GATES Prologue: Tunnel to the Deep
GATES Prologue: Tunnel to the Deep
Mirim Otech
12/7/955 New Common Era
People have been coming back to the ocean since whatever time in the Paleozoic our ancestors slithered out of it. Usually they return for practical reasons - to harvest the sea, spawn, kill invaders, throw rocks.
I studied the stone which I’d found half-buried in the sludge of the beach. It had caught my eye - dark gray, with some other stratum in it shaped like an infinity sign. In the dull daylight the mark looked like real silver. It was smooth, and flattish - an ideal skipping rock. I tried to make it skip, throwing it laterally over the incoming tide. It landed a handful of meters from me and sank.
I glared at the landing spot, until I had to back off from an incoming wave. I watched the wave pull out again, leaving greasy brown traces like a ring on a bathtub. More than 50 years had gone by since anyone wanted to swim in the Atlantic-or any other ocean. I didn’t need my oceanography degree to tell me that although I wouldn’t exactly dissolve, the effects of repeated exposure would not be pretty. You wouldn’t want your genes within miles of that chemical soup.
I was stalling. I had not taken the raptrans and the local and walked a mile from the marina just to throw rocks at the ocean. In October, even the Virginia coast isn’t exactly tourist territory. We’d picked this stretch for the sealab because it was generally deserted - no view, no fastfood, no marina -- just a vast stretch of cold Atlantic brownish gray, with the debris of the last century’s careless littering bobbing all over, and nothing else. Not that there would be anything else, animal or vegetable, around here. Even tourists weren’t anywhere near as plentiful as they’d been a hundred years ago.
I picked my way over the greasy boulders as far as I dared and peered out to sea. If I squinted, I could see the marker which led to my undersea shelter. Less than a kilometer, for certain, and then half a kilometer down. I should be able to make that easily. I kept telling myself that.
I would have given anything to simply hop in my boat and cruise out there. By now, the trip was routine. I’d check my instruments and take random samples of cubic meters of water. The instruments went back into the water. The samples came back with me to the underwater lab. I tested them and uploaded the results into the ocean project’s network puter. Then I was done for the month.
I had only spent 2.6 per cent of my grant time with the ocean, but that time was precious. Now, things had changed. Anything I was researching, I had to do in the lab. Stare at a puter screen and pretend the sound waves were ocean waves. Worse, pretend I was alone, trying to ignore the sound of 10 people keying their own research, chatting about their Friday nights, their lovers and friends. I couldn’t stand the thought. Rakel had tried to soften the blow. She came up to me as I stared at my screen thinking how dull my research was.
“Mirim, we’ve made some adjustments in the line items,” she began.
It was bad news. I knew Rakel’s tone of voice very well. I turned around just for the pleasure of seeing her, trendy short red curls, augmented curves, corrected lenses bluer than my own. Despite knowing how much was cosmetic, I couldn’t resist the view.
“Don’t sugarcoat it. Spill.”
She sighed, that little breathy sigh she saved just for me, combined of impatience and pity. “You’re not going to like it.”
“I didn’t think I was.”
“They’ve decided you don’t need to go to the field any more. It costs too much, and produces too little data.”
I froze. “Rakel, I have to check instruments and acquire samples!”
“We’re going to outsource the maintenance and collection.”
“Who the hel-who could maintain them cheaper than me?”
“There’s a tourist and rescue diving company. . .”
I won’t reproduce the rest of that argument. It was the kind of idiotic decision that is made by governments and large corporations - the numbers look good on screen, and that’s all that matters. As far as bureaucrats are concerned, there is only screen.
So people who knew nothing about research or research instruments would haul up MY sensors, pry them open, write down what they thought they saw, and possibly make corrections on the instruments’ mechanical and electronic boards. Then they’d close them again and return them to the proper place, according to written directions. They’d take samples of the ocean where the computer told them to each month. They’d send me the data.
All this without advanced training, scientific curiosity, or decent pay. Presumably, their on-the-cheap contract would ensure that they would never be tempted to knock off early on Friday night by getting their samples somewhat closer to shore than where the computer said. They’d always spend the extra time to make sure the instruments were re-sealed and watertight, and that every correction was precise. Right.
They certainly wouldn’t go to the underwater lab with the micro-sub - which I also used to collect the appropriate range and depth of samples. I kept the sub in a shelter near the buoy, and the lab was below. There was no real reason to go to the lab, admittedly - it was an old lab that I’d had to argue to get into the newer grant, explaining that I liked to be able to run in and connect to a semi-hard-wired network occasionally without having to return to the Terran Tech. The real reason, of course, was that no one ever used it but me.
“Any corrections they can’t do, you can allow for in the home lab. The subcontractors will do what you do, Mirim.” Rakel frowned. She was not used to my disagreeing with her. “Senior Faculty decided. There’s no point in arguing.”
My boat was an old wooden tug. Over time, as the acid ocean ate through it, most of the outer hull had been replaced with more contemporary materials. When the waves hit its hull, way offshore, I heard nothing but splashing and slapping sounds. I watched the crowded city slowly slide away and disappear. At night, when it was dark, I squinted for stars, wondering what kind of people might be looking at them from other worlds, never imagining that each little point of fire was a sun. I never saw stars anywhere else but out to sea.
Subcontractors would never do what I did. They wouldn’t listen for the sound of being alone. The silence and the stars - those, and zipping around in the sub looking for the last remnants of ocean life, had been the only perks of my job. Rakel was looking at me. “You’ve got that stubborn expression, Mirim. You’re not going to do something stupid, are you?”
“I’m not stupid.”
Not being stupid herself, Rakel wasn’t satisfied with this, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she made me type my grant id number and password on her puter to confirm she’d told me, sent me a copy, and left.
She had the sub returned to the rental company. I started thinking about a way to get to the instruments. If they were your instruments, would you trust the kind of guys who rent boats to tourists? I didn’t even trust my colleagues, who thought I was crazy not to use hardwired instruments in the labs, instead of ones I left lying on the ocean bed. They also couldn’t see why I’d do hands-on samples when satellite-based testing was much faster and less messy.
In some ways, I’m my mother’s son. I could think of too many places for error-misreading, miswriting, pretending to go down and faking the numbers entirely-Hell, when I worked with the forestry crew, those folks knew their job and did it well, and even they occasionally screwed up. My main job from my thirteenth to 16th birthdays was adjusting their report screens so the numbers came out right - even though officially all I was in charge of was dispatch and making tea.
After about a month, a solution had come to me. It would be absolutely free, which was good, because grant-funded researchers don’t exactly get rich at their jobs. No one could imagine that I would try it. And if it worked, I could go to the ocean lab any time I wanted.
I could move.
I called it moving, including the italics, because I felt completely idiotic saying “teleport.” Teleportation was science fiction at best. Ultimately, it was magic. Moving was just moving: I could decide to be someplace, so long as it wasn’t too far, and I would be there.
That was a secret only I knew. I’d seen the “magicians” on the nets. There were a few who could do things which appeared to be magic - the real kind. No one had ever figured out how they did it. But rational people, like my mother and colleagues, knew it had to be faked, and made fun of them and their credulous fans. I needed rational people to approve of me. Even though there were times it was a blasted nuisance not to move, not even my mother ever found out.
I could also make things burn. I’d kept the moving secret, but my talent as an accidental arsonist was on record. owing to an unfortunate incident involving a fire at school. It had taken years of working with Terran Tech scientists to figure out how not to start fires by accident, but by now, I could control that energy.
Once, before I could control even moving, and when there were mysterious little fires appearing occasionally in my vicinity, something even odder happened. I felt that energy flash which warned me I was starting a fire just as I was moving to the stableyard. Instead of going there, I ended up with a strange . . . thing. It looked like heavy mist surrounding a tunnel. The mist was solid to my hand, though, and when I walked through the tunnel I found myself actually in the stableyard - fortunately, by the manure pile in back, which was seldom occupied and kept invisible to visitors.
With hindsight, I realized that I had created mass by combining energy with whatever moving was. At the time, I only knew I’d created a problem for myself, if anyone spotted it. I burned the odd tunnel up quickly, so no one else would stumble across it.
But if I could reproduce doing that again, on purpose, I could actually expand my research. I might even be able to make other tunnels to other points. Although the distance I could move was limited to a few kilometers at best, maybe combining it with the fire power had a different set of physical laws? Then we could build one to … oh, say, the Florida Keys, or at least, where they used to be. I might get a grant of my own. That in turn could eventually mean an office of my own. My fantasy chained out pleasantly, adding a window, regular ocean trips, research assistants, even renting a sitting room in the dorm, as well as my bedroom. To fulfill the fantasy, I would have to rescind the laws of thermodynamics, but after all, moving did that on its own.
Before the fantasy was the problem. This time I was aiming for about half a kilometer under water. Being a few meters off wouldn’t be exactly the same as ending up in the horse barn when I’d tried for the stableyard, which had happened a couple of times when I moved. It would be wetter. Much, much wetter.
And since I’d never told anyone about moving, no one would know how I’d managed to drown myself. They might think I’d done it on purpose. And I couldn’t see leaving a non-suicide note as anything helpful.
I looked at the greasy water again, and then up at the sky. It was too light here at the edge, but there were stars out there. I wanted to survive to see the stars again.
“Get some guts, Mirim,” I told myself grimly.
I’d gone to college to save the world, after all. I’d gotten tired trying to save the last 40 horses on earth, having a bunch of cloned ducklings follow me around the cage as I scattered duck feed at 4 p.m. every afternoon, cautiously pruning each one-of-a-kind tree in the arb and trying to picture how its species looked when flourishing in a whole woods of wild mixed growth. Save the world, yes. I had not signed up for numbercrunching in a windowless lab, just to get my name halfway down a list of authors on an academic publication.
I shoved my hands in my jeans pocket, which stopped their shaking. Still thinking about the stars, I envisioned the lab. As I began to shake again, I reminded myself, It’s different because there are stars overhead. I made myself focus on the stars as I moved, eyes squinched shut, bracing for the heavy pressure of ocean water against my skin.
Instead, I felt the slightly stale conditioned air of a lab, the familiar 15 pounds per square inch of pressure, no more, and smelled the homey smells of toner and carpet cleaner. Safe.
I opened my eyes, expecting to see the familiar orange-toned sea lab, and instead saw light, flowing in all directions, opening outward. I walked forward into it.
The light flew out from around me like fireworks, and a wide ribbon of darkness shredded in front of me. From where I stood, there was an empty corridor, perhaps a hundred meters long or a bit more. It was gray all the way down, floors and walls, a little misty. I couldn’t see a ceiling, just a rainy gray deepening into almost black, like storm clouds. The floor looked like the walls. I took a step forward onto it, and it felt solid. The walls, floor, and ceiling all glowed with a light which did look natural, in an eerie, deep-sea-fluorescence way.
The other end was definitely not a stableyard. Or a lab. I backed away. This end really was my lab - but home lab, not sea lab. That was a shock. I took a hanger from the coats closet and went back to the tunnel.
I could hear faraway sirens and buzzers. They seemed to be coming from the other end of the corridor. I had no idea what was attached to the other end - it could have been the room next door. On the other hand, the alarms didn’t sound like any I’d ever heard before at Tech.
I stretched the hanger out as though I were extending a sword. The very end of it disappeared in the tunnel. When I pulled it back, the piece was still gone. That did not augur well for someone walking through.
It was cold in the tunnel. I crossed my arms to my chest, shivering. The chill made it hard to think - that, and the unfamiliar alarms, and the tunnel’s utter strangeness. So I just stood there, trying to get my brain to start processing rationally and decide what to do next.
After a couple of minutes, three people came trotting into the far end of the tunnel. Each was carrying something like a cross between a rifle and a stainless steel blunderbuss. They saw me staring at them, and stopped, and aimed the weapon-like objects at me.
Stalking after them was a man wearing clothes like none I’d ever seen before - silvery clothes which reflected light. They looked metallic and rather uncomfortable: form-fitted to his rounded body, they seemed to make him walk stiffly, though possibly his disproportionately large feet had something to do with that. His hands were as outsize as his feet. To balance that, he had small eyes and a snoutish sort of nose.
He was certainly within the range for normal human beings, but for some reason, he made my skin crawl. Looking at the other three, whom I guessed might be military of some kind, I saw they had similar features. They were tall, and their clothes were of the same shiny material as the other’s, but colored blue. They wore metallic boots, and what might be ammunition belts and sidearms.
After looking me over quickly, the silvery one said something to the three blue-clothed ones, sharply, and they lowered their weapons. He walked past them, just a meter or so down the corridor, and looked at me.
“Well,” he said, and his voice reverberated oddly, as if it were passing through something metal. “You don’t look at all what we expected.”
Mirim Otech
12/7/955 New Common Era
People have been coming back to the ocean since whatever time in the Paleozoic our ancestors slithered out of it. Usually they return for practical reasons - to harvest the sea, spawn, kill invaders, throw rocks.
I studied the stone which I’d found half-buried in the sludge of the beach. It had caught my eye - dark gray, with some other stratum in it shaped like an infinity sign. In the dull daylight the mark looked like real silver. It was smooth, and flattish - an ideal skipping rock. I tried to make it skip, throwing it laterally over the incoming tide. It landed a handful of meters from me and sank.
I glared at the landing spot, until I had to back off from an incoming wave. I watched the wave pull out again, leaving greasy brown traces like a ring on a bathtub. More than 50 years had gone by since anyone wanted to swim in the Atlantic-or any other ocean. I didn’t need my oceanography degree to tell me that although I wouldn’t exactly dissolve, the effects of repeated exposure would not be pretty. You wouldn’t want your genes within miles of that chemical soup.
I was stalling. I had not taken the raptrans and the local and walked a mile from the marina just to throw rocks at the ocean. In October, even the Virginia coast isn’t exactly tourist territory. We’d picked this stretch for the sealab because it was generally deserted - no view, no fastfood, no marina -- just a vast stretch of cold Atlantic brownish gray, with the debris of the last century’s careless littering bobbing all over, and nothing else. Not that there would be anything else, animal or vegetable, around here. Even tourists weren’t anywhere near as plentiful as they’d been a hundred years ago.
I picked my way over the greasy boulders as far as I dared and peered out to sea. If I squinted, I could see the marker which led to my undersea shelter. Less than a kilometer, for certain, and then half a kilometer down. I should be able to make that easily. I kept telling myself that.
I would have given anything to simply hop in my boat and cruise out there. By now, the trip was routine. I’d check my instruments and take random samples of cubic meters of water. The instruments went back into the water. The samples came back with me to the underwater lab. I tested them and uploaded the results into the ocean project’s network puter. Then I was done for the month.
I had only spent 2.6 per cent of my grant time with the ocean, but that time was precious. Now, things had changed. Anything I was researching, I had to do in the lab. Stare at a puter screen and pretend the sound waves were ocean waves. Worse, pretend I was alone, trying to ignore the sound of 10 people keying their own research, chatting about their Friday nights, their lovers and friends. I couldn’t stand the thought. Rakel had tried to soften the blow. She came up to me as I stared at my screen thinking how dull my research was.
“Mirim, we’ve made some adjustments in the line items,” she began.
It was bad news. I knew Rakel’s tone of voice very well. I turned around just for the pleasure of seeing her, trendy short red curls, augmented curves, corrected lenses bluer than my own. Despite knowing how much was cosmetic, I couldn’t resist the view.
“Don’t sugarcoat it. Spill.”
She sighed, that little breathy sigh she saved just for me, combined of impatience and pity. “You’re not going to like it.”
“I didn’t think I was.”
“They’ve decided you don’t need to go to the field any more. It costs too much, and produces too little data.”
I froze. “Rakel, I have to check instruments and acquire samples!”
“We’re going to outsource the maintenance and collection.”
“Who the hel-who could maintain them cheaper than me?”
“There’s a tourist and rescue diving company. . .”
I won’t reproduce the rest of that argument. It was the kind of idiotic decision that is made by governments and large corporations - the numbers look good on screen, and that’s all that matters. As far as bureaucrats are concerned, there is only screen.
So people who knew nothing about research or research instruments would haul up MY sensors, pry them open, write down what they thought they saw, and possibly make corrections on the instruments’ mechanical and electronic boards. Then they’d close them again and return them to the proper place, according to written directions. They’d take samples of the ocean where the computer told them to each month. They’d send me the data.
All this without advanced training, scientific curiosity, or decent pay. Presumably, their on-the-cheap contract would ensure that they would never be tempted to knock off early on Friday night by getting their samples somewhat closer to shore than where the computer said. They’d always spend the extra time to make sure the instruments were re-sealed and watertight, and that every correction was precise. Right.
They certainly wouldn’t go to the underwater lab with the micro-sub - which I also used to collect the appropriate range and depth of samples. I kept the sub in a shelter near the buoy, and the lab was below. There was no real reason to go to the lab, admittedly - it was an old lab that I’d had to argue to get into the newer grant, explaining that I liked to be able to run in and connect to a semi-hard-wired network occasionally without having to return to the Terran Tech. The real reason, of course, was that no one ever used it but me.
“Any corrections they can’t do, you can allow for in the home lab. The subcontractors will do what you do, Mirim.” Rakel frowned. She was not used to my disagreeing with her. “Senior Faculty decided. There’s no point in arguing.”
My boat was an old wooden tug. Over time, as the acid ocean ate through it, most of the outer hull had been replaced with more contemporary materials. When the waves hit its hull, way offshore, I heard nothing but splashing and slapping sounds. I watched the crowded city slowly slide away and disappear. At night, when it was dark, I squinted for stars, wondering what kind of people might be looking at them from other worlds, never imagining that each little point of fire was a sun. I never saw stars anywhere else but out to sea.
Subcontractors would never do what I did. They wouldn’t listen for the sound of being alone. The silence and the stars - those, and zipping around in the sub looking for the last remnants of ocean life, had been the only perks of my job. Rakel was looking at me. “You’ve got that stubborn expression, Mirim. You’re not going to do something stupid, are you?”
“I’m not stupid.”
Not being stupid herself, Rakel wasn’t satisfied with this, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she made me type my grant id number and password on her puter to confirm she’d told me, sent me a copy, and left.
She had the sub returned to the rental company. I started thinking about a way to get to the instruments. If they were your instruments, would you trust the kind of guys who rent boats to tourists? I didn’t even trust my colleagues, who thought I was crazy not to use hardwired instruments in the labs, instead of ones I left lying on the ocean bed. They also couldn’t see why I’d do hands-on samples when satellite-based testing was much faster and less messy.
In some ways, I’m my mother’s son. I could think of too many places for error-misreading, miswriting, pretending to go down and faking the numbers entirely-Hell, when I worked with the forestry crew, those folks knew their job and did it well, and even they occasionally screwed up. My main job from my thirteenth to 16th birthdays was adjusting their report screens so the numbers came out right - even though officially all I was in charge of was dispatch and making tea.
After about a month, a solution had come to me. It would be absolutely free, which was good, because grant-funded researchers don’t exactly get rich at their jobs. No one could imagine that I would try it. And if it worked, I could go to the ocean lab any time I wanted.
I could move.
I called it moving, including the italics, because I felt completely idiotic saying “teleport.” Teleportation was science fiction at best. Ultimately, it was magic. Moving was just moving: I could decide to be someplace, so long as it wasn’t too far, and I would be there.
That was a secret only I knew. I’d seen the “magicians” on the nets. There were a few who could do things which appeared to be magic - the real kind. No one had ever figured out how they did it. But rational people, like my mother and colleagues, knew it had to be faked, and made fun of them and their credulous fans. I needed rational people to approve of me. Even though there were times it was a blasted nuisance not to move, not even my mother ever found out.
I could also make things burn. I’d kept the moving secret, but my talent as an accidental arsonist was on record. owing to an unfortunate incident involving a fire at school. It had taken years of working with Terran Tech scientists to figure out how not to start fires by accident, but by now, I could control that energy.
Once, before I could control even moving, and when there were mysterious little fires appearing occasionally in my vicinity, something even odder happened. I felt that energy flash which warned me I was starting a fire just as I was moving to the stableyard. Instead of going there, I ended up with a strange . . . thing. It looked like heavy mist surrounding a tunnel. The mist was solid to my hand, though, and when I walked through the tunnel I found myself actually in the stableyard - fortunately, by the manure pile in back, which was seldom occupied and kept invisible to visitors.
With hindsight, I realized that I had created mass by combining energy with whatever moving was. At the time, I only knew I’d created a problem for myself, if anyone spotted it. I burned the odd tunnel up quickly, so no one else would stumble across it.
But if I could reproduce doing that again, on purpose, I could actually expand my research. I might even be able to make other tunnels to other points. Although the distance I could move was limited to a few kilometers at best, maybe combining it with the fire power had a different set of physical laws? Then we could build one to … oh, say, the Florida Keys, or at least, where they used to be. I might get a grant of my own. That in turn could eventually mean an office of my own. My fantasy chained out pleasantly, adding a window, regular ocean trips, research assistants, even renting a sitting room in the dorm, as well as my bedroom. To fulfill the fantasy, I would have to rescind the laws of thermodynamics, but after all, moving did that on its own.
Before the fantasy was the problem. This time I was aiming for about half a kilometer under water. Being a few meters off wouldn’t be exactly the same as ending up in the horse barn when I’d tried for the stableyard, which had happened a couple of times when I moved. It would be wetter. Much, much wetter.
And since I’d never told anyone about moving, no one would know how I’d managed to drown myself. They might think I’d done it on purpose. And I couldn’t see leaving a non-suicide note as anything helpful.
I looked at the greasy water again, and then up at the sky. It was too light here at the edge, but there were stars out there. I wanted to survive to see the stars again.
“Get some guts, Mirim,” I told myself grimly.
I’d gone to college to save the world, after all. I’d gotten tired trying to save the last 40 horses on earth, having a bunch of cloned ducklings follow me around the cage as I scattered duck feed at 4 p.m. every afternoon, cautiously pruning each one-of-a-kind tree in the arb and trying to picture how its species looked when flourishing in a whole woods of wild mixed growth. Save the world, yes. I had not signed up for numbercrunching in a windowless lab, just to get my name halfway down a list of authors on an academic publication.
I shoved my hands in my jeans pocket, which stopped their shaking. Still thinking about the stars, I envisioned the lab. As I began to shake again, I reminded myself, It’s different because there are stars overhead. I made myself focus on the stars as I moved, eyes squinched shut, bracing for the heavy pressure of ocean water against my skin.
Instead, I felt the slightly stale conditioned air of a lab, the familiar 15 pounds per square inch of pressure, no more, and smelled the homey smells of toner and carpet cleaner. Safe.
I opened my eyes, expecting to see the familiar orange-toned sea lab, and instead saw light, flowing in all directions, opening outward. I walked forward into it.
The light flew out from around me like fireworks, and a wide ribbon of darkness shredded in front of me. From where I stood, there was an empty corridor, perhaps a hundred meters long or a bit more. It was gray all the way down, floors and walls, a little misty. I couldn’t see a ceiling, just a rainy gray deepening into almost black, like storm clouds. The floor looked like the walls. I took a step forward onto it, and it felt solid. The walls, floor, and ceiling all glowed with a light which did look natural, in an eerie, deep-sea-fluorescence way.
The other end was definitely not a stableyard. Or a lab. I backed away. This end really was my lab - but home lab, not sea lab. That was a shock. I took a hanger from the coats closet and went back to the tunnel.
I could hear faraway sirens and buzzers. They seemed to be coming from the other end of the corridor. I had no idea what was attached to the other end - it could have been the room next door. On the other hand, the alarms didn’t sound like any I’d ever heard before at Tech.
I stretched the hanger out as though I were extending a sword. The very end of it disappeared in the tunnel. When I pulled it back, the piece was still gone. That did not augur well for someone walking through.
It was cold in the tunnel. I crossed my arms to my chest, shivering. The chill made it hard to think - that, and the unfamiliar alarms, and the tunnel’s utter strangeness. So I just stood there, trying to get my brain to start processing rationally and decide what to do next.
After a couple of minutes, three people came trotting into the far end of the tunnel. Each was carrying something like a cross between a rifle and a stainless steel blunderbuss. They saw me staring at them, and stopped, and aimed the weapon-like objects at me.
Stalking after them was a man wearing clothes like none I’d ever seen before - silvery clothes which reflected light. They looked metallic and rather uncomfortable: form-fitted to his rounded body, they seemed to make him walk stiffly, though possibly his disproportionately large feet had something to do with that. His hands were as outsize as his feet. To balance that, he had small eyes and a snoutish sort of nose.
He was certainly within the range for normal human beings, but for some reason, he made my skin crawl. Looking at the other three, whom I guessed might be military of some kind, I saw they had similar features. They were tall, and their clothes were of the same shiny material as the other’s, but colored blue. They wore metallic boots, and what might be ammunition belts and sidearms.
After looking me over quickly, the silvery one said something to the three blue-clothed ones, sharply, and they lowered their weapons. He walked past them, just a meter or so down the corridor, and looked at me.
“Well,” he said, and his voice reverberated oddly, as if it were passing through something metal. “You don’t look at all what we expected.”