His head cleared a little and he glanced to either side. The boy and the girl were in the party, in approximately the same condition as himself.
They reached an elevator, and Mazurin got a view of its scuffed metal floor before they carried him out of it again. More corridor, black-tiled this time. Several turns. Then a doorway with an ebony sill, followed by flooring of some brown composition, probably a primitive pressed fiber.
Finally he was set upright against a slender metal post and manacled there. The boy and girl were similarly disposed of to his right.
A round man in the green uniform stalked quickly in and stared at Mazurin. His little blue eyes darted quickly from Mazurin’s cloth-of-platinum robe to his face, then to the equipment hung at his belt.
“All right,” the round man said, “who are you ?”
Mazurin opened his mouth, then shut it again. Tell the truth? Oh, no.
His training as a law officer told him exactly what would happen to him if he did. But what lie could he invent that would save him the pain of being questioned? For he had no doubt that being questioned in this era would be painful, despite the rudimentary methods.
The best thing, he decided, was to say nothing. He tried it.
The round man nodded decisively. “We’ll see,” he said. He turned as a second and a third officer strode in. All three stared at Mazurin, then turned and went to the far end of the room. Mazurin could read their lips easily.
“We knew they were cooking up something, but we had no reports that even hinted at anything like this.”
“I don’t like the smell of it. Why would they materialize him in that cell and then let us capture him? Better get him out of the city as fast as possible.”
The round man got in the way at that point and Mazurin missed some of it. Then all of them turned to come back, and he caught one more sentence: “Put them all in one cell, and we may learn something.”
The three of them were detached from the pillars, efficiently trussed up again, and hurried outside to the waiting maw of a long black paddywagon.
It was a long ride and an uncomfortable one. Not being able to talk under the eyes of the guards, Mazurin had plenty of time to think, and, by the time half an hour had gone by, he was shoulder-deep in gloom.
He was roused out of himself when the car suddenly leaped six inches off the road, came down and leaped again. Looking back through the barred window, Mazurin could see that they had left the smooth concrete highway and were rushing down a cowpath of some kind. He and the two young people, all with their wrists manacled around a horizontal bar, bounced like popcorn. The two guards crooked their free arms around stanchions.
Glancing down, Mazurin noted that the two kids were at it again with the fingers. He looked away miserably, then peeked back. It was his damned curiosity that had put him there; he might as well satisfy it while he could—if he could.
The code was the same, all right: five standard positions for each of the five fingers gave you twenty-five letters, and a clenched fist was “X” if you needed it. After a moment, he could read what the boy was saying without difficulty.
“. . . in my shoe. If they give me a chance . . .”
“Charlie, I’m scared!”
“Only way. They’ll get it all out of us otherwise. They know how to. Would have done it before now if he hadn’t turned up."
“Think he’s one of ours?”
“Can’t be; we haven’t anything like that. Don’t understand it, but can’t take any chances. He might be a spy.”
They meant him, Mazurin surmised. An interesting century, indeed.
The girl again: “Okay. I guess it’s worth it.”
It occurred to Mazurin, with an ineffable shock, that it must be poison Charlie had in his shoe, of all unsanitary places. . . . They were going to kill themselves, to keep the authorities from putting them to question. Evidently, either a large and fanatical fraternal society, or else a revolutionary group; all kinds of secrets. But he couldn’t let them commit suicide! Such a thing would be an ineradicable blot on the totems of their thousands of descendants. Even worse, he didn’t know their surnames; they might be his own great-great-great-great grandparents.
Worst of all, he suddenly realized, their suicide might blot more than totems—himself, for example, right out of existence!
He could alert the guards, of course, but the more he thought about that, the less he liked it. Questioning, this far back in history, would be sure not to be subtle. From one point of view it was perfectly sensible of them to prefer poison. Bump! If only the car would stop bouncing for a minute so he could think. . . .
The car abruptly outdid itself. Mazurin found himself whirling around the horizontal bar like a demented acrobat, while two green blurs that were the guards soared airily to the forward end of the compartment. Something struck Mazurin a dizzying blow on the head, the car bounced twice more and came to rest, while the echoes of a thunderous explosion died away in his ears.
Ill
The car was canted, half in a ditch. The guards, piled up against the forward wall, were not moving. Charlie and the girl were half stunned but conscious. Mazurin pulled futilely at his wristcuffs; they were too tight even for his trained hands to slip.
Acrid fumes drifted into the car through a burst seam in the rear. Mazurin sniffed, and felt a cold dew break out on his forehead.
“Oh, what is it?” asked the girl faintly.
“Argo paste,” said Mazurin, jittering. “It must have started coming out of the exhaust or the jet tube—whatever these vehicles use. Oh, sacred name . . .”
“What’s argo paste?” demanded the youth groggily. “I never heard of the stuff.”
“I know you haven’t,” Mazurin said. He groaned. “They use it to burn through metal. It’s supposed to come out in glazed vats. If only it’s stopped—"
The fumes grew thicker. Mazurin looked out the barred rear window.
“We’re in a pool of it,” he said. He turned. “Can you reach those two?” he asked the boy, nodding toward the two unconscious guards.
The boy shook his head. “They haven’t got our keys, anyhow. The guard up front with the driver has them. And he’s knocked out, or he’d have been back here by now.”
The car lurched and settled. A section of the floor began smoking and dripped away, leaving a puckered gap through which they could see a slowly heaving pool of gray paste.
“Can you get your shoe off?” Mazurin asked suddenly.
Charlie gave him a look full of suspicion.
“Your shoe,” Mazurin repeated with agonized patience. “Either one, it doesn’t matter.” He slipped his left foot out of his own elastic-topped sandal, grasped it between his toes and held it up. “Mine’s no good, you see? Too thin. Yours is made of thick leather. Can you take it off?”
“I don’t get it,” said Charlie, baffled. A heavier drift of choking fog came up through the vanishing floor. “But—” He grunted, raising and twisting his leg until his manacled hands could reach the laces. “Here.” He dropped the shoe and kicked it along to Mazurin.
The car settled again. The pool of gray slime was now only a foot below them. Mazurin grasped the shoe with his toes, shifting his grip till it was as firm as he could manage. Then he held on like grim death and lowered the shoe through the gap in the floor, into the gray pool underneath. He brought it up quickly.
There was a good gob of the stuff in the heel end of the shoe, about two inches from his own bare foot, but it was smoking furiously. In another second, the leather would be eaten through.