Black Pockets by George Zebrowski

Author:George Zebrowski
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

10

We explored the level below our land, my father and I and Johnny, Pierre, Chen, Abasi, and Juan. My friends were happy to finally be able to do something after they had sent me off alone, Father included. He seemed to have lost years off his age.

Each day we searched for what he was sure would be a way to look out from the rock, and maybe see what had happened to us. We might simply be continuing on a much longer orbit of the sun than had been planned, one that would take us far out of the solar system, maybe never to come back. It all depended on the size of our initial boost.

The engineering level, as we began to picture it, was a wide corridor, with branches, that ran the length of the rock’s ten kilometer long axis; but the curvature made the entire level some twelve or more kilometers long, and nearly half a kilometer wide, with a four meter high ceiling. We walked it all in the first week of exploration.

It was a lot of empty space, with storage and dormitory areas. The life support areas were closed off, with doors we could not open.

My father hoped to find an observation area, much like the circle viewers we found in the floor at ten different locations, for looking into the rock. There had to be a place to look out.

He finally concluded that it had to be somewhere near one of the ends of the rock, down one of the two dozen branches off the main space. He also thought that the engineering level had been a staging area, for bringing in prisoners, and an area that had more use during the time of construction, and before that during the mineral mining period, when the center of the asteroid had been hollowed out.

The level was also used, he was sure, by observers who had visited the rock on its outward swing, which, he reminded us, had been slow compared to the ships that could come and go as they pleased. We were not that far beyond Earth’s sun, given our orbital speed. Speed was not the object. It was the length of sentence that mattered. We should have been back by now. Maybe they had simply left us to go around again, for another fifty years or more.

“What if they’re still coming and going,” I said one day. “How would we know?”

He shook his white-haired head under the glare of the ceiling lights. “No, I think they lost interest in us a while ago. Who knows what changes Earth has had by now.”

We went down a long passage. Lights flashed on before us and blackened behind us. We began to see that the passage ended.

It was a black opening.

We slowed. The lights continued to flash on ahead of us. We came to the opening and stopped. It was a large rectangular entrance, big enough to receive groups of people. There was no sign of a door that might close.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.