Ariel leaped after him, in her haste not bracing herself, and fell forward at full length-fortunately, on the slower strip.
Derec, grunting, had rolled half onto a yet slower strip, which slipped from under his fingers as he clawed at it. With great presence of mind he rolled over yet again fully onto that strip.
Ariel hastily picked herself up and gingerly transferred to his new strip. Derec sat grinning faintly and watched her as she walked back toward him. A couple of Earthers glanced at them incuriously and looked up at the lightworms. Apparently falling riders weren’t that uncommon. Nobody laughed.
Dusting himself off, Derec grinned more widely and led her down, then stopped in some consternation.
“Where’s your purse?”
Ariel clapped a hand to her side, gasped. She didn’t often carry a purse, but had had to on Earth. With all the identification and such she had to carry here, it was a real necessity. Now it was all gone.
“No real matter-R. David can fake up more identification for you,” Derec said.
They looked along the ways, but saw no sign of it. It must be hundreds of meters off by now, and they didn’t know on which strip. Ariel shrugged.
“There must be some central office where you can reclaim things lost on the ways,” Derec said, but dismissed it.
With a skill increased by their previous experiences, they made their way down into the bowels of the City to the freightway level. NO RIDING. PEDESTRIANS FORBIDDEN, the signs proclaimed. So they walked along beside them to the terminus, which was much like that of the passengerways above.
Small trucks with lifts in front and broad, flat beds behind brought in cannisters of freight. Somewhere not far from here big trucks were unloading these cannisters, driving in, wheeling out.
“Hey, you-you kids! Git away from there! Don’t you see the sign? Go on, back!”
Muttering, Derec led Ariel up a motionless ramp, hesitated, and struck out along a corridor running east. After half an hour of fruitlessly trying to go down to the entrance there, he retraced his steps and they went down to the lower level, and then marched toward the entrance. It was marked on the City maps as an entrance, not as an exit. There were no exits on the map.
Derec opened the door cautiously, beckoned her through. Beyond it they found a garage for the handling trucks that transferred the cannisters. Men swarmed around it, but ignored them.
“We can’t go there,” Ariel said when he had led her behind the trucks to the motorway.
It was a stub motorway joining the entrance with the freightway strips. To step out into that rumbling passage would be to get run over on the spot.
Derec hesitated. “Steal a handler and drive it out there?” he asked.
“And maybe keep on going?” she asked wistfully, thinking of sunlight and air. Tomorrow and New York were too far away to bother about. Her head hurt.
“No, we couldn’t get much past the exit. These things are all beam-powered. That’s why we have to have one of those big trucks. They’re nukes.”
In the end, they picked out a small handler and figured out the controls, which were quite simple.
“I’m surprised there’s no control lock,” said Ariel. “Knowing Earthly psychology.”
“Frost, you’re right,” said Derec, worried, and looked it over. “This slot,” he said after a moment. “For an ID tag, probably a specialized one.” He looked it over and said, “I wish I had my tools.”
Wonders can be performed with such things as metal ration tags. He worked away behind the control panel while Ariel crouched behind him in the tiny cab and watched anxiously for anyone approaching.
“Ready,” he said at last. “Take the stick and drive us slowly out into the rnotorway.”
She did so, nervously. At the door, the machine slowed, a panel on its controls lighting with the words: IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT. Derec did something, a relay clicked quietly, and the handler rolled smoothly out into the stream.
“So far, so good,” Derec said. “Nobody following.” Ariel turned to the right, guided them across the motorway to the proper lane, and they rolled slowly along toward the light. The traffic was fairly heavy, but moved slowly.
“Oh, almost-” Ariel said.
The light came from a vast open space where elephantine trucks trundled in and backed up to the loading docks. The handlers ran in and out of them, transferring their cargoes to small trucks, which took them to the freightways. Off to the right, a row of the huge trucks were disgorging golden grain into pipelines with a roar and a hiss of nitrogen.
“No good!” cried Derec. “Too many people. Pullover to the right, by those dumpsters. We’ll pretend to be inspectors or something.”
Sick, Ariel saw that he was right: There was little hope of seizing a truck unnoticed. The loading was done with smooth efficiency, though nobody seemed to move very fast. There were little knots of gossiping drivers and operators around. Men and women went around with clipboards, checking manifests. As soon as a truck was unloaded, it pulled out.
“Too bad we can’t find a clipboard or two,” Derec said.
Ariel thought that their shipsuits fit in pretty well, but wished they were cleaner. They had not thought to launder them-she had slept in hers, though the fabric didn’t show it.
They got out of the handler reluctantly, and stood looking about.
Ariel yearned for the open. They could go to the edge of the dock, drop their own height to the concrete, and walk perhaps a hundred or a hundred fifty meters, and find themselves at the opening.
“Might have expected these Earthers to block off the opening,” she observed. Light came in, but they couldn’t see out.
“They don’t even like as much of an opening as they’ve got,” said Derec. “Notice how they all stand with their backs to it?”
They did. Each little group was a semicircle facing away from the opening.
“Let’s go outside,” she said impulsively.
Derec hesitated. “It might not be easy to explain. It might not be easy to get back in.”
“Who wants to?” she said fiercely. “I just want to see sunlight one last time!”.
Derec looked at her, frightened, concealed it, and said gently, “All right, we’ll see what we can do.”
He led her across the dock space and peered up at the numbers and letters on the side of one of the mammoth trucks. It was damp, and had dripped a puddle under it. Ariel had had no idea of how big they were till then. Nodding wisely, Derec stepped to the edge, turned, and dropped off.
Ariel followed.
They strode briskly, as if they had business there, toward the front of the truck. Beyond lay the barrier. Trucks entered obliquely between overlapping walls, so that vision could not reach out to the frightening openness outside but the trucks could enter without opening and closing doors. Ariel suspected that the way zigzagged, so great was the fear they showed of the outside.
“Hey! Hey, you two!”
A group of men were walking threateningly toward them on the docks, gesturing them back. One turned and dropped off as they watched. “Come back here!”
“Run!” said Derec.
A big wet truck erupted from the barrier even as they began to run, and they swerved. They found themselves running toward the grain trucks dropping their cargoes from their bellies.
A sign hovered in the air before them: WARNING: OXYGEN REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT!
Ariel remembered reading somewhere that grain dust could explode if liberally mixed with air. They stored it in nitrogen to prevent that. But, she observed, stricken with fear, the men working here were not wearing masks.
Derec led her on a route that avoided them-these workers looked up curiously but did not join the chase immediately-and they ran through the first dust cloud, then through the second.
“Not good enough,” he said, as they paused, panting. Ariel tried not to cough; the dust was in her throat.