There was no sense of motion, but he was indeed falling toward those impossible stars, shining there in the dark heart of a moon. No--that wasn't where they really were, he felt sure. He wished, now that it was far too late, that he had paid more attention to those theories of hyperspace, of transdimensional ducts. To Maisam Dhala, they were no longer theories.432Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZl8DVKlMOg
Maybe that pylon on Japetus was hollow; maybe the "roof" was just an illusion, or some kind of diaphragm that had opened to let him through. (But into what?) As far as he could trust his senses, he seemed to be dropping vertically down a huge rectangular shaft, several thousand feet deep. He was moving faster and faster---but the far end never changed its size and remained always at the same distance from him.
Only the stars moved, at first so slowly that it was some time before he realized that they were escaping out of the frame that held them. But in a little while it was obvious that the star field was expanding, as though rushing toward him at an unbelievable speed.
The expansion was nonlinear; the stars in the middle barely seemed to move, while those toward the edge accelerated more and more swiftly, until they became streaks of light before they finally vanished from view.
There were always others to replace them, flowing into the middle of the field from an apparently inexhaustible source. Dhala wondered what would happen if a star came right at him; would it continue to expand until he plunged directly into the face of a sun? But not one came near enough to even show a disk; eventually they all veered aside, and streaked over the edge of their rectangular frame.
And still the far end of the shaft came no closer. It was almost as if the walls were moving with him, carrying him to---where? Or was he, in reality, motionless, and space was moving past him?
He suddenly realized that not only space was involved in whatever was happening to him now. The clock on the bola's little instrument panel was also behaving strangely.
Normally, the numbers in the tenths-of-a-second window flickered past so fast that it was nearly impossible to read them; now they were appearing and disappearing at discrete intervals, and he could count them off one by one without difficulty. The seconds themselves were passing with unbelievable slowness, as though time itself were coming to a halt. At last, the tenth-of-a-second counter froze between 5 and 6.
Yet he could still think, even observe, as the black walls flowed past at a speed that might've been anything between zero and a million times the speed of light. Somehow, he was not in the least surprised, nor was he alarmed. On the contrary, he felt a sense of calm expectation, such as he had known when the space doctors had tested him with hallucinogenic drugs. The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to be afraid of. He had traveled these millions of miles in search of mystery, and now, it seemed, the mystery was coming to him.
The trapezoid ahead was growing lighter. The hominous star streaks were paling against a milky sky, whose brilliance increased moment by moment. It seemed as if the bola was heading toward a cloud bank that was uniformly lit by the rays of an unseen sun.
He was emerging from the tunnel. The far end, which until now had remained at that same indeterminate distance, neither approaching nor receding, had suddenly begun to obey the normal laws of perspective. It was coming closer, and steadily widening before him. At the same time, he felt that he was moving upward, and for a fleeting instant he wondered if he'd fallen right through Japetus and was now ascending from the other side. But even before the space pod soared out into the open he knew that this place had nothing to do with Japetus, or with any world within the human experience.
There was no atmosphere, for he could see all details unblurred clear down to an incredibly remote and flat horizon. He must be above a planet of enormous size---maybe one 1000 times bigger than Earth. Yet despite its extent, all the surface that Dhala could see was tessellated into obviously artificial patterns that must've been miles on each side. It was like the jigsaw puzzle of a giant that played with planets; and at the centers of many of those squares and triangles and polygons were gaping black shafts---twins of the chasm from which he had just emerged.
Yet the sky above was stranger--and, in its own way, even more disturbing---than even the impossible land beneath. There were no stars; neither was there the darkness of space. There was only a softly glowing milkiness that gave the impression of unending distance. Dhala remembered a description he'd once heard of the dreaded Andean "whitehout"--"like being inside a ping-pong ball." Those words could be applied perfectly to this strange place, but the explanation must be utterly different. This sky could be no meteorological effect of mist and snow; there was a perfect vacuum here.
Then, as Dhala's eyes got used to the nacreous glow that filled the heavens, he became aware of yet another detail. The sky was not, as he had thought at first glance, completely empty. Dotted overhead, quite motionless and forming apparently random patterns, were myriads of tiny black dots.
They were hard to see, as they were only points of blackness, but once detected they were quite unmistakable. They reminded Dhala of something--something so familiar, yet so insane, that he would not accept the parallel, until logic forced it upon him.
Those black holes in the white sky were stars; he might have been looking at a photographic negative of the Milky Way.
Merciful Allah! Where am I? Dhala asked himself; and even as he posed the question, he felt sure that he could never know the answer. It seemed that space had been turned inside out: this was not a place for humans. Though the bola was comfortably warm, he felt suddenly cold, and was afflicted by an almost uncontrollable trembling. He wanted to close his eyes, and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him; but that was the act of a coward, and he refused to yield to it.
The pierced and faceted planet slowly rolled beneath him, without any real change of scenery. He guessed that he was about ten miles above the surface, and should be able to see any signs of life easily.
But this whole planet was deserted; intelligence had come here, worked its will upon it, and moved on again. Then he noticed, bumped above the flat plain perhaps 20 miles away, a roughly cylindrical pile of debris that could only be the corpse of a gigantic ship. It was too far away for him to see any details, and it passed out of sight within a few seconds, but he could make out broken ribs and dully gleaming sheets of metal that had been partially peeled off like the rinds of an orange. he wondered how many thousands of years the wreck had lain here on this deserted checkerboard---and what kind of creatures had sailed it between the stars.
Then he forgot about the derelict, for something was coming up over the horizon.
At first it looked like a flat disk, but that was because it was heading almost directly toward him. As it approached and passed beneath, he saw that it was spindle-shaped and several hundred feet in length. Though there were faintly visible bands here and there along its length, it was hard to focus on them; the object seemed to be vibrating, or maybe spinning, at a very rapid rate. It tapered to a point at either end, and there was no sign of propulsion. Only one thing about it was familiar to human eyes, and that was its color. If it was indeed a solid artifact, and not an optical illusion, then its creators maybe shared some of the emotions of men.
But they certainly did not share their limitations, for the spindle seemed to be made of silver.
Dhala moved his head to the rear-view system to watch the thing drop behind. It had ignored him totally, and now he saw that it was falling out of the sky down toward one of those thousands of great slots. A few seconds later it disappeared in a final flash of silver as it dived into the planet. He was alone again, beneath that sinister sky, and the sense of isolation and remoteness was more overwhelming than ever.
He then saw that he was also sinking down toward the mottled surface of the giant planet and that another of the rectangular chasms yawned immediately below. The empty sky closed above him, the clock crawled to rest, and once more his bola was falling between infinite black walls, toward another distant field of stars. But now he was sure that he wasn't returning to the Solar System, and in a flash of insight that might've been wholly spurious, he knew what this thing must surely be.432Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLkbfwbTpfs
It was some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of time and space. He was passing through what would one day come to be known as the Pylon Express!432Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAWRk9yi9vZ
