(Where's Polly? Deep in his mind something whispered, Where is she? Subliminally, he remembered. Tell me where Polly is!)
Bleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.
Either he'd finally lost his mind--and over a colonist girl!--or there was some connection between Matthew Keller and Polly Tournquist. But he had no evidence of that at all.
Perhaps the girl could tell him.
And if she could, certainly she would.
Matt had trailed them to the end of a blind corridor. When they stopped, Matt stopped too, confused. Was Castro going to Polly, or wasn't he?
Doors slid back in the wall, and Matt's three guides entered. Matt followed, but stopped at the doors. The room was too small. He'd bump an elbow and get shot--
The doors closed in his face. Matt heard muted mechanical noises, diminishing.
What in blazes was it, an airlock? And why here?
He was at the end of a dead-end corridor, lost in the Hospital. The Head and two guards were on the other side of those doors. Two guards, armed and alert--but they were the only guides he had. Matt pushed the big black button which had opened the doors.
This time they stayed closed.
He pushed it again. Nothing happened.
Was he doing exactly what the guard had done? Had the guard used a whistle, or a key?
Matt looked down the hall to where it bent, wondering if he could make his way back to Castro's office. Probably not. He pushed the button again...
A muted mechanical noise, nearly inaudible, but rising.
Presently the doors opened to show a tiny, boxlike room, empty.
He stepped in, crouched slightly, ready for anything. There were no doors in the back. How had the others left? Nothing. Nothing but four buttons labeled One, Two, Door Open, Emergency Stop.
He pushed them in order. One did nothing. He pushed Two, and everything happened at once.
The doors closed.
The room started to move. He felt it, vibration and uncanny pressure against the soles of his feet. He dropped to his hands and knees, choking off a yell.
The pressure was gone, but still the room quivered with motion, and still there was the frightening, unfamiliar sound of machinery. Matt waited, crouching on all fours.
There was a sudden foreign feeling in his belly and gonads, a feel of falling. Matt said, "Wump!" and clutched at himself. The box jarred to a stop.
The doors opened. He came out slowly.
He was on a high narrow bridge. The moving box was at one end, supported in four vertical girders that dropped straight down into a square hole in the roof of the Hospital. At the other end of the bridge was a similar set of girders, empty.
Matt had never been this high outside a car. All of the Hospital was below him, lit by glare lights: the sprawling amorphous structure of rooms and corridors, the inner grounds, the slanting wall, the defense perimeter, the trapped forest, and the access road. And rising up before him was the vast black hull of the Planck.
Matt's end of the bridge was just outside what was obviously the outer hull of the ancient slowboat. The bridge crossed the chisel-sharp ring of the leading edge, so that its other end was over the attic.
The Planck. Matt looked down along the smooth black metal flank of the outer hull. For most of its length the ship was cylindrical; but the tail, the trailing edge, flared outward for a little distance, and the leading edge was beveled like a chisel, curving in at a thirty-degree angle to close the twenty-foot gap between outer and inner hulls, the gap that held the guts of the ship. More than halfway down, just below a ring of narrow windows, the roof of the Hospital moved in to grip the hull.
Something hummed behind him. The moving box was on its way down.
Matt watched it go, and then he started across the bridge, sliding his hands along the hip-high handrails. The dropping of the box might mean that someone would be coming up.
At the other end he looked for a black button in one of the four supporting girders. It was there, and he pushed it. Then he looked down.
The attic, the space enclosed by the inner hull, was as perfectly cylindrical as a soup can with both ends removed. Four airfoils formed a cross at the stem, a few yards above the ground, and where they crossed was a bulky, pointed casing. There was a ring of four windows halfway down the inner hull. The airlock was at the same level. Matt could see it by looking between the hull and the moving box, which was rising toward him.
Matt felt a chill as he looked down at that pointed casing between the fins. The ship's center of mass was directly over it. Therefore it had to be the fusion drive.
The Planck was rumored to be a dangerous place, and not without reason. A ship that had carried men between the stars, a ship three hundred years old, was bound to inspire awe. But there was real power here. The Planck's landing motors should still be strong enough to hurl her into the sky. Her fusion drive supplied electrical power to all the colonist regions: to teedee stations, homes, smokeless factories--and if that fusion plant ever blew, it would blow Alpha Plateau into the void.
Somewhere in the lifesystem, sandwiched between inner and outer hull, were the controls that could blow the bomb in that casing. The Head was in there too-somewhere.
If Matt could bring them together...
The moving box reached the top, and Matt entered.
It dropped a long way. The Planck was tall. Even the beveled ring of the leading edge, which had held stored equipment for the founding of a colony, was forty feet high. The ship was one hundred and eighty feet high, including a landing skirt, for the inner hull did not quite reach the ground. The stem and the mouths of the landing motors were supported ten feet above the ground by that long skirtlike extension of the outer hull.
This moving box was an open grid. Matt could watch his progress all the way down. Had he been acrophobic, he'd have been insane before the box stopped opposite the airlock.
The airlock was not much bigger than the moving box. Inside, it was all dark metal, with a dial-and-control panel in chipped blue plastic. Already Matt was heartily sick of blinking dials and metal walls. It was strange and discomforting to be surrounded by so much metal, and unnerving to wonder what all those dials were trying to tell him.
Set in the ceiling was something Matt had trouble recognizing. Something simple, almost familiar... ah. A ladder. A ladder running uselessly from door to wall across the ceiling of the airlock.
Sure. With the ship spinning in space, the outer door would be a trapdoor down from the attic. Of course you'd need a ladder. Matt grinned and strode through the airlock and nearly ran face on into a policeman.
"The luck of Matt Keller" had no time to work. Matt dodged back into the airlock. He heard a patter of mercybullets, like gravel on metal. In a moment the man would be around the corner, firing.
Matt yelled the only thing he could think of. "Stop! It's me!"
The guard was around in the same instant. But he didn't fire yet... and he didn't fire yet... and presently he turned and went, muttering a surly apology. Matt wondered whom he'd been taken for. It wouldn't matter; the man had already forgotten him.
Matt chose to follow him instead of turning the other way. It seemed to him that if a guard saw two men approach, and ignored one and recognized the other, he wouldn't shoot--no matter how trigger-happy he was.
The corridor was narrow, and it curved to the left. Floor and ceiling were green. The left-hand wall was white, set with uncomfortably bright lights; the wall on the right was black, with a roughened rubbery surface, obviously designed as a floor. Worse yet, the doors were all trapdoors leading down into the floor and up into the ceiling. Most of the doors in the floor were closed and covered with walkways. Most of the ceiling doors were open, and ladders led up into these. All the ladders and walkways looked old and crude, colony-built, and all were riveted into place.