'How much have you had?' asked Curtis.
Birnbaum stared at the empty glass unsteadily, coughed and then shook his head.
'Forget that. Listen to me. I've changed my mind. And I think you're right. We have to escape. I was thinking…' He coughed some more.
'While Beech has got Death distracted, well, it's our best chance to get away. I think that the two of them are so occupied with their game they wouldn't even…'
Curtis coughed too. The air was beginning to taste vaguely metallic. He coughed again, failing to get a breath of clean air and noticed that Ellery was lying on his back and that a mucous-looking bubble had formed on his lips. He dropped on to his knees, looked closely at the edges of a carpet tile and then tore it up with his bare fingers.
'Gas!' he yelled. 'Everybody out!'
Smoke was wisping out of a perforated access panel in the centre of the floor. Curtis prised it open to reveal something that looked almost organic, like an anatomical dissection exposing the veins, arteries and nervous fibres in a human cadaver: thousands of miles of copper information cables winding their way around the Gridiron. In a computer room or some military application, plenum cables would have been sheathed with a specially formulated low-smoke flame-retardant material. Or with a zero-halogen coating. But since the Gridiron's boardroom had not been designated an area where there was an increased fire risk, the plenum cables were sheathed in ordinary polyvinyl chloride materials and the fumes released from the PVC by the extraordinary high temperatures Ishmael had generated in the copper cables was a harmful acid gas.
Curtis looked around for a fire extinguisher. Failing to see one he grabbed Ellery under the arms and started to drag him out.
Jenny, Helen and Birnbaum dashed towards the door, already halfchoked by the quick-dispersing fumes, but Beech seemed inclined to remain seated in front of the computer.
'What are you, crazy?' coughed Curtis. 'Beech. Get the fuck out of here.'
Almost reluctantly, Beech stumbled up from his chair. Convulsed by a fit of coughing he followed the others into the corridor where Ray and Joan Richardson had already been driven by the same fumes under the kitchen floor.
'Get to the balcony,' said Curtis. 'The air should be better near the atrium.'
Beech helped Curtis drag Ellery towards the section of handrail where David Arnon had fallen to his death. For a while they stood there, coughing, spitting and retching into the atrium below.
'What the hell happened?' wheezed Joan.
'Ishmael must have caused the data cables under the plenum floor to get hot and release some kind of halogen acid gas,' said Richardson, 'but I can't imagine how.'
'Still figure we can last the weekend?' asked Curtis. He wiped his streaming eyes and knelt down beside the injured man. Ellery had stopped breathing. Curtis leaned forwards and pressed his ear close to his heart. This time the man was beyond resuscitation.
'Willis Ellery is dead,' he said after a long moment. 'He was lying on the floor. The poor bastard must have been breathing that stuff for a while longer than the rest of us.'
'God, I hope Mitch is OK,' said Jenny and looked anxiously over the buckled handrail. But there was no sign of him.
Mitch slid off the cross-brace and jumped to the floor.
As he walked around the tree towards the hologram desk he saw what was left of David Arnon. Hardly recognizable, he lay slumped across the bloody broken table leg that had impaled him, as in a ghastly vampire horror movie, his long legs splayed out in front of him like a collapsed scarecrow.
It was strange how you reacted to things, he thought, as he stood near his old friend with a short prayer in his heart, wishing that there was some way of at least covering him up. Strange what you noticed: Arnon himself was encrusted with congealed blood, but the white marble floor around him was spotless, almost as if it had been cleaned up afterwards. A few metres further on, spread-eagled on the lid of the Disklavier piano, was Irving Dukes, his head hanging over the strings, his open eyes still bright red from the contact poison.
Mitch looked for the walkie-talkie and saw that it was on Dukes's belt with his gun and his Maglite. Trying to unbuckle the belt, Mitch leaned on the piano keys, still silent, and jumped back, horror-struck, when they started to ooze blood. It was a moment or two before he realized that blood from the huge fracture on the back of Dukes's head had collected inside the piano frame and run down the keys when he had pressed them. Mitch wiped his fingers on the dead man's pants and, ignoring the blood that was now dripping off the keyboard, quickly relieved the body of the belt.
'I hope you haven't damaged this,' he said, inspecting the walkietalkie. He pressed the call button.
'This is Mitch. Come in Level 21. Over.'
There was a momentary silence before he heard Jenny's voice.
'Mitch? Are you all right?'
'It was harder getting down here than I imagined. How are things?'
Jenny explained about the gas, and told him that Willis Ellery was dead.
'We're out here on the balcony waiting for the air to clear. If you look up you can see me.'
Mitch walked to the opposite side of the atrium and looked up. He could just make Jenny out. She was waving. He waved back without much enthusiasm. Willis Ellery was dead.
'Mitch?' Suddenly there was urgency in her voice. 'There's something crossing the floor. It's coming straight at you. Mitch!'
Mitch looked round.
Speeding towards him was the floor-cleaning droid.
Marble is one of the easiest materials to maintain. The beauty of the white stone can be enhanced by polishing with a good silicone wax, although care needs to be taken to prevent staining. Thus there existed SAM, the Semi-Autonomous Micro motorized surface-cleaning droid —
the most sophisticated maintenance system for marble flooring in the world, designed to deal with every kind of hazard, including oil, citrusfruit juice, vinegar and similar mild acids. SAM was about the weight and height of a medium-sized refrigerator, and shaped like a pyramid. Powered by thirty silicon-embedded micro-motors, the machine was practically a semiconductor wafer chip on wheels, with the circuitry of eighteen computers, fifty different sensors to detect obstacles, and an infrared video camera to find dirt. SAM was supposed to travel at no more than one mile an hour, but it hit Mitch square against his ankle at nearer fifteen. The impact knocked him off his feet.
As he rolled over the apex of the pyramid-shaped droid, Mitch recollected the clean floor around Arnon's body and, before he landed hard on the marble, he told himself that he ought to have remembered SAM. He was still picking himself painfully off the floor when the machine hit him again, this time on the knee cap. Bellowing with pain, he fell back, clutching his leg.
With sufficient distance to build up momentum for another potentially damaging impact, the SAM droid spun around on its short axis and, once again, accelerated.
Mitch drew Dukes's gun, aimed it at the centre of the electronic pyramid and fired, hitting it several times. But if the SAM was damaged it gave no indication, and Mitch found himself cannoned towards the empty pond at the bottom of the tree. Grateful for the hint, he scrambled over the low wall to safety. For a minute or so SAM patrolled the perimeter of the pond and then set itself to clean the blood from the floor underneath the piano.
'Mitch?' It was Curtis speaking on the walkie-talkie. 'You OK?'
'A few bruises.' He tugged down his sock to inspect an ankle that was already turning a dark shade of purple. 'But I don't think I'll be able to outrun that thing. I shot at it couple of times. Didn't even slow it down. Right now it's cleaning the fucking floor.'