Finn stared, blank.
The Sapient snapped, "It"s the only way out! The ship will fall and rise and tumble forever! We have to drive her in there!"
He pointed. Finn saw a dark cube. It jutted out from the beaten metal, a hollow opening of darkness. It looked tiny; their chance of entering it remote.
"Sapphique landed on a cube."
Gildas had to hold on to him.
"That has to be it!"
Finn glanced at Keiro. Doubt d.i.c.kered between them.
As Attia came up the hatchway and slid toward them, Finn knew his oathbrother thought the old man was crazy, consumed with his quest.
And yet what choice did they have? Keiro shrugged. Reckless, he spun the wheel and headed the ship straight at the Wall.
In the headlights the cube waited, a black enigma.
CLAUDIA COULD not speak. Her astonishment, her dismay were too great. She saw animals. Lions.
She counted them numbly; six, seven ... three cubs. A pride. That was the word, wasn"t it...?
"They can"t possibly be real," she murmured.
Behind her, Jared sighed. "But they are."
Lions. Alive, prowling, one roaring, the rest snoozing in an enclosure of gra.s.s, a few trees, a lake where water birds waded. She drew back, stared at the microscope, looked again. One of the cubs scratched another; they rolled and fought. A lioness yawned and lay down, paws flat.
Claudia turned. She looked at Jared through the mothy lamplight and he looked back, and for a moment there was nothing to be said, only thoughts she didn"t dare to think, implications she was too horrified to follow through.
Finally she said, "How small?"
"Incredibly small."
He bit the ends of his long dark hair.
"Miniaturized to about a millionth of a nanometer ... Infinitesimal."
"They don"t... How do they stay ...?"
"It"s a gravity box. Self-adjusting. I thought the technique was lost. It seems to be an entire zoo. There are elephants, zebra ..." His voice trailed off; he shook his head.
"Perhaps it was the prototype ... trying it first on animals. Who knows?"
"So this means ..."
She struggled to say it. "That Incarceron ..."
"We"ve been looking for a huge building, an underground labyrinth. A world."
He stared ahead into the darkness.
"How blind we"ve been, Claudia! In the library of the Academy there are records that propose that such things-trans-dimensional changes-were once possible. All that knowledge was lost in the War. Or so we thought."
She got up; she couldn"t sit still. The thought of the lions tinier than an atom of her skin, the gra.s.s they lay on even smaller, the minute ants they crushed with their paws, the fleas on their fur ... it was too difficult to take in. But for them the world was normal.
And for Finn ...? She walked in nettles, not noticing. Made herself say, "Incarceron is tiny."
"I fear so."
"The Portal..."
"A process of entering. Every atom of the body collapsed."
He glanced up and she saw how ill he looked.
"Do you see? They made a Prison to hold everything they feared and diminished it so that its Warden could hold it in the palm of his hand. What an answer to the problems of an overcrowded system, Claudia. What a way to dismiss a world"s troubles. And it explains much. The spatial anomaly. And there might be a time difference too, a very tiny one."
She went back to the microscope and watched the lions roll and play.