Space Eater by David Langford Read Free Book Online Page A

blocking the way, with a small door set in the middle; the corridor was well made but old, this wall was new and shoddy. A plastic box carrying sixteen unmarked buttons in a square was hung askew on the door; Wui hunched himself over it and did things.
    The footsteps came up behind us as he straightened up. A click-buzz; the door hinged in and light spilled out. Corman and I followed Wui through, stepping over a high doorsill; the follower behind came too, and turned out to be a woman in standard dun overalls, young, taller than Wui or Corman, and pudding-faced. Her features looked like they’d been stirred into the middle of the face with a big spoon.
    “Oh, there you are ... missed breakfast again?” Wui said. “Cathy Ellan, our resident genius.” He reeled off our names. We were in a squarish space between two partitions, and the second looked massive.
    There was an enormous round door like a bank vault—in fact it looked like professional work and probably had been liberated from some old bank. Another grid of buttons on the partition at the side, this one glowing with alphamerics, 0 to 9 and A to F. Fuse boxes and power switches on the concrete wall, and heavy cables. Ellan shut the first door while Wui tapped a code to unlock the second.
    “Why the fortifications?” I asked.
    Ellan had a squeaky, pedantic voice. “We had anticipated a gateway into vacuum; we did not want to evacuate the entire complex. Likewise, we might have emptied the North Sea or the Atlantic Ocean into our laboratory. Our fears were groundless, as it proved, but other undesirable things could still pass through the gate: we chose to install the safety locks and keep the option of cutting power from out here.”
    She waved a hand at the switchgear on the wall.
    “I sure am enjoying the guided tour,” I said not too loudly. Ellan looked sour; I was surprised to catch a tiny smile from Corman. Good on you, Rossa , I thought. Meanwhile Wui was grunting as he pulled on the big round door; it swung out slowly; it was more than two meters thick. Undesirable things, eh? The opening tapered from maybe two meters high and wide to the point where even Rossa had to crouch; we went in one by one, hunched up, and stepped down into the biggest room yet. Wui snapped switches and strip-lights flickered, came on full. It was an enormous hall, maybe designed for underground government sittings. It was an incredible mess.
    The walls were clogged with racks of electronics; in a couple of places they pushed out into the room like library bays. There were sagging cardboard boxes stacked with electrical junk, trolleys and scar-topped benches littered with large and small parts, steel cupboards with still more stuff spilling from them and, all over the floor, bright blobs of solder, colored insulation and integrated circuits squashed like insects with lots of legs. There were computer consoles and printers, a traveling crane running on tracks up near the high ceiling, other pieces of machinery that meant nothing to me. And near the far wall, surrounded by meters and meters of the only clear space you could see, power lines thick as my arm vanished into a big gray case the size of an office desk. The one clean surface in the room was the flat, shiny, stainless-steel top of this thing, up there at the end like an altar. More or less centered in that surface there was a black spot. I guessed it might be 1.9 centimeters in diameter.
    Wui moved fast, out to one of the cluttered trolleys not far away. “Sorry, security,” I heard him say. He grabbed a couple of assemblies from between the dirty coffee cups there, stuffed them into a cupboard and hit the red RANDOMIZE button of a scrambler lock. “One or two things I’m not supposed to let you see, that’s all. But feast your eyes on all the rest. Real tribute to our disorderly minds, isn’t it?”
    Ellan said, as though she were talking in a lecture room: “We prefer to be judged by our achievements.
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