Hamil clapped the older one on the shoulder and turned to the others. “Hah, people! Here are two of the gang that we depend on for getting the real work done in this operation. This is Zeke. The one with the heavy tan is Lou. Gentlemen, here are our new arrivals, Dr. Walter Trevany, Rudi Magelsberg, Katrina Ersohn. And this is Kieran Thane whom I told you about, who’s come in as Pierre’s replacement. We’re all a family here.”
“I guess we’ll all get to know each other later,” Zeke muttered as he moved through, steering the front end of the wagon.
Lou nodded a round of acknowledgments at the company as he followed. “Nothing personal, Doc,” he said as he passed Kieran. “But I hope our relationship stays strictly nonprofessional.”
“I need to check something with Zeke,” Dennis said, stepping aside and looking toward Hamil. “I’ll follow you on down.”
While Zeke and Lou trundled the wagon across the terrace toward the dump point, followed by Dennis, the others crowded onto the elevator. Hamil closed the gate and pressed a button, and they began descending.
The rock flowed by, the rumbling and squeaking of the pinch rollers on the rails sounding faint and distant through the thin Martian air. The far wall edged closer as the fissure narrowed; then shadow fell abruptly, framing a receding patch of pale pink sky above. As darkness closed in around, Kieran reflected yet again on what it was about his life that always seemed to draw him into situations of the strange and unexpected. He had come to Mars in all innocence to visit an old friend and follow a unique scientific experiment. Now here he was, plunging down a hole in the Martian desert, once again involved in something totally unconnected with the purpose he had started out with, wondering what twists would lead him where this time. Somebody had remarked to him once that his life was like a lightning conductor.
Light reasserted itself as the elevator passed the first of the lamps on the sides of what had by now became little more than a broad slot through the rock. More lamps appeared and the light grew stronger, revealing the face wall breaking into fault lines and fractures where the pinnacle had torn away. The elevator stopped in what appeared to be a cavern extending under the face beneath a jumble of standing flakes choked with debris and jammed boulders that had fallen from above. The cleave planes and bore holes from blasting showed that it was artificial—or at least, had been artificially enlarged. Another tip wagon stood by a pile of rubble, presumably hauled from farther within. More tools and equipment, stacks of adjustable steel roof props and scaffolding parts, and a humming motor-generator with cables snaking off toward the rear of the cavern filled the rest of the space around the elevator. Hamil raised a gate opposite the one via which they had entered and beckoned the others out. They followed silently, the chatter of the trail above gone now, conscious of moving from one world and its time into another, far removed.
The left side of the cavern ended in a square-cut alcove, clearly artificial, where a section of steel pipe several feet long and a foot or more in diameter, capped by a red plastic plug, protruded up at an angle from the floor. “That’s the original Zorken bore shaft,” Hamil told the others, waving as he led the way past it and into a low, rising gallery of open floor interrupted by roof props, extending farther back, under the plateau. “But what got our attention when we began exploring the surroundings was this. We were lucky in finding just a trace that the Zorken people had uncovered but not recognized. We’ve opened up a lot more of it since then.”
He stopped before a cleared section of floor and indicated it with a gesture of both hands. The others drew up on either side. The area was formed from roughly rectangular, convex-faced slabs, lying regularly with the edges aligned in both directions. To the rear, they disappeared under a layer of rock that looked as if it had covered them and been cut back. At the front, where the group was standing, the slabs ended at an erratic edge where the underlying rock had fallen away into the fissure behind. A trench had been cut to one side, presumably to investigate the foundation and underpinnings.