a different species. If Rich is right, they even used the same language."

"Not necessarily," Skibow cautioned. "There are a lot of subtleties in the way Bemmie script works that Jane and I are unsure about. We'll still very much groping our way, from a cultural distance far greater than any we face dealing with a human language. Even there, don't forget that to someone unfamiliar with any of them, the way Chinese and Japanese and Korean are written all look quite similar, even though they're not very similar at all."

He moved closer and scrutinized the markings. "I should have said that the markings here look similar, not the same. They might be identical, but that would take closer examination. And keep in mind that even the markings on airlocks in Phobos aren't always identical, either."

"Okay, Rich, caution noted," Helen said. "But, more and more, I'm thinking that Bemmie was quite similar to us in many respects, whatever the differences elsewhere. One of those similarities—if we're right—being the fact that they didn't always get along with each other any more than we do."

Madeline, meanwhile, had been studying the lever arms. "If this works anything like ours, it's mechanical, and probably a sort of turning lever or screw arrangement. Did they have a preferred direction? Clockwise or counterclockwise, I mean."

Helen shook her head. "Not that I've ever been able to determine. Rich? A.J.? Any opinion?"

A.J. shook his head. So did Rich.

"May as well just try one, then, and see what happens," Madeline said. "Experiments-R-Us. Let's start with clockwise. Rich and A.J., why don't you go over to the one on the right and lean down on it. You both weigh more than I do, so you'll get more leverage. Meanwhile, I'll pull up on the other one."

"Damn lady weightlifter." But A.J. went over to the lever she was pointing to.

"Don't be silly, A.J.," Madeline said sweetly. "I'm quite sure you could lift a much heavier weight than I could, so small a woman am I."

She sounded about as sincere as a praying mantis extolling the culinary virtues of broccoli. Helen almost laughed out loud. "What do you want me to do, Madeline? Give you a hand?"

"No. Just stand there and watch. I have a feeling we're going to need an observer to let us know if we've moved it at all. Otherwise we could wind up straining at it for hours, not knowing."

Once they were in position, Helen gave the signal. A.J. and Rich essentially jumped on the right side while Madeline pulled upward on the left.

To their surprise, the handle moved grudgingly about ten degrees before it stopped. "Maybe that's got it!"

The door, however, would not open. A.J. inserted Fairy Dust around the rim and determined that some sort of bolts were retracted.

"But something else is blocking the entrance and keeping the door from swinging open. We'll have to push it in."

That called for reconfiguring the ripper into a device more like a short, fuel-cell-powered battering ram. After about twenty minutes, the ripper started pounding regularly on the door.

"You do realize that we are to Arean archaeology what Indiana Jones would have been in real life," Rich commented dryly. "You watch, Helen—future generations of our colleagues will call us looting barbarians."

Helen smiled. "Yes, I can see it now. 'Helen the Hun' and 'Skibow the Scalper.'"

She shrugged, a bit uncomfortably. "It rubs me the wrong way, too, being honest. But . . . what can we do? On Earth we have the luxury of unlimited air when we want to get into an ancient ruin."

"True enough," Madeline said. "Even digging in Antarctica was a picnic compared to this."

A.J. would never leave well enough alone. "Why were you
digging
in Antarctica? Never mind, never mind. Still a deep, dark secret."

"Well, the name is, but that's just to protect the family from publicity. Not the fact. I was trying to find a corpse. It was all very anticlimactic, in the end. I was called in because the guy who disappeared knew a lot of classified information. But there turned out to be no foreign skullduggery involved at all. Not a terrorist in sight. The damn fool just got drunk and wandered off too far. You really, really, really don't want to do that in Antarctica."