“I am thinking of them,” answered Zip. His brow wore the characteristic furrow that showed he was not completely at ease.
“What’s wrong?” asked Joe, as if he hadn’t a care.
“Something bothers me. Our unseen friends, if they are the ones who built and maintain this asteroid, are highly advanced technologically—far in advance of anything we’re likely to achieve for centuries. But from what Mark told us, it’s obvious that they’re afraid of something. I can’t see that they’d be afraid of Zimbardo and his cronies. They’re afraid of something else, something we don’t know about yet—and that makes me afraid.”
He continued his fast pace and Joe kept up with him, but Joe’s eyes glanced into the shadows as they walked.
11: An Asteroid is Missing
THERE was a breeze. A very light breeze, a mere breath. Mark could feel it on his cheek, just a slight chill that was pleasant. He had not felt air moving since he had been on Mars.
“Surely, the air cannot move in here,” he thought to himself. He lifted his eyes upward. As he expected, the lights failed before they revealed the ceiling immensely far above. “How far?” he wondered. “A half a mile? A mile? More?” The lights looked almost like stars, placed in the strategic joints and balconied work areas of the monstrous iron latticework.
The refugees from Lurton Zimbardo’s prison had been walking through the power plant for some time—long enough to have covered at least a mile, and probably closer to two. Though the surroundings were obviously nothing more than the power station of the asteroid, the men were as hushed as if they were in a cathedral. They were small figures in an enormous place, reminded of their smallness and overwhelmed with a sense of the numinous.
Mark sifted through his memories to a time when he was a child of about six, and his parents had brought him to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. He had stood in an immense room below ground, large enough to contain several football fields. He had exulted then, identifying for the first time his restlessness inside, his search for something larger than himself, something that could fill a universe.
He spoke aloud to no one in particular. “When I was in Carlsbad Caverns about a dozen years ago, the ranger told us that the temperature inside the caverns was constant. This is like that.”