"Neither am I, if I can help it. I'm the science team coordinator."

"So Mr. Heineman told me. I have so many questions. . . Mr. Lanier, Garry, is this really a spaceship, a starship, the whole thing?" She swung her arm wide, her feet lifting from the deck momentarily.

"It is," he said, feeling the familiar, peculiar pleasure. Even though the Stone had nearly driven him crazy in the past few years, with its endless layers of surprise and shock, he was still more than a little in love with it.

"Where did it come from?"

Lanier held up his hands and shook his head. Vasquez suddenly noticed how exhausted he appeared, and that subdued her excitement some.

"First, I'm sure you'll want to rest and get cleaned up. Our facilities in the valley—the chamber floor—are quite nice. Then you can visit our cafeteria, meet a few of the team scientists, take it from there. One step at a time."

Vasquez examined him intently. Her eyes made the inspection seem less than sympathetic, even aggressive. "Is something wrong?"

Lanier raised his brows and glanced to one side. "We have a name for what this place does to you. We call it getting Stoned. I'm just a little Stoned, is all."

She looked around the staging area and experimented with the centrifugal force, pushing herself up a few centimeters with a nudge of her toe. "It looks so familiar," she said. "I expected an alien artifact to be mysterious, but I can identify almost everything, like it was built on Earth, by us."

"Well," said Lanier, "Heineman and his people have been busy up here. But keep an open mind. If you'll follow me, we'll descend to the floor of the first chamber. Use the ropes. And if Larry hasn't already said it, allow me to welcome you to the Stone."

Chapter Three

Patricia lay on the air mattress, keeping still so the synthetic fiber sheets wouldn't squeak against the vinyl. Surrounded by darkness, she was clean, warm, well fed—the cafeteria food had been more than palatable—and now that she wasn't walking around, not nearly so breathless. Tired but unable to sleep. Her memory kept tossing up visions:

The thirty-kilometer-wide chamber floor, a mottled gray-and-brown valley landscape, capped at each end by impassive rock and natural metal walls, run through by the glowing plasma tube.

The peculiar perspective as she stood outside the valley level zero elevator entrance, facing the immensity, the landscape for kilometers around looking flat and normal, a desert on a bright cloudy day. Off to either side, however—spinwise and counter-spinwise—the curve became more pronounced. She seemed to stand under a vast arching bridge with the plasma tube a bright milky river flowing overhead. Directly north, the land rose to curve in snug conformity with the circular cap. Looking up, everything distorted as if seen through a fish-eye lens, the cap accepted the embrace of the opposite side of the chamber, completing the circle behind the plasma tube.