Bingo.
There was a crash bar on the inside of the door, halfway up. The plastic caught and bent over it. Nohar had to lean the curtain rod up next to the doorjamb so he had a hand free to knock the plastic out of the way. In response to Nohar's break-in, an alarm inside the building did an anemic imitation of the sirens at the prison.
Because of his leg, Nohar put down the shotgun and scrambled under the crash bar on both hands and his good leg. He sliced open his right palm on a stray piece of glass.
Once he pulled the cane and the gun after him, he pushed himself up to a standing position.
Inside, the place was much better maintained—and strange. He could smell their odor, as well as the odors of chemicals—there was a strong hint of sulfur and sulfur dioxide—and disinfectant that had a fake pine odor. The hall he was in was brightly lit with sodium lamps. They cast an unnatural yellow glow over the
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hallway. There were filters on the lamps that seemed to increase the effect. The floor he was hobbling along had been stripped to the concrete. It had been polished and felt slightly moist under his feet. Not water. It was damp with something more viscous that made it hard to keep his footing.
The first door to his right was open. He looked in and saw a storage area. The room must have filled half the building, both floors. It was stacked with white plastic delivery crates. It was lit with normal fluores-cents, and to the rear was a rolling metal door that must open onto a truck-loading bay. Nohar could smell the flush—even through the packaging, there was so much of it—a rotten, artificial fruit smell, like spoiled cherries.
Nohar continued to limp down the hallway. The doors he passed on his left were new, solid, air lock doors. He looked through the round porthole windows, and saw clean rooms containing glass laboratory equipment filled with bubbling fluids. Here was the damn flush lab the DBA wanted. Nice sterile environment. The stuff must be real pure.
He kept walking, following the ammonia smell. They were here. He could feel it. He kept going down the corridor. It took a right turn near the far wall. More labs, older, not behind air lock doors. Nohar noticed familiar items that matched the genetics lab at Metro General. Especially the hulking form of the chemical analyzer. This had to be part of the food production, R&D anyway. Any real volume processing must happen in the other building.
Nohar rounded the corner and faced a stairwell, up and down. Same slick polished concrete. The sulfur and the ammonia were worse going down. That's where he went.
The steps went slowly, one at a time. Each step felt like he was going to slip and break his neck. As he descended, the atmosphere became thicker, denser.
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was beginning to feel the heat—the temperature down here must be around 35 or 40. The atmosphere was heavy with moisture that clung to his fur.
The heat and the heavy atmosphere were making his head throb.
He could feel his pulse in his temple.
Down, he was in the basement. Here, there was no pretense at normal construction. The hall was concrete that had been polished to a marblelike sheen. All the right angles had been filled in and polished smooth, giving an ovoid cross section. The walls were weeping moisture that had the viscosity of silicone lubricant.
There were pipes and other basement equipment, but all had been molded into the walls. Nohar looked up and saw a length of white PVC pipe just above his head. Concrete had been molded around the ends where it came in through the wall so the wall's lines melded smoothly with the length of pipe. It looked like some organic growth. Nohar looked at one wall, and from the discoloration he could make out where the lines of the old cinder block wall used to be. There was only one way to go. He followed the hall. He hobbled down and left the last of the yellow sodium lights, and entered the world of green-tinted red. The ammonia smell was very close now.
He rounded a very gradual turn in the hall. It felt like he was hobbling through a wormhole in the bowels of the earth. He completed the turn, and saw a perfectly round door. Out the door was pouring an evil bluish-green light and that bile-ammonia smell.
Nohar stumbled through the opening and covered the room with a shotgun held, clumsily, in his left hand. He didn't realize the floor was a half-meter lower man the floor in the hall until it was too late. His good foot slipped away.
He tried to catch himself with the cane in his right hand, but the pipe was slick with blood from his palm and slid off into the room, beyond his reach.
He slid down a steep concrete curve sitting on his bad leg. He heard a crack.
A shiver of agony
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told him he was not going to walk again for a long time.
He did manage to keep a grip on the shotgun.
Through his pain-blurred vision, he realized that if there had been any doubt Smith wasn't the product of some pink engineer, one look at this room put all doubts to rest. The room was a squashed sphere nearly ten meters in diameter. Eight, evenly spaced, round holes were in the wall, doors like the one he had come through. In the center of the room was a two-meter-tall cone, molded of concrete, shooting up a jet of blue-green flame. From it came most of the oppressive heat in the room, and the smell of burning methane.
The wall had niches carved into it. Hundreds of them, all the same size, a meter long by half a meter high. They were concave, oval pits that angled down into the wall slightly. From nearly half of them came the glitter of MLI's wealth, diamonds, rubies, emeralds. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of stones—
And, of course, there were Smith's kinsmen. The creatures that ran Midwest Lapidary. Four, in all, were facing him. They were wearing pink clothing, like Smith had. They all had the same blubbery white hu-manoid form that Smith wore.
"That's why," Nohar managed through gritted teeth. "The hit in Lakeview. Couldn't tell who he was over the comm ... "
One of them addressed him in Smith's blubbery voice. "We do not do such things lightly. We must be certain of the right when we do such irrevocable acts. A waste you must be here—"
The pain in his leg was making him dizzy. He was beginning to feel cold, clammy. In this heat, he must be going into shock. "Right? "It was a yell of pain as much as an accusation. "I talked to Smith." Nohar caught his breath. "You were breaking your own rules when you cut him out of the loop." Nohar wished he had one of Manny's air-hypos.
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"He is a traitor. He knows not that the mission is paramount. He clings to propriety as if we are in—" A word in the alien's language. "And not in this violent sewer."
Another one continued. "We do not allow ourselves to perform physical violence. The traitor does not understand our circumstance is dire and requires an exception,"
Nohar was beginning to have trouble feeling his leg. The dizziness was getting worse. "End justifies the means?"
A third one, near the cone, spoke. "It is a waste. The tiger understands."
The first one—perhaps the leader, but Nohar was having trouble keeping track of these similar creatures—continued. "The traitor, perhaps, understands or suspects our plans when he hires you. It is intended you lead the new unrest—" The one by the cone, "—like your father leads the convenient rebellion eleven years ago. The traitor anticipates us and hires you against us—"
"The traitor," one of them went on, "knows what kind of resonance there is when he hires you—"