CHAPTER 11: “What seest thou else, in the dark backward and abysm of time?”

“What have you been doing to yourself?” Howard Anson peered anxiously into the holoscreen, where Rob’s weary face was displayed. “You look terrible.”

“Thank you. I’ve been working, and worrying. Too much of both.” Rob took in the details of Anson’s strange costume, and his face relaxed into a tired smile.

Anson nodded. “That’s better. Now you’re more like the man I met at Way Down. You don’t need me to tell you this, but you don’t look good. I think you’d better find some way to take a rest for a while. You’ve added ten years since we first met.”

“I feel all of them.” Rob wriggled his shoulders, trying to get the tension out of them. “More than ten years, inside. I can’t get my mind off the beanstalk, and if ever I do I’m back to worrying about my parents. A year ago, I felt like an engineer. Now, I feel like a mess.” He stared again at Anson’s outfit. “Less of one than you look, though.”

Howard Anson glanced down at himself with undisguised irritation. “It’s not my idea, you know. A couple of my big clients are doing this as the latest madness. If I want to stay close to my customer base, I have to go along with it.”

He picked at the lapel of his flowered dressing-gown with disgust. “You know what this is, don’t you? We’re all supposed to dress as `gay young things’ from a hundred and forty years ago.”

He picked up a small black cylinder from the table in front of him and regarded it gloomily. “I think I know what’s been happening to you, though I doubt it does much to help. Until a year ago, you were a real orphan. You probably never thought of that as an advantage, but there’s a positive side to a lack of ties. You don’t have anything to live up to when you start out in life with no family. Now, you’ve started to think of your parents as real people — not just abstract nouns, but individuals with lives and deaths. That’s what is getting to you, Rob. I take a lot of the responsibility for that, and I’m sorry.”

He sniffed at the cylinder he was holding, while Rob watched him curiously.

“You may be right, Howard. Something started me off, and now I can’t stop. What is that thing?”

“This?” Anson held up the cylinder. “It’s a cigarette holder. Something else that was de rigeur for a man-about-town around 1925. A fire on one end and a fool on the other. It was Senta’s idea. We’re supposed to go to a Dawn-of-Man party in these clothes later today. Now I’m not sure we’ll make it. Maybe that’s a good thing.” He put down the holder. “Let’s get down to serious stuff. How’s the ’stalk coming along?”

“We’re well past seventy thousand kilometers of cable. Four more months and we’ll be flying it in for landing. How would you like to come over to the Control Center and see it happen?”

“Out in space?”

“No.” Rob smiled at the mixture of disdain and trepidation on Anson’s face. “The Control Center will be down on Earth, near Santiago. But it would do you good to get out into space. You’re a creeping Earth-worm, you know. `What can men know of Terra, who only Terra know?’ “

“Indeed.” Anson raised his eyebrows. “Half a year ago you felt the same about space as I do. And you’d certainly never have said that, misquotation and all, when we first met. Somebody’s been educating you. Keep it up, maybe you’ll become human after all. I’ll stick with my own views of space travel. Anybody who wants to sit on a heap of explosives and have it lit underneath him can have my share of space. I’ll stay on terra firma — and the more firmer, the less terror. I’ll take you up on your other offer, though, and come to Control Center. You’ll be able to get Senta in, too?”

“Sure. Where is she now?”

“Gone to talk to the Perions, if you remember them. They were with us when we first met you. They were one of the couples who had a narrow escape, and Senta thought they might need to talk it out with somebody.”

“Escape?”

Rob waited impatiently as the radio signal sped on its three-second round-trip path between the L-4 communications center and the surface of Earth. The delay encouraged longer exchanges of information at each end, with passage of single-word exchanges especially annoying.

“Don’t you bother to listen to any news when you’re out there?” Anson’s reply came at last. “I thought you’d know all about it — every news outlet here has been full of nothing else. It happened two days ago. Way Down went away. Closed up completely, at the worst possible time — evening, when it was at its busiest. The Perions were down there in the afternoon, but Lucetta had a headache, the sort she usually gets before a thunderstorm. They left Way Down and came up to the surface about six o’clock. Two hours later there was a small earthquake in Mexico. Not even enough to do more than tickle the seismometers. After it, Way Down had gone.”

“My God. How many people?”

“Twenty-two hundred. Trapped twelve miles down, and not a chance of getting to them.”

There was a long silence over the comlink. Rob had always been blessed — or cursed — with a strong visual imagination. Now he could see the whole thing in his mind’s eye: the basalt walls of Way Down moving inexorably in on the central cavern; the sudden and total darkness as electrical power from the surface was cut off. Then the panic, the random movement of people; and finally, the quick extinction in that deep mass grave, many miles below the surface.

“No one else at all got out?” he said at last.

“No one but the other couple who were with the Perions, the ones they persuaded to leave with them.” Howard Anson laughed shortly and looked down again at the flowered robe he was wearing. “Maybe I should be blessing this outfit instead of cursing it. Senta stayed back here for a costume fitting, otherwise we might have been there, too. You know, when I was down there I always had this funny feeling that there could be an accident. Maybe everybody did, and maybe that was part of the attraction of the place.”

Rob shook his head, dark eyes somber. “Not to me. I felt uncomfortable all the time I was down there, and I couldn’t wait to get out. There were enough dangers in bridge construction work, I never needed to look for more. It must be horrible to be so bored with life that you have to introduce artificial dangers into it. I’m sure you’re right, though, that was part of the draw of Way Down for some people.” He stared thoughtfully at the brocaded robe that showed its multiple colors in the display screen.

“Not me,” Anson said hastily. “Don’t get the wrong impression, Rob. I do this for business, not entertainment.” He glanced down again at his colorful costume and scowled. “You don’t know how lucky you are. Your line of work doesn’t call for any posturing, the way that mine does.”

“Rubbish.” The word took a long time to get there. “How much money do you have, Howard? Don’t even bother to answer that. You don’t have to work if you don’t choose to, I know that. The Information Service must be pulling in money hand over fist. Digging out information when other people fail is your life-blood. You’re just unnaturally interested in other people’s affairs.”

Anson listened to Rob with no trace of expression on his fine-boned face. “Hmph,” he said at last. “We’re cutting close to the bone tonight. After those kind words, I don’t know if I should tell you what I’ve been doing while you’ve been away.”

“You don’t need to. You’ve been digging. From the look on your face you’ve found something, too.”

“Maybe.” Anson rubbed his chin. “Rob, you take the fun out of everything. I expect to get some credit for this. The sort of thing I’ve been doing is damned hard. I don’t believe there’s another man in the System who can do it half as well as I can. I’ve been digging all right. We’re following a scent that’s old, and one that has been well covered up. I’m getting somewhere, but not as fast as I’d like or in anything like the detail we really need.”