«You haven’t deciphered it?»
He could see the colonel sweating. «Not even a single character, much less a word.»
Peter reached out a hand to the bedside table and lifted the carafe, tipped it above the glass. There was nothing in it.
The colonel heaved himself out of his chair. «I’ll get you a drink of water.»
He picked up the glass and opened the bathroom door.
«I’ll let it run a while and get it cold,» he said.
But Peter scarcely heard him, for he was staring at the door. There was a bolt on it and if—
The water started running and the colonel raised his voice to be heard above it.
«That’s about the time we started finding the machines,» he said. «Can you imagine it? A cigarette-vending machine and you could buy cigarettes from it, but it was more than that. It was something watching you. Something that studied the people and the way they lived. And the stamp machines and the slot machines and all the other mechanical contrivances that we have set up. Not machines, but watchers. Watching all the time. Watching and learning …»
Peter swung his legs out of bed and touched the floor. He approached swiftly and silently on bare feet and slammed the door, then reached up and slid the bolt. It snicked neatly into place.
«Hey!» the colonel shouted.
Clothes?
They might be in the closet.
Peter leaped at it and wrenched the door open and there they were, hung upon the hangers.
He ripped off the hospital gown, snatched at his trousers and pulled them on.
Shirt, now! In a drawer.
And shoes? There on the closet floor. Don’t take time to tie them.
The colonel was pushing and hammering at the door, not yelling yet.
Later he would, but right now he was intent on saving all the face he could.
He wouldn’t want to advertise immediately the fact that he’d been tricked.
Peter felt through his pockets. His wallet was gone. So was everything else—his knife, his watch, his keys. More than likely they’d taken all of it and put it in the office safe when he’d been brought in.
No time to worry about any of them. The thing now was to get away.
He went out the door and down the corridor, carefully not going too fast.
He passed a nurse, but she scarcely glanced at him.
He found a stairway door and opened it. Now he could hurry just a little more. He went down the stairs three at a time, shoelaces clattering.
The stairs, he told himself, were fairly safe. Almost no one would use them when there were the elevators. He stopped and bent over for a moment and tied the laces.
The floor numbers were painted above each of the doors, so he knew where he was. At the ground floor, he entered the corridor again. So far, there seemed to be no alarms, although any minute now the colonel would start to raise a ruckus.
Would they try to stop him at the door? Would there be someone to question him? Would—
A basket of flowers stood beside a door. He glanced up and down the corridor. There were several people, but they weren’t looking at him. He scooped up the flowers.
At the door, he said to the attendant who sat behind the desk: «Mistake. Wrong flowers.»
She smiled sourly, but made no move to stop him.
Outside, he put the flowers down on the steps and walked rapidly away.
An hour later, he knew that he was safe. He knew also that he was in a city thirty miles away from where he wanted to go and that he had no money and that he was hungry and his feet were sore from walking on the hard and unyielding concrete of the sidewalks.
He found a park and sat down on a bench. A little distance away, a group of old men were playing checkers at a table. A mother wheeled her baby. A young man sat on a nearby bench, listening to a tiny radio.
The radio said: «… apparently the building is completed. There has been no sign of it growing for the last eighteen hours. At the moment, it measures a thousand stories high and covers more than a hundred acres. The bomb, which was dropped two days ago, still floats there above it, held in suspension by some strange force. Artillery is standing by, waiting for the word to fire, but the word has not come through. Many think that since the bomb could not get through, shells will have no better chance, if any at all.
«A military spokesman, in fact, has said that the big guns are mere precautionary measures, which may be all right, but it certainly doesn’t explain why the bomb was dropped. There is a rising clamor, not only in Congress, but throughout the world, to determine why an attempt was made at bombing. There has as yet been no hostile move directed from the building. The only damage so far reported has been the engulfment by the building of the farm home of Peter Chaye, the man who found the machine.
«All trace has been lost of Chaye since three days ago, when he suffered an attack of some sort and was taken from his home. It is believed that he may be in military custody. There is wide speculation on what Chaye may or may not know. It is entirely likely that he is the only man on Earth who can shed any light on what has happened on his farm.
«Meanwhile, the military guard has been tightened around the scene and a corridor of some eighteen miles in depth around it has been evacuated. It is known that two delegations of scientists have been escorted through the lines. While no official announcement has been made, there is good reason to believe they learned little from their visits. What the building is, who or what has engineered its construction, if you can call the inside-out process by which it grew construction, or what may be expected next are all fields of groundless speculation. There is plenty of that, naturally, but no one has yet come up with what might be called an explanation.
«The world’s press wires are continuing to pile up reams of copy, but even so there is little actual, concrete knowledge—few facts that can be listed one, two, three right down the line.
«There is little other news of any sort and perhaps it’s just as well, since there is no room at the moment in the public interest for anything else but this mysterious building. Strangely, however, there is little other news. As so often happens when big news breaks, all other events seem to wait for some other time to happen. The polio epidemic is rapidly subsiding; there is no major crime news. In the world’s capitols, of course, all legislative action is at a complete standstill, with the governments watching closely the developments at the building.
«There is a rising feeling at many of these capitols that the building is not of mere national concern, that decisions regarding it must be made at an international level. The attempted bombing has resulted in some argument that we, as the nation most concerned, cannot be trusted to act in a calm, dispassionate way, and that an objective world viewpoint is necessary for an intelligent handling of the situation.»
Peter got up from his bench and walked away. He’d been taken from his home three days ago, the radio had said. No wonder he was starved.
Three days—and in that time the building had grown a thousand stories high and now covered a hundred acres.
He went along, not hurrying too much now, his feet a heavy ache, his belly pinched with hunger.
He had to get back to the building—somehow he had to get back there. It was a sudden need, realized and admitted now, but the reason for it, the source of it, was not yet apparent. It was as if there had been something he had left behind and he had to go and find it. Something I left behind, he thought. What could he have left behind? Nothing but the pain and the knowledge that he walked with a dark companion and the little capsule that he carried in his pocket for the time when the pain grew too great.
He felt in his pocket and the capsule was no longer there. It had disappeared along with his wallet and his pocket knife and watch. No matter now, he thought. I no longer need the capsule.