He rested, then set out in a more leisurely stroll. It was level land: not ankle-breaking country, though he had to watch his footing. It was packed earth with rocks inset, and there were gentle wind-carved risings and failings-off.
Peerssa led him to the range of hills and apparently expected him to walk straight across them. Corbell turned left until he could find an easier slope. He found he was grumbling subvocally.
He had had to grumble subvocally for lo, these eight years' waking time in which he had grown one hundred and eighty years old while three million years passed on Earth. Grumble aloud and you couldn't know what Peerssa might pick up and take as an order. Goddamn literal computers, he grumbled. Sleep tanks and super medicines that don't keep you young. Air and cooling equipment getting heavier with each step. Why couldn't they have put a belly band in this suit? A belly band was the greatest invention since the wheel. It let a hiker carry the weight on his hips instead of his back. If the State had had its head screwed on right- Which was silly. The suit was designed for free-fall and use aboard ship. Not hiking. And if Peerssa took orders, it was a damn good thing. And he was lucky to be on Earth at all. And, Corbell thought as he topped the crest, he was damn glad to be here. Puffing, bent over so he could pant better, half listening for the heart attack he'd been expecting for so long, it came to him that he was happy.
Yeah! In three million years, probably no human being had ever done what he had done. Be nice if there were someone to brag to.
He saw the house.
It was on a higher crest of hills beyond this one. Otherwise he might not have noticed it. It was just the color of the hills: gray and dust-brown; but he saw its regular shape against the blue of sky. It was set against the rock slope.
It took him another two hours to reach it. He was being careful with himself. Even so, he knew how his legs would hurt tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow. He was two-thirds of the way up that second range of hills when he found the remains of a broken road. Then it was easier.
The house was extravagantly designed. The roof was a convex triangle, almost horizontal, with the base against the hill itself. Below the roof were two walls of glass, or of something stronger. The house's single room was exposed to this single voyeur, who perched precariously on the slope and clutched at a boulder with thick gloves. It was, he thought, a hell of a place to build a house.
He pressed his faceplate against the (presumed) glass.
The floor was not level. Either the hill itself had settled, or architectural styles had changed more than Corbell was willing to believe.
He was looking into a living-room-sized area with what had to be a bed in the middle. But the bed was two or three times bigger than king size, and it had the asymmetrical shape of a '50s-style Hollywood pool. The curved headboard was a control panel fitted with screens and toggles and tall grills like hi-fl sound boxes, and a couple of slots big enough to deliver drinks or sandwiches. In the darkness above the bed hovered a big wire sculpture or mobile or possibly some kind of antenna, he couldn't tell which.
Two pinpricks of yellow light lived in the control panel.
"This is your power source, all right," Corbell reported. "I'm going to find the door."
Twenty minutes later he reported, "There's no door."
"A house must have an opening. Look for an opening that doesn't look like a door. From your description, there must be more to the house than you can see: a toilet at least, perhaps an office, or a food dispensary."
"They'd have to be under the hill. Mmm... all right, I'll keep looking."
He found no trace of a trapdoor in the roof. Could the whole roof lift up in one piece, on signal? Corbell couldn't guess whether the architect would have been that wasteful of power.
If there was an entrance in the road itself, then hard dirt covered it. Corbell was getting annoyed. The house couldn't have been used in a hundred years; possibly a thousand; conceivably ten thousand. Likewise the door, wherever it might be. Maybe the house had a second, lower story, now buried in the hill, door and all.
"I'll have to break in," he said.
"Wait. Might the house be equipped with a burglar alarm? I'm not familiar with the design concepts that govern private dwellings. The State built arcologies."
"What if it does have a burglar alarm? I'm wearing a helmet. It'll block most of the sound."
"There might be more than bells. Let me attack the house with my message laser."
"Will it-?" Will it reach? Stupid, it was designed to reach across tens of light-years. "Go ahead."
"I have the house in view. Firing."
Looking down on the triangular roof from his post on the roadway, Corbell saw no beam from the sky; but he saw a spot the size of a manhole cover turn red-hot. A patch of earth below the house stirred uneasily; rested; stirred again. Then a ton or so of hillside rose up and spilled away, and a rusted metal object floated out on a whispering air cushion. It was the size of a dishwasher, with a head: a basketball with an eye in it. The head rolled, and a scarlet beam the thickness of Corbell's arm pierced the clouds.
"Peerssa, you're being attacked. Can you handle it?"
"It can't hurt me. It could hurt you. I'd better destroy it."
The metal object began to glow. It didn't like that. It fled away in a jerky randomized path, while the red beam remained fixed on one point in the sky. Its upper body glowed bright red verging on orange. It was screaming; its frantic warbling voice sang through Corbel's helmet. Suddenly it tilted and arced away down the hill. It struck the plain hard, turned over and over, and lay quiet.
There was a hole in the roof now. Corbell said, "You think there are more of those?"
"Insufficient data."
Corbell climbed down to the roof and looked through. Molten concrete, or whatever, had set the bed afire. Corbell jumped down onto the flaming bedclothes, prepared to get off fast. Wrong again: It was a water bed, and his feet went right through it. He waded out, then pushed the burning bedclothes into the puddle in the middle with his clumsy gloved hands. The fire went out, but the room filled with steam.
"I'm in the house," he reported. Peerssa didn't bother to answer.
Corbell the architect looked about him.
This room, the visible part of the house, was a triangle. The bed in the center had the pleasing asymmetry of a puddle of water-and it was pleasing. An arc of sofa occupied one corner, facing the bed. In front of the sofa was a slab of black slate or a good imitation, arced like the sofa, but broken in the middle. Corbell bent and lifted one end of the slab. Something on the underside: solid circuitry. At a guess, this had been a floating coffee table until whatever was holding it up burned out.
From inside the room he still couldn't see any doors.
There was only one opaque wall to inspect. He moved along it, rapping. It sounded hollow.
Door controls on the headboard? Nuts. You'd have to walk clear around to the other side-wait, there was something on the back side. Three thumb-sized circular depressions of chrome yellow against black headboard. Corbell pushed them.
The back wall slid up in three unequal sections.
The biggest one was a closet. Corbell found half a dozen garments in it, all one-piece long-sleeved garments with lots of pockets. Some had hoods. A layer of dust at the bottom of the closet was two to three inches thick.
The second section was smaller, no bigger than a telephone booth, with a free-form chair in it. Corbell stepped in. He found another chrome-yellow depression on the wall, and touched it. The door shot up behind him.
A chair. Funny. Now he saw the great hole in the seat of the chair. A toilet? But there was no water in the bowl, and no toilet paper...nothing but a glitteringly clean metal sponge attached to the chair by a wire.