11.32 A.M.
The two of them, dressed in white, contrasted with the infinite range of greens and browns of the surrounding flora. They went down the path, moving the vines and bromeliads from their side, careful not to trip over the roots that protruded from the ground, and not to stagger because of the natural unevenness of the terrain.
Since entering the realms of that strange radiation, Adam had tried repeatedly to fly. But just as that skinny Anderson had predicted, the gravitational weight generated by the rock did its job of keeping him on the ground. He had no choice but to move his feet.
Fearing some thorn or sharp branch would tear the suit up, he exaggerated his caution when walking. He lifted his feet like an astronaut walking on the moon, swinging his arms for balance with the same grace as those inflatable air dancers in the shops. Yes, he guessed they had made the fabric with those eventualities in mind, but he didn’t want to take risks. After all, the geniuses who designed it had considered everything but two things, the oppressive heat that would be experienced by the wearer, and how uncomfortable and even painful it could make him feel to have to move around with such a tough fabric squeezing his crotch.
“This crap is hell itself!” he said—his voice sounded muffled by the mask on and the hood over it. He yanked the suit off between his legs, adjusted it a little, and continued; wearing the pants underneath had turned out to be a bad idea. “I don’t understand why they invented an oxygen renovator for this suit, and it didn’t occur to them to include an internal air conditioner. My balls are cooking here!”
“Oh, the poetry in that sentence!” Malin said. “Look, if you get anxious, you’ll sweat even more.”
“How much have we already walked? Three hundred feet?”
“Fifty tops.”
“Damn!”
Moment of silence.
“I don’t think I thanked you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For what you’re doing. You’re involved in this, partly because of me, aren’t you?”
“And you wouldn’t have gotten into this if it hadn’t been for me,” Adam said. “I think we’re even.”
The crack of a branch came from behind. There, several feet away, two agents in gray were coming.
“They’re guarding us like we’re gonna escape,” he said, glancing at them. “What a bunch of clowns!”
Then he realized there were two more agents following them from afar, though every so often he lost sight of them through the trees. Never in his life had he felt so guarded, and at the same time, so unprotected.
They crossed a swampy patch of ground, and their boots sank into the thick mud, causing an unpleasant stomping sound. Flop, flip, flop.
Malin noted there were traces of stagnant water to her right, off the track; a thick puddle, covered in dust and lichens.
“Heading in that direction are the Black Plateau swamps,” Anderson said through the communicators. His tone of voice was annoying her; that mixture of a fussy scientist, teacher, and tour guide was insufferable.
“Whatever,” Adam said; “all I wanna know is that I will return to civilization before sunset, before this place turns into mosquito pandemonium.”
After a while, they distinguished something dark and blurry in front of them, beyond the foliage of the trees. The blurring effect was caused by a semitransparent wall: the protective tent Anderson had told them about, the same one with which they isolated the rock from the rest of the place. The dark spot behind it must be the Ita-Hu. They went on a little longer and faced the smooth, translucent wall, held by steel rods.
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They looked up to get a better picture of what they had in front, and despite the web of leaves and branches tangled over them, they saw that the plastic wall and the rods drew a big cupola. It was a giant dome, just like Anderson had said. Then they realized the entrance was right in front of their noses: a door just as translucent as the rest of the tent, although solid.
“Welcome. I was waiting for you.”
And not only the image of the door had eluded them at first but also the presence of the Cyclops, who waited next to it like a silent doorman.
“Reed, I suppose,” Malin said, and the android affirmed it with a pulse of light from his big red eye. Unlike the Cyclops she’d seen in the camp, this one wore a completely gray jumpsuit, which brought a smile to Adam.
“It’s all about branding, right?” he whispered.
Reed pushed the bar, and the door swung open with a muffled hiss.
From outside, Malin could see that, inside the dome, the terrain—which must have been a radius of ninety or a hundred feet—was completely barren. Across the door, the ground was just as cracked and parched as the desert where they had gone to train. There were no palm trees, no ferns, and no other plants, just the Ita-Hu, which actually looked like a rough black egg of gigantic proportions stranded on the ground. Wildlife remained outside the protected area just like a not wanted host, a greenish spot behind the whitish covering of the dome.
There were no traces of the felling of trees, nor remnants of grass. It was as if there had been no vegetation there from the beginning.
They had seen the photos in Halstein’s office, and the District Chief had commented that the ground beneath the Ita-Hu had begun to change yet seeing it with her own eyes gave Malin a new and even unsettling perspective on how strange the phenomenon caused by the rock was.
Adam, for his part, did not spend much time observing the state of the terrain. The immense Ita-Hu had stolen all his attention. The dome blotted out the shadows, blurring the sunlight, and bringing out the blackness of the rock so that his eyes couldn’t stray from it.
“The Ita-Hu has an approximate circumference of fifty-three feet, a diameter of sixteen feet, and forty feet high, although only half protrudes to the surface.” There was David Anderson’s exasperating voice again. “The clearing that surrounds it is about two hundred feet in diameter.”
Adam and Malin took their first steps inside the dome, but the android remained outside.
“What is it, Reed? Don’t you wanna come with us?” she tempted him. She knew the Cyclops’ capacitors were highly complex electromagnetic mechanisms, as much as that of the Daedalus thrusters; a step inside the dome, in the radioactive epicenter of the rock, for the android could mean a general failure in its systems.
“Reed will wait for the sample outside. Go ahead,” Anderson told them, and the Cyclops, silent, closed the dome door behind them and didn’t move from there. His silhouette, along with that of the men in gray who had escorted them, were left as blurred spots imprinted on the plastic wall.
Those bastards won’t move from there until we get out, Malin thought. She had to think about what to do once the mission was over so that no agent would take the sample from her.
Adam, who guessed what was going through his partner’s mind, asked her to continue. If they didn’t move, it was a matter of seconds before Halstein ordered them to do it, and he didn’t want to hear it.
They approached the Ita-Hu and felt it. On their legs... It felt like they were walking in heavy shoes.
They looked at each other.
“Yes,” he nodded; “in the legs…”
“You’ll feel a slight weight when moving,” Anderson informed as if necessary.
“Intensified gravity,” Malin pointed out.
“Yes, you’ll soon get used to it.”
Adam and Malin split and circled the rock, looking it up and down.
He reached out with his palm to touch it, but held back. The images of the destroyed tools Halstein had shown them in his office flashed in his mind like a huge red traffic light. The radioactive force field surrounding the rock’s surface was too important a detail to be ignored.
“Go ahead, you can do it,” Anderson told him, whispering in his ear like a little imp. “Try to touch it.”
“No, thank you. I wanna go back with my full set of fingers.”
“Unless you hit it hard, nothing will happen to you. Believe me.”
Adam thought about it for a moment and then dared to do it. He rested his open hand and discovered the force field was real. His palm didn’t come to touch the Ita-Hu because there was something invisible that prevented him from doing so; he could even see the shadow his hand was casting over the rock. He pushed, but nothing happened; it was impenetrable.
“Please do what you’ve come to do,” Halstein said.
Dammit! He was distracted by the rock and there was Halstein’s voice, giving him the chills.
Well, it was time to do the job and leave. He was craving to take off that hellish suit and vent his crotch, anyway.
And all of a sudden, a loud crackle, a bang.