Nicole tried to imagine an adult man slugging an eight-year-old child. What kind of human being could break his own son’s nose? she wondered.

“I had always been very shy,” Richard was saying, “and had convinced myself that I had inherited my father’s social clumsiness, so I didn’t have many friends my own age. But I still yearned for human interaction!” He looked over at Nicole and paused, remembering, “I made Shakespeare’s characters my friends. I read his plays every afternoon in the park and immersed myself in his imaginative world. I even memorized entire scenes. Then I talked to Romeo or Ariel or Jaques while I was walking home.”

It was not difficult for Nicole to visualize the rest of Richard’s story. ! can picture you as an adolescent, she thought. Solitary, awkward, emotionally repressed. Your obsession with Shakespeare gave you an escape from your pain. All the theaters were near your home. You saw your friends become alive on the stage.

On impulse Nicole leaned over and kissed Richard lightly on the cheek. “Thanks for telling me,” she said.

As soon as it was daylight they walked over to the lattice. Nicole was surprised to find that the incisions she had made when she had freed the avian had all been repaired. The lattice was like new. “Obviously a repair biot has already been here,” Richard commented, no longer extremely im­pressed after all the wonders he had already witnessed-

They cut off several long strands of the lattice and headed for the bam. On the way Richard tested the elasticity of the material. He found that it stretched about fifteen percent and always restored itself, albeit very slowly at times, to its original length. The restoration time varied significantly, depending on how long the piece had been fully stretched. Richard had already begun his examination of the inside structure of the cord when they arrived at the barn.

Nicole did not waste any time. She tied one end of the lattice material around a stumpy object just outside the barn and lowered herself down the wall. Richard’s function was to make certain that nothing untoward occurred and to be available if there was some kind of an emergency. Down in the bottom of the pit Nicole shuddered once as she remembered how helpless she had felt there just a few days earlier. But she quickly turned her attention to her task, inserting a makeshift handle made from her medical probes deep into the manna melon and then securing the other end of the handle to her backpack. Her ascent was vigorous and uneventful.

“Well.” She smiled at Richard as she handed him the melon to carry. “Should we now continue with Plan A?”

“Roger,” he replied. “Now we know where our next ten meals are coming from.”

“Nine,” Nicole corrected with a laugh. “I’ve made a slight adjustment in the estimate now that I’ve watched you eat a couple of times.”

Richard and Nicole marched quickly from the bam to the western plaza. They crisscrossed the open area and combed the narrow alleys nearby, but they did not find anything that would help them build a boat. Richard did have an encounter with a centipede biot, however, in the middle of their search one had entered the plaza and then moved diagonally across it. Rich­ard had done everything possible, including lying in front of it and beating it over the head with his backpack, to try to induce the biot to stop. He had not been successful. Nicole was laughing at him when Richard returned, a little frustrated, to her side.

“That centipede is absolutely useless,” he complained. “What the hell is it for? It’s not carrying anything. It has no sensors that I can see. It just travels merrily along.”

“The technology of an advanced extraterrestrial species,” she reminded Richard of one of his favorite quotes, “will be indistinguishable from magic.” “But that damn centipede’s not magic,” he replied, a little annoyed at Nicole’s laughter, “it’s goddamn stupid!”

“And what would you have done if it had stopped?” Nicole inquired. “Why, I would have examined it, of course. What did you think?” “I think we’d be better off concentrating our energy in other areas,” she replied. “I don’t imagine a centipede biot is going to help us get off this island.”

“Well,” Richard said a little brusquely, “it’s obvious to me already we’re going about this process all wrong. We’re not going to find anything on the surface. The biots probably clean it up regularly. We should be looking for another hole in the ground, like the avian’s lair. We can use the multispectral radar to identify any places where the ground is not solid.”

It took them a long time to find the second hole, even though it was not more than two hundred meters from the center of the western plaza. At first Richard and Nicole were much too restrictive in their search. After an hour, though, they finally convinced themselves that the ground underneath the plaza area was solid everywhere. They expanded their search to include the small streets and lanes nearby, off the concentric avenues. On a dead-end alley with tall buildings on three sides, they found another covering in the center of the road. It was not camouflaged in any way. This second cover was the same size as the one at the avian lair, a rectangle ten meters long and six meters wide.

45

NIKKI

“Do you think the avian cover opens in the same way?” Nicole asked, after Richard had very carefully searched the environs and found a flat plate on one of the buildings that looked decidedly out of place. Pressing hard against the plate had caused the cover to open.

“Probably,” he answered. “Well have to go back and check.” “Then these places are not very secure,” Nicole said. The two of them walked back onto the street and knelt down to look in the hole. A broad, steep ramp descended from beside them and disappeared into the darkness below. They could only see about ten meters into the hole.

“It looks like one of those ancient parking lots,” Richard remarked. “Back when everybody had automobiles.” He stepped on the ramp. “It even feels like concrete.”

Nicole watched as her companion moved slowly down the ramp. When Richard’s head was below the ground level, he turned and spoke to her. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked. He had switched on his flashlight beam and had illuminated a small landing another few meters below.

“Richard,” Nicole said from above. “I think we should discuss this. I don’t want to be stuck—”

“Ah-ha!” Richard exclaimed. As soon as his foot hit the first landing, some lights around him automatically lit the next phase of the descent. “The ramp doubles back,” he shouted, “and continues down. Looks just the same.” He turned and disappeared from Nicole’s field of view.

“Richard,” Nicole now yelled, a little exasperated, “will you please stop for a minute? We must talk about what we’re doing.”

A few seconds later Richard’s smiling face reappeared. The two cosmo­nauts discussed their options. Nicole insisted that she was going to stay outside, in New York, even if Richard was going to continue with his explo­ration. At least that way, she argued, she could guarantee that they would not be stranded in the hole.

While she was talking, Richard was standing on the first landing and surveying the area around him. The walls were made of the same material Nicole had found in the avian lair. Small strip lights, looking not unlike normal fluorescent lights on Earth, ran along the wall to illuminate the path.

“Move away just a second, will you?” Richard shouted in the middle of their conversation.

At first puzzled, Nicole backed away from the entrance to the rectangular hole. “Farther,” she heard Richard yell. Nicole walked over and stood against one of the surrounding buildings.

“Is this far enough?” she had just finished shouting when the covering on the hole began to close. Nicole ran forward and tried to stop the motion of the cover, but it was much too heavy. “Richard,” she cried as the hole disappeared beneath her.