In the Ocean of Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

glowing red where his torch touches or is that a trick of the eyes?—he has difficulty focusing, probably loss of local vertical, an old problem in zero g, just a turn of the head will fix it—
    Worn stone steps leading impossibly up, up into a ceiling now crumpled, spattered with orange drops that gleamed like oil in his murky light. Nigel remembered abruptly, dimly … An old film. A film of the Tutankhamun tomb, the jackal god Anubis rampant above nine defeated foes. Within the Treasury, tossed against a wall near the burial chamber by the necropolis guards after a robbery, lay a chest. Dried wood. It held the mummified bodies of two stillborn babies, perhaps Tutankhamun’s children, in resins, gums and oils.
    Opening the tomb.
Stepping inside.
     
    And up from the Valley of Kings, from Karnak and Luxor, winding with the Nile to Alexandria, a woman, ancient, wrists rouged and walking with legs numb in the grip of a gnawing, eating disease—
    Nigel shook his head.
    The steps were only markings. They led nowhere. He photographed them
click whirr
and moved on.
    The odd humming, again. There was no air in here— how did he hear it? He coasted down a narrowing tube. The humming was stronger. Ahead loomed a sphere. It was not connected to the walls. Nigel touched it. It did not move. The humming increased. He stuck the adhesive webbing on the backs of his gloves to the sphere and used the leverage to swing himself around it. The space beyond yawned black. His torch licked into it and found nothing. The light simply faded away. Nothing was reflected back. The humming continued.
    He moved to the far face of the sphere and peered into the abyss beyond. Nothing.
    Abruptly the humming rose, shrieked, wailed—and stopped.
    Nigel blinked, startled. Silence. Around him was a pocket of darkness. The sphere, when he turned to face it, seemed somehow inert, exhausted.
    Nigel frowned. He jetted back to the sphere, worked his way around it and returned through the tunnel the way he had come, searching.

FOUR
     
    Three hours later, when he had exhausted his film canisters and was beginning to tire, he headed back. The network of corridors was a simple but space-saving web of spherical shells, intricately intersected, and he had no difficulty finding his way out.
    “I’m back in the cabin,” he said, sighing with a leaden fatigue.
    “My God, where have you been, Nigel? Hours without a peep—I was almost ready to come in after you.”
    “There was rather a lot to see.”
    “Houston’s patched through—and mad as hell, too— so start talking.”
    He took them through it all, describing the small rooms with elaborate netting that might have been sleeping quarters, the places like auditoriums, the ceilings with dancing lights, all the similarities he could find.
    And the strangeness: spaces clogged with an infinitely layered green film that did not dissipate into the vacuum around it, but rippled as he passed by; rooms that seemed to change their dimensions as he watched; a place that gave off shrill vibrations he felt through his suit.
    “Was there any illumination?” Dave said.
    “Nothing I could see.”
    “We picked up a strong radio pulse several hours ago,” Dave said. “We guessed you were trying to transmit from inside.”
    “No,” Nigel said. “I couldn’t raise Len or anything else on suit radio, so I packed it in and simply looked about.”
    “The signal wasn’t on our assigned frequencies,” Len said.
    “We missed recording it—only lasted a second or so, and all our monitoring is in the telemetry bands,” Dave said.
    “Never mind,” Len said. “Look, Nigel, it’s just abandoned in there? No signs of occupants?”
    Nigel paused. There were things he wanted to tell them, things he had felt. But how could he convey them? Earthside wanted facts.
    Nigel had a sudden image of himself blundering ham-fisted through those strange stretching corridors. The sphere. That humming. Had he accidentally triggered