Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (43 page)

“But why a separate gravitational field for this place?”

He shrugged. “Why not? They’d mastered gravity. They used the Dead World in the terraforming process and, unless they wanted to risk falling off the surface, its own gravitational field was not only a safety feature but a great convenience.”

“Well, at least we have some answers as to how this impossible place came to be.”

He frowned. “Answers? A few, perhaps. But they in turn have spawned so many more questions.”

“I’m a little curious about the creatures they released onto the surface before they left.”

“Yes,” Perry said, his expression grim. “You should be more than curious. You should be disturbed. They appeared to be protomammals.”

“So?”

“Hundreds of millions of years of evolution led from them to . . . us.”

“You mean . . .?”

He nodded. “The Fashioners rape a planet, virtually wipe out the existing flora and fauna, and then seed it with new life.”

I was having a hard time swallowing this. “They created us?”

“Not directly.” He shrugged. “Who knows how evolution is going to go? This may be an ongoing experiment: release the same life forms on different worlds in different environments and see how they develop.”

I found this a crushing revelation.

“That means the human race is an experiment.”

“It appears so.”

My self-granted title of “emperor” now seemed even more ridiculous.

“All right,” I said. “We can ponder that later. This thing we’re in, this . . . this moon . . . they used it in the terraforming, but why did they leave it behind?”

And suddenly I knew, because the answer popped into my head. The Dead World was a “dock.”

“It’s a dock,” Perry said, then frowned. “How do I know that?”

“Because it’s all in our heads.” I closed my eyes. “I can visualize a whole schematic of the place.”

Indeed, I saw a hollow sphere with a corridor—
this
corridor—running along its equator. And I knew without a doubt that we were the only living things here.

I opened my eyes. “There’s some sort of control room—”

Perry pointed east and said, “That way.” He smiled and shook his head. “This is wonderful. I feel as if I designed the place.”

We began walking, Koort trailing us. The gently curving hallway was devoid of decoration or design except for the large black rectangles, looking like polished onyx, set into the floor at regular intervals.

Along the way, Koort offered us dintls—a Pellucidarian cross between an apple and an orange—but neither Perry nor I partook. I was too excited to eat. Koort, however, attacked his juicy dintl with relish.

As we proceeded, I heard a rapid tapping behind us. We turned and the three of us gasped as one to see a gleaming metallic spider, perhaps a foot across, scuttling our way along the floor. It stopped maybe ten feet from us and something whirred on its underside. Then it scuttled a few feet closer, and again came the strange whirring.

It looked less like a spider close up—it had a chromed, hemispheric body rimmed with black dots that appeared to be sensors, and fully a dozen jointed legs.

As I studied it, I noticed a trail of droplets between us and the spider—dintl juice. The spider moved again, stopping over the farthest droplet to repeat its mysterious ritual. Then I knew.

“It’s a cleaning machine! It’s mopping up after Koort.”

Sure enough, it stopped over every droplet and left clean dry floor in its wake. It darted up to a spot directly before Koort’s feet where he had dripped more juice. Startled, he jumped back and dropped the dintl core.

The spider clattered after it until it stopped rolling, then squirted it with a turquoise fluid. I watched in awe as the dintl core dissolved into a puddle, which the spider promptly sucked up into the underside of its body.

It moved away, and I noticed a dull patch on the floor’s otherwise gleaming surface. It then ran around in a figure-eight pattern. As it completed its second circuit, a small rectangular slot opened in the base of the wall. It scuttled inside, but the slot remained open as another automaton emerged, this one the shape and size of a candy box. It hurried over to the dull patch, squatted over it for a few seconds, then returned to the slot, leaving gleaming, unmarred floor behind. The opening in the wall closed.

“Cleaning automatons,” Perry said. “No wonder the place is spotless.”

We continued our trek and soon came to a rectangular space that brightened as we entered.

“Why all this red light?” I said.

“I would imagine that’s the end of the spectrum where they see best.”

The entire floor of the control room was the same black onyx as the rectangles in the hall. Half a dozen glassy panels were set in the wall over a large console ornamented with nodules and grooves. The panels lit with views of Pellucidar as we entered.

Koort gravitated to those as I looked around.

“Where is everyone?”

“They left,” Perry said, articulating the answer just as it popped into my head. “The Dead World—and the name is so much more apt than we ever imagined—has hovered here, sleeping, empty for nearly three hundred million years—”

“—awaiting the Fashioners’ return. Our entry must have triggered some sort of telepathic recording.”

“Thuria!” Koort said, pointing to one of the illuminated panels.

I approached and realized these glass screens were showing images transmitted from the Dead World’s surface. I saw the vine-choked circle of shadow that had once been Koort’s homeland. With a start I noticed that the foul green mist had crossed Lidi Plain and was lapping at the abandoned Mahar city that sat on its northern border.

I was wondering how the image remained stable despite the Dead World’s rotation. The answer came to me but was too complex for my level of technological knowledge. And even if it weren’t, the explanation would have been blasted from my mind by the vision of the mist creeping eastward toward Sari . . . and Dian.

“We’ve got to kill those vines!”

“Yes!” Koort cried. “The mist has put all the lidi to sleep! How will I get a new one?”

I wanted to punch him. “Forget your damn lidi! We—”

“Seeding was successful,”
said the voice in my head.
“Initiating maneuver to increase habitable area.”

A number of grooves and nodules lit on the console, and then a vibration ran through the floor and into my feet.

“We’re moving!” Perry cried.

I sensed it, too—the Dead World seemed to have released a brake, and was indeed moving. But where?

We crowded before the view of Thuria and the Land of Awful Shadow. I blinked. Thuria seemed to be shrinking. And then I realized—

“We’re rising! What—?”

“But how?” said Perry. “We have no engines, no—”

The answer must have flashed into his head as it did into mine: gravity manipulation. The Dead World stayed suspended by partially negating the artificial gravity of the Fashioners. It stayed fixed in position over the Land of Awful Shadow by dual means: cinched a set distance from the sun above and locked on to a beacon buried in Thuria below.

“It’s attenuating the gravitational field’s hold, allowing it to rise.”

I estimated its distance from Thuria must have doubled by now—to two miles.

“Maybe we’d better return to our balloon,” I said. “If we get too close to the sun—”

Perry was staring at the screen. “I don’t think that’s the purpose. Besides, the sun here is thirty-five hundred miles away—minuscule in astronomical terms but still quite far off.” He turned to me, his expression grim. “Look at the surface. Tell me what you see.”

At first I saw nothing I hadn’t seen before: the circle of vines, the spreading green mist, the—

I gasped. “The shadow! It’s expanding onto Lidi Plain!”

“It’s expanding in
all
directions.”

He was right. With the Dead World sitting only a mile above Thuria, the umbra and penumbra of its eclipse were virtually identical. But now that it was increasing its distance from the surface, the penumbra was expanding.

“That means—”

He nodded. “Direct sunlight appears toxic to the vine. But now, with the area of shadow increasing almost exponentially, it will undergo an explosive growth spurt.”

“Doubling—
tripling
the volume of poison mist it can produce!”

“Exactly.”

The clock counting down to Pellucidar’s doom had just accelerated.

“We’ve got to do something!”

And just as I said that, the Dead World stopped rising. I prayed for it to descend again, but it did not. I stared at the widened shadow on the surface. Although I couldn’t see the vines expanding their territory, I could almost
feel
them growing.

My gaze wandered to the other screens, each displaying a different vantage. One was focused directly on the miniature sun, the others at various angles. I noticed movement on the one that was angled due north, east of the abandoned Mahar city and west of the Great Peak . . . it resembled a balloon emerging from the haze. I was about to mention it, when the voice spoke again.

“Preparing for docking.”

“Docking?” Perry said. “Where on Earth—or rather, Pellucidar—are we going to dock?”

As if in answer, the black panels under our feet lit with red light. I knelt for a better look and quickly realized that these were not image screens but rather windows into the Dead World’s interior—its
hollow
interior.

Suddenly a beam of white light lanced into the vast empty space. Gradually it widened. I craned my neck and saw one of the Dead World’s poles irising open.

“That’s sunlight!”

And then I remembered the balloon I’d seen on the north-facing screen. I ran back to it and saw that it wasn’t a balloon at all.

“Look!”

Perry and Koort joined me. In silence we watched a sphere, a duplicate of the Dead World, only smaller, glide toward us.

“The Fashioners,” Perry said in a hushed tone. “They’re back.”

“They must have come through the polar opening. That was why it was left open—for their return.”

“I’m beginning to see,” Perry said, stroking his chin.

“See what?”

“The Dead World . . . its very existence has mystified me, especially its fixed position in Pellucidar’s sky. Now I think I understand.” He pointed to the screen showing Thuria. “Don’t you see? This was the plan all along. The shadowed area was designed as the perfect garden for the light-sensitive vine. The stunted vegetation there offered little competition, allowing the vine to spread like wildfire. Remember the first thing the voice said after it welcomed us?”

How could I forget? “
‘We received your signal and began the protocol.’”

He nodded. “The ‘signal’ must have been an alert as to the Fashioners’ imminent arrival. And the ‘protocol’ was the seeding of the Land of Awful Shadow to create the toxic gas. This whole scenario was planned three hundred million years ago!”

“To put Pellucidar into suspended animation? Why?”

He gazed at the approaching sphere. “I fear we are about to find out.”

We watched the Fashioners’ ship close with us, then rise out of sight. We returned to the floor windows onto the inner space and watched the gray sphere descend through the roof and angle toward the control area. It stopped and hovered perhaps a hundred feet below us. The Dead World was indeed a dock; its interior was a giant hangar. As the opening in the pole irised closed, a transparent tube descended from somewhere to our left and connected with the sphere.

I checked my revolver to make sure it was ready to fire.

“I don’t think they’ll be too happy to find us here,” I said.

“That is a very real possibility.” Perry checked his musket. “Perhaps we should—”

The voice interrupted us:
“Welcome back. We received your signal and began the protocol.”

It proceeded to recite the exact same message we had received upon arrival. Yes, definitely a recording, this time triggered by the arrival of the craft. It droned on, but no one appeared in the tube.

“Where are they?” Koort said, banging his club against the wall. “They owe me a lidi!”

I shook my head in wonder. Our lives, the future of Pellucidar itself were at stake here, and he was still worried about his damn lidi.

He darted to the wall and slammed his fist against a slightly brighter spot on its surface. A panel slid to the right with a hiss, revealing a triangular opening. Koort darted through it.

I stared after him in wonder. “How did he know—?” And then I realized I knew it, too—all part of the schematic that had been infused into our brains.

“He’s headed for the ship!” Perry cried. “Stop him!”

We rushed for the door, but it closed before we reached it and would not reopen despite my pounding on the bright spot.

“Look!” Perry cried, pointing to the floor windows. “He’s going to the ship!”

Sure enough, there was Koort, standing on a platform as it descended through the tube toward the sphere. Seconds later he disappeared within.

I pressed the bright spot on the wall again and watched the platform return—empty.

“What does he hope to accomplish by this?” Perry said.