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Hunted Head
3
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“They can be worn over clothes,” Marius murmured, “but they are more comfortable without.” He took down the smaller of the suits and gave it to Sandy; then he pressed another button and a screen whirred out of the wall, cutting the space in two.
Sandy examined it suspiciously. It seemed to be quite opaque, but suppose it was transparent from the other side, so that Marius could watch her undressing—?
On the other hand, why should he bother? She dragged off her sweater and jeans; hesitated for a moment about her underclothes, then removed those also.
She climbed into the suit with a certain amount of reluctance, but it felt much better than it looked, like silk rather than polythene. The transparent part at the top was stiffened and stayed away from her face; there was a thickened inset just opposite her mouth, which appeared to be a microphone—she whispered and felt it vibrate.
“The central opening will close if you smooth it together,” said Marius from the other side of the screen.
Sandy stroked the edges of the slit together and wondered, a moment later, how she was going to breathe.
“The fabric is permeable to air molecules,” Marius mentioned. “Also to sweat. Are you—ready?”
“I’m decent, if that’s what you mean.”
“Good.” The screen slid away into the wall.
Marius looked bigger than ever. Sandy’s suit hung around her in baggy folds, but his, apart from some kind of built-in athletic protector, fitted him like skin.
“Excuse me,” he said, and laid his hands on her shoulders. The fabric of her suit shrank inwards and settled gently against her flesh. Involuntarily Sandy sucked in her stomach and wished she had kept her bra on.
“The suit will adapt itself to give support, if you stroke it in the appropriate places.” Tactfully, Marius turned his back and fiddled with things on one of the high-tech walls. Sandy experimented and found that it was true. Where did you get stuff like this? J. C. Penney’s didn’t stock it, that was certain. She had a hunch Bonwit Teller’s didn’t, either—or Nieman Marcus, come to that.
“Are you ready?” said Marius. Sandy nodded. He pressed something, and the door in the opposite wall slid aside. She looked.
Sandy realized she had been thinking of the room they had left as though it belonged somewhere inside the University. No way could this place have been fitted in… She was standing on the edge of a central space, from which broad hallways—or highways, except that they had ceilings—stretched in four directions, more or less forever. Or on second thoughts, one pair went on until perspective narrowed them to vanishing point; the other pair were only about ten times the length of the campus, and ended blindly.
All four were flanked by a series of bays; from the nearest of these (and no doubt from the others, but she couldn’t see that far) passages and doors opened off, indicating other spaces beyond.
The floor had a funny feel to it. Trying to identify it, Sandy shifted from one foot to the other. Nothing she could define—
Marius had come through while she was not looking. Damn. She had meant to watch… She turned to him, or on him.
“Where the hell are we now?”
Marius said firmly, “You will understand more easily when you have seen more of it.”
He held out a small gadget. It clicked. A moment later a spidery vehicle with two seats perched among its four wheels rolled out of a nearby bay and came to a halt in front of them. Marius handed her into a seat and heaved himself into the one beside her.
His manner reminded Sandy of somebody. After a minute or so she chased down the memory; first day at college, she and a dozen others had been shown round by an administrative assistant who obviously knew every possible question and intended to deal with them in the order and the way that long experience had shown to be most rapidly understood. But she was not a fresher any longer; she had been a stranger in enough different surroundings not to be bemused even here.
She said abruptly, “This is the future. Isn’t it?”
Marius pressed something on his gadget and the car began to roll down one of the longer hallways.
“No, Miss Jennings. This is here and now.”
“Damn it, you know what I mean. What’s the date?”
“Look there.”
He pointed to a sign glowing blue on the wall of the bay they were passing. Sandy remembered seeing something of the sort in the bays they had passed. It read, HOUR 10.23 DAY 73, YEAR 147.
“And before you ask,” continued Marius softly, “I cannot give you a terrestrial equivalent. We are no longer in that universe—the one that contains Earth, and the Milky Way, and nebulae and pulsars and all the rest of it. The dimensions here are completely independent of the ones you know.”
He had said before, “This Universe.” Sandy had not forgotten; she just had not assimilated what it implied.
“But… the gravity’s just the same —Oh. This is an alternate Earth—”
“No, this universe is not an alternative. It is artificial. We are inside an asteroid known as Donander; roughly a cylinder a couple of miles long. The gravity is artificial also. You may have felt a kind of disorientation for a minute or two. That is because the gravity is generated from a flat surface some distance below us, rather than being directed towards the centre of a sphere.”
“Artificial? But—”
“Donander was separated off from the Main Continuum—from the Universe with which you are familiar—a hundred and forty-seven years and seventy-three days ago.
“How—”
“The technology used was developed some centuries after I was born. How it works, I have not the slightest idea. All the inhabitants have been recruited from Earth, from between 1900 and 2800 a.d. Now stop asking questions, and come and see.”
The wheeled spider had turned suddenly at a right angle and rolled through a bay, then along a broad passage; halting finally in front of a formidably constructed, formidably fastened door. This bore a large notice in red characters and a language Sandy did not recognise.
Marius got down and approached the door. He took off his ring and pressed the black stone into a small cavity at the side of the door, which slid ponderously but quietly aside.
He withdrew the ring when there was space for one person to go through, and the door stopped moving. He beckoned Sandy to follow. Once through the door, he pressed a lever and it closed behind them.
More high-tech stuff on the walls—the place they had started from paled by comparison, if only because this was a much larger room. There was another door, heavy but smaller, in the far wall, and a padded bench beside it. Marius waved Sandy toward this and became engrossed in manipulating various controls, stopping frequently to consult one of the digital displays.
Finally satisfied, he beckoned Sandy up and opened the far door. Behind it was yet another grey blank. She went through it this time without hesitation and found herself in a glass-walled structure, rather like the viewing gallery in a wild-fowl sanctuary she had visited once. It looked out on a somewhat similar view, wet and marshy, with open water in the middle and trees on the far side.
Marius sat her down by one of the windows and pressed a pair of binoculars into her hand.
“The far side of the bayou. Over by that tall tree with the scaly trunk—next to the fallen log. No, the large fallen log, not that branch!—Now to the left of it. You see?”
Sandy had never been much of a bird-watcher. It took her some time to adjust the glasses to the width of her eyes, and longer to get them focused on the right spot. At least, she supposed it was the right spot. There was a fair-sized boulder there, basically brown in colour but greened over with what looked like algal slime. A triangular slab at the far end extended on to the bank, and… that must be what she was to look for… something like an outsize dragonfly, blundering from one clump of reeds to another—
The triangular slab moved. Slowly it reared up at an angle to the rest of the boulder. The dragonfly, which seemed not to be very well in control of itself, wavered towards it and disappeared beneath the overhang.
The slab dropped. Somewhere towards the mid-line Sandy caught, momentarily, the glint of an eye.
The paleontology course had been compulsory. She had taken it without much enthusiasm, but some of the more bizarre fossils had made an impression on her; such as a vast, flat, triangular skull with eye-sockets close together in the middle… She regained her breath, which seemed to have got mislaid, and yelled “It’s a labyrinthodont!”
“Certainly.”
“But, but—they were on Earth!”
“From the Late Devonian until the end of the Triassic, I believe.”
“But you said we weren’t in the same Universe as Earth!”
“When I said it, that was the case. We have just passed through an interface between Donander and a Carboniferous swamp. Donander maintains a contact with the main continuum—Earth’s Universe, that is—via the time-point at which it was twisted out, and this enables interfaces to be set up between the two. Once again, I have no idea why, or how; but as you have seen, it works.”
“Then, then—” Sandy was just catching up with the implications, “that’s what this place is for? You’re studying prehistoric life—?”
“No. Or rather, we are, but not for its own sake. Come along, I want to show you something else.”
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