Tintagel by Paul Cook Page B

Eventide was somewhere . But Lanier could see nothing but the blurred dreams of lakes and mountains. A puff of green indicated a dense forest. There was nothing resembling a human habitation anywhere. But on the soil beneath his own feet he could see the small crescents of hoofprints. Game trails threaded through the bent grasses.
    Where could Eventide be in all of this ? It would take him months to explore the inside of the rotating cylinder by foot. There must be hundreds of square kilometers of surface area. Much too much to cover.
    Gravely, Lanier realized that Eventide might have created a vacant world. A private solitude given no man, an empty fantasy, a perfect place in which to be alone.
    Then an explosion knocked him off his feet, face first into the sod.
    "Someone's here," he said sardonically to no one but himself.
    The ground shook for a few minutes after the jolt. He jumped up to his feet and began to run toward the "north," where the horizon didn't curve up but stretched forward to the end of the cylinder.
    It was rough going across the prairie. Prairie dog towers and snake holes kept appearing, and he kept tripping in them. He topped a small rise and saw beneath him a grove of cottonwoods, their green leaves shuddering in the slight afternoon wind. Afternoon ? he pondered, realizing that the dimness in the light—perhaps a flexing or angling of the exterior mirrors that provided the light for the cylinder—made it seem like afternoon.
    He stopped short of the cottonwoods, breathing heavily. He couldn't possibly be out of shape, but he seemed to be, considering the pain in his lungs, and the giddiness. He bent over. The air was much thinner than it should have been. The ground shuddered once again, but it was something quite different from an earthquake. A rending, deep and resonant.
    My God, he thought suddenly, this world is falling apart ! The air was getting thinner because it was leaking out through the walls of the cylinder into outer space! The wind kicked up a fuss through the trees.
    This wasn't in the music, he realized. This had something to do with Eventide's mind. Where was he? Lanier dove through the cottonwoods. Just beyond the cottonwood stand he came to a large meadow. He popped his priest's collar and removed his coat. In the center of the meadow, as if fused by lightning, was a flat circle of crystal.
    Lanier then recognized what this particular world had come to: the inner surface area was for animal and plant life. The people who maintained the cylinder lived below the surface. This enormous cylinder held wilderness areas, farms, and lakes ranging over hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers. And this was an entrance to the world below his feet.
    He stepped out onto the smooth surface just as another quake shook the ground. This time a slight crack followed the joining of the crystal area to the cottonwoods. It was almost as if he could hear the roots of the trees and grass scream as they were torn apart. But his hearing was beginning to fail. Lack of atmosphere. He felt light-headed.
    Standing in the center of the crystal shield, he was jerked to his knees suddenly as the entire crystal area began lowering. It was an elevator!
    He reached for his Malachi, but thought against it. He would wait, for he felt as if Eventide was very near. The music—for he could still hear it clearly—was quite intense. And Eventide must be feeling some sense of danger, because something was conveyed to him in the music that let him know that more than just this world was falling apart.
    Another jolt. If there was an explosion, he couldn't hear it. But the elevator stopped, locked between floors in the shaft. He had descended about thirty-five meters. In the glass cylinder of the elevator shaft, he had seen that the previous floors—the inner floors—were empty of life.
    He climbed up onto the floor he had just passed. He stood in silence, the floor extending for a great distance before him, filled with