"That wasn"t the Moon," he said.
They turned to look at him. Jamie smudged one last tear from her face. "What?"
"Where the Door opened up to. It wasn"t the Moon."
"It sure the f.u.c.k looked like it," said Sasha.
He shook his head. "The Moon"s our only reference for images like that-a world with no life and no atmosphere. But the gravity was wrong."
Arthur wrinkled his brow for a moment. "On the Moon," he said, "all those items should"ve gone for a hundred yards or so."
Mike nodded. "The lighter ones at least, but even the heavier ones should"ve gone farther than they did." He pointed at the screen. "That was Earth gravity. One g. Everything was just moving a little strange because there was no air resistance."
"So that was...what?" Sasha glanced from the screen to the rings. "A world where Earth was just some rock in s.p.a.ce?"
He counted to three. The ants carried out numbers for him, like tiny ring girls at a sporting event. "No," he said. "Well, sort of."
Olaf frowned at him.
Mike turned to Jamie. "Can you bring the camera two footage back up. Time-stamp thirteen-eleven-twenty-three."
She tapped the keyboard. "How fast do you want it?"
"Just freeze it there."
The screen filled with the starry void. The dim image of the rings were visible behind it, and the gray horizon past that. The red fire extinguisher and the chair had both already come to rest. The first roof panel was a blur of motion, still up on its side like a wheel.
"Full screen?"
Two more clicks and the frozen image leaped to fill the flatscreen. Mike reached out and ran his fingers along an outcropping of rock on the left side of frame. "See that? How straight it is?"
Arthur squinted. Jamie pulled up the image on the screen in front of her and stared at it. "Okay," said Sasha.
Mike traced a few faint vertical lines along the outcropping. They were straight and evenly s.p.a.ced. "See these? This is the only point they really stand out. The light"s reflecting off the roof panel just right."
"What"s your point?" asked Olaf.
"Those are cinder blocks," said Mike. "That"s what"s left of the south wall of the main floor. Back there-" He pointed at a faint ripple in the gray sand past the fire extinguisher. "-that"s the west wall."
Arthur pushed his gla.s.ses tighter against his head. "Are you sure?"
"Positive," said Mike. He tapped the side of his head. "They all line up with the regular view through the Door. I even overlapped it with previous crosswalks to be sure."
"f.u.c.k me," said Sasha. She glanced down at the main floor and shook her head.
"That doesn"t make sense," said Olaf. "If the main floor"s there, and presumably a Door, that means we were there working on it."
"Maybe you were," Mike said.
Jamie leaned back in her chair, still staring at the smaller screen. "So what happened?"
Mike counted to four this time. "There"s nothing there. No old weeds or vines. No sign of life at all. Sometime between finishing the Door and now, maybe in the last year or two, something wiped out all life on the planet. It even sucked away the atmosphere. And it did it fast."
"A war?" asked Jamie. "People always say we had enough nukes to destroy the world a hundred times over, or something like that."
Sasha frowned. "Could that burn off all the air?"
Mike shrugged.
"It looks too complete," said Arthur. "Unless a warhead struck the lab dead center, we should see more than this."
"There"s also the bigger picture," said Mike.
They all glanced at him, then back to the screen.
"Metaphorical picture this time." He waved his hand at the rings outside the window. "When all this happened at Site B, nothing happened here. This mouth was normal. Which would mean the Door only opened on one side. Or, at least, the two sides were open to two different realities."
Arthur"s mouth flattened into a line. Jamie"s eyes went wide.
"Which means," Mike continued, "we still don"t know how it works."
"Or it"s working differently now," said Sasha.
Arthur shook his head. "Nothing else has changed. Why would it be working differently?"
"Why would it be open when there"s no power?" she asked. "How the f.u.c.k should I know?"
Olaf gazed at the rings below and stiffened. He took a step to the left, then back. "Jesus," he muttered.
Sasha pressed her head against the gla.s.s. "What? What is it?"
"The Door," he said. He glanced back at Arthur, then at Sasha, and then back down to the main floor. "The d.a.m.ned thing"s still open."
"It can"t be," said Arthur. "The other rings were destroyed."
They all moved to the gla.s.s and craned their necks. Jamie and Arthur slid to the side, pressing against the others to get a better view.
The rings stood still and quiet. From the high angle, another two feet of the pathway could be seen continuing on through the Door. The base and bottom section of a third ring could be seen curving up and around the pathway.
"f.u.c.k me," said Sasha. "Does this mean there"s another Site B over there? On the other side?"
Jamie lunged back to her chair and stabbed at keys. The monitors lit up with new camera feeds, showing the floor, the stations, and a high view from just below the window. The last monitor let them see another fifteen feet through the rings.
All three of the rings.
Through the open mouth, the red light flashed across the walkway and ramp of a whole, undamaged Site B, complete with a white paint line marking off the safe zone.
"If each set of rings opens to a different reality," murmured Arthur, "it may have been doing this all along."
"You might have something there," Mike said. "I wonder how many discrepancies we"d find if we went back over the video logs and compared what one camera saw through the rings to what another camera saw directly. Things you might"ve written off as little glitches or time lags."
"Your red hair," Olaf said to Sasha.
She blinked twice and her eyes went wide. "Oh, f.u.c.k," she said.
Mike looked back and forth between them. "You saw Sasha with red hair once?"
Olaf nodded. "About six months ago. We"d just changed out some of the overhead lights and were doing a random physics test. I was at Site B, she was over here. Her hair looked deep red. I remember saying something to her about it while we tossed the ball, how the lights made her hair look red, and she laughed it off."
"But I didn"t remember it," said Sasha. "The comments or anything. We talked later, face-to-face, and I just thought he"d been thinking of something else." Her gaze drifted back to the rings.
"I thought you were being absentminded," Olaf said.
"There are probably even more examples," said Mike. "Times the difference was just too slight to notice."
"So," said Sasha, "what now? Do we go say h.e.l.lo to ourselves?"
"We have to shut this thing down," said Mike. "If it"s opening onto random realities, it"s too dangerous to spend any more time trying to study it. It could flip back to the airless world again. Or worse."
"It might not," said Olaf. "In three years of operation, it"s the first time something like this has happened. I"d say the odds are low."
"Three years of operation that don"t even add up to eleven hours altogether," said Mike as the ants added up hundreds of timed reports. "The odds don"t seem so low when you look at it that way."
They all looked at one another for a moment. They all looked at Arthur. And then, one by one, their gazes all slid to Mike. Jamie was first. Then Sasha. Then Arthur himself. Olaf was last.
"Well," said Arthur, leaning forward on his cane, "what do you suggest we do?"
Mike counted to five while the ants carried out images, sounds, and predictions.
"The set of rings on Site B shut down after they were damaged," he said. "We should try the same thing here."
"But we don"t know why they shut down," said Olaf. "We still don"t know how the Door is staying open."
"I still don"t care about the why or how," said Mike. "I just want to turn this thing off before someone else gets killed or hurt."
Sasha cleared her throat and tapped two fingers on the window. "What if we just took it apart?"
Arthur blinked. "What?"
"Take it apart," she said again. "Since we can"t shut it off."
"Could we do that?" asked Mike.
"The actual construction took about two months once all the components were fabricated. We could have the rings disa.s.sembled in a day or two, tops." She gestured at the rings down below. "Heck, we could break it down into larger components and drag them off the main floor one at a time. Then we can take "em apart in the hallway or in here."
"What if that makes it even bigger?" asked Olaf. "This area of...instability? Right now we"re relatively sure it"s still around the rings, but if we start spreading the ring components out, what then?"
"If it does that," said Arthur, "then we should be able to go the other way. We can make a pile of everything and contract the area a bit. But I believe Sasha"s right. Based on the evidence, taking them apart seems like our best bet to collapse the fold."
"How do we do that," asked Jamie, "if it"s dangerous to have people near the rings?"
"We risk it," said Mike. He looked at Arthur and was relieved when the older man gave a nod of agreement. "We"ll try to be quick, go in with specific goals, and get out."
"We should go over the design specs," Arthur said to Sasha. "Determine the fastest way to pull things apart."
She was staring out at the rings again. She looked back at Arthur and took a breath. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, we should. I can do that."
Mike looked out the window again. On the floor, the roaches were weaving back and forth. "How long, you think?"
Sasha and Arthur exchanged a look, then included Olaf. "A few hours," said Arthur. "We didn"t design it with rapid disa.s.sembly in mind. There may be a few snags." He tapped his cane twice on the floor. "I won"t be much good for the physical work, but I think we can come up with a few ways for the four of you to make some quick headway."
"Five," said Jamie. "We could bring Anne."
"She"s not cleared for the main..." Arthur shook his head. "Sorry. Old habits. Still, we shouldn"t a.s.sume. She"s not paid for these kinds of risks."
"None of us are, really," said Sasha.
FORTY-ONE.
"Do you have everything?" Arthur asked.
"Yes," snapped Olaf. "For the third time, we have everything."
There wasn"t much to have. Mike was a bit surprised at how few tools they"d need to disa.s.semble the rings. A few socket wrenches and screwdrivers. Sasha had outfitted each of them with a full set. They didn"t know if the tools on the main floor would still be there. Or if they"d still fit the hardware if they were.
Anne had offered to help while Arthur and Jamie were still explaining what was happening on the main floor and what they needed to do. Her offer didn"t change when they finished explaining. She"d shown up in heels and a dress, but it turned out she kept a pair of running shoes in one of her desk drawers. She"d copied Jamie and tied her hair back. Her dress didn"t have any pockets, so Sasha had strapped a tool belt on her.
Arthur went up to watch them from the booth. The five of them stood by the door beneath the flashing red light. "Everyone ready?" asked Mike.
They nodded. "Right side first," said Sasha. Her T-shirt showed a group of zombies in Starfleet uniforms below the logo THE WALKING RED. "We"re going to start with the bolts at points six, seven, and eight. I"ll get the ones at six. The four of you should be able to reach the others without getting up on the walkway. That"ll get those carapace sections off and let us get at the coils."
"Do we need, I don"t know," said Jamie, "a safe word?"
Anne laughed. Even Olaf smirked. "A what?"
She smiled herself. "Not like that, pervs. Some sort of code word or something that we can say in case..." She glanced at Mike. "So we can prove who we are."
"I think if anything happens," he said, "it"ll either be very obvious, or it won"t matter. Not for what we"re doing, anyway."
"The safe word is Isis," said Sasha. "Work for you?"