Further into the Unknown
The elevator was tucked away in the rock wall, unnoticed until then. It was similar to the turbo lift in design, but a little smaller and somewhat slower; a fact the Violet was thankful for. The team entered the lift, Helen stood next to the small panel of buttons, like a normal elevator's, but the bottom button was blank. "What floor?" she asked.
"Push the blank one and see what happens."
Helen did, with a bit of reserve, but nothing happened.
"How about nine?"
Helen pressed the button marked nine. The lift door closed quickly and immediately started its descent.
As the glass car passed the gallery's floor, Buddy inhaled deeply.
"What's wrong?"
Buddy replied with mumblings, his face showed signs of multitasking; fear, disbelief, and advanced calculations. It got worse with each floor passed, as Buddy scanned each during the few seconds given him as the car made it's way to the gallery selected.
"Buddy what's going on?" Helen asked, "Your scaring us a little."
"Span ratio," was all he said.
"Care to explain?"
"I'm trying to think," Buddy snapped in a low voice, still watching the passing floors.
As they reached the seventhfloor, Buddy's eyes widened somewhat. He continued lookingat the far wall as they passed the next two floors, "Floors with no holes. Wrong...it's all wrong."
"What's wrong Buddy...tell us something."
"Too many floors with nothing there...no practical purpose, spans can't support themselves, no drills, only one gantry – eyewash,no LMD's, never were I'll bet."
The family was confused with the babbling; concern, bordering on fear, was creeping in. They desperately wanted to know what was going on in Buddy's mind, but they thought better than to press him for information. He would explain things in his own time.
The lift reached it's destination, the door opened to a gallery identical to the others...enormous and empty. After a quick glance, Buddy got everybody back into the lift. Once they were in, he inserted his key card and pressed the blank button; the car made one more descent...to the last gallery.
Again, the car stopped and the door opened. But this floor was different, it wasn't a gallery, it was a huge office, the ceiling was only twelve feet, and a computer console was the main piece of furniture. But like the others, it opened up to the wall look at it a second, then turned to face the computer. With a few seconds of study, he tapped a key. The monitor immediately lit up, displaying what looked like a blueprint.
"No password needed?" Helen asked a little surprised.
"This is Nick's place, the only way to get here is with a card...no need for a password."
Buddy thought for a second, "Like most things here, this was meant to be found."
"By who?"
"Anybody unfortunate enough to make it down here," Buddy stated as he analyzed the plans.
"What do you mean by unfortunate?"
"They wouldn't have come via the lift, they would have come a different way...that would have started the reaction...providing it hadn't started already."
"The lift is the only way to this floor isn't it?" Dash inquired.
"No, you can easily repel from the floor above."
"That's true," he said looking towards the ceiling's edge.
"Yeah," Buddy said nodding his head slightly. "This is the real deal."
"The actual plans to the complex?"
"Yep."
The team looked at the display, showing the typical elevation and orientation views of the complex. The orientation appeared to be nothing more than a large rectangle made up of tentiny rectangles stacked one on top of the other, a sliver of a gap then hundreds of very long, horizontal parallel lines making up the rest of it.
"What are these?" Violet asked pointing to the tiny rectangles.
"The galleries."
Violet swallowed hard. "You mean like the galleries above us?"
"The same. In fact, this one," Buddy began, pointing at the upper rectangle, "is the gallery we originally entered...this space is the opposite wall with the holes, and this dot, represents the lift."
"If those are the galleries, what are all these long lines lines?"
"Tunnels."
"Where do they go?"
"Nowhere."
"What do you mean?"
"They don't go anywhere...there's sixty tunnels splitting into about ten more, approximately six hundred, closely spaced, parallel tunnels, all going nowhere."
Buddy continued to study the plans, a small glimmer of hope was in his eyes, unseen by the rest of the team. In spite of that, he felt conned, made a fool of in a high-stakes, intellectual game.
"I've been had," Buddy said with a mix of anger and disbelief. "Everything was staged, and I bought into it all the way."
"Why, because the drills are gone or that there are more than you thought?"
"It's not about the drills, the line of fire, or anything else we thought of...it was all a fabrication, none of it real," Buddy said hurriedly. "The plans and engineering drawings were meant to steer away from all this. If someone had stumbled onto the galleries, they would be confused and have to rethink all while fighting whatever security is in place. If this room was ever found it would be much to late."
"What was the actual plan then?"
"One drill on a suicide mission, to breach a soft spot causing the interior of this entire complex to collapse and fill with magma."
"Where's the drill at? Maybe we can stop it."
"Dash, go over to that depression and tell me what you see."
Dash did as he was requested, covering the 50 or so yards quickly, he came up on a large hole going straight down, looking more like a huge well than a tunnel.
"Just a hole like the others, only going straight down."
"Anything else?" Buddy asked, his voice little shaky.
Dash crawled to the edge, with a his mom holding on to him, while helooked in, "No, nothing but air."
"We need to leave."
"Hey Buddy, this thing is going down, but I feel a little bit of a breeze coming from it. Does that mean anything?"
There was a slight tremor. It was hardly felt, small enough that any other time no one would pay attention to it, but in this situation, Buddy did everything he could not to show the panic consuming him.
"It means we have to leave...right now."
"What's happening Buddy?"
"He's creating a caldera, a big one, enough to take out not only Metroville...buta largepart of the country."
"What's a caldera?" asked Dash.
"I'll explain on the way...if we have enough time."
Seconds later the team was on its way up, the first leg of their escape to the surface, Buddy secretly wondering if they really had the time.