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Page 42.

The cabin was dark and smelled faintly of rubber and smoke, making Alex and Maryan choke.

They rushed to the side door by which they had entered down on Earth. They pounded on the door’s hard surface. Alex noticed a red and white striped area above the door and pounded a fist there. The door slid open a few feet with a tortured creak and then died in its tracks. Maryan and Alex held hands and stumbled from the opening. Cool, fragrant forest air enveloped their senses as they fell to their knees on thick moss several feet below door level. They rubbed their eyes to clear them, and then looked around at this orbiting wilderness.

An animal howled loudly, and eerie echoes reverberated through the forest. Goosebumps rippled on Alex’s back, and Maryan gripped his arm with steely fingers as she looked around terrified. The ground started trembling, and the boat lying nearby began to shake. “Let’s find a safe spot,” Alex said. He looked up, frowning, as a wind blew around them.

The air smelled fresh, of pine and water and soil, even aromatic from mosses and flowers and fresh grass, but the atmosphere itself seemed to be becoming more disturbed by the moment.

Alex took in the vastness of this place. It appeared to be an enormous cylinder coated on the inside with forests. The opposite surface was almost too far away to see, lost in haze and distance as if on another planet. On this end was a narrow pinch of windows and balconies leading to the deserted and airless stores and avenues of that long-ago downtown to which the agrarian residents must have gone for shopping and entertainment. The other end of the cylinder was twenty miles away, lost in a fog of light and atmosphere. Along the center of the cylinder were clouds, and at times they flashed with lightning. Some areas were dark and foreboding, as if full of rain. It was such a dark, roiling, disturbed area that now seemed to be closing in on Alex and Maryan and their beached boat.

Minute by minute, the swirling wind doubled. Surrounded by forest on all sides except the grayish walls and blank windows behind them, they couldn’t see the countryside around them. The wind tore through the tree crowns, making their branches and leaves sway. Even more puzzling was the fact that dark shapes seemed to be lifting up, like blankets, twirling in the wind, and angling in toward the boat. Heavy, wet bunches of leaves were spinning through the air toward them, and when the first ones started hitting the boat, Maryan tugged at his hand. “Come on, we’ve got to run for cover!”

Alex hesitated. Should they get into the boat? As he stared at it, the boat trembled as the wind shoved it a bit, and a thick dust of loose soil swirled up around it.

“Come on!” Maryan yelled. Her voice was almost lost in the din.

Together, they ran uphill, through a maze of trees, while leaves shot around them and whipped their faces with cutting ferocity. They had to help themselves along by pulling themselves along the trees and taking turns helping each other. There was only one logical direction to take: toward the wall behind them, but away from the boat, away from the broken window through which they had crashed.

The wind was audibly howling now, and Alex couldn’t hear his own voice as he yelled for Maryan to grab his hand. She was clinging to a tree, trying to make it the last fifteen or twenty feet toward an opening in what looked like a stone or concrete wall. Alex ran toward her through the wind that practically tore his clothes off. Together, they ducked and ran down hill, into the opening, into a dank but quiet cellar of sorts. There was a slightly rancid smell in there and it was dark, and their feet stood in water up to the ankles that felt cold and unpleasant, but Alex felt safer than outside. He rumpled his face squeamishly at the feel of running slime between his toes. Outside, small whirlwinds danced about. Leaves and branches raced in circles.

The boat lifted up at the bow, bounced a few times, then swung around. For a second it rested facing the opposite way. The boat slowly rolled over, turned sideways, and rolled out of sight. There was a loud tearing, smashing noise, a rending of metal and shattering of glass. There were a series of slapping noises. Alexa and Maryan hung on in the darkness as their refuge shook. The air was filled with dust, and they had to hold their hands over their faces to protect their eyes and to minimize breathing in debris.

Then, some ten minutes after the wind had started, it began to subside. The howling faded, almost reluctantly, as if the atmosphere had enjoyed a good, mean brawl. Branches and leaves fell to the ground. The wind wasn’t strong enough to sustain heavy objects now. The air was still brown with dust. Leaves ran in circles, but the wood debris lay still. In another ten minutes the wind had almost completely subsided.

Glad to get back onto dry ground, Alex and Maryan held hands as they emerged from the muck and scrambled onto dustier, drier ground. They clambered back up that small incline through the trees, and emerged coughing and waving their hands before their faces to face what had happened. Now Alex understood, he thought. The smashed window was virtually sealed off, and no more air could escape. The boat was totally wrecked. The boat was wrapped around one edge, twisted in the middle, and partially draped across the opening so that its other end rested against the opposite side of the window frame. The rest of the window was covered with a thick mat of tree branches. The blanket-like objects, which proved to be of a stiff, dark material like the moss on his sky island back on Earth, formed a barrier.

Maryan stiffened and pointed upward at the wall.

Alex jerked his head up to look, and saw large crab-like or spider-like creatures descending. They were as big as human beings. Each had legs six to eight feet long, and chitin-covered body sacs the size of a human torso. Alex towed Maryan along as they sprinted away from the wall.

They ran up a long, gradual incline into the forest until they came to a ridge about ten feet high. It was covered with brittle leaves and other debris, and afforded them an outlook point over the dust-choked canyon leading down to the building wall. The spiders were too busy to pay any heed to the two humans. The spiders’ mandibles worked furiously as fine ropes of sticky grayish fluid came from an orifice each had in the base of its torso and curling up for ready access.

“They’re weaving a net over the hole,” Maryan said, catching her breath. She wiped a dirty wrist over an equally dirty face.

He nodded. “It’s all part of some damage control scheme, looks like. To keep the atmosphere in. To repair holes. The station is sealing up the hole we made coming through, using any material at hand including the boat we came in.”

“The station must take a good number of micrometeorite hits,” Maryan said. “That’s part of the answer how any of this has survived.” She bit her upper lip pensively. “Alex, it almost seems as if the station itself is intelligent, doesn’t it? Do you suppose it’s been repairing itself like this for a million years from all those little micrometeorite hits?”

He remembered the smudge of light, and the plume of debris they’d seen while approaching the station. “I suspect you’re right. I just hope it doesn’t think we are the enemy.”

“At least the air is still breathable.”

“It’s actually rather pleasant,” he said, looking around. “This place has survived for a long, long time.”

She stepped beside him, putting her arm around his waist, and for a few minutes, they were able to gape at their surroundings together. They stood higher than before, but still couldn’t see over the tree level, which reached a hundred feet in an endless cascade of forest leading away from the wall.

She pointed up at the distant, hazy opposite wall of the cylinder. “That looks like forest up there, above the clouds.”

He nodded, squinting in the indirect bluish sunlight that filtered through from the distant end of the cylinder. “I think I see some water glittering. How do you suppose it stays flat against the cylinder wall?”

“We can’t tell from here, but I’d guess this whole station must be spinning,” she said. “This structure seems big enough to have some slight gravity, and probably has more mass than a fair-sized asteroid.” She did a few quick guesses and calculations. “Although the cylinder is mostly hollow, its walls have mass. It’s five miles in diameter, so (multiplying by ?, or very roughly three and one seventh), it’s over 15 miles in circumference. Twenty miles long, so the inside surface, if it were perfectly flat along its curvature, without hills and dips, would be about 300 square miles. God, that’s huge.”

Alex shook his head. “Amazing. And yet—they were dying out. They had all that genius, all those tools at their disposal—“

“All dressed up and nowhere to go,” she concluded.

“Or going nowhere,” he said more ironically.

“Don’t forget the city at the end. That’s a disk about a mile thick, and as much as seven miles in diameter, so it’s got an inside surface area of 20 square miles, not counting multiple floors, which could make it dozens of square miles more.”

“The scale is mind-boggling,” he agreed. He thought of the floating bodies, the debris, around their landing zone. “No gravity in the center, I imagine, so they would have lived on the inside surface.”

She said “It wouldn’t be the same as natural gravity, but close in some ways. I have to wonder about the health effects.”

“Like on the vascular system.”

“Exactly.”

“So how will it affect us?”

She shook her head. “We’ll probably be okay for a while, but I would think long-term it might affect our blood pressure, our sense of balance, the way our organs function, I have no idea. Still, we may be safer here than down on Earth with the Siirk and who knows what other predators.”

“You have a point there.” He looked back at the wreckage of the boat. “We’ll need to find water, shelter, food, weapons—with luck, another boat. Then we can choose whether to live up here or down there.” He grinned and added: “We can commute back and forth.”

She took his arm and started to say something affectionate, but they heard the trumpeting scream of a wild animal again, echoing across the forest and losing itself in the freely floating inner atmosphere, and he could feel her freezing against him in shock while her features blanched. He imagined he probably looked just as terrified to her, as he cradled her against himself. His hair stood on end, and he felt goose bumps rippling up and down the back of his neck and spine.

Even as he held her close, he glanced about seeking higher ground for them.