Beside the gantry, workshops and hangars crouched low, busy with fire and thunder. Vast areas of roof covered industries stretching for acres. Streets bisected in neat patterns. The towers and turrets of his childhood vision resolved now into a complex of engineering workshops and refineries from which the glow and flood of color illuminated everything about.
In dominant tandem with the ship gantry lifted the bowl — the fiery bowl like an Olympic flame magnified ten times the size of Wren’s dome over Saint Paul’s. That, still, he could not neatly docket into a file of understanding.
He began to walk down the metal slatted road into the city. He walked on an escalator, a moving road; but the treads had long since ceased to move and weeds and daisies grew from the dirt trapped between them.
The first scuttler poked a stalked eye from the crumbled ruins flanking the stalled escalator. Its body followed: bucket-sized, scuttling on six jointed metal legs, gnashing metal mandibles before it, scrabbling out with hostile intent. This time Crane’s trigger pressure accurately released one shell. The scuttler vanished in a blooming detonation that rolled around the ruins in powdery echoes. Crane smiled.
“So the Wardens have baby brothers,” he said cheerfully. The first evidence of tangible opposition cheered him; he lost the sensation of boxing shadows.
He knocked off three or four more scuttlers as he pressed on determinedly for the squat blue-columned, ocher-walled building supporting that enormous bowl. They skittered out at him from the ruins and then, as he pressed on, from between rows of factory workshops from which sounded the heavy beat of machines in full production. And he remembered that all the time he’d been with McArdle not one single Warden had attacked. Odd, that.
The Loti posed a different problem. He halted, rifle raised warily, at the corner of a power house with massive aerials rising from the roof giving clear indication that beamed broadcast power was a reality here, confirmed by the general absence of pylons and cables. The Loti hung about twenty feet off, glowing, vibrating, a luminescent oval in which the great sad eye flowed, appearing and disappearing disconcertingly.
Crane began to resent what he felt about that luminous mournful eye. The thing looked at him so reproachfully. But it would be no good loosing off a round; the lozenge of living light would merely expand, rippling color, and contain the explosion. The converse also held true. The Loti wouldn’t grab him because they’d tried and he’d had the Amullieh. True, he now had only a broken link; but they weren’t to know that. Unless they tried to snatch McArdle and discovered he had the Amullieh — then they might turn nasty. He slogged on towards the building of the bowl, keeping the Loti in the corner of his eye.
Two or three others joined the first, and in between blasting a couple more scuttlers and nearly reaching the last expanse of wire-mesh landing area before the building, he’d built up quite a procession of them. They tailed along behind him like the caudal appendage to a comet. They didn’t want him to go into that building. The clattery scratchy sound of scuttlers’ feet on the wire-mesh sounded from all directions. Crane pushed his back up against a masonry tower supporting what at first glance looked like a statue of a wheelchair and began loosing off snap shots all around. Smashed and degutted scuttlers began to litter the ground. A nasty smile passed across his face as the shells crashed home. He crouched, and his reactions came lightning swift after the sluggish torpor of the preceding days. The opposition he understood — it presented targets as though in a shooting gallery. He was enjoying himself.
From the moment he had first clearly seen the enormous fiery bowl mounted atop its hulking blue and ocher building it had seemed obvious it was the place to make for. The focal point of the city, more dominating even than the giant missile gantry, it had drawn him. And now he was here.
The rifle hiccoughed deafeningly six times. Crouched over automatically as though subject to snipers’ bullets, Crane belted it out for the base of the building. His feet rang against the wire-mesh. His path carried him close by a Loti — and he could have sworn the lozenge of light swayed quickly away from him as he barreled past.
Then the floor came up in a leering hole and only some fast and fancy back-pedaling saved him from pitching into a square opening in the ground. He circled it, picking off two more scuttlers, and headed on for the building.
The door stood open — and that seemed wrong.
The Loti had been trying to prevent him from entering this building, hadn’t they? Then why leave the front door open? Answer — trap.
He looked for another way in. Between the blue columns, the ocher walls contained tall, narrowly conceived lancet windows, the lowest too high for him to jump. He had to snap his attention back to the wire-mesh as a fresh gaggle of scuttlers charged. This time they each had different appendages: one a broom, another a shovel, a couple with drilling implements. He smiled again as he blasted them competently. So the Loti were bringing out the wash-and-brush-up brigade to deal with him. That was only fair, anyhow; to them he was vermin.
If he was going into that building after Polly then he was going to have to enter that door. There was no other way he could see. Testing every step before putting his weight on it, he edged towards the door, rifle ready to blast the first scuttling heap of machinery to show itself. He felt cool blue shadow drop across his shoulders as the masonry cut off the sun. Beyond the door lay a smooth marble floor and multicolored walls. He couldn’t smell a trap anymore — the obvious hadn’t panned out this time.
The whole sequence of events since he had entered the environs of the city struck him as out of focus. If the Loti really wanted to stop him, then, with all their super-science so lavishly displayed around him, they should have found that no problem, no problem at all. He pushed on, puzzled and wondering.
Behind him the door shut with a click.
He whirled, rifle up, before he realized that it didn’t matter.
He wasn’t going out that door without Polly; and when he returned to it he’d blast it as he’d blasted the door in the tower. If he returned.
Padding up the corridor he saw the light subtly changing, running through the spectrum so that he had constantly to adjust to it, ready for what might spring out on him. But nothing did.
When he reached the huge and impressive antechamber to hell he stepped inside, an ant in a cathedral. The roof soared into corbelling high above; groined columns fluted into distance; under his feet the marble extended, vast and shining; and clustered thickly before him, waiting, hung a group of Loti, the living lozenges of light.
He looked about, faintly puzzled, not expecting this, ready to walk steadily on, into and through their lambent barrier. From, a hidden source a bright actinic light stabbed out, lanced into his eyes. Blinking, eyes watering, he flung up a hand, shading, trying to see into multicolored whorls of color and shadow beyond the light.
A voice cracked suddenly and shockingly from the great chamber, a woman’s voice, Polly’s voice.
“It’s Rolley! It’s Crane! It’s all right!”
The light went out. When he could see again Polly was walking across the marble floor towards him. Her feet went tac-tac-tac across the floor. Then they speeded up and she flung herself into his arms, grasping him, clasping him, laughing and crying.
“Hold up, Polly,” Crane said. “What’s this all about?”