The exercise cleared his mind of everything else—for a few minutes, at least—and took him back to his days as a college gymnast.

The Stone's first chamber, viewed in cross section, resembled a squat cylinder, fifty kilometers in diameter and thirty across the floor. Since each of the Stone's first six chambers were wider in diameter than in length, they resembled deep valleys, and that's what they were sometimes called.

Lanier paused for a second with toes pointed together and stared up at the plasma tube. Rings of light passed through ionized gas only slightly denser than the near-vacuum around them, sweeping along the axis from the bore hole to the opposite side of the chamber with such speed that the eye interpreted their passage as a continuous hollow shaft or tube. The plasma tube—and extensions in the other chambers—provided all the light for the Stone's interior and had been doing so for some twelve centuries.

He dropped to the sandy bed and rubbed his hands on his sweatpants. He worked out for an hour—no more—whenever his schedule allowed, which wasn't often. His muscles were feeling the lack of Earth gravity. At least he was acclimated to the thin air.

He ran his hand through his short black hair, face expressionless, pumping his legs slowly to cool them down.

Soon, back to the small office in the administration bungalow, back to signing slates allocating materiel to the various experiments, looking over the science team shifts in the five cramped labs, scheduling equipment and central processor time. . . back to the memory blocks and the information coming out of the second and third chambers. . .

And to the security squabbles, the Russian team's constant complaints about limited access.

He closed his eyes. Those things he could handle. Hoffman had once called him a born administrator, and he didn't deny it—handling people, especially brilliant, capable people, was his meat and drink.

But he would also go back to the tiny figurine in the top drawer of his desk. For him, the figurine symbolized everything peculiar about the Stone.

It was a lifelike three-dimensional image of a man, encased in a block of crystal. On the base of the block, which stood just under twelve centimeters high, a name had been engraved in neat round letters: KONRAD KORZENOWSKI.

Korzenowski had been the main engineer on the Stone, six hundred years ago.

That was where it began—the Library Beast, he thought of it, threatening to consume him—the knowledge that had every day taken a bit of his humanity and rubbed it thin, pushing him closer to some sort of personal crisis. There was no way—yet—to deal with what he knew—he and only ten other people. Soon, an eleventh would arrive.

He felt sorry for her.

The gymnastics pit was half a kilometer from the science team compound, midway between the compound and the barbed wire fence that marked the boundary beyond which no one could go, unescorted, without a green badge.

The valley floor was covered with a soft, sandy layer of soil, not dusty though dry. A few scrubby patches of grass grew out of the soil, but for the most part the first chamber was arid.