The only thing that kept him going now was the knowledge that his actions to this point must already have had an effect on the future of their probability line.
He turned and made his way back across the room to the door. He held the gas pistol tightly in his right hand. The 810-40.04 had reminded him, earlier in the night, that he was ambidextrous; in the event he had a hand shot off, the computer wanted him to remember to shift the gun to his other paw. Somehow, such a suggestion had not raised his spirits any. At the door, he sucked in a hot breath, hooked fingers in the handle to slide the thing open.
I love you, Lynda said from the basement.
He couldn't answer her. If he did, if he turned to say something, his courage might snap and go tumbling down around his feet. He was working on sheer grit at this point, his sense of reason momentarily suspended. He could not risk a glance at those green eyes or that crooked tooth.
He slid the door open, looked into the corridor beyond, stepped through, and slid the door shut on the messy scene in the projection room.
The vacii, being an alien race with alien heritage and with, certainly, alien patterns of thought which would not be ever totally conceivable to a man, did not build in any way similar to human architectural concepts. Salsbury had noticed, while in the prober room, that there were no straight walls here, no perfectly angled corners. That room had been like the inside of a very large igloo, white, slightly rough like pebbled ice, and domed. The walls were not regular, but cut with nooks and crannies, tiny blind ends where things were stored, where equipment was built in, or where, oddly, there was nothing but emptiness. It was as if the place had been hacked out of stone; it had the feeling or a cave, not a room. No, more than that. It was the kind of building one might expect man-sized insects to build.
The hallway was no different. It was much like a tunnel, large enough for three people to walk abreast and still leave a foot on each side, boring straight away in both directions. The light was dim and yellow and came from glowing stones set at regular intervals in the rounded ceiling. He hesitated only a moment, then turned and walked left in search of a stairwell. If vacii had stairwells.
Thirty feet from the projection room, he came to an abrupt halt and listened intently; he picked up the screeching, giggling noise he had caught a sliver of moments before. It was loud and clear now. He judged it was coming from somewhere just ahead, off to one side, probably from a connecting passageway. It continued, a keening babble. Two separate babbles; vacii speaking in their native tongue. The sound of it chilled him, and he thought of them more as lizards than ever. Their tone, the syllables of their native language spoke of claws and caves, of scaly love-making and slimy burrows of antiquity. It was so unhuman, so much more unhuman than their appearance, that it nearly unnerved him, almost froze him to the spot.
Which would have been disastrous.
Then they were so close he could hear their broad, splayed feet slapping against the cold floor. Any moment, they would appear ahead of him, would look up, perhaps gasp, then spread the alarm Unless he killed them. But if he had to start stashing bodies in closets this soon, he would be discovered by some janitor before he had finished with the operation. He looked around anxiously, caught sight of a closed door five feet ahead. He bounded to it, trying to land silently on his toes, and slid it open, his gun still in his hand.
Luckily, the place was empty and dark. He stood against the wall, slid the door shut and waited. A few moments later, the voices passed the door, heading back the way he had come. He stood sweating, trembling, waiting until he could not hear them before returning to the corridor.
Then he had a bad thought.
What if they were going to the projection room? And found the bodies. And found Lynda. And
He slid the door part way open and peered after them. They came to the prober room, passed it without slowing. A hundred feet beyond that, they turned into a side corridor on their right. Their voices faded, faded and were gone at last, letting the oily quiet of the place slide back over the walls.
Acting the part of the cat burglar, slinking, eyes slippery inside his sockets, ears primed, gun hand nervous, Salsbury went into the corridor and hurried along, looking for stairs. Fifty feet from the room in which he had hidden, he found a stairwell, looked both ways down the hall to be certain he was still unobserved, then started up the steps.
He found he could not look up the well to see if there was anyone above him, but the construction also made his own position safe from anyone higher on the stairs. The steps themselves seemed to be hacked from the wall, rugged, white, worn slightly yellow-brown in the center with the tread of vacii feet. There was a landing fifteen steps up, another and another. Thirty flights and fifteen stories later, he came to the end of the stairs.
He looked into the top floor's corridor. There was no traffic. He stepped out and ran lightly and, he hoped, silently, to the extreme right end of the corridor. The building seemed about two blocks long, so the run was a feat performed not totally without damaged nerves. He expected any moment to run head on into a group of vacii, to be carried down by their long arms and splayed feet But he reached the end and stopped, panting. Quickly, he removed his rucksack from his back, took out one of the many finger-sized bombs the computer had supplied.
The plan called for the planting of dozens of these weapons in various parts of the structure, each a thing of nuclear capacity. The vacii built to withstand a nuclear blast, but dozens erupting in their midst would be more than the building could absorb. This would more than likely not stop the vacii invasion of their worldline, only delay it. But if the vacii managed to push through again, the men of the future who had sent Salsbury back to destroy the installation would send back yet another android to bring down the next installation. It would be tit-for-tat for a while, though the men of Salsbury's probability's future hoped to discourage the vacii in the end. It was a small hope, but the only one.
He kept hoping he could think of something better.
He jammed the pronged end of the white bomb into the plaster-like material of the wall. It blended almost perfectly. As hastily as possible, he planted a second one at the other end of the top floor. Then he ran back to the stairwell and went down a floor. Only fourteen more levels to go.
He knew he could not hope to accomplish all that without meeting a vacii.
Unfortunately, the trouble came early. On the eleventh floor, with eight bombs planted, he encountered his first opposition.
CHAPTER 14
As before, Salsbury heard them coming before he saw them. Their screeching voices grated on his nerves so harshly that, in seconds, he felt like raw, quivering meat. He had planted the second explosives package on that floor, and was making for the stairs like a cockroach on his way to a crack in the baseboard when he heard them coming up the stairs. He skittered backwards, out of the stairs and into the hall, up against the cool white wall, trying to look like an irregular hunk of plaster.
He could wait there in hopes the vacii would pass this floor by, but what if their destination was this floor? A rather nasty scene would ensue, surely, if they found their temple had been violated by a human being with a gas pellet pistol in his hand and a rucksack full of microminiaturized bombs on his back.
The seconds sped past while he fought his own terror to reach a course of action. He wondered, caustically, where the speed of mental processes the 810-40.04 had spoke so much about was. Finally, when the voices were so loud they seemed to be coming from inside his head, he back pedaled to a door on his left, slipped his hand in the groove and waited. If the vacii continued up the stairs, there was no problem. He would be in the clear, free. But if they got off at this floor, he could be into this room before they saw him. But he didn't want to open the door and risk finding out what was on the other side unless he had to. He had to.