climb down. Then I remembered two other ladders, one to the Sixth Level and another down to a boat. That’s what it was. Damned ladders. Halfway down the tube, which was only seven or eight feet long, I suddenly felt dizzy and my stomach turned topsy-turvy and then I found that I was much lighter and standing on my head. It was the point where the internal gravity of the Ship cut out and the normal gravity of a small asteroid, no longer blanked out, took over. “Down” in the Ship and “down” outside were just opposite, and I was passing from one to the other. So now I was pointed head-down, but my feet were outside the tube, and with a little effort and the light gravity, I managed to scramble out. I stood up with a motion that left me with a whirling head and looked around. Overhead there was a sharp, eye-blurring silver-grayness marked by streaks and pinpoints of black that almost edged over into purple. It hurt my eyes to look at it and I was reminded of a photographic negative, even though this had a tone to it that no photograph ever had. It made you want to squint your eyes and look away, but there was no other place to look. The rocky surface of the Ship had an eerie, washed-out silver look to it, too. The rocks looked sterile and completely dead, as though no one had ever been here before or would ever be here again. A playground for the never-was only a few feet away from the living, breathing, warm, real world I was used to, but effectively in another dimension.
Almost as confirmation of the other-dimensionality, Jimmy’s legs suddenly stuck up out of the hole beside me, as he came down. I helped him out. He sat beside the edge of the tube as though to right his senses, and then looked around, just as I had.
Beside us, apparently to mark the location of the lock, was an eight-foot pylon. On it were lock controls, a location number, and a crude sign—the joke, I suspect, of somebody long dead—that said in hand-written capitals, KEEP OFF THE GRASS! It gave me a shivery feeling to read it. I don’t know if it was the probable age of the sign, the weird tone of its surroundings, the whirling of my head, or some combination.
We looked around us silently, and then Jimmy said, “What are those?”
Beyond the pylon, in the distance, was a long row of giant tubes projecting above the uneven rocky surface like great guns pointed at the universe. They could not have been too far, since for all the irregularity of the Ship’s surface the distance to the horizon was not great.
“Scoutship tubes, I think. I didn’t realize that we were this close to the scout bay.”
“Yes, I guess.” Jimmy said.
The distortion that affected everything around us touched him, too. “You don’t look very well,” I said, peering at what I could see of him in his suit.
“I don’t feel very well. I’m getting sick to my stomach. You don’t look very well yourself.”
“It’s just the light,” I said, but that wasn’t true. My dizziness was making me sick to my stomach, too. I was almost afraid I was going to vomit and out here in a suit was the worst possible place. So I said, “Where’s Riggy? Shouldn’t he have surprised us by now?”
Jimmy slowly looked around. “There are other locks. Maybe he went down one of them to leave us wondering.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I think we’d better look for him, though.”
“What if he’s hiding? Maybe that’s his surprise.”
There were so many tumbled rocks around us that if Riggy were hiding it would be no simple thing to find him. He would be just another lump among many.
Then our questions were answered for us.
Jimmy said, “What was that?”
“What?” The noise came again and I heard it this time—a horrible retching sound. I had both send and receive controls on my suit turned low, but in spite of this the sound was almost too much for me. My stomach heaved and I had to fight to keep from throwing up, too. My head continued to spin.
“Where are you, Riggy?” Jimmy asked.
“I don’t see him,” I said.
Riggy said nothing, just made that awful vomiting sound again. It didn’t recommend him to me. Jimmy crouched then and jumped straight up in the “air.” In the light gravity he went up a tremendous distance,