Polly was in the maze of corridors when she suddenly remembered Matt Keller. Her regal dignity, assumed for the benefit of the pair of Implementation police who were her escorts, softened in thought. Why would Jesus Pietro be interested in Matt? He wasn't even a member. Did it mean that he had escaped? Odd, about that night. She'd liked Matt. He'd interested her. And then, suddenly ... It must have looked to him as if she'd brushed him off. Well, it didn't matter now. But Implementation should have turned him loose. He was nothing but a deadhead.
Castro. Why had he told her all that? Was it part of the coffin cure? Well, she'd hold out as long as possible. Let Castro worry about who might know the truth of Ramrobot #143. She had told nobody. But let him worry.
The girl looked about her in pleased wonder at the curving walls and ceiling with their peeled, discolored paint, at the spiral stairs, at the matted, withered brown rug which had been indoor grass. She watched the dust puff out from her falling feet, and she ran her hands over the coral walls where the paint had fallen away. Her new, brightly dyed falling-jumper seemed to glow in the gloom of the deserted house.
"It's very odd," she said. Her crewish accent was strange and lilting.
The man lifted an arm from around her waist to wave it about him. "They live just like this," he said in the same accent. "Just like this. You can see their houses from your car on the way to the lake."
Matt smiled as he watched them walk up the stairs. He had never seen a two-story coral house; the balloons were too hard to blow, and the second floor tended to sag unless you maintained two distinct pressures. Why didn't they come to Delta Plateau if they wanted to see how colonists lived?
But why should they? Surely their own lives were more interesting.
What strange people they were. It was hard to understand them, not only because of the lilt but because certain words meant the wrong things. Their faces were alien, with flared nostrils and high, prominent cheekbones.
Against the people Matt had known, they seemed fragile, undermuscled, but graceful and beautiful to the point where Matt wondered about the man's manhood. They walked as though they owned the world.
The deserted house had proved a disappointment. He'd thought all was lost when the crew couple came strolling in, pointing and staring as if they were in a museum. But with luck they would be up there for some time.
Matt moved very quietly from the darkness of a now doorless closet, picked up their picnic basket, and ran on tiptoe for the door. There was a place where he could hide, a place he should have thought of before.
He climbed over the low stone wall with the picnic basket in one hand. There was a three-foot granite lip on the void side. Matt settled himself cross-legged against the stone wall, with his head an inch below the top and his toes a foot from the forty-mile drop to hell. He opened the picnic basket.
There was more than enough for two. He ate it all, eggs and sandwiches and squeezebags of custard and a thermos of soup and a handful of olives. Afterward he kicked the basket and the scraps of plastic wrap into the void. His eyes followed them down.
Consider:
Anyone can see infinity by looking up on a clear night. But only on the small world of Mount Lookitthat can you see infinity by looking down.
No, it's not really infinity. Neither is the night sky, really. You can see a few nearby galaxies; but even if the universe turns out to be finite, you see a very little distance into it. Matt could see apparent infinity by looking straight down.
He could see the picnic basket falling. Smaller. Gone.
The plastic wrap. Fluttering down. Gone.
Then, nothing but the white mist.
On a far-distant day they would call the phenomenon Plateau trance. It was a form of autohypnosis well known to Plateau citizens of both social classes, differing from other forms only in that nearly anyone could fall into such a state by accident. In this respect Plateau trance compares to ancient, badly authenticated cases of "highway hypnosis" or to more recent studies of "the far look," a form of religious trance endemic to the Belt of Sol. The far look comes to a miner who spends too many minutes staring at a single star in the background of naked space. Plateau trance starts with a long, dreamy look down into the void mist.
For a good eight hours Matt had not had a chance to relax. He would not get a chance tonight, and he didn't want to dwell on that now. Here was his chance. He relaxed.
He came out of it with a niggling suspicion that time had passed. He was lying on his side, his face over the edge staring down into unfathomable darkness. It was night. And he felt wonderful.
Until he remembered.
He got up and climbed carefully over the wall. It would not do to slip, three feet from the edge, and he was often clumsy when he felt this nervous. Now his stomach seemed to have been replaced by a plastic demonstration model from a biology class. There was a jerkiness in his limbs.
He walked a little way from the wall and stopped. Which way was the Hospital?
Come now, he thought. This is ridiculous.
Well, there was a swelling hill to his left. Light glowed faintly along its rim. He'll try that.
The grass and the earth beneath it ended as he reached the top. Now there was stone beneath his bare feet, stone and rock dust untouched by three hundred years of the colony planting program. He stood at the crest of the hill looking down on the Hospital. It was half a mile away and blazed with light. Behind and to either side were other lights, the lights of houses, none within half a mile of the Hospital. Against their general glow he saw the black tongue of forest he'd noticed that morning.
In a direction not quite opposite to the dark, sprawling line of trees, a straighter line of light ran from the Hospital to a cluster of buildings at the perimeter of the bare region. A supply road.
He could reach the trees by moving along the edge of town. The trees would give him cover until he reached the wall--but it seemed a poor risk. Why would Implementation leave that one line of cover across a bare, flat protective field? That strip of forest must be loaded with detection equipment.
He started across the rock on his belly.
He stopped frequently. It was tiring, moving like this. Worse than that, what was he going to do when he got inside? The Hospital was big, and he knew nothing about the interior. The lighted windows bothered him. Didn't the Hospital ever sleep? The stars shone bright and cold. Each time he stopped to rest, the Hospital was a little closer.
So was the wall that surrounded it. It leaned outwards and on this side there was no break at all.
He was a hundred yards from the wall when he found the wire. There were big metal pegs to hold it off the ground, pegs a foot high and thirty yards apart, driven into the rock. The wire itself was bare coppery metal strung taut a few inches off the ground. Matt had not touched it. He crossed it very carefully, staying low but not touching the wire at any time.
Faintly there came the sound of alarm bells ringing inside the wall. Matt stopped where he was. Then he turned and was over the wire in one leap. When he hit the ground he didn't move. His eyes were closed tight. He felt the faint touch of numbness which meant a sonic beam. Evidently he was out of range. He risked a look behind him. Four searchlights hunted him across the bare rock. The wall was lousy with police.
He turned away, afraid they'd see his face shining. There were whirring sounds. Mercy-bullets falling all around him, slivers of glassy chemical which dissolved in blood. They weren't as accurate as lead pellets, but one must find him soon...
A light pinned him. And another, and a third.
From the wall came a voice. "Cease fire." The whirr of anesthetic slivers ended. The voice spoke again, bored, authoritative, tremendously amplified. "Stand up, you. You may as well walk, but we'll carry you if we have to."