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 Awakening on the ledge overlooking
the dynamo, Kevin felt energetic enough for another day's exploring. Yet, he
was a little tired -- and wondered whether it was worth spending any more time
there.
But he couldn't shake the feeling that there
was something in the complex that he had missed so far. Well, he'd take another
look here and there, and then get going.
The
rope was still where he had left it on the balcony railing in the greenhouse
room. And it even felt like morning in the air there, unlike the dry sameness
of the air everywhere else in the complex.
Not
quite halfway across the room, he saw some movement in the forest. Looking at
it, he saw a metal box about the size of a shoebox floating in the air next to
a tree, with metal arms from it reaching out to trim one of its branches. That
explained the mystery of how this place was well-maintained.
At the far end of the room, the forest came
to an end. There was a gap as the soil gave way to some kind of plastic, and
beyond a short band of that there was the usual rock flooring. Looking to his
side, it appeared there was something on the wall to his right.
He pressed a finger into the small
indentation that normally indicated a door. But he was startled by what
happened next; a doorway opened by rising up, but it spanned the entire width
of the wall at the back of the room, and the opening it made was at least
thirty feet high.
Beyond it lay
another square hallway, but considerably larger, especially wider, than the
ones he had seen before. Across from him was another indentation.
Another large doorway. Another forest. He
walked in. The room was warmer than the rest of the complex. The door quickly
closed behind him. He walked to the center of the doorway, and found the path
into the woods.
This one was quite a bit noisier
than the previous one as well. He thought he heard cockatoos and parakeets. And
many of the trees had vines hanging from them. It was the same size as the
previous greenhouse. Walking to the other end took some time. He saw a couple
of small moving boxes attending to the plants again on his way. This time,
though, the end of the room didn't have a ledge or an elevator, or any
doorways.
Returning to the hallway, he
turned left and walked along his length. After passing by many buttons, he
decided to try another one at random. It opened to another greenhouse section.
Except that a blast of cold air came at him from it, and he saw penguins on a
snow-covered beach diving into a small lake. Not wearing winter clothing, he
declined to explore.
At the end of the hallway was
another button. But this opened up the end of the hallway instead of a door on
the side. Beyond was a large squarish room. Looming ahead of him, to his left,
were a small number of large machines, with pipes, wires, and control panels,
roughly shaped like giant blocks or bricks, no two the same size. Overhead, the
ceiling rested on a what appeared to be giant hinge, like he had seen in the
room with the spacecraft.
On his right were
plastic boxes that looked like railroad cars from a freight train, or
containers -- like those used to transport cargo on ships, and then to trains
or trucks. Only, they were a bit bigger.
One of
them was sitting open, its two halves joined by a hinge at the far end. He
looked inside, and saw a handful of earth on the inside of it. So that was how
the contents of the "greenhouses" were brought in to the complex. Interesting,
but not useful. But there were other doorways from this room.
The first he tried led into a bare room with
a table, some empty shelves -- and another of those one-way windows into the
room he came from. Hmm... another alien "office".
He then
crossed the room, going past the large machines, and tried the other door he
saw. It was a large room, but not as large as any of the other large rooms he
had been in; perhaps 20 feet by 100 feet.
This room
contained two rows of squat cylinders along its length. Each one had beside it
a wedge-shaped object, its two sloping sides made of a dark glassy material
that reminded Kevin of the laptop-like device he had earlier
found.
He returned the large
biosphere hallway and headed back to the Forest room. As he walked along its
long length he pondered his experience over the last couple of days. He had
come here to catch some fish and relax in solitude. Instead, it seemed he had
gotten caught in an alien "fish bowl". Being in the complex was a solitude of
sorts but it certainly was not relaxing. To be sure, he wasn't really caught
the way he had felt he was at the beginning. Now he knew how to get out and
come back in and he was beginning to find his way around the place. Now,
though, it was his curiosity and imagination that were caught. He would have to
satisfy it as much as he could the rest of today and possibly tomorrow. After
that it was best to start making tracks for back home.
His Dad had been known to embellish the
stories he told about "the one that got away". When Kevin got back to his
relatives and friends he wondered if when he told them of this place if they
would think he was doing a little embellishing himself. They might think he had
found a few good mushrooms in the bush or something. Maybe it wouldn't be such
a good idea to tell too many people at first. Yet how would it be possible to
keep such a thing quiet?
He had reached about the half-way point down
the hallway and as a lark, he decided to look in one more biosphere. He wanted
to look in all of them but there would be lots of time on the next trip back to
explore the place fully.
The chamber raised up and...
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