spores, dust, and other contaminants from being carried into or out of
the chamber that I call the egg room. Perhaps those personnel going to
and from that inner sanctum were subjected to powerful sprays of
sterilizing solution as well as to microbe-killing spectrums of
ultraviolet radiation.
My hunch, however, is that the egg room was pressurized and that this
airlock served the same purpose as one aboard a spaceship. Or perhaps it
functioned as a decompression chamber of the type deep-sea divers resort
to when at risk of the bends.
In any event, this transitional chamber was designed either to prevent
something from getting into the egg room or to prevent something from
getting out.
Standing in the airlock with Bobby, I trained my flashlight on the
raised, curved threshold of the inner portal and swept it around the
entire rim of this aperture to reveal the thickness of the egg-room
wall, five feet of poured-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete.
The entryway is so deep, in fact, that it is essentially a
five-foot-long tunnel.
Bobby whistled softly. “Bunker architecture.”
“No question, it’s a containment vessel. Meant to restrain something.”
“Like what? ” I shrugged. “Sometimes gifts are left for me here.”
“Gifts? You found that cap here, right? Mystery Train? ”
“Yeah. It was on the floor, dead center of the egg room. I don’t think I
found it, exactly. I think it was left there to be found, which is
different. And on another night, while I was in the next room, someone
left a photograph of my mother here in the airlock.”
“Airlock? ”
“Doesn’t it seem like one? ” He nodded. “So who left the photo? ”
“I don’t know. But Orson was with me at the time, and he didn’t realize
someone had entered this space behind us.”
“And he’s got the nose of noses.” Warily, Bobby directed his flashlight
through the first circular hatchway, into the corridor along which we
had just come. It was still deserted.
I went through the inner portal, the short tunnel, crouching because
only someone under five feet could pass this way without stooping.
Bobby followed me into the egg room, and for the first time in our
seventeen years of friendship, I saw him stricken with awe. He turned
slowly in a circle, sweeping his flashlight across the walls, and though
he tried to speak, he couldn’t initially produce a sound.
This ovoid chamber is a hundred twenty feet long and slightly less than
sixty feet in diameter at its widest point, tapering toward each end.
The walls, ceiling, and floor are curved to form a single continuous
plane, so you seem to be standing in the empty shell of an enormous egg.
All surfaces are coated in a milky, vaguely golden, translucent
substance that, judging by the profile around the entry hatchway, is
nearly three inches thick and is bonded so securely to the concrete that
the two appear to be fused.
The beams of our flashlights shimmered over this highly polished
coating, but they also penetrated the exotic material, quivering and
flickering to the depths of it, flaring off whorls of glittering golden
dust that were suspended like miniature galaxies within. The substance
was highly refractive, but light did not shatter through it in hard
prismatic lines as it might through crystal, rather, buttery bright
currents, as warm and sinuous as candle flames seduced by a draft,
flowed and rippled through the thick, glossy surface plating, imparting
to it the appearance of a liquid, purling away from us into the farther,
darker corners of the room, there to dissipate like pulses of heat
lightning behind summer thunderheads. Gazing down at the floor, I could
almost believe that I was standing on a pool of pale-amber oil.
Marveling at the unearthly beauty of this spectacle, Bobby walked
farther into the room.
Although this lustrous material appears to be as slick as wet porcelain,
it is not at all slippery. In fact, at times but not always the floor
seems to grip at your feet, as if it is gluey or exerts a mild magnetic
attraction even on objects that contain no iron.
“Strike it, ” I said softly.
My words spiraled along the walls and ceiling and floor, and a cascade