I drove the oval craft through the arched tunnel under the high black wall, across the empty blue floor of the huge plain, under the high ceiling, and across the red dust that got deeper toward the back of the structure. Stopping the craft beside the brown oval spot in the black wall, I took the oval key and went out of the craft to turn on the light in the floor and ceiling, and the light in the highway.

"I may as well close off the entrance to the giant warehouse too. That should also draw some-ones attention to the fact that I'm here in this place," so I made the shimmering blue curtain appear at the entrance to the structure.

Staring at the shimmering blue curtain, I thought, "That sure looks the same as the shimmering blue toilet-bath does. I wonder if it acts the same way. Well, I'll just go out there and find out if it does!" I went back into the oval craft, and drove it out to the shimmering curtain that was at least a mile out from the back wall of the structure.

When I edged the oval craft closer, I saw that it began to penetrate into the curtain of shimmering blue. So I drove the oval craft through the curtain out onto the glowing blue plain.

Now I knew that the curtain wasn't a solid wall. But, when I turned the craft to go back through the curtain, the curtain wasn't shimmering on the outside. It was now a solid glowing blue wall, and it looked as if it was an extension of the glowing blue plain. I drove the craft up to the wall, and the craft went through as if the wall wasn't there.

"That curtain sure wasn't meant to keep anyone out of here," I thought as I drove the oval craft toward the back wall to find the other brown spot that opened the craft's garage.

After opening the garage with the oval key, I turned on the light in the ceiling and floor of the large room, then I went back into the oval craft and drove it into the room.

I picked up the oval key and white steering sphere from the console, and I also got the black sphere from the right seat where I had placed it earlier. I didn't know how long the power would last in those spheres, so, if that cubicle kept them charged, I wasn't going to take the chance that the power would run out on me in the center of the ocean later on that afternoon.

I walked over to the scooter and put the oval key in a pouch at my waist, laid the black spheres on the seat in the back, sat down in the left front seat and drove the scooter out of the, now dark, oval craft.

Stopping the scooter beside the cubicle in the back wall of the room, I stepped off and placed the black spheres in two of the four cupped depressions in the bottom of the cubicle and behind the two black oval keys that were in the cubicle.

"There must have been two more of these domed craft in this room at one time." I stepped back to the scooter and sat down, "That would explain the two extra cupped and oval depressions in this cubicle. I wonder where in this world they are, and if they will return when they find out that someone is here at this place? I sure hope they're friendly!

"Nevertheless, I think I'll go explore some more of this huge place. This time I'll go north along that large hallway to see what's in that direction."

Driving the scooter through the doorway, which was on the right side of the cubicle, I drove it around the other scooter setting in the small room, and out the other doorway into the very large hallway, which went to the north and south for as far as I could see. Turning to the left, I drove along the center of the hallway for what seemed to be twice as far as I had to the south before I saw another hallway going to the east.

This hallway was the same size as the other one to the south, and I could see the end of this one in the distance also. After I turned into the hallway, I found that it too had doorways on each side of it which led into apartments very much like the ones in the hallway to the south, and there were sixteen of the apartments in this hallway also.

I yelled into two of the apartments as I drove by them, but my voice was the only sound that I heard in this very quiet place. In fact, the silence was so deep that it made me a little nervous, so I started talking to myself as I drove the scooter on toward the small hallway at the end of this larger one.

"There may be other hallways with apartments like these that branch off that long north-south hallway, but why put them so far apart from each other. Unless of course, there's something there between them that I don't know about.

"At first, I thought this place was a new type of an atomic bomb shelter. What with those thick and high walls around it, and the thick roof over the warehouse, but now I'm not sure what it was built for."

The smaller hallway at the end of this hallway was about thirty feet wide and fifteen feet high, and, as I drove along the center of it, I saw that it curved back to the north. The one at the end of the south hallway had looked as if it had curved to the south.

When I drove around the long curve and was heading north, I saw that the end of the hallway was a long way up ahead, but it didn't take the scooter very long to get there.

"Well I'll be damned!" I said as I drove out of the hallway into a very large oval room that was at least four to five hundred feet long, with a domed ceiling, and I had came into the room at the west end of the south side.

Scattered around the glowing blue floor, parked in every direction, were a lot more of the scooters. Some were blue, like the one I was driving, but most of them were gray.

Across the two to three hundred foot wide room was a very large opening in the center of the north side that looked like it was open to the outside world. In the wall on my right and left, about four feet off the floor, was a one foot high, one foot deep cubicle that looked as if it went all the way around the black wall of the room, and there were more of those black spheres in it.

I stepped off the scooter and walked over to the cubicle in the wall. For every sphere in it, there were at least two empty cupped depressions, but there were no oval depressions for keys as the one in the craft's garage had.

"This is probably where the scooter's steering-power sphere is charged. But I tried to get that sphere off the scooter, and it wouldn't come loose from the console!" I said as I walked back to the scooter, "But I'll try again."

I pulled at the blue steering sphere, and it did come loose from the console this time. However, it didn't turn black as I thought it would. The blue sphere faded to a milky brown color, so I took it over and placed it in one of the empty cups in the cubicle. I saw the sphere get darker and darker until it was black.

"I guess it needed to be charged if that is what's happening to it now. However, I didn't get a shock when I put my hand in that cup out there in the other cubicle. It must have a very low voltage."

Picking up one of the other black spheres, I went back to the scooter and placed the sphere on the console between the two front seats. I was surprised when the sphere changed to white instead of blue. "The steering sphere must turn blue when it's getting low on power and needs to be recharged. I'll remember that!"

Sitting down in the scooter, I placed my hand on the white sphere and rolled it forward. The scooter shot forward and swerved around two of the other scooters before I jerked my hand off of the sphere to stop it.

"Gee-golly damn!" I said slowly, "This scooter is a lot faster now, so I'll have to be a little more careful! But it never hit the other scooters? It just seemed to slide around them. Maybe the scooter has a way of knowing when something is in front of it? Like radar, or something similar to radar? Well, anyway, I'm going to be more careful in the future!"

Another thing that I had noticed was, I never felt the speed, or the pressure when the scooter had swerved around the other scooters, so the scooter had to have an anti-gravity device in it the same as the oval craft had.

Driving the scooter around the other scooters, I headed toward the large opening on the north side of the room that, I thought, led to the outside. However, as I got closer, I saw that the opening just led into another very large room that was about half the size of the giant warehouse. I guessed the size of the room to be about two to three miles from where I was to the north black wall, about a mile wide from the west black wall to the east black wall, and about a half mile from the glowing blue floor to the glowing white ceiling above me. The west wall was only about three hundred yards to my left, so I drove the scooter in that direction, and I found where the wide north-south hallway came out into this giant room.

As I drove back toward the large oval room that had the scooters in it, I talked to myself, "Well Caleb, this may be a bomb shelter after all. There's sure plenty of room for a lot of people in here. But why would they build it with such a high ceiling? It looks to me like there's too much wasted space. They could have built a lot of extra floors, one on top of the other, and that would have given them more room for more people. Of course, I'm not sure what this place is for, but I can't think of anything else it could be but a bomb shelter."

I drove past the large opening that led into the oval room, and continued on east. I wanted to see if there were any other rooms in this south wall, and after traveling about three hundred yards, more or less, I came to a large alcove that had another wide hallway in it that went to the south. The alcove was twenty or thirty feet wider than the hallway, which was sixty or seventy feet wide, and the alcove set back into the wall at least twenty feet. The ceiling of the hallway and the alcove were about thirty feet above the floor.

"If I could get that oval craft in here," I said, "I could drive it in these large hallways, and I'll bet there's a way to get it in here. I just haven't found it yet."

Looking toward the high black wall in the east, I said, "I may as well find out if there's any more rooms up ahead before I go exploring this hallway," I placed my hand on the white steering sphere and drove the scooter on toward the east; with the black wall of this giant room, on my right, making me feel very small and insignificant.

"This place," I said, "gives me the willies. I have a notion to just turn around and go back to that hallway. At least I'd be out of this giant empty room, and maybe there's something along that hallway which would explain what this place is for.

"Hold it, Caleb, that looks like another room up ahead. Gee-golly damn, it's another large opening, and it's bigger than the one where all those scooters were parked."

This room didn't have a doorway, it was all open to the giant room, and the opening into it was at least a hundred yards wide. The ceiling was about fifty to sixty feet above the glowing blue floor that was cluttered with black boxes. And there were many gray boxes stacked very high against the back wall, which was about three hundred feet away from me, and this room wasn't oval.

I drove the scooter into the room and stopped it beside one of the four feet high, three feet wide, and two feet thick black boxes that were scattered around the room. As I got off the scooter, I saw that there was a blue sphere on top of the box. The bottom of the three foot wide side of the box extended out about twelve inches, and it was about six inches above the floor like a step.

"This must be some kind of machine," I said as I stepped up on the black box's step, "Let's find out what it does." On the top of the box, on my side of the blue sphere, there were four small brown spots that felt like dents in the top. When I put my finger on one of the dents, the black box that was a few feet away in front of me rose off the floor. I quickly jerked my finger off the brown dent, but the other black box continued to hang above the floor.

"What the hell ....!" I said as I stepped down from the machine and walked around it to stare at the other machine that hung above the floor, "This has got to be some kind of joke! How can that thing hang there without anything holding it up?"

I walked over to the black box, which was about three feet off the floor, and swung my hand under it. Then I walked around it, but there was nothing there to hold it up in the air. I was completely baffled by this event.

"I've heard about tractor beams from some of the science fiction movies I've seen, but there's no beam here. If there was, I would have felt it. I think?"

I walked back to the black machine, and stepped up on it. Placing my hand on the blue sphere, I twisted it a little, and the machine turned, and the other machine, which hung in the air, swung around with it to stay in front of me. I rolled the blue sphere forward, the black machine moved forward, and the one that hung in the air moved forward also.

"Okay," I said, "I guess that other machine is attached to this one in some fashion, so let's see what these brown dents do."

I touched each of them and each of them did a different thing to the suspended black machine: One made the machine rise, one made it move to the right, one made it move to the left, and the other made the machine move down to the floor; however, it was still attached to this one. But after I touched a combination of two of the dents, I got the two machines separated.

"These machines," I said, "are probably what were used to stack those gray boxes against the wall," I stepped down off the machine and looked toward the high stack of gray boxes, "I think I'll go over and find out what's in them."

I sat down in the scooter and drove it around the black machines, which were scattered around the floor as if they were left there in a hurry by the people who were using them, and I saw that all of the steering spheres were blue; that is, all of the ones I saw were blue because some of the black boxes didn't have any. I finally drove up to the high stack of gray boxes on the south side of the room, and I got off the scooter.

"Doesn't look like I'm going to see what's in these boxes," I said, as I walked along beside them, "not the way they're stacked I'm not. Wait a minute now! That looks like some more gray boxes over there by the east wall, and they're not stacked on top of each other."

I walked back to the scooter and drove it toward the black wall, at the east side of the room, and sure enough there were more of the gray boxes scattered around the floor in front of a straight line of boxes, which looked as if they had been pushed out of a blue square in the bottom of the wall, and the square was only a little larger than one of the boxes, which were about three feet square.

About twenty-five or thirty feet to my left, another row of three foot square gray boxes extended out into the room from a blue square in the wall. In fact, I could see that there were many more rows of the same gray boxes, which extended out from the east wall, and about the same distance apart, all the way to the opening into this room.

Stepping down from the scooter, I inspected one of the boxes and found no way to get the top off. I was checking the third box when I felt a small dent in the side of it, near the top, and there was another one on the opposite side of the box also. When I touched these two finger dents at the same time, the top of the box vanished.

The box contained four trays that were filled with the same kind of gray packets which I had found below the seats aboard the oval craft, and I had eaten from. I picked up one of the trays, by a tab at each end of it, and there were more of the packets below it. So, the gray boxes, which were a little smaller than the black box machines, contained many trays of food packets, and there were one hundred gray packets in each tray.

Setting the tray back in the box, I picked up one of the gray packets and squeezed some of the gray substance through the small tube into my mouth. Thinking at the same time that it would taste like beef steak, and, except for not having to chew it, it tasted like hot beef steak with a touch of steak sauce just the way I always fixed my steak at home.

"There must be a manufacturing plant on the other side of this wall," I said, as I stared at the blue square in the base of the wall, out of which it seemed, that these boxes came from, "However, I can't think of any way that this food stuff can be hot or cold and taste the same as whatever I'm thinking of at the time I'm eating it. That, by-golly-damn, is one hell of a mystery to me."

Taking two more packets from the box, I touched the finger dents on each side of the box, and the top of the gray box appeared instantly and sealed the box closed again. I put the three packets in one of the pouches at my waist, and stepped up on the scooter.

As I sat down in the left seat, I said, "I belive I'll go back to that hallway and see what's to the south of here. There should be some offices somewhere in this place, and if there are, maybe I'll find out what this place was built for."

I turned the scooter toward the north, and drove it along the rows of gray boxes that extended out from the east wall of the large room. When I reached the entrance into the room, I drove the scooter out into the huge open space of the giant room and turned left. In a few seconds, I was at the alcove, in the south wall of the giant room, where a wide hallway went south into the structure.

After turning into the hallway and driving the scooter south a few hundred yards, I came to another wide hallway that crossed the one I was in. I turned the scooter to the left, and I soon found that this hallway had doorways on each side of it that led into apartments very much like the others. Although the apartments were similar to the others, the front rooms were much larger and there were two bedrooms, with two beds, in each of the four apartments I checked. But, when I touched the brown finger dent on the oval panel in these bedrooms, no suit of clothes appeared on the wall as the suit I had on had appeared in that other apartment's bedroom. There were also fifty of the apartments in this part of the hallway.

At the east end of the long hallway was another corridor, which was slightly smaller, that curved to the left about a hundred feet away from the opening into it.

"Maybe," I said, "this one will lead me to the place where the food packets are manufactured," so I drove the scooter into the hallway and around the long curve. "Well I'll be damned! This is the same room that I was in less than an hour ago."

I drove the scooter out into the large room where the black box machines were scattered around the glowing blue floor, and the gray boxes were stacked against the south wall. The hallway had ended at the south west corner of the room, and I had driven in a circle.

"I better head back to the oval craft," I said, "to see what time it is. I want to make a trip toward the west before it gets too late in the afternoon," so I drove the scooter along the west wall of the room and out into the awesome bigness of the giant room, then I turned left.

I drove past the alcove where the one hallway was, past the opening into the room where the scooters were, and turned into the hallway that would take me south to where the oval crafts were setting in their garage. Although I expected to, I never saw any other hallways, other than the one in which I had already been, leading from this hallway before I reached the doorway into the small room where the other blue scooter set next to the doorway into the crafts garage.

I didn't stop at the oval craft but drove the scooter out over the red dust to the shimmering blue curtain. I wanted to find out if I could walk through it. I got off the scooter, and stepped right on through the curtain as if it wasn't there. When I looked up, I saw a black spot where the sun should be.

"What the hell," I said, "is going on now? I'm not in the oval craft, so why is the sun a black spot." I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but the black spot was still there, "Maybe this suit has something to do with it. But the hood only covers my head, not my face."

I pulled at the seams of the upper part of the suit, the seams came apart, and the hood came off my head. I looked up at the sun, and this time the sun was as bright as hell.

"How about that!" I said as I placed the seams back together, "This suit has a way of protecting my eyes from the sun the same way as the dome of the oval craft does," I also noticed that the sun was only a little past high noon. Maybe it was one o'clock or one thirty at the most.

I walked back through the shimmering blue curtain, and drove the scooter back across the red dust that covered most of the glowing blue floor in this part of the giant structure. I was undecided on whether to go back into the structure and explore more of it, or to drive the oval craft across the sea to see if there was a mainland to the west.

"It just doesn't feel right," I said loudly, "for the time to be only around noon! I feel as if I've put in a full day going across the ocean and back, and also exploring the north part of this place. However, if it's only one o'clock, I believe I'll explore the south part of this place."

An hour later, I was back at the craft's garage.

The south part of the structure was like the north. But for the green water packets in the east room where they were in green boxes that came from out of the east wall.

I decided to take a nap before I left the island to explore to the west, so I drove the scooter over to the cubicle in the back wall of the craft's garage, and took out one of the black steering spheres. I also took one of the black ovals which I had not tried yet, then I drove the scooter up the ramp and onto the deck of the blue domed craft, which I had used before, and walked over and sat down in the left front seat of the darkened craft.

As I set the black steering sphere in the round depression on top of the console, the sphere changed to white, and the dome of the craft vanished. I then lay the black oval in the oval depression, the oval changed to blue, and the ramp into the craft vanished. I felt that I was safe now if anyone should show up here while I was asleep.

As I lay back against the soft seat and closed my eyes, I felt the seat move as it changed into a flat comfortable bed. I opened my eyes for a second and it was dark, then I closed my eyes and it didn't take very long for me to doze off to sleep.