“If they come from elsewhere,” I said, “they certainly don’t use the dropshaft we came down. If there’s another, the sensible place to put it is in the city.”
“Wishful thinking,” Myrlin observed. He was right—but so was I.
I glanced behind. The crowd behind us had grown considerably. There must have been a hundred or more ahead of us, discreetly placed to either side, but there were three or four times as many in the rear.
“They expect something,” I said, “but no matter how badly they need it, they know how to behave.”
“Dumb animals,” the android suggested. “Maybe it’s the clothes that are misleading. They’re built like humanoids, but they might not be humanoids at all in our sense.”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “Maybe they’re androids—obsolete androids, put out to grass.”
“Built for what purpose?” he countered.
“Built small to alleviate the possibility of rebellion,” I suggested. “If I were thinking in terms of manufacturing people to do my bidding, I wouldn’t make them your size.”
“That was a mistake,” he conceded. He came to a halt then, and just stood there, scanning the sea of wrinkled faces—waiting.
I wasn’t sure that it would work, but it was worth a try. I stopped too.
“Okay,” I said, as if to the crowd, in parole. “You can take us to your leader, or bring your leader out to us, or whatever you want. Just give us a sign.” In the meantime, I raised both arms in an expansive gesture of helplessness— although it would have been a lot more expressive if I hadn’t been wearing a cold-suit.
They weren’t in any hurry, but they looked at one another, and jostled one another a bit. They seemed to have got the idea that the onus was on them to find somebody willing to show a bit of initiative.
In the end, the tension was too much for them. The crowd behind was densely packed now, and it was difficult to see what was happening beyond the first few rows, but someone was pushing through—or being pushed through by his companions… if it were, in fact, a “he.”
“He” came forward very tentatively, one step at a time. We turned to face him—and to look down at him.
He stopped a couple of metres short, and looked up at Myrlin’s faceplate. He was presumably making the assumption that the android was the senior authority-figure because he was taller.
He began talking. I could hear him, even through the faceplate—but not very distinctly. It didn’t matter. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t pangalactic parole that he was spouting, or any other language I knew.
I waved my arms, hoping to signify that I wasn’t getting it, tapped my helmet to signify that I couldn’t hear very well, then tapped the palm of my left hand with the forefinger of my right, in the hope of suggesting to him that he might do better to try sign language.
He wasn’t very quick on the uptake, but at last he stopped looking at Myrlin. I continued signalling madly. I pointed in four different directions, to indicate that we didn’t know which way to go. I mimed walking and tried to impress upon him the urgent need I had for guidance. I was glad that I didn’t have to try to get across any notion of where I wanted to go.
For a while, it seemed that I was making no headway at all. He looked at me with a stare so blank that I might as well have been dancing a jig or performing a mating ritual.
Somewhere out in the crowd, though, the penny finally dropped. Some local genius figured out that we were all standing around because the big guys didn’t know where to go, and figured that it was up to him—or maybe her—to think of an appropriate destination. “He” thrust himself forward, babbled at the spokesman for a few moments, got into an argument and eventually won it. He moved around us and looked back at us, expectantly.
I gave him a Star Force salute. “Lead on,” I said.
He set off in the direction we’d been heading in before we stopped, and we followed. Everybody else followed us.
We didn’t turn right or left for such a long time that I began to wonder whether the little person was merely going ahead of us in the direction he thought we wanted to go rather than actually guiding us.
I estimated that there must be at least six hundred “people” following us by now—maybe as many as a thousand. The city was big; it must have been built to house at least a hundred times as many—but it still seemed reasonably populous to me, given that everyone seemed to be on the brink of starvation.
At last, we turned aside, and found ourselves in a new region where the buildings were larger—not just because they had been very obviously built to accommodate people my size rather than the little people, but because they were municipal buildings rather than dwellings. They had suffered even more from the ravages of time than the simpler edifices; more than half had been reduced to rubble or to gaunt skeletons of jagged pillars and broken arches. Spears of shadow crisscrossed the cracked and thickly begrimed pavements on which we walked, although the open plazas we crossed on occasion showed much whiter in the relentless glare.
My heart rate increased when I saw the place to which our guide was leading us. It was a hemispherical dome, brilliantly lit from within so that beams of yellow light radiated like spines from its many rounded windows. Alone among the buildings it seemed untouched by decay. It did not belong here.
Our guide took us right up to a great circular portal that looked like the airlock of a starfreighter. He didn’t touch it. Once he was ten metres away, he turned sideways and beckoned us on. He obviously felt that he had done his bit. I hoped that he wasn’t expecting a tip.
Unfortunately, the door was tightly sealed and we hadn’t the slightest idea how it might be opened. There was some kind of panel beside the door, set at the height of my shoulder in the curved surface of the dome, but it was shielded by a plate of transparent plastic that didn’t yield to gentle pressure or prising by our gauntleted fingers.
I had to stand on tiptoe to look through the nearest of the brightly-lit “windows,” but I couldn’t see anything inside; the light was so bright that I wondered whether it was an incandescent bulb rather than a window.
The crowd was waiting.
“We must look like a couple of idiots,” I said to Myrlin, after several minutes of experimental probing and prodding.
“It seems to be locked,” he agreed—but he still had a cutter suspended from his belt, beside my flame-pistol, and he was already unshipping it.
I wasn’t sure that it was the wise thing to do, but I didn’t have any alternative to suggest.
I had a knife, and I opened it. I made one last attempt to lever off the plastic cover, but I couldn’t shift or scratch it.
“Let me,” said Myrlin.
I stepped aside, and he activated the cutter’s beam. I looked around to see how the crowd reacted to the sight of the flame, but they didn’t fall back in awe or display any alarm. They just watched, and waited.
Myrlin cut the centre out of the plate in a matter of seconds; the plastic shrivelled and melted away. He switched it off and waited for the edges to cool; then he inserted his vast fingers into the gap and started pressing the panel beneath.
Nothing happened.
I drew his attention to a vertical slit to the left of the panel. “A keyhole, do you think?” I said.
“Probably,” he admitted. I looked back at the crowd, still thinking that we must seem like total incompetents. Myrlin activated the cutter again, increased the power, and thrust the head of the device into the panel-box. The surface began to sizzle, and the metal of the console flared magnesium-white as its components began to burn.
“Be careful,” I said.
It was too late for that. The lights in the dome suddenly went out. Then the lights above the city went out too— every last one of them.