“Uhuh; that’s good.” He rose and went to the big table and the solidigraph, where Steefer was already talking to a dozen or so men. He saw Niles Guerrin, the ventilation engineer, and pulled him aside.
“Niles, the insides of those ducts are dusty?” he asked.
“The ones that carry stale air to the reconditioners,” Guerrin replied. “Dust from the air in the rooms…”
“They’re the ones we’re interested in. Now, these snoopers, robo-inspectors; could they pick up tracks the Fuzzies make, or traces where they’ve brushed against the sides of the ducts?”
“Yes, sure. They have a full optical reception and transmission system for visible light and infra-red light, and controllable magnifying vision…”
“How soon can you get them started, from the gem-vault and from the captain’s office in detective headquarters?”
“Right away; we’ve set up screens and controls for them in here; did that right at the start.”
“Good.” He raised his voice. “Chief! Captain Hurtado, Lieutenant Mortlake; do-bizzo. We’re going to fill the ventilation system with snoopers, now.”
PHIL NOVAES LOOKED at his watch. It was still 0130, the damned thing must have stopped, and he was sure he’d wound it. Holding his wrist to catch the dim light from above he squinted at the second-hand. It was still making its slow circuit around the dial. It must have been only a few seconds since he had looked at it last.
“Herk, let’s get the hell out of here,” he urged. “They aren’t coming out at all. It’s been an hour since the last two went in.”
“Thirty-five minutes,” Herckerd said.
“Well, it’s been over an hour since the other three went in. Something’s gone wrong; we’ll wait here till hell freezes over…”
“We’ll wait here a little longer, Phil. We still have fifty million in sunstones to wait for, and we want to get those Fuzzies and shut them up for good.”
“We have better than fifty million already. All we’ll get’ll be a hole in the head if we stay around here any longer. I know what’s happened, those Fuzzies have gone out some other way; they’re running around loose, packing sunstones…”
“Be quiet, Phil.” Herckerd reached to his shirt pocket to turn on his hearing aid and put his head to the ventilation duct opening. “I hear something in there.” He snapped off the hearing aid, listened, and snapped it on again. “It’s ultrasonic, whatever it is. Probably vibration in the walls of the duct. Now just take it easy, Phil. Nobody knows there’s anything happening at all. Grego’s the only man in Company House that can open that vault, and he won’t open it for a couple of weeks, at least. All the stones from Evins’s office were put away yesterday. It’ll take that long before anybody knows they’re gone.”
“Suppose those Fuzzies got out somewhere else. My God, they could have come out right in the police area.” That could have happened; he wished he hadn’t thought of it, but now that he had, he was sure that was what had happened. “If they did, everybody in the building’s looking for us.”
Herckerd wasn’t listening to him. He’d turned off his hearing aid, and was squatting by the intake port, peeling the wrapper from a chewing-gum stick and putting the wrapper carefully in his pocket. Another piece of foolishness; no reason at all why they couldn’t smoke here. He listened with his hearing aid again. The noise, whatever it was, was louder.
“There’s something in there.” He pulled the goggles down from his cap and took out his infrared flashlight.
“Don’t do that,” Herckerd said sharply.
He disregarded the warning and turned the invisible light into the duct. There was something moving forward toward the opening; it wasn’t a Fuzzy. It was a bulbous-nosed metallic thing, floating slowly toward him.
“It’s a snooper! Look, Herk; somebody’s wise to us. They have a snooper in the duct…”
“Get the stones in the box! Right away!” Herckerd ordered.
“Ah, so there was something went wrong!”
He snapped the suitcase shut, shoved it into the box on the contragravity lifter, and fastened the lid, then snapped the hook of his safety-belt onto one of the rings on the lifter. There was a crash behind him, and when he turned, Herckerd was holstering his pistol. Then he, too, snapped his safety-strap to the lifter, and pulled loose the two poles with hooked and spiked tips, passing one over and slipping the thong of the other over his wrist.
“Full lift,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He fumbled for a second or so at the switch, then turned it on. The whole thing, lifter, box, and he and Herckerd, were pulled up from the ledge and swung out into the shaft.
“What did you have to shoot for?” he demanded, pushing with his boathook-like pole. “Everybody in the place heard you.”
“You want that thing following us?” Herckerd asked. “Watch out; watermain right above!”
Maybe the snooper was just making a routine inspection; maybe Herckerd had finally panicked, after all his pretense of calmness. No. Something had gone wrong. Those damned Fuzzies had gone out the wrong way, somebody’d found them… There were more pipes and conduits and things in the way; he remembered the trouble they’d had getting past them on the way down. He and Herckerd had to push and pull with their poles and for a moment he thought they were inextricably stuck, they’d never get loose, they were wedged in here… Then the lifter was rising again, and he could see the network of obstructions receding below, and the white XV’s on the sides of the shaft had become XIV’s, so they were off the fifteenth level. Only five more levels and a couple of floors to go.
But he could hear voices, from loudspeakers, all around:
“Cars P-18, P-19, P-20; fourteenth level, fourth floor, location DA-231.”
“Riot-car 12, up to thirteen, sixth floor…”
He swore at Herckerd. “Sure, it’ll be a month before they find out what’s happened!”
“Shut up. We get out of the shaft two floors up, to the left. They have the shaft plugged at the top.”
“Yes, and walk right into them,” he argued.
“We’ll lift into them if we keep on here; we’ll have a chance if we get out of this.”
They worked the lifter around the central clump of water and sewer and ventilation mains, pushing away from it and then hooking onto handholds and drawing the lifter into a lateral passage, floating along it for a hundred feet before Herckerd could get at the lifter controls and set it down. Then he unsnapped his safety-strap and staggered for a moment before he found his footing.
It was a service-passage, wide enough for one of the little hall-cars, or for a jeep; maintenance workers used it to get at air-fans and water-pumps. They started along it, towing the lifter after them, looking to right and left for some means of egress. There should be other vertical shafts, but they would be covered, too.
“How are we going to get out of this?”
“How the hell do I know?” Herckerd retorted. “How do I know we’re going to get out at all?” He stopped for a moment and then pointed to an open doorway on the left. “Stairway; we’ll go up there.”
They crossed to it. From somewhere down the bare, dimly-lighted passage, an amplified voice was shouting indistinguishable words. The passage connected with another, or a hallway. They couldn’t go ahead; that was sure.
“We can’t get the lifter through.” He knew it, and still tried; the lifter wouldn’t go through the narrow door. “We’ll have to carry the suitcase.”
“Get the box off the lifter,” Herckerd said. “We can’t carry that suitcase ourselves; they’d catch us in no time. Get the suitcase out of it.”
The box, four feet by four by three, with airholes at the top, had been necessary when they had the Fuzzies to carry; they didn’t have to bother with them now. He opened it and lifted out the suitcase. No; they couldn’t carry that, not and do any running. It was fastened with screws to the contragravity-lifter. Herckerd had his pocket-knife out, with the screwdriver blade open, and was working to remove the brackets.