BOUNDARY(163)

"Okay, Joe, you were right. That would have been bad."



"Damn right it would, Mr. Seat-of-the-Pants."



Finally Joe decided they'd done all they could, and they began attaching cables to the door. Most of the door appeared to have been eaten through, according to A.J.'s Fairy Dust examination, and the remainder of the seal area was cracked.



Jack the Ripper was once more reconfigured, this time to a winch configuration. A block and tackle had been rigged using cable of the same composition that Thoat's winch used, and Jack was braced and locked to one of the main support columns. Even with bracing methods and mechanical advantage, the cable was far stronger; Jack would break long before the cable would.



It was something of an anticlimax that after all that preparation, the Vault door moved almost as soon as Jack started pulling. Within a minute, the heavy drone had dragged it open far enough to allow the little party to enter the area it had formerly sealed off.



"I guess you do know your explosives," Joe said. "But then, I always knew you were dynamite."



Madeline actually giggled.



"Why is it," A.J. complained, "that you tolerate his stupid jokes?"



But Madeline ignored him, since she was already passing through the door. The interior of the tunnel beyond was a pearl-gray color, almost nacreous, smooth and seemingly unmarked by the immense span of years. Twenty meters farther down, the tunnel ended in a door, with the widely-separated lever arm design they had seen before.



Madeline reached it first. Obviously not really expecting any positive result, she gave a small tug upward on the left-hand crossbar.



The valve lock handle spun smoothly, as though it had been checked and oiled only yesterday. The other arm nearly clipped A.J., who jumped back with a startled exclamation. Madeline had stepped back herself, not having expected any movement at all. When nothing untoward happened, she moved forward and gently turned the lock still further clockwise, until it finally stopped after three full revolutions. They'd learned from experience that the Bemmies opened and closed things in the opposite directly that people generally used.



Cautiously, she pushed inward. The massive door, well over two meters high and wide and, as they could see as it opened, half a meter thick, swung back without effort or protest.



"Sixty-five million years," A.J. almost whispered. "And it opens like someone was just here minutes ago. What the hell is this?"



Madeline entered first, flashing her light around. "Looks like a sort of rotunda with—"



Her words cut off in a shriek of unrestrained terror.





Madeline nearly dove out of the doorway. The others backed away hurriedly also—all the faster because Madeline was normally unflappable. Anything that could frighten her that badly . . .



"Madeline, what was it?" Joe asked. A.J. had yanked the door shut and spun the lock the other way. The people listening in from Nike began asking what had happened with the common morbid mixture of worry and excitement that such events tend to produce.



Madeline's breathing slowed, and suddenly she started to laugh. More questions began to flood the link. Madeline stopped laughing long enough to choke out: "Hush up, everybody. It just took me by surprise, that's all."



She took a deep breath and looked over at Helen. "You go in first. You deserve to, I think. Don't worry—it's safe."



Uncertainly, Helen went to the great door, reopened it, and entered. Her light moved slowly around the room. Suddenly, she gasped. But, forewarned, she didn't come running out or scream the way Madeline had. She just stood there, mostly out of sight half behind the door.



Joe and A.J. followed. At first, all they could see was Helen, her face inside the mostly-transparent helmet staring in what looked like almost religious rapture. For a moment, they forgot why they had come, seeing tears starting from her eyes. And then, as they turned, they could see what she was staring at. Both of them cursed and stepped back, almost in unison; but they, too, were unable to take their eyes from the sight before them.



Towering above them, no more than fifteen meters away, rearing meters high under the ceiling of the immense room, the monster seemed poised in the moment of attack. Its hide was banded in shades of green and brown and black, the camouflage of a predator. Behind a gaping maw more than a meter long filled with teeth as long as a man's hand, the eyes seemed to blaze with hunger.



Tyrannosaurus rex snarled soundlessly, motionlessly, at the first beings to look upon him in sixty-five million years.



The others came in slowly. Bruce and Rich, warned by their reactions, didn't jump back, but couldn't restrain their own quiet curses of disbelief.