“Professor?” I turned towards the gentleman next to me. “Why did you come here? Participation in this expedition was strictly voluntary. I have never forced anybody to go where they do not want to. It is obvious that you are as knowledgeable on these matters as that girl in black. And I also suspect that you know only because you learned it from her. Why all this secrecy?” What do you know about the Nameless Town?”

“Nothing. If it indeed exists, I have heard nothing about.” The Professor said.

“Different from, you, for Mariann information in and of itself has no intrinsic value. Information is but folklore, nothing more. Whoever knows even a little bit can find all the information on their own based on that little bit. But for you information is priceless, that’s why you are trying to keep it to yourself like this. But here, in this place information does not have the value it had over there. That girl in black knows plenty to not be afraid of the things she knows. While you are afraid of both what your yourself know as well as what she might know. And the soldier who was sent to accompany her, he too was afraid to know, even more than you are. You see what I’m getting at?”

“What am I supposed to see?” The Professor asked, his voice still contained his intent to keep anything to be considered a national secret to himself.

“There is no place here for secrecy and privileged information. Nor for being afraid of something or scared for something. That girl has spoken enough about these matters so that even if we should find our way back, there is no real life remaining for any of us in there. The state and its secrets are worth much more than our lives or even what we have learned.”

“I am still not sure what you are accusing me of.” The Professor said in a defensive tone. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Look,” I leaned closer to him and grabbed his shoulder to turn him towards the window. “You have two options here. Option one, you speak to me right here and answer my questions, or...”

“Or…?” The Professor asked.

“Or I’m asking that girl in black what is it that you are so afraid of.”

The Professor took a silent glance out the dirty window and sighed dejectedly. “Fine. Fine, I’ll talk.”

“The government has been aware of the Route for a long time now. Different central powers since Peter I have been aware of the Nameless Town. Reportedly it has always been known as the Nameless Town, because never has anybody remembered what the real name of it was, despite assurances throughout the ages that at one time it indeed did have a name. There still exist rare maps from the 19th century which have on them the Nameless Town and the whole surrounding countryside. Reportedly it lies straight down southwards from Yuryev.

“But at the beginning of the 20th century it was discovered that this place would not submit itself to aerial photography. You could reach it by car, you could see planes flying over, even be in radio contact with them, but what one could not do was capture this area on photographs.

“German war on two fronts was partially caused by Ahnenerbe and the Thule Society notifying Hitler a little too late that the Nameless Town really exists. Hitler and Himmler were convinced that should they manage to keep the Nameless Town and the Balto-German Esoteric Intitute in the middle of it in their hands long enough, then conquering Russia this side of the Ural range and winning the war would not be a problem.

“Our problems, ergo the Route, started when some strange trouble started cropping up. It started with people being able to access the Nameless Town along other roads than the one people had become accustomed to using during the centuries past. For example one could be driving the road between Reval and Baltiisk and then suddenly find himself on a road not far from the Nameless Town. As a singular event.

“However such singular events started to repeat far too often and a legend about a depressive small town with no name started to spread. And then something happened. At first moving back and forth simply became unstable. A few dozen minutes spent in the Nameless Town could have meant that three week passed in the rest of the world. Also the places of going and coming were no longer the same. And then the Route appeared in the form it currently exists in: as an unstable unidirectional anomaly. I was sent to look into what had happened, if possible to look into reversing this change.”

“Wait a second.” I asked, now feeling waves of cold running over my back as I started to understand what the Professor had just told me. “You know how to leave this place? To get back?”

“Yes, I do.” He said. “This is not my first time to be in the Nameless Town. But to get back, I must first get to the Center Station and activate the machines located there.”

“When did you plan to tell the rest that you had a way back?” I asked.

“Before what we saw and what happened in the marsh, there was no need for any of that. But that soldier and the boy disappearing changed everything. It clearly told me that not only those two were lost, but all of us were equally lost in here. This whole place has become lost. The vectors are that diametrically different. This what that girl did not mention. What she also hasn’t spoken of is that the way back might be possible at all. I am pretty convinced she came along for the sole reason of also becoming lost herself.”

“She came here looking for her demise?”

“Yes.” The Professor said. “This is all I am willing to talk about. And I will deny that this conversation even took place. I advise you to do the same. If that does not suit you then you are free to continue to listen to the fairy tales that girl tells. These will certainly be of immense help to the both of you.”

“They have been thus far.”

“Thus far her fairy tales and the three of us staying alive have been to her benefit.” The Professor gave an evil smile. “When we are no longer of use to her… can you be sure which one of us is the first to disappear?”

The professor gave a small nod and left to find a small tin with evening meal and a sleeping bag from his backpack.

I sat down onto the blanket on the bed, next to the pillows. I looked as Laura sat next to Mariann who was kneeling in front of the lit fire in the fireplace and finally grabbed her attention. If I really focused I even managed to hear snippets of what the two of them were talking. It seems that the events of today had seriously rattled Laura and she was now looking to get clarity about everything that had happened. Starting from the beginning.

“Mariann…?” Laura asked. “What exactly did happen to that soldier in the marshes?”

“I told you what happened.” The girl in black sighed. “We lost sight of you and then that idiot stepped into a kolk.”

Laura did not have to say anything to express her deep disappointment in her conversation partner and her lie. However she also conveyed her desire to hear what really happened.

“Remember how I spoke about the marsh grabbing onto a people if a people allows themselves to be grabbed onto? Fixations are never good, even if they are only on the level of dedication. That soldier dragged me onward and we lost sight of you. Only for a moment but that was enough to become hopelessly lost. It was obvious we had stepped off the path. We wandered around for three hours before the major finally released my bonds. He left the belt around my midsection hoping to chain me up after we had found the path once more.”

“How long did you spend in there?” Laura asked.

“At least a full day, according to my local time. We spent all that time wandering around, always ending back on the edge of that very same bog pond he initially dragged me to. More than ten times we also found our way back to a path, but not the path.”

“In what way?”

“To the right place but not the right time.”

“I assume he did not simple fall into a bog pond?”

“You assume correct, as did your companion earlier.” The girl in black gave a sad smile and then glanced at me. “In the light of the early morning he woke from a short nap, he drank a few handfuls of bog water, stretched his body, took a deep breath of cool air from the morning marsh, full of dew… and then without pause produced his pistol, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

“He shot himself in the head?!” Laura was stupefied.

“Into the brain stem. He was a soldier, after all. He would not risk damaging any components with higher functions and dying slowly. From his body I only took the keys to the belt and the irons and one of his dog tags.”

Mariann opened her left palm to show Laura something.

“After that, I made it back to you in less than half an hours. That’s all the story.”

“How is that possible?” Laura asked. “For us you weren’t gone more than ten minutes!”

“In this place the world is all twisted up.” Mariann said. “Time and space no longer carry the same meaning they once did. And there’s of course what the marsh wants and the intentions with which a person enters the marsh. All that creates quite a complicated structure.”

“And what happened to that boy? We all spoke of him getting lost as if he was dying, but that is not exactly correct, is it?”

“No. Becoming lost is not something akin to death. It is just a term some third party is using. When we ended up in here, we also became lost, from the perspective of those over there. We became unreachable. It is sort of like the story of the wayward son in the Bible. When the son returned home, the father held big festivities justifying it with his son having been dead and now again living. For a third party, a person becoming separated and lost might be similar to dying, and the presence of a kind of an event horizon reinforces analogy with a black hole. But for a person who becomes lost, it is not the least bit as dramatic. He still exists, he still lives, but is no longer located on the same timeline.

“In here one can only die by four means: suicide, an accident, some pathological condition or old age. If that young man makes no stupid mistakes he may stay alive until he is old and shriveled. And as the world is as twisted here as it is, he might meet individuals, see their abandoned property or even stumble upon it literally during the process of it being piled up into a makeshift shelter, on a parallel timeline. There is a myriad of options.”

“This makes one think, about the world.”

“Only at first. It a way of thinking unaccustomed to us and thus needs practice.”

“There was one other question I had.” Laura said. “This pertains to the railway and the path you spoke of. If the rest of the world is as twisted up as you say… Full of chances to simply go missing, drown into the bottomless marsh, be impaled on underwater ruins. Be poisoned by exotic aircraft fuels… Why then is the railway so safe? If we disregard the carriages rushing by on their own accord. Even by that broken section of the line, you asked if there was no option to get across it by some other means.”

“I did ask that.” Mariann said. “Railway here is something more than simply a railway. It is a pair of rails, but at the same time that pair of rails can also be seen as a kind of electric cable. A long time before everything went to hell, it was discovered that strong magnetic fields repressed certain occurrences or disallowed them from ever even appearing. This was discovered while experimenting with the creation of man-made Routes. This also meant to places outside the confines of a single space-time continuum. The original discovery was made in the 47th Secret Base, but the real work with the results of that discovery was carried out in the 48th and the 49th Secret Bases constructed singularly for that purpose. Outside the H-labs of the 47th Secret Base nobody even knew about the existence of those two bases.

The railways were the first objects to experiment on. They even built a closed railway track at the test polygon in the old open pit mine. This was used to test how temporary space-time warping and magnetic fields counter-influenced one another. Based on the results, thick copper cables were also placed under all streets and mayor roads in the area, just in case an enemy should attack using their own weapons of spatial warping, or something else should go catastrophically wrong. To a location classified at the highest of levels, a special closed reactor complex was placed which was supposed to keep the railways and the cables under the roads constantly electrified.”

“Classified at the highest of levels?” Laura asked. “Wasn’t this whole region classified at the highest of levels?”

“That means that every person who had the smallest inkling of knowledge where the complex had been built, was executed. This included the builders, the locals, but also soldiers guarding the construction site and keeping the on-site personnel in check. So that the only things remaining on the lips of the common folk were stories of a facility that did not exist. Like the submarine base on the Northern coast built into the Baltic Klint rockface.”

“Does this mean you know what went wrong in this place?” Laura asked. “Why the world twisted out of shape like that?”

“I do, that’s quite a simple thing to know. Local experiments with the Routes were successful but the energy consumption to carry them out was unimaginable. They then started to research into keeping the Route open with the energy contained within them...” Mariann fell silent for a moment. “What lies all around us is the result of the first and the last experiment into that.”

“But the Route we used to get to this place, that is remaining open using its internal energy?” Laura asked.

“That’s what made the scientists scratch their heads. In their opinion it was being kept open exactly by such a mechanism. It is possible they were mistaken.”

“And the crater?”

“Have no idea.” The girl in black smiled. “There are limits to my knowledge. However the world being bent of of shape like that made a few things pretty clear.”

“Like what?”

“People have become used to thinking about space as a three-dimensional thing and time as an illusion or a time arrow with a single dimension. But the truth is a bit more complicated.”

The girl in black revealed a black Swiss army knife and used it to scribble on the sheet of brass protecting the wooden floor from the embers jumping out if the fireplace.

“The world bending out of shape made it possible for the time to become relative and fragmented, it brought out at least another dimension to time. But I like to think that the truth is even more complicated.”

She drew a square, then turned it into a cube and that in turn to another figure Laura could not recognize.

“What’s that?”

“A hypercube. A four-dimensional cube. The world being bent out of shape mainly consists of the aspects that while space likely remained three-dimensional, time became four-dimensional. You could understand it by imagining that every dimension must be standing on something. A line must stands on a point. A square on a line. A cube on a square, a hypercube on a cube. That’s the source of that internal energy that keeps the Route open.”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“Does that not mean that the Route was never open spontaneously or by chance?” Laura asked. “It was always open by virtue of some source of energy?”

“Or alternatively, one of the locations it was open into possessed more temporal dimensions than one. Even a fractional dimension would have been enough.”

“A fractional dimension? How do you imagine that?”

“Beats me,” Mariann smiled. “I can draw you all the strange figures here you want but it remains a fact that I am drawing them while sitting on a linear timeline. Despite that, I am certain that fractional spatial and temporal dimensions exist. Just that they are very hard to pick out from between the whole numbered dimensions.

“Just keep in mind that everything I’ve told you is just one of many ways to understand what transpired. Nothing more.”

“Hoe do you know all these things?” The Professor asked, having seemingly heard the whole discussion.

“If your aim is to experience becoming lost as many times as possible, you will learn many things during that.”

“This may not be the correct question, but...” Laura started. “How old exactly are you?”

Mariann smiled, wordlessly indicating that this was very correct a question.

“Old enough to remember everything.”

*

The next morning I was woken early by a cold yet bright sun. It felt like spring was in the air. According to my watch it was three o’clock in the night but I knew that here timepieces were affected in the same way compasses were. That had become abundantly clear last night when at one point Laura directed my attention to my wristwatch. Namely, the minute hand had started to make its rounds disturbingly fast, almost a full revolution every second. I observe it do this for a dozen seconds or so and then in stopped completely for the rest of the night.

I myself could not sense any change in my sense of time, as if the anomaly was only affecting clocks and in this particular case only my wristwatch. While all this was happening the girl in black was explaining how in this place stability was but a relative thing. Even the most stable location would be riddled with floating pockets and tears vibrating forward and back in time, unique to those particular spatial coordinates.

Standing outside, in front of a bare ground covered in white frost which radiated cold towards me it was even harder for me to tell what kind of season it was. Blinding cold sun in my eyes and on my face did not help at all. Some signs pointed at the spring, others at winters, still others at autumn. And the morning sun still blinded me though sunglasses supposedly able to block up to 80% of solar rays.

I walked around the perimeter of the house, all the while keeping to its wall, to take a look at the gigantic crated that the darkness had kept hidden from us last night. After last night I felt unnerved. I only held a slim hope that during this small and solitary expedition I did not slip to some other place in this world or some other one. That when returning to the interior of the house I would not find it empty and devoid any signs of presence other than my own. Or conversely, meet some stranger I had never seen before.

My eyes found the crest of the crater rim, which seemed to be pretty sharp in places other than this house and the tracks next to it. In some places the crater wall near the rim was almost vertical. As if a sheer rock wall. It was difficult for me to judge how deep the crater was, with or without the rim, didn’t matter. But on the relatively flap bottom of the crater there was a massive bucket wheel excavator. This was probably the object which had been full of lights last night. At the same time, the tracks going over the rim traveled down the crater wall and straight across the bottom. It was obvious that these tracks did not belong to that excavator, as the tracks rose up on the opposite wall of the crated and climbed over the rim having rammed it from a vertical wall into a steep ramp. Also, in the middle of the crater these tracks were much more shallow than here on the rim. But whatever it was, it had come and gone a long time ago.

At least this massive excavator allowed me to guess how big the crater was, both in width as well as depth. These excavators were originally designed to mine brown coal. Each one was 300 meters across and nearly a hundred meters tall. And looking at it from here it seemed that could have set a bit more than 2 of them on top of each other to reach the crest of the rim. So a depth of about 250 meters. As for width, I could easily imagine more than ten of them from end to end at the bottom of the crater, so the “bowl” of this thing was nearly 4 kilometers across.

In the middle of the crater I could also make out a small collection of low ruins. It was impossible to tell from this distance what were they the ruins of. Compared to the giant excavator left behind it seemed that if there had indeed been a settlement in the crater after it had been created then there wasn’t too much remaining of it. Low walls only enough for a few intersecting streets, no more. And these too seemed to rise out if a lifeless sandy surface reminiscent of Mars, if one disregarded the color.

I also noticed a slightly brighter line near the ruins. The lined seemed to run straight from the house, down the rim and across the crater, ending up at the excavator. Then I finally realized: it was rock surface blown clear from the sand and dust, but a car having driven over it at speed.

“Good morning.”

Laura stopped next to me, handing me a metal mug with hot coffee. Wind played with her loose slightly messy hair.

“Have you been up for long?”

“For a while now.” I said. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“During the day, this crater seems even more disturbing than in darkness.” Laura said. “These ruins at the bottom, these caterpillar tracks, that mining machine there… do you believe a town might have been here in the past?”

“Honestly? I don’t know.” I replied. “This is most definitely an impact crater, not one caused by explosion or underground collapse. And those last two would explain some of the ruins surviving. But a meteorite of that size would turn everything to molten stone and destroy everything within hundreds of kilometers. The only explanation that could fit in any shape or form, if we tie in the ideas of that girl in black as well, would be that whatever fell here did so after the world and time were warped out of place.”

“That… would be… the right… thinking.”

We heard a weak voice grasping for air. Heavily leaning against the wall, the girl in black stepped closer. And as she reached the corner, she collapsed to remain sitting on the ground. Trying to breathe air clearly too thin for her.

“Where’s your…?”

“Empty.” Mariann said before Laura could finish her question. “At night already.” She laid down on her back and this seemed to ease her struggle to breathe. “I did not expect to spend a whole day wandering the marsh.”

“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked.

“I doubt it.” The girl on the ground said. “I need to get to the bottom of that crater, to those ruins. That’s the only way I can get back to normal, more or less.”

“I should have thought of this last night and charge up the car batteries, or at least mount the wheels.” I said.

“I think the Professor...” Mariann started to say.

“When I left the building, I could hear him making noise in the garage, so… I wouldn’t be surprised if he got something working.” Laura said.

“Both… can be gotten to work.” The girl in black said, having sat up and again, grasping for air. “Diesel fuel doesn’t lose much… of its properties as it ages. And that other car… is old enough to… burn unleaded gas that’s… several years old.”

A moment later the doors to the garage opened up and the burgundy red pickup truck reversed out of it puffing pitch black smoke.

“Too bad.” Mariann said. “I myself would have preferred the other one.”

The red pickup truck with the word ‘Dodge’ on the back did not stop however, instead to surprise both me and Laura, it took off and then started down the winding road which headed into the crater.

I managed run a few steps after it and shout, but then I understood that it was pointless.

“It would seem the Professor was adamant in his desire to get to the Center Station.” Laura said.

“I’m nut surprised.” Mariann said. “Doesn’t matter though. The car he’ll be leaving behind on the opposite edge of the crater is probably already back at the garage, so don’t worry about it.”

“I doubt that he will be able to climb up the edge of the crater with that truck, even if he picks the mildest gradient he can find.” I said.

“Oh, he will.” Mariann smiled. “And he will even reach the Center Station.”

“What will he find in there?” Laura asked.

“I don’t know. The Center Station is a wonder unto its own in this out of shape world. I cannot see through the fields surrounding it and I have never traversed them. But we can be pretty certain that the Professor has abandoned us. We should see if the other car starts at all.”

Mariann tried her best to get up in any way possible but remained to sit in her former position.

“Yeah, I’m gonna rest here until you find something useful.” She said.

Surprisingly, it did not take me much time to get the remaining green luxury sedan into working order. The Professor had probably calculated how much of a lead he would need for us to not interrupt him and had not set up any additional hindrances for us. On the contrary, the battery was charged and already installed under the hood and the tires had the proper pressure. The engine started up with a single crank and soon found the stable cold idle, hovering around a thousand revs per minute.

I reversed the car slowly out of the garage into the morning sun still pale and blinding and onto the small driveway before the garage.

“So where are we going?” I asked as I opened the driver door.

I then headed to the side of the building to help carry Mariann to the car.

“It is obvious we have to get back there with a car somehow.” Laura said. “You won’t last long in this situation.”

“I could ask you to leave me behind.” Mariann said. “But I know you would not do that.”

“You can be sure we won’t!” Laura said. “I have no desire to remain here wandering until the end of times with only him to accompany me!”

The way Laura put it made me smirk, again, but her words had a lot of truth in them. Struggling on some distant Siberian permafrost mountain or on an ice shelf in Greenland and getting into a serious fight only because who and how should set up the tent… the two of us had more than enough experiences like that. And in situations like that even wild wolves and polar bears were welcome party crashers, As long as they ate the other person first.

“In that case… we need to get down into the crater, to the ruins there.”

“What’s there?” Laura asked. “How can those help you?”

“Let that be my problem.” Mariann gasped. “I recommend you make haste. I Doubt I will last more than half an hour like this.”

We helped Mariann onto the back seat to lie down. And after fastening our seat belts we started on the winding gravel road down side of the rim towards the bottom of the crater.

“It is quite a.. mystery.” Mariann said after awhile.

“What’s a mystery to you?” Laura asked.

“This car. No matter what era it is from, whether it has an age of a quarter or half a century, whether the interior is in royal leather or hollow velour, still the same kind of familiar nostalgic feeling develops. Nostalgic for home and childhood that never was. Something about the seats, something about… something… else…” The girl fell silent and she seemed to have lost consciousness, her chest though kept rising and falling, indicating that there was some life left in her.

“At least in this way she requires less oxygen and manages to stay alive a little longer.” Laura sighed with a slight relief.

“We’ll see if that’s gonna be enough.”

The gravel roads at the bottom of the crater were strangely smooth and even. Disturbingly smooth compared to average village roads full of clay, crushed granite of all fractions and deep potholes with edges sharp enough to destroy tires. However here one could fearlessly get up to triple digit speeds without fearing that a pothole popped the tire or turned an axle into a healthy salad of small metal bits. Or started to break plastic details off the body.

Compared to the marsh and the dark woods surrounding it, the crater seemed to located as if in another world, in a climate much drier and hotter. No matter that the true climate outside the car was still familiar by being Nordic and frigid. Despite that I doubted if this crater had ever seen any snow. And by that I meant a decent layer of snow lasting throughout a long winter. A snow cover which grew a meter thick with just a few hours of blizzard and then took months to finally melt and disappear. In some places never ever really melting. The world here was a world ready for snow. A world waiting for it and longing for it. But all it got was some frozen dew in the morning and perhaps the slightest of snow, which melted under an hour.

The view while driving towards the center of the crater bottom was astonishing. Before us were the black ruins with the reddish crater wall as the backdrop. And underneath that rested that towering gray metal monster. A mining machine, it’s tower swaying and loudly creaking in the wind. The sound of metal flexing echoed across the crater, it even reached our speeding green car, it penetrated the body and the closed windows and we could all hear that metal thing slowly but surely breathing.

It seemed as if the machine could start moving under it’s own volition. Rise from it’s seat with organic suppleness and attack both people and objects using the bucket wheel as a weapon. In a situation where each bucket on that wheel had the volume of over seven cubic meters it really mattered little how fast it revolved.

I stopped the car in the middle of a ruined street which barely reached out of the dusty ground. There had definitely been a street here as I could recognize four building corners which had made up the buildings and the intersection between them. Tarmac pavement was just a shadow of a dream here, as were the utility poles with lighting. All that remained were blackened low walls and broken window frames. Not a single other sign of civilization or past human activity. Beyond this intersection, the ruined walls quickly grew lower and became level with the rest of the ground.

“What’s next?” Laura asked.

“I don’t know.” I said. “We probably have to wake her and ask.” I glanced into the rear view mirror to see the girl in black still breathing on the rear seat. “Without her help, we may well search ourselves mad.”

I stopped the car and got out of it. I walked a few dozen steps on the sandy-dusty ground, which I could not tell whether it was solid rock or compacted gravel and sand. The tracks the Professor had made when he drove thorough this place were still visible. Never mind other tracks, lots of different tires and footwear. Something that should have never been here like this. Not in a million years. I knelt down to lay my hand on a warm dusty sand. I observed the wind sift the dust out of the red sand on the ground. Turning it into strange smoke looking like it was sublimating and then fading away.

Despite that, faint footsteps and tire tracks seemed to stay here for decades, just like on the Moon. And still this place saw rain, day and night changed. Nighttime fog and morning dew from the marshlands. This crated could not have been an isolate pocket of desert climate in this strange world. Maybe some of the ideas of that girl really were the truth? For example that the whole crater was ripped out of some distant future and carelessly thrown here. That the whole crater was but a temporal bubble, originating from a future much more distant than the landscape surrounding it. From an era where the marsh has long since dried up, lakes and seas evaporated. And humankind along with their civilization have turned from a distant memory into a strangely shaped piece of rock the wind and sand were mercilessly eating away at.

While I knelt there like that, drowning into my dream-like musings, I noticed a small metal dome just barely reaching out of the ground. I walked to it and started to clear away the sand and crushed stone from around it. The dome turned out to made of brass and was likely a sphere with an approximate diameter of half a meter. It seemed to be attached to a metal pole slowly growing thicker and sturdier inside the ground. My hands suddenly fell as I realized what it was or could have been. A decorative sphere set at the top of a spire. Perhaps belonging to some church, or perhaps to the Esoteric Institute, which in and of itself had looked like an anti-christian church.

As I continued to examine the sphere, my fingers found a hair-thin demarcation line on the equator of it, which seemed to split the sphere into two halves.

“Could you come here and...” Laura asked, still by the car.

“You better come here!” I said out loud. “I think I found the tower decoration of the Institute.”

“What?!” Laura asked, now approaching me at a quick pace.

I forced my hands against the sphere and tried to rotate the upper dome on it. Slowly but surely it seemed to give, although more often than not, my palms slid along the surface of the dome.

“That’s the ball at the top of the Institute main tower?” Laura asked. “By the way we should deal with Mariann first.”

“I know.” I decided to give up on the sphere for now. “We need her.”

“What for?” A familiar voice asked. It literally made me jump.

Laura had also flinched. The voice did not originate from behind us, but instead from in front of us, where there stood the girl in black, holding a shovel on her shoulder. Strands of her elbow length dark hair moving in the weak wind.

“What happened!?” Laura asked. “How did you…?!”

“Doesn’t matter.” Mariann replied. “It is done.” She threw the rusty shovel aside. “The thing I came here for.”

“You… no longer need additional oxygen?” Laura still continued. “How?”

“No, I no longer do.” The girl in black replied. “How, that’s not important. Let’s just say that I left something behind in here a long time ago. Something that would help me to recover should I ever… become injured. And that sphere, by the way.” Her gaze fell on the ground in front of me. “I don’t recommend opening it, or even touching it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Do you have a dosimeter on you? I’m certain that this sphere is brass on the outside but beryllium on the inside. In the middle of the sphere there is a sub-critical mass of radioactive material and in the top of the sphere there is a thin lead window. It would be best to cover it with sand once more.”

“Temperature?” Laura asked.

The girl in black nodded, not saying a word.

“A radioactive dome?” I asked as I used my legs to push the removed materials back onto the sphere. “What the hell for?”

“To set up radioactive material at barely sub-critical amount and modulate the criticality was considered a cheaper and more robust alternative to building an electronic device to do that.” Mariann said.

“You said that there are ruins here,” I started slowly. “And the re is a crater here, so something had to come down here. And yet down here there’s the radioactive sphere off at least a single tower of the Institute. What did really happen in here?”

“Who knows.” The girl smiled. “Doesn’t matter whether a meteorite fell, or a non-meteorite or some aircraft. Or there was a malfunction in one of the thousands of military satellites circling above our heads, and that satellite dropped its seismic charges right here. The end result is the same. But an aspect which has thus far become known only to the few worthy ones far and wide, is that the Nameless Town is not lost forever. These ruins here don’t belong to the Town, they belong to a mining settlement which was in the process of excavating the Town.”

“The Nameless Town is… right here?” I looked down, “Under our feet?”

“Yes.” Mariann replied. “That big excavator is also here for that sole reason. Modified so the beak and the bucket wheel could cut deeper below the level it stands. Something did fall, but the town was surrounded by an invisible force field which directed all the energy from the strike down the sides of the field dome and into the ground.”

“A force field?” I asked. “Really? A dome protecting the town? There are no such things.”

“It all started with a plasma window and a major discovery on a nameless and unnumbered secret level of the 47th Secret Base. Eight kilowatts of RF power for every centimeter of diameter. At first glance that seems like a lot, but one readily has access to 20 and 50 megawatt reactors the size of shipping containers, measuring the power consumption no longer matters. The only question left to be solved was how to create parabolic force fields. I don’t know how they solved this problem but that sphere you found was part of that solution. Barely sub-critical mass of radioactive material created a sort of stabilizing resonance throughout the force field, keeping it up.”

“What powered that field?” Laura asked. “One reactor is not gonna cut it, especially since the power requirement goes up as exponentially as the diameter grows.”

“A complex of 500 megawatt modules located several hundred meters under the town. A series of ten kiloton nukes created the necessary cavities and 24 months later it had cooled sufficiently to start the construction. The 49th Secret Base was created in much the same way, but that only needed a single test of a few dozen kilotons.”

“So what went wrong?” I asked.

“What went wrong, that I don’t know. The world twisting out of shape and that of which I am talking about are two very different things. But a single thing went wrong with the force field and the thing that hit it. A fraction of a second after the detonation, the second, external force field activated above the first one. The energy of the explosion was caught between the two layers and it went straight into the ground.”

“Into the nuclear complex?” Laura asked.

“Yes. That started a self-destruct program which allowed the whole complex go super-critical. The exact level of power is unknown but the bang and the resulting hole were big. The earth gave way, the town fell into the hole and since there was no force field, all the earth sent into the atmosphere by the explosions fell back onto the town, burying it.”

“And the Center Station and other facilities remained intact only because they had their own fields?” I asked.

“That’s the only explanation I can give.” The girl in black smiled.

“I have a much better question.” Laura started. “What’s next? We came here to look for something. I think we have found it. Is it now time to return?”

“It depends what you came looking for.” Replied Mariann. “I came looking for something other than the Professor, or you. And that soldier had his own agenda altogether. But yes, we can go now. But before that, let’s just see if the Professor has already exited the crater or not.”

“I assume the exiting does not take place at the same location as entering it?” I asked. “And also it won’t be as easy?”

“In a sense.” The girl in black said. “We have to journey some more, find the pasture. It is not far though, only on the other side of the crater.”

“You said it is nit possible to go beyond the crater.” Laura spoke.

“Did I?” asked Mariann, also giving a strange smile. “Well, right now I’m a bit better informed.”

I looked at the girl in black clothing walking to the car with unhurried steps and getting into the driver’s seat. She turned on the engine and did a reversing J-turn putting a huge cloud of dust in the air before stopping right by us.

“Do you want to come with?” She asked, lowering the window.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “To the excavator?”

“Near the excavator.” Mariann said. “The road ends there. A bit further from there is the only place the Professor might exit the crater and try to make it to the Center Station.”

“Can’t we find him looking for that red pickup truck?”

“I doubt the red pickup truck will lead us to the right location.” Mariann said. “That pickup truck is probably back at the garage by now.”

“How?” Laura asked.

“Get in and I’ll tell you.” The girl smiled.