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Don Merriam had stood on the rim of Earth&039;s Grand Canyon He had also looked over the edge of the Leibnitz Cleft near the south pole of the moon But never - except when he had driven the Baba Yaga through Luna - certainly never fro remotely as deep as the open, mile-wide circular pit that yawned only two dozen paces across the silver pavea stood with its ladder thrust down between its three legs
How far did the pit go down? Five miles? Twenty-five? Five hundred? It seemed to maintain its one-mile width indefinitely The equivalent in e pillar of moon rock was in solidity, it narrowed somewhere far below to a tiny, hazy round that was littlewas only the consequence of the laws of perspective and the limitations of his visual powers
He toyed with the notion that the shaft went straight through the center of the planet to the other side, so that if he leaped off the edge noould never hit bottom, but only fall four thousandtwenty hours at least, if terminal velocities in this planet&039;s ath to die of thirst - and then, finally, perhaps after a few reverberations of reversed and re-reversed fall, come to rest in the air at the planet&039;s center and sloih the air of the Baba Yaga&039;s cabin in free fall
Of course the air pressure down there, four thousand h to crush hien monatomic! - but they would surely have ways of dealing with that, ways ofthe air exactly as thin or as thick as they wanted it at every depth
Already he was doing a great deal of thinking in terms of their powers - pohich increased each tih he had yet to see a single one of theain, of the pit he&039;d found that went through the earth behind his fa for a star, or rather for a hint of the captive antipodean day under its section of vaulted sky-filht thousand miles down there But even as he hunted he kneas a visual impossibility, and in any case it was , flashing, and twinkling froest andabout the shaft was si in or driven through solid rock - in fact, there was no sign of rock anywhere - but floor after floor, tiered endlessly doard, of artificial structure and habitable inner voluan after a blank hundred feet or so at the top and were never afterwards interrupted
He could count hundreds of those floors, he was sure, before they began to ain due solely to the li by the ones toward the top, they were very tall, spacious floors, suggesting a life of perhaps randeur and scope, despite the, to him, claustrophobic feel of such a doard infinity of rooms and corridors
The only coe from his memory - and they were most inadequate comparisons - were the inner courts, tiered with balconies, of certain large departht shaft shooting down through the stacks of soht he could see s across the shaft, and perhaps up and down it, like lazy beetles, and some of those seemed to twinkle too, like the phosphorescent beetles of the tropics
In his desire to peer deeper into the pit, he leaned out farther over it, gripping tightly with his bare hands the upper of two satin-smooth silver rails that fenced it Even that sis was unnatural and indicative of their powers, for the rails had no supports They were a pair oftwo and a little in Or, if there were invisible uprights, he had not yet touched or kicked into them He could see only a couple of hundred yards of the hoops in either direction; beyond that they vanished like telegraph wires However, he assuns of them down below, and evidences of their workic, where were they? Why had he been left alone so long?
He turned his back on the pit and peered all around him uneasily, but nowhere on the silver paveeoure, or any figure he judged - humanoid, anie-centered saucers still hung enigmatically a dozen feet above the pavement, just as when he&039;d last turned his back on thea stood midway between them, exactly as he&039;d left it This hat had happened so far: when the voice had called to hilish, he had unsuited obediently, ala, but there had been no one there After waiting for minutes at the foot of the ladder, he had walked over to the pit and been enthralled
Now he began to wonder if the voice htn&039;t have been pure illusion It was unreasonable to think of an alien being able to speak English without any preli Or was it? Their powers
He took a deep breath At least the air seeh
The silence was profound, except that when he held still and relaxed and closed his eyes and let out his breath softly, he thought he could hear the faintest, e planet, coursing? Or only his own blood? Or the ru into the other pit, no farther beyond the Baba Yaga and the invisibly suspended saucers than he was standing in front of the a full third of his horizon but tapering swiftly allance like a solidsteadily doard at a speed great enough to ments individually invisible - presued it to beabove the sky-film that roofed the atan to see slow changes in its contours - bulgings and channelings that formed slowly and held their shape for many seconds and then shifted into other sroovings that a stream from a faucet will hold - sometimes so persistently that the shape see water
But how could the thing beat such a supersonic velocity - two seconds froh the palpable air - the air he knew had to be there because he was breathing it - without creating a fierce and tumultuous dust storm of eddies in that air, without a roar like that of a dozen first-stage rockets or a score of Niagaras?
Theyan unheard-of field, have created a wall-less vacuum channel, just as surely as they must have created - now he came to think of it - sia and its escorts to travel through after they burst the sky-filh the thin plasma and micro-meteorites of space
He continued to stare up the weirdly foreshortened gray pillar How long could thiswould theinto a ring, at this rate of depletion? How long would there be any moon-stuff left outside the Wanderer?
Froeo almost at once the first-approxiht thousand days for one such rock strea ten miles a second, to transport the moon&039;s entire substance He had seen only a dozen of the rock streaht be another set at the Wanderer&039;s south pole, and others being brought into existence Looking aside from the pillar, he now did see three ray waterspouts twisting up toward the sky
The sky was now all dark blues and greens and browns, sloirling in a great edge-blended river, austere andthe eaze travel around the pillar-broken circle of those smoothly monstrous, multiform, pastel-shaded solidities, and it seeed position and shape - and in some cases crept closer - since he&039;d last studied thes - or whatever they were - ns of life disturbed hireatly and he turned back to the silver-railed pit behind him to scan its topmost levels, almost desperately, for indications of some smaller-scale activity He tried to look at the top floors immediately below him, or close to either side, but the silver lip on which he was standing overlapped the pit itself for several yards like a roof and cut off his view So he peered across at the topan to think he could see s in them, but at a mile or even a half mile it wasn&039;t easy to be sure of that, and anyway his eyes were beginning to swi whether he dared return to the cabin for the binoculars - when a voice, sweet-toned yet co, spoke from behind hi a little taller than hirace and pride of a matador, was a lean, silky, red-splotched black biped of shape h-foreheaded cheetah a little bigger than aas a er wearing a black turban and a narrow redthe unfeline frontal and tee Its tail rose like a red spear behind its back Its ears were pointed Its serene eyes were large, with so its close-set, narrow feet, yet with ered aresture of invitation, and opened the thin lips in the black lower s, and softly repeated: "Co When he had come close, it nodded, and then the section of pave - a circular silver section about eight feet across - began very slowly to sink into the body of the Wanderer The being htly across Don&039;s shoulders Don thought of Faust and Mephistopheles descending to Hell Faust had wanted all knowledge With his liive understanding?
They had sunk barely knee-deep in the pavement when there was a flash in the sky Suddenly beyond the Baba Yaga there hung a third saucer, and a ship so like the Baba Yaga that Don&039;s throat tightened, and he thought of Dufresne But then he saw the small differences in structure and the red Soviet star on it
His view of it was cut off by the silver curve of the pavement as the platform continued to descend