"Then do what you wish. It'll take them a couple of weeks to find out and mount an effort to remove you." She smiled. "As soon as Vasquez does her stuff, you let me know somehow, okay? Not all the cards have been played yet. There are senators and a couple of members of the Joint Chiefs still on my side."

"I'll do that," he said. He took the paper and put it in his pocket.

She opened the door for him. "Good-bye, Garry."

The agent several steps down the hall regarded him with a deadpan expression.

Do I really want to know?

He had to know.

He had to get the Stone ready for whatever would come.

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

Heineman piloted the V/STOL alone, using the aircraft's rocket to push the tuberider along the axis from the first chamber bore hole. It had been only forty minutes since he had linked the tuberider and V/STOL in the south polar bore hole. The "ground" surrounded him on all sides, giving him a peculiar sensation of vertigo at first; which way should he orient? But he adapted quickly.

Using radio beacons set up in each chamber, coordinating through the V/STOL's guidance computers, he could tell his position within a few centimeters. Cautiously and lovingly, he eased the assembly from chamber to chamber, using temporary propulsion packs on the tuberider and the aircraft, coordinated through the aircraft's own customized guidance system.

Coming up on each bore hole was a thrill that raised the hair on his neck. In the center of the massive gray caps, that tiny hole—wider than a football field, no challenge really, but from a distance almost invisible. . .

He flew steadily over the fifth chamber's darkly Gothic landscape of clouds, mountains and chasms. Entering the bore hole between the fifth and sixth chambers, he issued a terse instruction to a crew of his engineers waiting near the seventh chamber singularity: "Take 'er down. I'm coming through in a few minutes." They acknowledged and began to dismantle the top of the research scaffold.

It was Heineman's intention to thread the needle without readjustment, slowly but expertly.

The mated vehicles were monstrous from an aerodynamic viewpoint, and cumbersome from any perspective, but the flight was not difficult. The near-vacuum of the Stone axis offered no resistance.

Even concentrating on the last phase of the delivery, Heineman couldn't stop thinking about flying the aircraft.

Reentry was the uncertain part. Once the tuberider was threaded and steady on the singularity, Heineman would test the clamps by moving thirty-one kilometers down the axis. Descent would be much less complicated—so he was told—that far down the corridor; he could descend in almost a straight line instead of the spiral necessary within the rotating chamber.