The wall behind the desk had a hole in it big enough to drive a car through. Bombs?
Corbell heaved himself up on the table with the skeleton. He rubbed the bandages against a scalpel edge... and behold! His wrists were free.
Now he moved to the great gap in the wall. He was getting his breath back, but his heartbeat was fast and fluttery. What he wanted most was a chance to lie down and rest... until he looked down into the vault.
It was two stories high and windowless. To the left, a thick circle of metal almost the height of the wall, with a stylized ship's wheel set in it. It looked for all the world like a bank-vault door. There were guard posts: glass cubicles set just below the ceiling, and in the cubicles were skeletons armed with things like spotlights with rifle butts.
A bank vault seemed out of place in a hospital.
There were shelves on all three walls, floor to ceiling. The few items still on the shelves were not gold bars. They were bottles. The floor, ten feet below Corbell, was covered with broken glass.
There was a hall-melted metal thing, an animated dishwasher very like the machine that had attacked Corbell and Peerssa as burglars. Other machinery looked intact. There was an instrument console that might have been (given the hospital motif) diagnostic equipment. There was a matched pair of transparent "phone booths," glass cylinders with rounded tops. Corbell saw these and lusted.
The invaders had brought a ladder. He climbed down carefully, treating himself as fragile. Four skeletons at the bottom showed that the invaders had not had things all their own way. He stepped carefully among the bones. As a hospital the place made a good crypt- better than most, in fact. Cool. Clean. No insects, no scavengers, no fungus.
But it wasn't death Corbell was running from. It was a silver cane and a change more humiliating than death.
The lights were still on in the vault. Indicator lights glowed on the console. With luck the booths would work, too. He stepped into one and looked for a dial.
No dial, just a button set in a slender post. No choice about where he was going. Corbell wondered if the Norn would be waiting at the other end. He made himself push the button anyway.
Nothing happened.
He cursed luridly, pushed out of the booth and tried the other. The second booth didn't even have a door, and there was fine dust floating in it. What the hell?
What was this place? The drugs on the shelves must have been incredibly valuable. Four human guards and a metal killer, a single door that looked like it would stand off an atomic attack, an instant-else-where booth with only one terminal and another booth you couldn't get out of... an invading army willing to go up against all that, with bombs... and suddenly he knew where he must be.
It was a double jolt.
Those shelves must have held dictator immortality. And they were bare.
Everything fitted. Of course you'd store geriatric drugs in a hospital. The booths must lead directly to dictator strongholds- and even they could only appear in the closed booth. If the man in the booth wore the right face, someone outside could dial him into the booth that had a door. If not, he was a sitting duck for the laser weapons.
And the vault door might well stand an atomic attack. But thieves had come through a wall -and maybe they'd used atomics too. Did Mirelly-Lyra know about this place? She must. She'd have kept looking until she found it.
And so would Corbell, and she knew it: The Norn herself had told him about dictator immortality. He had to get out of here.
Exhaustion had become an agony. He would climb the ladder if he must, if he could, but he tried the vault door first. And it was open! All of his strength and weight were just enough to swing it wide. The invaders must have left by the door they could not enter.
So did he, very gratefully. The line of "phone booths" was on this floor. He had walked a zigzag path from there; he might have trouble finding his way back- He saw the booths as he rounded a corner. And he saw Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, holding her cane like a gun and squinting at something in her other hand. Just before he ducked back he saw her look up at the ceiling with her teeth bared.
It wasn't him she was tracing. It was his pressure-suit helmet. Peerssa, good-bye. Corbell counted to thirty, then stuck his nose around the corner. She wasn't there. He tiptoed through the cloud-rug to the next intersection and peered around it. She wasn't there either, and he crossed the intersection at a leap and was in the nearest booth with the disk in his hand.
Mirelly-Lyra would not have liked the way he was smiling.
Two commas crossed; an S reversed; an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends; a crooked pi. The corridors vanished. In blackness he thumbed the door open and stepped out into blackness. A gust of warm, damp wind whipped at him, and at the same time he saw dim light: a slender, hot-pink crescent with the horns down, at eye level.
He stood still while his eyes adjusted. A world took form around him.
He was on a flat roof, looking into a solar eclipse. They must be fairly common these days, with both Sol and Jupiter occluding so much of the sky. But the effect was beautiful, a hot-pink ring lighting sea and city with red dusk. He wished he could stay.
Mirelly-Lyra must be finding his pressure-suit helmet about now.
There were stairs. He would have been happier knowing how tall the building was, but he didn't. He had to walk all the way to the bottom-and he was reassured to recognize the building that housed Mirelly-Lyra's office. He paused for a precious moment of rest, then climbed back up three flights. Next question: Had the Nom noticed that the office door wasn't closed?
The sixth door was open a crack, blocked by a fallen button. The door resisted his weight, then gave slowly, let him in.
They must have turned these offices out like popcorn boxes, he thought. Did it connect to the exploded bedroom? He had bet his life on it. He stepped into the "phone booth" and looked for the intercom panel.
Five buttons? He pushed the top one.
Through the glass door he saw salt dunes running downslope to a distant line of brilliant blue. He was in one of the seashore booths. He pushed the second button.
Back in the office, he pushed number three.
In red-tinged darkness he saw a triangular floor plan, walls and roof exploded outward. A dark doughnut shape, coiled just where he would have stepped on it, raised a white face, questioningly.
He shouted, "Yeeehaa!"
"Meep?"
He jabbed the fourth button down. The startled cat-tail vanished.
Sunken tub, shower... He thought of hot water and comfort and sleep, and the hell with it. Would the old woman set her private zero-time "jail" next to a Turkish bath? Why not? But he pushed the bottom button anyway, to see what there was to see.
Thoughts of sleep returned. His knees sagged. His muscles and bones seemed to be melting. But he saw. Ovens and cupboards to left and right. A long dining table, floating, and lines of floating chairs. The hooded Norn at the far end, and the silver cane foreshortened, end-on. Behind her, shards of a picture window, and a bundle of thick cables running over the sill.
He stabbed two buttons and kicked out at the door.
II
He was trying to remember something. It was urgent.
See now, I hit an intercom button, then the door button, then kick out. Or the other way around? Intercom, door, kick out. Didn't wait- couldn't wait- never thought so fast in my life.
Pressure on his ankles. He thrashed a bit, got his elbows under him to lift his head. The door of the "phone booth" was trying to lift under his ankles. Beyond, the great red sun was almost whole again, a chunk still missing behind black Jupiter. Closer: A desk floated above cloud-rug.