Lost again. Loster and loster.
To kill the agonizing wait I examined Susan's strange weapon. Taking the pieces out of the box, I tried to figure a way to put them together. The largest component of the three looked like a handle-end, and I proceeded on that assumption. The smaller of the remaining two pieces appeared to be a power pack, which fit into the third, a long rod with an adjustable clamp on the end of it. Click, snap, and it was together.
Fine. Now, what the hell was it, and how did it work? Second question first. You held it by the handle and pointed. You crooked your middle finger around this little ring here, and…? Nothing. There were various circular switches on the handle, and I pressed some of them. Nothing. I broke it apart, examined the cylindrical power pack, decided it looked to be in backward, and turned it around. Putting the contraption back together, I pointed it out the door at the floor and squeezed the ring.
A tiny, bright blue discharge sputtered from the end of the rod. That was it. I fiddled with the switches and tried again. The discharge was brighter and more elongated. Further fiddling produced a weaker, shorter discharge.
And that was absolutely it.
The floor was in great shape.
This was obviously not a weapon but a tool, probably a pipe cutter or scoring tool of some kind. Apparently our salesman had been extremely pissed off at us. Why hadn't Tivi known it wasn't a weapon? Possibly because the thing was alien manufactured and designed for non-Nogon use. It didn't look like a typical Nogon tool; I had seen plenty of those.
I pressed switches until it didn't discharge when I pullet on the ring. On safety. I slipped into my back pocket and stood up. I played with the control knob some more. Nothing. I paced inside the car, then tried the control again. No response. I banged on it in annoyance. Hell, don't break it, I told myself, I paced in a circle, giving the knob a good twist every circuit,
Some ten minutes later I decided it was never going to go up again, at least not very soon. I picked up Tivi's cloth sack. Inside was Susan's new torch and another thing that looked like a sewing kit.
I took the torch, dropped the sack and walked out into the pipe jungle, taking a corridor leading to the right. Just as I got far away enough not to be able to run back in time, the goddamn elevator shut its doors and took off. Maybe it had been waiting for me to leave.
I wandered for an hour, looking for a way up. No stairwell, no ladders, no more elevators. Endless passageways through thickets of pipes, ducts, cables, and conduits. The life of the faln throbbed in the darkness all around me. The Nogon had never really left their caves. Vents of steam hissed at me. Strange markings on the walls gave no clue as to where I should go, how to get out. Lost and more lost. The urge to panic was returning.
I stopped and sat on a metal canister left in the passageway, leaned back and rested my head against a warm pipe. I couldn't see a way to the other side of this. I would wander endlessly through an eternal humming night-no one would find.me, ever.
Hey, you'd better stop that, another voice told me.
Right. But I had been worn down. Every man has his breaking point. I was tired of this. Tired of it. I wanted to sleep, get into another dream. I didn't like this one. Whirclickbeep… whirclickbeep, something sounded behind me. Whirclickbeep… whirclickbeep. I was lost in a forest of sounds again. Lost in a cave again. The same cycles were repeating incessantly. Over and over, over and over. Run, chase, run, chase… lost, lost, lost…
… The road is never-ending. I run along it into the night, footsteps echoing from the vast nothingness that slowly envelopes me, that slowly closes me within its dark maw. I run into the throat of the night. Eternal night. Even the stars are gone, winked out, choked out by the miasmal nonbeing that clouds the universe ahead. All that remains is the road, my feet slapping against it. Hard metal, it drains the strength from my legs, but I must go on, I must run. That is the only thing left, the only thing I have. I keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep throwing one leg out, then the other, jogging on, loping on. The things behind will never catch me if only I can keep running. I must. The light behind fades, my own shadow on the road ahead blends with the darkness. I am alone. Running, running… I can't feel my legs. My body is gone. I am pure movement, forward movement without cause, without purpose, but with an inevitable destination. I am in a dark tunnel, rushing forward, my speed increasing, momentum — building. I accelerate into the starless dark trailing slipstreams of blackness. Time winds down and stops while I gain speed. I plunge headlong through eternity, aiming for a nodal point where all lines of force, all threads of being converge. I fall. I gravitate toward the center, toward the knot in the middle of space, the beginning of time. I slide along a web woven of the stuff of night, all lines leading to its heart. I plummet. But as I approach, as I am about to reach my resting point… Sudden tight! Blinding explosion of light! The wavefront overtakes me, I dissolve into purest energy, I am swept away by overwhelming force…
I jerked awake and fell off the barrel to the hard, warm floor.
Sitting up, I waited until my heartbeat slowed, then stood. I had dozed off-or maybe I had had a recurrence of my hallucinating. I was bone tired. Sure, I had only fallen asleep. Time to get moving. Sit here and they'll never find you. Okay.
I walked forward again a few steps and stopped abruptly.
Something tall was standing in the shadows farther down the passageway.
I slowly took Susan's torch from my back pocket. My nonBoojum again, I thought. Will I never be rid of the thing of will it follow me for the rest of my life?
I played the beam of the torch on it and my heart dropped into my stomach.
"Grrreetings, Jake-frrriend. We have found you at last."
A nightmare in gray-green chitin, fully two and a half meters tall, the Reticulan took a step forward. I assumed it was Twrrrll, the one who had always spoken to me. His zoom-lens eyes rotated slightly to get me in better focus. The complex apparatus of his mouth worked in and out, up and down in a rapid and silent sewing-machine motion. His body was thin, his seven-digited hands and feet huge. Jutting out from a long narrow face, the eyes were dead, containing nothing, no emotion, no palpable presence. A thin spike of a genital organ hung from his lower abdomen. He wore no clothing except for a harness of leatherlike material wrapping his torso. He carried a large pouch hung by a strap from his shoulder. Something was in it.
Twrrrll and his hunting companions had followed me all the way from Terran Maze. They had been teamed with Corey Wilkes. Ostensibly, Wilkes had been paying them off in return for safe passage through Reticulan Maze, the only way back to Terran Maze from the Outworlds. But I suspected that the Reticulans had wanted the Roadmap, too. It would open up new hunting grounds to them, provide fresh honorable game. Their home world and Skyway planets had been hunted out long ago. I also suspected that they had just about given up hope of getting the map. Too many hounds after one fox. The only thing that drove them now was the hunt. For members of a Reticulan Snatchgang, bagging the quarry and dispatching it in a horrific ceremony of vivisection was the overriding concern.
I took a deep breath. At least the danger, the thing to be feared, had taken on a physical form. I had been chased and now I was caught. And now I would deal with the situation.
"So you've found me," I said. "What's your intention?"
"Ourrr intention is to give you an honourrrable death, Jakefrrriend. It is ourrr obligation. You are the Sacrrred Quarrry, the honorrrable game. You must die well, and we shall see that you do."
"Thanks, I was really worried about that."