The Long Utopia Read Online Free PDF Page B

Here, girl! Rio! . . .’
    The pit he revealed was only maybe eight feet deep, crudely cut into loose-packed earth. He dangled over the edge, made sure he could scramble back up the sides before committing himself, then he dropped down to the bottom.
    He looked around. If this had been intended to be a cellar it wasn’t much of one, the walls bare earth, the floor still showing the spade marks left by the original digger and not smoothed off. It was just a hole in the ground, hastily cut and more hastily concealed. And there was no sign of his dog.
    It was pretty clear where Rio had gone, though. There was a breach in one wall, down near the floor.
    Making sure he had his pocket knife to hand, Nikos got down on hands and knees, and found himself looking into a kind of tunnel in the earth. It wasn’t too wide, just a few feet, but it was a lot more smoothly cut than the aborted cellar, with a circular profile and smooth walls. And, he saw, sweeping his flashlight, it sloped down at a fairly steep angle. Down into darkness, beyond the reach of his light. What could have made this ? Some kind of burrowing animal, maybe? There were furballs that lived underground, and his mind conjured up a vision of a squirrel-mole the size of a human, with claws on its big digging paws the size of spades. It would be like a kobold, he thought, a human-sized mole-like humanoid that sometimes came by, trying to trade. But he remembered that peculiar rustling, that whispering, scraping noise, like no sound a furball would make, or even a kobold.
    Then, in the furthest distance, he heard another bark, a frightened yelp.
    He let instinct take over. ‘Coming, girl! Just you wait for Nikos!’
    He took his flashlight in his mouth, entered the tunnel on allfours, and began to crawl down the slope. Under his hands and knees there was only dirt, smoothed over and close-packed. Behind him the disc of daylight receded, while ahead of him the light of the flash showed another opening at the end of the tunnel, a neat circle that let out into a still deeper dark. Being shut up in this tunnel was scary, and the Stepper box at his belt made it awkward to move. He’d have to back up to get out of here, for he’d have trouble turning round. But he pushed on.
    He travelled maybe twenty feet, he figured, a steady descent down into the dark.
    Then the slanting shaft ended in an opening to a much larger chamber. Still on his hands and knees, he cautiously peered out, waving his light. His flash picked up a roof and floor, both smoothly worked, maybe ten feet apart, and pillars, like remnants of cutaway dirt or bedrock, regularly placed. He couldn’t see any walls, to either side or ahead; his flash wouldn’t reach that far. He was evidently entering a much more expansive space, wide and deep.
    So much for his ideas about squirrel-moles. What the hell was all this?
    It reminded him of what he’d read, in his mother’s irregular school classes, about mining back on the Low Earths. He knew there was a seam of iron ore around here that the founders had plundered when the Poulsons had built their forge – the rich seam, unique to this particular world, was one reason they’d settled here. But he’d seen the size of that home-built forge, and the handfuls of nails and such they’d made, the few horseshoes for the exotic-sounding animals they’d meant to import here some day but had never gotten around to (Nikos had never seen a horse). They could never have dug all this out in such a short time, and there would have been no need anyhow. But if not them—
    The face appeared in front of him.
    Face : that was one word for it, a mask that was vaguely the shape of a human face, one side covered by silvery metal, the othereven worse, sculpted out of what looked like the black shiny stuff God made beetles out of, as his father might have said. But it was a definite face, mounted on a tiny-looking head that tilted on a narrow neck.
    It almost looked curious.