Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [50]
He thought about that.
He seemed to be doing a lot of thinking in the past few minutes.
Finally, he decided—in what may have been the first real decision he’d ever made for himself—to wait until his eyes adjusted. He sat—on some firm, resilient surface—enjoying his new-found warmth.
And the new-found working of his mind.
It had been hours!
Four hours, twenty-three minutes, fifty-five seconds, to be precise, by Vuffi Raa’s built-in chronometer. He never had to see the time, he simply knew. The trouble with built-in faculties, he reflected, such as being able to pilot a starship, for example, is that they denied or dulled the urge to acquire new ones for oneself. Better to be like a human being, he thought, without innate programming, with the ability and necessity—
A human being? What was he thinking?
He’d been approximately—no, exactly—seventeen centimeters from touching it with his nearest tentacle, and yet, when Lando had activated the Key, suddenly, he, Vuffi Raa, was here (wherever here was) on the other side of the wall.
Five hours, twenty-nine minutes, thirty-one seconds.
Exactly what here was, Vuffi Raa thought rather ungrammatically, was a good question in itself. He’d felt strangely isolated, lonely for quite a while, and, oddly, that feeling had preoccupied him so thoroughly that he’d failed to examine his surroundings with much enthusiasm. The feeling hadn’t gone away, it had gotten worse, much worse. Now, it was necessary to investigate, if only to take his badly shaken mind off his emotions.
Of the presumed-to-exist inside wall of the pyramid, he could see no evidence. He stood in a brightly lit corridor, seemingly kilometers between him and the ceiling. His doppler radar, not his strongest sense, couldn’t reach quite as far as the roof, although he got some tantalizing echoes from it.
The area he occupied was a longish rectangle, five meters by perhaps fifty. Behind him was a semitransparent wall through which he could see what appeared to be a vast circular drum, several stories high, much like a fuel storage tank, yet made of the same plastic-appearing material as everything else here. In front of him, a smaller circular subchamber filled the corridor from wall to wall, yet he could see beyond it with several of his senses, knew it divided his chamber precisely in half.
To the right and left were similar, exactly parallel corridors, “visible” through walls much as the one behind him, and identical to the corridor he occupied except that they lacked the smaller circular “storage tank.”
He turned left.
As far as he went along the wall, there was no exit. The available space grew smaller and narrower as he approached the circularity. Finally, he stopped, retraced his steps, and took the right-hand direction. This time, near the angle of the wall and the tank, he found a permeable area. He stepped through into the next corridor. The predominating light was blue, as it had been in the chamber he had left, but here it was slightly brighter. He crossed the corridor, found another “soft” spot in the wall, went through into a third chamber, identical to the second.
The fourth chamber was shaped differently—five-sided, but not regularly so. The only permeability was in the far right-hand wall, a very short one, forcing him to take a right turn. The next chamber was the mirror image of the last, then a series of rectangular chambers began again.
He kept walking, lonely, and, for the first time in his life, really afraid.
Seven hours, sixteen minutes, forty-four seconds.
From the inside, the pyramid was transparent.
That was the first thing Lando noticed. Outside, he could see the sun shining, the reddish color of the sand, a few scrappy shrubs, and, comfortingly close (although farther away than he would have liked) the Millennium Falcon sat patiently awaiting his return.
He hoped she wouldn’t have to wait very long.
It was