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must have been immensely difficult. Even this small building must have cost a
fortune. When this was built, a few short years ago, Ross
Gabriel must have been able to afford his own space yacht, perhaps several of
them.
Ditmars walked completely around the tomb. It had a vaulted roof that would be
too tricky to get in through. As his distant observations had indicated, the
sole original entrance had been quite blocked up by the movement of the land.
Now Ditmars got out a tool and had a try at digging the land out from under
the lintel of the doorway. As soon as he had thrust the implement into the
ground, a slow and somehow profound throbbing came back into his hands along
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its metal grip as if he were taking some giant's pulse.
He squatted there for a little while, listening and feeling.
He pushed the tool handle this way and that. He timed the beat. He was certain
it was the pulsar's rhythm that he heard and felt, as if it could be located
in the core of
Azlaroc instead of at an almost interstellar distance.
Well, he would get nowhere without being willing to take some risk. He applied
low power to the tool and instantly a symmetrical pattern of shatter-marks
spread in radii for many meters across the ground. The pulsar's voice was
suddenly loud. No excavated matter came up as it should have done, but the
cracks in the ground widened alarmingly.
Less than two seconds after turning it on, Ditmars cut power to the tool.
Twenty meters away a mausoleum made
from a native landform changed shape suddenly, half a wall of it sliding into
a hole in the ground that had not been there a few seconds earlier. The
pulsar's notes turned basso, and reluctantly died away.
Dangerous land movement, the signs had said. Ditmars sat there considering,
sweating a little as he watched the tool's unheld handle continue its
deliberate vibration. The land was still again, but one crack nearby was half
a meter wide, and he could see no bottom to it.
So, it looked as if he was going to have to cut his way in through the wall,
someplace where there was still space enough to make a door above ground
level. If the ground had risen inside the tomb as well-he would see about that
when he got in.
A good deal of coral was growing on this side of the tomb, around and above
the almost-buried entrance.
Pulling his digging tool gingerly out of the cracked ground, Ditmars packed it
away and walked round to the other side. Here, as he had already noticed, the
wall was practically free of coral and the land had not risen quite so high.
Mentally he checked Bellow's plan of the interior of the structure. Yes, he
should be able to break in on this side without threatening Milady Rosalys.
Attacking the wall, Ditmars' tools worked almost normally. He cut around the
brick-sized chunks of local matter, lifting them out whole and stacking them
in order on a sheet of plastic he spread on the ground. The imported stone of
the wall opened up silently, in neat knife-blade cuts, before his power
implements. The more he saw of the wall, the more he appreciated the builders'
skills.
Bellow had not been able to offer a good guess as to its thickness, which
turned out to be about twenty centimeters. As soon as Ditmars had a head-sized
hole cut
through, he paused to take a look inside. The air inside was fresh-there were
probably small ventilating channels concealed somewhere-but it was very dark.
Indeed, Ditmars' first impression was that darkness flowed almost palpably out
of the interior. When he shone his electric torch around inside, the opening
seemed to swallow its brightest beam almost without a trace.
Even with the torch, he was able to see only the mere suggestion of vague,
shadowed shapes within. At least the floor was a good distance down, the
rising land had not filled the interior. He made his hole a little bigger and
tried again. Now he could see that there was a lot of coral growing in the
tomb, which must be what was making it so dark, by literally absorbing any
light that came along.
Ditmars didn't know quite what interior design he had expected, but certainly
he was looking for something impressive and extreme. And what he could see
looked very commonplace, giving almost the impression of an ordinary room
inside some quite ordinary house or apartment. Peering in carefully, he could
make out, first of all, two large, straight-backed chairs. They were tall and
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elaborate and perhaps had had some ceremonial function as well as being
decorative. Besides the chairs there were a small table, a couple of large
vases standing on the floor, and some empty shelves built in along one
wall-Bellow had mentioned those. Bulking in the center of the single chamber
was a bed-sized shape that must, according to
Bellow's sketch, be where the body and the book were laid. This shape was
surrounded by growing coral, and visible only as a mound of shadows.
As he cut out his doorway, Ditmars continued to stack the removed chunks of
wall in order at his feet. When he was ready to depart he would rebuild the
wall, sealing the blocks back into their original places. A passerby would
not be able to tell that someone had broken in.
When the opening was big enough for him to slide through it comfortably, he
put his tools back into the bag again. He entered the hole, dropping lightly
to the tomb's paved floor, a level considerably lower than that of the outside
ground. As Ditmars' eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he could see that the
coral was almost everywhere. It had interpenetrated the walls in a hundred
places, as if the amalgam of native and foreign matter offered it an
especially fertile soil.
For some reason the stuff was growing most thickly near the body itself.
Nourished by a decomposing corpse?
Ditmars doubted that. As he understood the workings of the native life forms,
they got their energy by absorbing radiation. These inside the tomb had grown
branches out through its walls and roof in search of that, and their parts
inside were already a starved, stark black. The fierce light of the torch
falling on them was absorbed almost entirely so that he could not see even the
shape of the coral itself in any detail. No more could he see the exact shape
of what the coral shadowed.
Once, with the idea of forestalling any possible difficulties caused by a
final barrier, he had asked Bellow what sort of a coffin or container the body
was in. The agent had answered with vague assurances that he would have no
problem getting at the body once he had come this far.
Bellow had been right. Standing beside the central mound of shadows, he put
his hand in among the coral branches and saw it disappear in darkness, even
while the torch in his other hand was aimed that way. When he tried thrusting,
the torch itself completely into the shadows, its light vanished, only the
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