The Lord of Opium(106)
They went on with occasional stops to watch a technician study graphs or adjust a number on a dial. The Mushroom Master opened every door they passed—carefully, so Dr. Angel wouldn’t notice—and discovered a lunchroom with tables. “Excellent! Let’s have tea,” he said.
Two technicians were sitting at a table, but they left when the visitors arrived. The old man was intrigued by a coffee machine and, by punching a button, managed to scald himself. “Here, I’ll do it,” said Cienfuegos, blowing on the old man’s hand to cool his skin. “Coffee or hot chocolate? I don’t think you’d like the tea.”
“Hot chocolate,” the Mushroom Master said eagerly. They found a box full of donuts and helped themselves. “This is extremely unhealthy,” the old man said happily. “The dieticians at home are fanatical about me not eating sugar.”
“By the way, sir, you do a fine imitation of a Tundran,” said the jefe. “Dr. Rivas and Dr. Angel couldn’t wait to get rid of you.” The Mushroom Master smiled and stuffed another donut into his mouth.
Afterward they explored the solar telescope. A technician carrying a clipboard hurried over and offered to show them around. The man took them to the top of the tower, where the telescope followed the movement of the sun, and then down to the opening of a giant shaft that plunged at an angle into the earth.
“Look at that,” cried Matt. A huge tube filled the inner part of the shaft, and elevators enclosed in a chicken-wire wall spiraled slowly down the outer part.
“The elevators are for the maintenance crew. The tube is like a giant thermos bottle, and it needs to be checked constantly for weaknesses,” said the technician. “The image of the sun is projected inside the tube from lenses in the tower and filtered to remove most of the heat. Even so, the temperature can be lethal. The final image is relayed to computers in the main observatory to study the weather on the surface.”
“The sun has weather?”
“Yes, indeed. The surface is always boiling, and sometimes streams of hot gas are ejected into space. We’re concerned with the ones aimed at the Scorpion Star.”
Lights illuminated the sides of the shaft, but it was so deep that Matt couldn’t make out the bottom. Air conditioners whirred in alcoves at various levels, and a hot breeze rose out of the depths and was sucked through vents.
“Amazing,” said the Mushroom Master. “Even with all those safeguards, it’s still hot.”
“The air-conditioning isn’t perfect,” admitted the technician. “Every now and then we lose a few eejits.”
“What an evil place to work,” said Matt, watching the pasty faces of the maintenance crew in their wire cage. They were dressed in the usual tan jumpsuits, and their skin was bleached from lack of sun. They looked like mushrooms. Matt shone Tam Lin’s flashlight, and powerful though it was, the beam was lost.
He thanked the technician for his help, and the man went back to his work. Matt continued to look into the hot shaft. More elevators slowly rose and fell along the sides, and some had stopped at alcoves to tend to machinery.
“Triple dare you to go down to the bottom,” Cienfuegos said.
“Me? Oh, no! It would be like being buried alive. I hate going underground.” Matt remembered finding part of El Patrón’s dragon hoard at the oasis. A dark shaft had opened up, and he’d glimpsed strange Egyptian gods and a floor covered with gold coins. It was the first of many chambers the old man had created. The earth around Ajo was riddled with them, all interconnected, with the last one leading to El Patrón’s funeral chamber and the bodies of those he had chosen to serve him in the afterlife.
Matt had to hold on to the railing. Looking over the edge made him light-headed.
“And you call yourself a drug lord,” the jefe said scornfully. “The Mushroom Master overcame his fear and threw away his umbrella.”
“Not completely,” reminded the Mushroom Master.
“It’s a work in progress. A real man doesn’t run and hide, Don Sombra. He would be ashamed.”
Matt was shocked. Never had Cienfuegos dared to lecture him like this. It was like having Tam Lin back, scolding him for being afraid to get onto a horse. For a second he was angry, but then he realized that what the jefe said was true. He could not afford to give in to fear. He was the Lord of Opium. You couldn’t be weak and have power at the same time.
“I could have you cockroached for that,” he said in an effort to save face, “but this time I’ll overlook your insolence. Let’s all go down to the bottom.”