“You have beaten rigged games in the past,” Lobot said.
“Yeah—I guess I have,” said Lando. “But it helps a lot if you can watch the table for a while first. Kill the map, Artoo, but keep tracking us as best you can. We’re going to pick up the pace a little.
Two meters per second, on my mark—” Most of another hour dragged by before Artoo made a discovery that set him to beeping agitatedly.
“What is it?” Lando demanded.
“Artoo says that there is an irregularity ahead,” Threepio said. “It may be an artifact of some kind.”
Lando jetted ahead, scanning the passage face hopefully.
“Which side?”
“Ahead and high to your left, Master Lando,” said Threepio.
“I see it,” said Lando. “Blast, it’s tiny. Wait—oh, no.”
“What is it? Lando?”
Lando did not explain, but when the others joined him, they got all the explanation they needed. A fragment of metal diamond grid protruded from the face of the passage, and a short cord waved from its anchoring knot.
Threepio gave voice to the unspoken. “Why, we’re back where we started.”
“That’s impossible,” Lobot said, with a touch of irritation.
“Yeah, you’d think so, but how else do you explain this?” Lando said, gesturing.
“Perhaps it was moved,” said Lobot.
“How? You think there’s someone else on this ship?”
“I do not know,” said Lobot. “This could be a copy of our marker, a deception. Artoo’s sensors still indicate that we’re heading toward the bow.”
“Oh, we are—for the second time, most likely.
What kind of crazy ship are we On? This passage doesn’t go anywhere, and it doesn’t do anything.”
“It occupied us for two hours,” Lobot pointed out.
“So it did. And we’ve wasted those two hours and”—Lando checked his readouts—”about nine percent of my thrust mass. Same for both of you, I’d guess.”
“This is most distressing. What do we do now?”
Threepio asked.
“We start playing smarter,” said Lando. “How much carbon line do we have? “
Lobot knew the answer without looking. “Two spools, five thousand meters each. Why?”
“If we keep going around in circles, we could find ourselves unable to get anywhere for lack of propellant.
There’s not enough grid to spare to make handholds the length of the passage, but there might be enough for line anchors. I think we’d better start stringing some hand lines now,” Lando said. “And they’ll help keep us from getting fooled again.”
“Yes—we can build a topological map rather than a representational one,” Lobot said. “We will at least know the relationships between the places we have been, even if the exact geometry escapes us.”
Lando nodded. “Something had better start happening.
I’m starting to get seriously annoyed.”
According to the counter on the line spool, they had gone 884 meters down the passage, staking four improvised line anchors along the way, when they came to the junction.
“This is nuts,” Lando said, hovering in midair before the twin openings. “This passage didn’t branch the last time we were through here.”
“If we’ve been through here before.”
“Don’t start with me,” Lando said, turning.
“It was not a jest,” Lobot said. “It remains a possibility that these passages are channels or conduits, related in some way to the operation of the ship. What we have seen in here may have nothing to do with us.”
“Conduits for what? They’re dry as a bone.”
“There are other types of fluids and flows—gases, energy plasmas, electrical charges,” Lobot said. “And conduits generally require stops, valves, and switches of some sort. This is likely to be one, directly ahead of us.
There may be another somewhere behind us that placed us on this path.”
Lando slowly spun back to face the junction. “If I had a fat toe, a short toe, a black toe, a new toe, I would know, where to go,” he chanted softly.
“What?”
“Pardon me, sir. It is a children’s counting rhyme, from Basarais,” Threepio said. “Master Lando, may I make a suggestion?”
“Anytime, Threepio. The last thing I want is for the last thing I hear to be someone saying, ‘You know, I wondered about that earlier—I guess I should have spoken up.”
“Very well, Master Lando. My suggestion is that we should separate into two parties and explore both passages at the same time. This would be the most efficient method. If each party consists of a human and a droid, I believe we should be able to maintain communications even if we become separated by some distance.”