Mazurin’s first reaction was horror; his second was bewilderment. He saw now that what his superior had described as an “interesting” era could only be painful to any person of normal sensibilities; for all of these people, without exception, were ancestors in one sense or another!
And why were these officials, who were possibly ancestors, maltreating two young possible ancestors in this manner, instead of running down tweedledums as they had evidently been sent to do? Could it be that the boy and the girl were suspected of being responsible for the catastrophe?
It was absurd, but the only explanation he could think of. He followed, soaring over the rooftops, as the car containing the two zoomed off again.
He managed to keep in sight of the car, though it moved much too fast for him, and saw the two captives half-dragged, half-carried up the steps of a large, cubical black building.
Once inside the building, however, he was lost in a maze of corridors full of hurrying, worried-looking people. The place was three stories tall above the ground, and ten stories below, and there were hundreds of separate offices and suites. It was not till a full hour later that he found them, in a brilliantly lit cell facing a white-enameled corridor, in the lowest level of all.
If it weren’t for the bruises and cuts on their faces, Mazurin thought, they would have been a handsome couple. The boy was tall and lean, with a dark, thoughtful face; the girl was neatly rounded and had a charming head of almost-platinum hair.
They were sitting side by side on a hard, narrow bench that ran from wall to wall of their five-by-five cubicle. The harsh glare that illuminated them was hard on Mazurin’s eyes; he put his polarized goggles on. They themselves had shut their eyes tight against the fierce light, and their heads were close together, their hands clasped.
Mazurin watched their lips. The girl was saying, “We must be guilty, of course. I mean guilty of something.”
“Or they never would have arrested us,” the young man finished after a pause.
“Yes,” said the girl. “They are always right. Always. So we must be guilty. And yet it’s hard to see—”
“Hush, dear. It isn’t for us to question what they do. Perhaps we have committed some crime without even being aware of it. Or maybe—”
“Yes?”
“Well, maybe they are just testing us, or—or something.”
The girl’s eyes opened for a second. “Oh, Rob, do you suppose that’s it?”
“It might be. Certainly we didn’t cause any disturbance at the patriotic meeting that we know of.”
“But it’s not for us to judge.”
“No.”
For some time, while he watched this conversation, Mazurin had been increasingly aware that the two young people were doing something rather odd. It had to do with their hands. He stopped watching their lips altogether and concentrated on the hands.
They were clasped loosely together on the bench between the two, half covered by the drape of the girl’s flowered skirt. Between the boy’s palms and the girl’s, Mazurin could see a constant flicker of motion, fingers flashing back and forth, first hers, then his.
Now this, thought Mazurin, was extremely interesting. Beyond a doubt, the two prisoners were communicating by means of some ancient form of the finger-code he had learned as a raw cadet in the Internal Security Commission. If he could only get closer, he was almost sure, he could read it . . .
Cadenced footsteps came down the corridor. It was a white-robed attendant, flanked by two of the green-clad officials, each with a drawn missile gun. The attendant was carrying something in a white enamel tray, and in his other hand he had something that looked like the key to an old-fashioned mechanical lock.
Clearly, they were going to open the young people’s cell, to feed them, most probably. If he could slip in while they did it . . . Caution urged him back, curiosity drew him forward. There was no dinger, he told himself. If the cell was opened once, it would be opened again, and he could get out. He made up his mind.
The two guards stepped back, guns ready, as the attendant opened the door and stepped inside, depositing the tray—which did, indeed, contain food of some sort—on a shelf. As he stepped out again, Mazurin, lithe as a rozzer, squeezed in past him. Simultaneously, two things happened.
The door shut with a clang.
Mazurin toppled to the metal floor under a totally unexpected access of weight.
The two prisoners, the attendant, and the guard turned to stare at him with saucer eyes.
While he sat there, feeling as if someone had slugged him from behind, the three men outside exploded into activity. The attendant fled with hoarse cries down the corridor, and the two guards threw themselves flat, aiming their curious weapons at Mazurin. The two people in the cell with him, he was vaguely aware, had moved as far away as they could get and were sitting in stricken silence.
Mazurin said weakly, “Kamerad. Tovarich. Ami.” Then it occurred to him that these men spoke English and, anyway, they apparently didn’t intend to shoot. Not as long as he didn’t move, at any rate. He shut up and tried to think. What the Blodgett had happened to him?
The metal floor of the cell was hard and cold under his palms. He was here, all right, and not on the end of any pencil of temporal energy. It had happened when the cell door shut behind him.
He looked at the door. It was a grid of stout chrome-plated bars, with an interval between the bars of about three centimeters. A nonsense phrase came into his mind, “Eve and Agrid,” which meant nothing. It wasn’t Eve and Agrid; it was Eve and Adam. Eve and Agrid. Eve and Agrid. Evean-dagrid—
Even a grid.
Mazurin shut his eyes and groaned. He opened them again when one of the guards made a warning sort of noise, and stared miserably at the limited vista before him. “Above all,” one of the technicians had said, “don’t get yourself completely surrounded by metal, even a grid. It will break the temporal beam and you’ll be marooned there. . . .”
Marooned. Stuck with a lot of irrational people in a barbaric century. In a cell, at that. Under suspicious circumstances.
He thought about it gloomily for a few minutes before, being a naturally cheerful young man, he tried to find the brighter side of it. Even then, the best he could do was, Well, things cant get any worse, and Blodgett himself is alive right at this moment.
Running footsteps approached down the corridor, and a squadron of the green-uniformed men hove into view. Two of them had a thing on a wheeled tripod that looked as if it were capable of blowing out the side of a building. The rest spread out with drawn hand-guns. The two on the floor got up, saluted and joined the semi-circle.
“Stand up!” said one who seemed to be in command.
Mazurin obeyed with alacrity.
“Remove that mask! Put your hands behind your head! Face the wall!” When he had done all that, the cell door opened, someone took two swift strides inside, and then colored lights detonated inside Mazurin’s head.
He couldn’t have been entirely out, because when he came to he was already thinking, Very efficient police methods. They didn’t take any chances. Just the way an ISC man would have handled it. . . .
His head ached abominably, and his hands and feet seemed swollen. Green-trousered legs were scissoring back and forth in front of his eyes, and the gray concrete floor was moving rapidly backward under him. He was, he realized, trussed up like a rozzer, being dragged down the corridor.