Two sets of doors dropped into the floor to let them through, then slid back up.
Mirelly-Lyra took them through a lobby padded in cloud-rug, then through a corridor lined with handleless doors. "The lifting boxes don't work," she explained. They climbed stairs: three flights, with pauses to rest. They were both panting when Mirelly-Lyra turned down a hallway.
Corbell's fingers worked steadily at a button on his undersuit.
He'd been wearing it since Don Juan took off. He'd washed it several hundred times. He twisted and twisted at the button. One thick flexible "thread" joined it to the fabric. It would have to part all at once.
More doors without handles. Mirelly-Lyra stopped beside the sixth door. She pressed something in her hand against the center of the door. As the door swung open she put the unseen thing back in a pocket and gestured. Corbell passed through ahead of her. He dropped the button as his fingers brushed the jamb.
It was the first big risk he'd taken. He had no choice. He had to be able to re-enter this place.
Mirelly-Lyra kept her eyes on Corbell as the door closed behind her. It closed on the button... and she didn't notice. Corbell was looking around him, everywhere but at the door.
Desk covered with widgetry; cloud-rug; "phone booth"; picture window. The offices were mass produced too. There were minor differences. The "phone-booth" door was transparent. The picture window was intact, and rain had not ruined the desk or the rug.
Corbell's pressure suit and helmet had been dumped on the desk. He picked up the helmet in his bound hands. He called, "Peerssa! This is Corbell for himself calling Peerssa for the State."
There was no answer.
"Peerssa, please answer. This is Corbell calling Peerssa and Don Juan."
Nothing. Not a whisper. And Mirelly-Lyra was watching.
"My ship may be around the other side of the planet," he told her. But Peerssa set up relays! "Or the autopilot may still be holding an equatorial orbit." But he wasn't, he'd changed it! Where was Peerssa?
Then he remembered. Mirelly-Lyra had altered the subway system. Wherever Corbell had come out, wherever he was now, it wasn't where Peerssa had aimed his instruments. As far as Peerssa was concerned, Corbell had never emerged from the subway system.
I will wait until I am sure you are dead, Peerssa had said. Then I will search other systems for the State.
He would have to bluff. "If he's still in equatorial orbit, we'll have to call from my landing craft." He had to explain equatorial orbits to her by drawing in the dust on the desk. Then she understood.
She said, "We must use the tunnel cars. Take your pressure Suit. Mine is in the terminal."
The "phone booth" was too small. Mirelly-Lyra clearly did not trust Corbell that close to her. She held him covered while she drew a symbol in the dust: the crooked pi. "Push this key four times," she said. "Then wait for me. You cannot outrun my cane."
He nodded. She watched him through the door. He paused to note that four of the eight symbols on the keyboard matched the four he'd seen over the entrance.
He pushed the crooked pi four times.
Zap, he was elsewhere. The world beyond the door snapped into another shape. Vast empty space, rings of couches humping from the floor: Here was another intercontinental subway terminal. Corbell fumbled in the belt pouch of his pressure suit, found a circle shape. His hands were trembling violently. Clear plastic disk: right. With both hands he guided it into the coin slot. He stabbed at the compressed hourglass symbol, 4 4 4 4.
Nothing at all happened. The "phone booth" in the Four City Police Station must be out of order.
Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar stepped into view from another booth and looked about her, eyes narrowed and jaw thrust forward. She saw him, still in the booth with the door closed.
He jabbed frantically at the crossed commas. Remorse, terror, guilt, death-wish flashed in his brain and were gone, and so was the light. In blackness he rammed his shoulder against the door and ran blindly out into...
Corridors... corridors with pale-green walls and glowing-white ceilings. Wide doors with no knobs, only small plates of golden metal that might have been electromagnetic key plates. He turned right, left, right, and stopped, face to a wall, sucking air. Fatigue soaked into his legs like an acid solvent.
Would she know how to trace his "call"? He couldn't know. He ran.
A bigger door at the end of the corridor dropped open to reveal stairs. One long flight ran diagonally between a sheer wall and the tinted glass-mosaic face of the building, with doors at landings along the flight. He froze in fear. If she was out there, she'd see him!
Then he remembered. They'd passed a building with this pattern on its face. From the outside it was a mirror.
He was (he counted) three stories up. He still didn't know what kind of place this was; but it must be some kind of public service facility.
All right. By the time she got here, if she ran as he'd been running, the old lady would be exhausted. She'd want to go down. So did he, and she'd guess that. He went up. At the fourth story the door dropped for him, then closed as he passed it. He climbed another flight, then looked back and saw footprints in the dust.
He stopped, resting, listening.
No sound.
He walked backward down the stairs, stepping in his own footprints as best he could. When the fourth-floor door dropped, he threw his helmet through, then his pressure suit. Then he jumped for it.
He'd left a pair of sloppy footprints, but no other tracks. And now he was on cloud-rug. He stooped to brush away two dusty footprints, picked up his suit and helmet and staggered on.
He couldn't seem to get enough air.
Chapter FIVE: STEALING YOUTH
I
He staggered through clean, geometric, empty, sound-deadening corridors. Doors did not drop for him. Twice he tried holding his plastic disk against what he thought were entrance plates. It was all he could think of, and it didn't work. Whatever this place was, he-or the dead man Corbell had robbed-was not authorized to pass these doors.
The pressure suit became too heavy for him. He dropped it.
He talked to the helmet, but it didn't answer. Where the hell was Peerssa?
Corbell had freed Peerssa from all orders past and future. Corbell had gone unprotected into an unknown environment; had later dropped out of communication. Jaybee CORBELL Mark II: missing, presumed dead. By now Peerssa could be rounding the sun on his way to some nearby star. Searching for the State.
Peerssa's interstellar laser beam could have burned the old woman down as she crossed a street. But Corbell's computer had abandoned him... and Corbell hurled the helmet viciously into the cloud-rug, but not as hard as he wanted, because his hands were still bound. The blind faceplate stared after him as he went on.
His legs were starting to cramp.
The clean air was turning musty with the old smell of something truly dead when Corbell came at last to an open door. He thought the mechanism had failed... and then he saw why. A small hole had been burned through the gold plate.
Beyond the doorway was cruder damage and a richer smell.
It had been a surgery, he guessed. At least, that looked like an operating table with machinery suspended above it, and the machinery included scalpels on jointed arms.
There were crumbled brown skeletons. One, naked, lay in a pool of dust on the table. Two others sprawled against a wall. Their stained and damaged uniforms were in better shape than the bones within. The cloth bore charred slashes that continued into the bones, as if men had been hacked by a white-hot sword. These men had been man-sized, Corbell's size.