So the office wing itself was not over any part of the cellars but was built on solid ground, and she was looking at one side of its foundation and underpinning. It was built from materials and in a fashion that would have supported a battleship. What could there be upstairs that would have crushed the foundations of an ordinary house and had made all this necessary? she wondered.
And then she remembered the holes she had seen punched through the concrete at McClusky.
A Thurien interstellar communications system contained a microscopic, artificially generated, black-hole toroid when it was switched on and operating.
But that idea was even more insane. The house had been built ten years before. Nobody had heard of the Ganymeans, let alone Thurien, in 2021.
She backed slowly away from the partition and turned dazedly back toward the stairs.
At the top of the stairs she stopped for a while to give the thumping in her chest time to slow down and to bring her reeling mind under some kind of control. Then she opened the door a fraction and brought her eye close to it just in time to catch a glimpse of Sverenssen moving out of sight behind an angle in the wall back near the corner room. He had been turning his head from side to side as he moved, as if he were looking for something
• . . or somebody. Lyn immediately erupted into a new spasm of shaking and shivering. Suddenly Navcomms and Houston seemed very far away. If she ever got out of this, she’d never want to leave the coziness of her own office again.
If Sverenssen was looking for her, he would already have tried knocking on the door of her room. The part of her that felt guilty told her that she needed a reason for not being there. She thought
for a few seconds, then let herself out into the corridor and went the other way, into the kitchen. A minute later she reemerged holding a cup of coffee and began making her way back to the guest section of the house.
“Oh, there you are.” Sverenssen’s voice sounded from behind her when she was halfway across one of the raised floors around the periphery of the corner room. She froze; had she done anything else, the coffee and the cup would have been all over the carpet. Sverenssen came out of one of the side rooms as she turned to face him. He was still wearing his bathing trunks, but had put sandals on his feet and thrown a shirt loosely over his shoulder. He was eying her uncertainly, as if he were mildly suspicious about something but not sufficiently sure of himself to be direct.
“I went to get some coffee,” she said, as if it weren’t obvious. Immediately she felt like the classical dumb broad; but at least she managed to stop herself from following up her statement with an inane laugh. She was certain that Sverenssen was looking past her shoulder at the sculpture in its recess. She could picture it in her mind’s eye with a neon sign in six-inch letters above shouting, “I HAVE BEEN MOVED.” Somehow she resisted the compulsion to turn her head.
“I wouldn’t have thought that somebody from Houston would be bothered by the sun,” he remarked. “Especially somebody with a tan like yours.” His voice was superficially casual, but had an undertone that invited an explanation.
For a second or two she felt trapped. Then she said, “I just wanted to get away for a while. Your friend. . . Larry, was starting to come on a bit strong. I guess I need time to get used to this.”
Sverenssen looked at her dubiously, as if she had just confirmed his fears about something. “Well, I do hope you manage to loosen up a little before too much longer,” he said. “I mean, the whole idea of being here is to enjoy oneself. It would be such a shame if one person allowed her inhibitions to ruin the atmosphere for everyone else, wouldn’t it?”
Despite her confusion, Lyn couldn’t keep a sharp edge out of her voice. “Look . . . I didn’t exactly come here expecting this,” she told him. “You never said anything about playing musical people.”