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"Airlock?"
"Doesn’t it seem like one?"
He nodded "So who left the photo?"
"I don’t know But Orson ith me at the time, and he didn’t realize soot the nose of noses"
Warily, Bobby directed his flashlight through the first circular hatchway, into the corridor along which we had just coh the inner portal, the short tunnel, crouching because only so
Bobby followedroom, and for the first time in our seventeen years of friendship, I saw hi his flashlight across the walls, and though he tried to speak, he couldn’t initially produce a sound
This ovoid chahtly less than sixty feet in dia toward each end The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved to for in the e
All surfaces are coated in aby the profile around the entry hatchway, is nearly three inches thick and is bonded so securely to the concrete that the two appear to be fused
The beahly polished coating, but they also penetrated the exoticto the depths of it, flaring off whorls of glittering golden dust that were suspended like hly refractive, but light did not shatter through it in hard prisht currents, as warm and sinuous as candle flah the thick, glossy surface plating, i away from us into the farther, darker corners of the roo behind su down at the floor, I could al on a pool of pale-a at the unearthly beauty of this spectacle, Bobby walked farther into the rooh this lustrous material appears to be as slick as wet porcelain, it is not at all slippery In fact, at tirip at your feet, as if it is gluey or exerts a netic attraction even on objects that contain no iron
"Strike it," I said softly
My words spiraled along the walls and ceiling and floor, and a cascade of whispery echoes returned to my ears from more than one direction
Bobby blinked at un," I prolass," Bobby protested
The extended sibilant at the end of his second word returned to us in a wash of echoes as susurrant as gently foalass, it’s not breakable"
Hesitantly, he gave the floor near his feet a gentle tap with the , like chimes, seee chanant with suspense, as if the bells had announced the approach of soreat import
"Harder," I said
When he rapped the steel barrel harder against the floor, the ringing was louder and of a different character, like that of tubular bells: euphonious, charht be performed on a world at some far end of the universe
As the sound drained into another suspenseful silence, Bobby squatted in order to sun barrel
"Not chipped"
I said, "You can bang on it with a hammer, scrape at it with a file, chop at it with an ice pick, and you won’t leave the slightest scratch"
"You tried all that?"
"And a hand drill"
"You’re a destructive i his hand to the floor at a few different points around hihts, the deep concrete structures of Fort Wyvern are as cool as caverns, cool enough to serve as wine cellars, and the chill sinks deeper into your bones the longer you haunt these places All other surfaces within these warrens, other than those in this ovoid room, are cold to the touch
"The stuff is alarm," I said, "yet the room itself isn’t warm, as if the heat doesn’t translate to the air And I don’t see how this hteen months after they abandoned this place"
"You can aly in it"
"There’s no electrical power here, no gas No furnaces, no boilers, no generators, no machinery All stripped away"
Bobby rose fro his flashlight over the floor, walls, and ceiling
Even with two flashlights and the unusually high refractivity of the mysterious irandoles, pinwheels, lady ferns, and fireflies of light swarold and yellow but so to oblivion in far dark corners, like fireworks licked up and sed by a night sky, dazzling but illu as a concert hall"
"Not really But it seeer than it is because of how every surface curves away froe occurred in the acoustics of the chamber The whispery echoes of my words faded away, swiftly became inaudible, and then my words themselves diminished in volu sound less efficiently than before
"What’s happening?" Bobby asked, and his voice, too, sounded suppressed,from the other end of a bad telephone connection
"I don’t know" Although I raised my voice almost to a shout, it remained muffled, precisely as loud as when I’d spoken in a nor the increased density of the air if I hadn’t suddenly begun experiencing difficulty breathing Although not suffocating, I was afflicted severely enough to have to concentrate to draw and expel breath I ing reflexively with each inhalation; the air was virtually a liquid that I had to force down Indeed, I could feel it sliding along my throat like a drink of cold water Each shallow breath felt heavy in my chest, as if it had s were filling with fluid, and the moment I coe to get this stuff out, to eject it, convinced that I was drowning in it, but each exhalation had to be forced, al
Pressure
In spite of ure out that the air was not being alchemized into a liquid but that, instead, the air pressure was drastically increasing, as if the depth of the earth’s at down on us with crushing force My eardruertips pressing hard against my eyeballs, and at the end of each inhalation, my nostrils pinched shut