Chamber Two was a bubble, like Chamber One, but three times as big and twice as high. Michael Lum had joked that this was obviously an alien church, because it was so hole-y. Circular niches a meter around and ten centimeters deep had been carved into the walls. Small shafts perforated the floor, ranging between one and six centimeters in diameter. Robot surveyors sent down those shafts found they interconnected at different levels underground. Maybe they once held a pipe network.
Tiny holes that sank into the walls at regular intervals might have been for staples or brackets of some kind, holding up shelves or wiring or domes pegs for all they knew. An entire section of floor had been dug away for about a half meter, making a shallow, smooth-walled depression at the eastern curve of the chamber. At the bottom of the depression were still more holes—two ovals of eight holes each were surrounded by numerous minute holes drilled at seemingly random intervals.
Not even the stark evidence of human intervention could dampen Josh’s delight at finally standing in the middle of the Discovery. Every last one of the holes now had a cermet tag next to it with a number designation. It had taken almost a week just to get all the holes tagged. The measurements still weren’t finished. Hopefully Julia would be able to make a contribution to that effort with the miniature survey drones she carried in her pack.
From the ceiling hung three quartz globes. Inside them, you could see a tangle of filament wires. Big, pressure-tolerant, alien light bulbs. No one had managed to find the power source though, and God, how they’d looked.
A low, round doorway opened across from the tunnel. This one led to another smaller bubble room, almost a closet. Chamber Three. The laser was in there. Josh’s curiosity was almost a physical force pushing him toward that other doorway. He kept still with difficulty while, one at a time, the remainder of the team emerged from the tunnel.
Every last one of them looked up and around, just as Veronica had. Josh had a feeling a number of jaws had dropped open. It even took Terry a moment before she started systematically aiming her camera again.
After that, it was a replay of the scene in the antechamber, except nine times more intense. Snatches of competing conversations jammed the radio until everyone remembered about the private channels. Troy and Julia crowded the edge of the pit, pointing and gesturing. Terry tried to record everything at once. Only Veronica didn’t move. She stood in the middle of Chamber Two and frowned up at the lights.
In return, Josh frowned at her. He opened a private channel between them. “Vee? We’re here to see the laser?”
She focused on him slowly, as if his words reached her from a long way away. “Yes. Right.”
“This way.” He pointed to the low doorway. His hand almost shook with eagerness. Let the other tourists fend for themselves for a while. Let’s see what the neighbors left for us.
Josh ducked through the low doorway, for the moment not really caring if Vee followed him. He turned to the right, and there it was.
The laser rig stood next to the far wall of Chamber Three. Whoever hollowed out the chamber had left behind a single wedge of polished rock. It had been planed off at a forty-five-degree angle and tapered up from the floor until it was about level with Josh’s waist. A mechanism fastened to its surface and pointed toward a pair of short, narrow holes let in the ashen light from the surface.
Clumsily, Josh sat down. Now the laser rig was about level with his nose. “We’re dealing with little green men all right,” he said to Vee. “If this was working height for them, they couldn’t be much more than a meter tall.”
Vee said nothing. She just sat down beside him.
The laser itself was nothing much to look at right off. Its body was a dull-gray half-pipe about a meter long. Two tubes with roughly triangular cross sections projected out of it and pointed toward the holes to the surface, their flared ends almost touching the living rock.
“There’s a set of staples down here,” said Josh, leaning into the base of the half-pipe and pointing to the thick metal fasteners. “They pull out.” He gripped one carefully in his thick glove fingers and pulled as gently as he could. The staple eased out a little ways, then stopped.
“Anybody analyzed the cover?” asked Vee.
“It’s a ceramic. They think it’s refined from local earths. Maybe shaped by some kind of laser tomography.”
Vee just grunted. Josh pulled out the remaining staples. Then he lifted the cover away to reveal an interior that guttered with black glass, crystal, and gold.
And there it all was—the power points tucked into the two long, black glass (maybe) tubes, with what were unmistakably Brewster windows set into either end. The tubes themselves contained…what? They didn’t know yet. Mirrors of incorruptible gold (probably gold. Looked like gold) stood at either end of the tubes. Golden strips had been laid down in neat patterns along the tube supports. Pairs of thick lenses had been positioned at the end of each tube that was closest to the wall, with the smaller of the pair on the inside (almost definitely a beam expander), and in front of them was a pinplate to focus the light and send it…where? He looked at the holes to the surface. To do what?