Keep doing the unexpected, he reminded himself.
He still didn’t feel in complete command of himself, but he knew he couldn’t wait any longer. He held the captive weapon at the ready in his right hand, opened the door, peered out. There was less activity in the tunnel now, but a silent file of naked men and women crossed in front of him from left to right without a single curious glance. Janvert counted nine in the group. A longer line was passing in the other direction on the far side of the tunnel. They, too, ignored him.
As they passed, Janvert slipped out of the cell and fell into step at the end of the line going left. He dropped back at the first elevator, waited for a down-car to appear, stepped up quickly as he saw a lean, blank-faced male doing. They both faced the front of the car, rode silently downward.
The smell of the place began to repel Janvert more and more as he found himself growing increasingly alert. The man with him in the elevator appeared not to notice it. He breathed easily, but Janvert experienced a faint nausea every time he focused on the smell. Best not to think about it then, he warned himself. His partner in the elevator remained a figure of mysterious menace, but something kept the man from taking special notice of Janvert. The man’s pubic hair had been shaved or removed in some other way. His head was shiny in its baldness.
The man leaped out as the elevator passed another floor and Janvert now had the car to himself. He counted gray walls and floors, got to ten before wondering how long he should stay with this car. He glanced up at the ceiling. It was as featureless as the floor. Something glistening gray was stuck to the ceiling near the wall on his left. He reached up, touched the substance. Some of it clung to his finger and he brought it back, sniffed it. The smell was that of the gruel in his food bowl. He rubbed it off on his thigh. The significance of food on the ceiling began to demand his attention. That ceiling might become a floor in the elevator’s return phase. The cars never seemed to stop. People leaped on and off them through the doorless openings. Everything spoke of an endless chain of cars circling between levels of Hellstrom’s anthill.
Abruptly, the car lurched, tipped slightly to his left. It lurched again, tipped more. Janvert knelt against the lower edge, crouched there as the elevator turned flat on its side. Nothing but gray wall showed in the door opening as he walked the side around until the former ceiling became the floor, confirming his guess. The car was going up now. He leaped out at the first opening, found not another person in sight. He was in a tunnel illuminated by dim red light, but there was a brighter yellow glow off in the distance to his right. The tunnel stretched away into red gloom beyond that glow. He glanced left, found a gentle curve to the tunnel’s floor which bent it out of sight to the right. He decided to head for the glow, turned right, held himself to a normal walking pace. He had to be just another occupant of this warren going about his normal business. The weapon felt heavy in his right hand, slippery beneath the perspiration in his palm.
He heard the sound of running water before he reached the area of the glow, but he could see by then that the light came from long slits parallel to the floor and the arched ceiling. The slits were eye height, and he had only to turn his head as he passed to look into a wide, low chamber with long tanks spaced through it, water running in them, people working with businesslike concentration around the tanks. Janvert peered at the nearest tank, discerned fish boiling in it, little fish about six inches long. He saw now that the people farther out in the room were scooping fish from a tank into a wheeled carrier.
A fish farm, by God!
Janvert continued past the glowing slits and there was another glow ahead of him now, a distinct cast of pink in it. The light came from floor-to-ceiling doors that revealed a chamber even larger than the first one. This chamber was jammed with waist-high benches, lights low over them and on the benches, lush plants with rich green leaves. Again, he heard the sound of running water, but fainter here. Workers wearing dark glasses moved among the benches, carrying bags slung from their shoulders and harvesting red fruit that Janvert took to be tomatoes. Filled bags were being carried toward openings in the far wall, dumped through there.
He was encountering more people in the tunnel now and there was a humming sound ahead that grew louder as he approached. He realized he’d been hearing that sound for some time now but had been filtering it out of his consciousness.
Thus far, none of the people he had met paid any special attention to him.
He felt it was getting warmer in the tunnel as he neared that irritating humming. The sound was almost painful in its intensity. He came presently to larger slits in the tunnel’s left-hand wall, peered through into a gigantic chamber. It went down at least two stories, up an equal distance, and was filled with tall tubular objects that dwarfed the workers moving on the floor far below him. He estimated that the things were at least fifty feet high and probably a hundred feet in diameter. They were the obvious source of the humming and there was a noticeable ozone smell coming through the slits into the tunnel.
Electrical generators, Janvert guessed.
But it was the biggest generator plant he had ever seen. It stretched away at least half a mile to his left and more than that on his right and looked to be at least half a mile wide. If those were generators, he wondered what was driving them.
Janvert answered his own question as he came to the far end of his tunnel. It turned left there with a double ramp. One ramp went down into the lighted room and the other ramp, parallel to the first on the right and separated from it by a thin wall, slanted down into a gloomy area where he could discern the oily rush of water passing beneath dim lights.
Water—was that his escape route?
Janvert turned purposefully down the ramp to the water, passed another file of people without a side-glance. He emerged onto a black ledge beside the water. It was a damned river! The thing stretched away in the gloom and he could detect moving lights on the far side about a quarter of a mile away.
The ledge beside the river decreased in width as Janvert moved along it below the generator room. He could hear the water beneath his ledge, the muted humming on his left.
The possible dimensions of this enterprise beneath the earth began to insinuate themselves into Janvert’s awareness. It was so large he began to suspect the government must be involved in it somehow. What other answer could there be? It was too big to escape notice. Or—was it?
If the government had a hand in this, why had the Agency known nothing about it? That didn’t seem possible. The Chief had been privy to some of the touchiest secrets in the land. That had been made clear on many occasions. Even Merrivale probably would have known about something this big.
In this questioning reverie, Janvert almost collided with a gray-haired man who stood in his path at what appeared to be the end of the ledge. A spidery open stairway climbed upward beyond the man. The gray-haired one lifted his right hand, wiggled the fingers oddly in front of Janvert’s face.
Janvert shrugged.
The man wiggled his fingers once more, shook his head from side to side. He was obviously puzzled.
Janvert lifted the weapon, pointed it at the man.
The other stepped backward, shock apparent on his face. His mouth was open, eyes wide and staring, muscles bunched defensively. Once more he held up his hand, wiggled his fingers.
“What do you want?” Janvert asked.
It was as though Janvert had struck him. The man took another step backward, stopped at the edge of the spidery stairs. Still, he didn’t answer.
Janvert glanced around. They appeared to be alone on this ledge and he could feel tension mounting. The hand signal obviously was supposed to mean something to him. The fact that it didn’t was growing increasingly apparent. With abrupt decision, Janvert flicked the firing stud on his weapon, heard a short bap-hum, and the gray-haired man crumpled.