BOUNDARY(107)

The room was huge. Not quite the size of the monstrous room that had held the vast supplies of mud and water which the aliens had apparently favored, but still immense. The part that shared a wall with the corridor was a hundred meters long, and the room extended out from that wall twice as far. The ceiling height was about three meters—tall enough that Joe didn't feel his usual impulse to stoop. A sort of clear lane or corridor, about three meters wide, ran from the door they'd just entered across the entire width of the room. At intervals of a bit less than every three meters there were . . .



Booths, Joe guessed. Each booth had a low desk or something like it on the sides, with holes or depressions in it and other structures they'd already deduced were for holding things down in microgravity. These were pretty much universally present throughout the base, although in a number of areas it had seemed they were in positions indicating they weren't used much. That had led some eternal optimists in the crew to suggest that Bemmius had some form of artificial gravity. Joe doubted it; but, hey, nothing wrong with hoping.



The "booths" weren't enclosed, though. They were more like security gates at airports, Joe decided—two walls and a roof, giving you a semienclosed space about three or four meters long. That was much longer than any security gate a human being would need, of course. But, adjusting for their greater size and the fact that their major axis was horizontal rather than vertical, just about right for a Bemmie.



You could just walk straight through from this side, down the long axis of the room to the far side. It was hard to make out details on that distant wall, but looking through the booth he thought he could see something on or against the wall directly aligned with the booth's opening. He checked a couple of others; yes, it seemed that there was something directly in line with each of the booths, way over on the far side of the room.



"Well, what have we found here?" Harry finally asked aloud.



"Looks like a bowling alley." That was Helen's voice. She must have tuned in to take a look. Joe gave silent thanks that she hadn't tuned in earlier, to hear—



"And I'll deal with you later, Mr. Baker. Conan the Barbarian, ha. You ever try using a bulldozer on one of my digs, you'll go out Conan the Castrati. As for you, Dr. Buckley, you ought to know by now that hell hath no fury like a bonedigger called a bonedigger."



Joe winced. Hastily, he focused on Helen's substantive remark. "Well, yeah, I suppose looked at from one way it does resemble a bowling alley. Sort of. But without any gravity worth talking about, you're not doing any bowling here."



"Close, and yet so far away." Hathaway's voice now broke in, clearly amused. "It's obvious y'all are civilians."



"What do you mean?" Joe and Helen asked, almost simultaneously.



Hathaway snorted. "People, that is a target range."



As soon as Hathaway said it, Joe felt like smacking his forehead. Probably would have, if he hadn't been wearing the suit.



"Of course. That desk up front is where you'd go and pick up your gun for practice. The thicker door—and I'll bet this wall's a lot thicker too—keeps you from accidentally shooting through."



"Which means," Hathaway continued, his voice drawling speculatively, "that through the other door there might be an armory."



"Maybe. Well, yeah, certainly, in some sense, if the weapons are still there. But probably not military arms. I mean, you guys don't stock missiles and tank killers at the target range, right?"



"No, we don't. Still, it'd be interesting to see what they've got. I'd guess a variety of small arms, probably their equivalent of pistols, shotguns, and rifles."



Joe checked his telltales. "We've got plenty of air, and I don't feel a need to find a bathroom yet. How about it, Harry? You want to check?"



"You have to ask? This is the fun part of the expedition, like unwrapping presents at Christmas. Afterwards is when we get to the part where some assembly is required and we discover that batteries weren't included."



Harry started moving the opener toward the rear door. "We'll have to take a look at what they use as targets, too. We may be able to get a lot of used rounds out of there, which will give us ways to verify the characteristics of the weapons."



"Glendale was right," A.J. put in. "A bunch of peace nuts aren't going to have a training area like this—especially on a base where every resource had to be brought in from outside, and where most rooms had to be carved out of solid rock. Look at the size of the place. They could have had more than thirty people practicing at once, even as big as they were. That's a lot of people slinging lead—or whatever they used—and a hell of a lot of lead to sling. Lots of resources. These were not peaceful people."