Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [67]
‘Can you feel it?’ he asked..
‘Yes,’ she said, still not daring to turn round. A sense of foreboding, of history in the making.
The Doctor consulted his watch. ‘We have to get back to the train.’
The lock on the transmat chamber door was proving particularly stubborn. It hadn’t responded to any of the Adjudicator codes that Forrester knew, and she had abandoned it to search the room. Adric had set to work, using his wrist computer to hack into the lock’s operating system. The combination seemed to be an entirely random sequence, and it looked like they needed a keycard. None of the ones that Forrester had with her worked.
Roz was standing on tiptoes, peering out of a sunlight.
‘Adric, come and have a look at this. Bring that chair over here.’
‘What did your last slave die of?’ he asked her.
‘I accidentally beheaded him.’
Without another word Adric pulled one of the chairs over and clambered onto it.
He saw something that was too big, too awesome to take in at once.
‘What is it?’ he asked, already aware that Forrester couldn’t possibly know the answer.
‘Alien,’ she said.
Everything about it defied description or explanation.
Vast sections of it hung over the cavern floor, in defiance of gravity. It was made of a material that was solid and shifting, oily and burnished, curved and angular. It wasn’t a building, a sculpture or a spacecraft. They stared at it, tried to work out how tall it was, what it could possibly be.
The sensors in their armour had gone dead, unable to interpret what they registered.
‘People,’ Adric said simply. At the base of the artefact there were tiny white dots. Increasing the magnification on the visors, they saw a dozen men and women in radiation suits. The Machine was even further away than they thought. The scientists were preparing some heavy equipment, floodlit by a pure bright light.
‘Look above them,’ Roz responded. Adric turned his head, his view of the Machine lurching at even that tiny movement. He corrected himself, bringing his head down and lowering the magnification. A portal was open on the side of the Machine, the only visible entrance to the structure. The scientists had fed cables through the doorway, and those cables were connected to monitoring equipment.
‘What are they doing?’ Roz asked impatiently. ‘They look like the bomb squad.’
‘I recognize some of that equipment,’ Adric realized. ‘I saw it in the Scientifica; It was a research programme into
–’ he racked his brains ‘– dimensional energy. The Doctor said it was a dimensional observatory.’
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
‘It allows them to look into other dimensions,’ Adric explained. ‘Perhaps that’s another Gateway.’
She looked away from the Machine for the first time ‘A what?’
‘At the mathematical boundary of E-Space and N-Space the Doctor found a pan-dimensional structure that allowed transference between Minkowski Space to other quantum states, access to non-Euclidean geometries, post-mathematic spatio-temporal co-ordinates and extra-universal–’
‘Yah, OK, I get the message: inside that thing you think there’s a doorway to another dimension.’
‘Yes. Or perhaps just to another universe.’
‘A doorway that’s open,’ Roz observed.
There was a chime from behind them. They spun around, and saw that the transmat platform had lit up.
‘The rematerialization cycle has started up,’ Forrester said. ‘Someone s coming through.’’
Nyssa knelt on the floor in front of Chris. She was wearing a towelling dressing gown loosely tied at the waist. Her clothes were drying on a rack by the holofire. Steam rose lazily from them. At her side there was a plate with half a dozen empty oystershells on it. Chris was still wearing his tuxedo. Nyssa sipped at her champagne, then leant over and tugged off Cwej’s left shoe and sock..
‘What are you doing?’ Chris asked, apparently a little disconcerted.
‘It is nothing I haven’t seen before,’ she said primly.
You can relax, I am only examining your ankle.’ She