This is bad, he thought in unexpected panic. There’s a world and all its people at stake and all I do is drift!
The room suddenly seemed small and oppressive, and the sunlit word outside correspondingly more inviting, a better place in which to think. There were three days to wait until the 2H plan reached its irrevocable climax, and at any point up to a few hours before zero all the years of planning and work could be negated by his making a single mistake. It was essential that he should pull himself together and get his thinking straight, and a plunge into the bright winter chill seemed as good a way as any to begin. He took his slate-grey overcoat from a closet, put it on and went out into the corridor.
There was a sign at the elevator saying it was operating that day, but he decided against paying the surcharge and went down the nearby stair. As an after-effect of Haran’s call and his bout of introspection, he was abnormally alert when he reached the bottom flight. At another time the four tall men shouldering their way into the lobby through the glass doors might not have drawn his attention, but on this occasion he picked them out at once and recognition jarred him to a halt.
Mollanians!
The word clamoured inside his head as he backed up the stairs to the first corner. One of the men had gone to the reception desk, one was heading for the hotel’s rear entrance, another was approaching the elevator bank and the fourth was walking directly towards the stairs. Their behaviour was odd by normal standards, Lorrest realised, but understandable if the object was to seal off the building. He turned and sprinted towards the upper floors, easily taking the steps four at a time, his heart thudding with a fierce excitement. At the third floor he swung into the short transverse corridor and ran to its end, where an emergency door opened on to the fire escape. His instinct was to throw the door open and launch himself down the outside stair without checking his speed, but a warning voice sounded above the thunder of blood.
He slid to a halt, very gently opened the door and looked down the fire escape.
A big man was waiting in the alley below.
Lorrest closed the door, his mind grappling with the fact that the man had been standing with one hand thrust inside the unzipped front of his quilted jacket. Weapons? Would Vekrynn’s men use weapons against him?
The answer came immediately, impelling him back towards the hotel’s main stair in an urgent loping run. He carried defences against certain kinds of radiation weapons, but there was no guarantee his pursuers would not employ drug darts. He reached the stairs without encountering anybody and was going up them in great leaps, two to each short flight, when it occurred to him that he was running blind. Any hiding place he might chance on would be discovered sooner or later, and there was no escape route in the upper part of the hotel, unless…unless he dared take what was, for a Mollanian, an unthinkable risk…
At the fifth floor he deflected himself into the corridor and got to the door of his own room just as the elevator’s arrival light came on. He stabbed his key into the lock, sidestepped into the room, began to bolt the door behind him then realised that doing so would be a clear indication of where he was. The desk clerk spent much of her time in the back office and would not have been able to tell his pursuers for sure whether he was in or out, and it was up to him to make them believe they had been unlucky.
He ran to the window, threw it open and climbed out on to the ledge. Cold breezes tugged at his clothing as he closed the window, and when he turned the shifting of parallax made the steel skeleton of the adjacent structure appear to sway like the masts of a ship.
Lorrest stared at the nearest floor beam, mesmerised. It was perhaps three good paces away from him, a distance he knew he could leap with ease, but a measurement in paces implied the reassuring support of the ground. Here there would be nothing but cold clear air beneath him, and if he were to make a bad jump—perhaps hampered by his overcoat—he would go down and down, and there would be lots of time to anticipate what was going to happen to him when he hit the pavement, or perhaps a perimeter fence and then the pavement, or perhaps a ledge and a perimeter fence and then the pavement…
This must be the main feature, he thought in bemused wonderment as he saw angular patterns flow beneath, evidence that he had made the leap and was flying through space. His feet came down on rusted metal. He caught hold of a stanchion for momentary support and, now totally committed, ran along the narrow aerial pathway of a floor beam to where the massive stump of an incompleted central column offered some concealment. Belatedly aware that he could have attracted the attention of other residents of the hotel, he worked his way round to the far side of the column, hunkered down and nestled into the boxlike space between its flanges.
A sudden eye-of-the-storm calm descended over him as he realised he had done all that was possible for the time being. If he had been seen by the Mollanians he would know about it soon enough, and if any Terrans had noticed him there would be some kind of outcry—but for the present all he could do was crouch in his strange geometrical eyrie and survey the deserted wasteland of the building site below. And force himself not to think about falling.
As the protracted minutes went by he gradually came to accept that he had eluded the Bureau’s agents. They would certainly have gone into and searched his room, but Mollanian conditioning would have prevented them from considering the vertiginous metal pathway to freedom. Unfortunately, one problem led to another. If the Mollanians believed he would soon return to his hotel they were bound to keep watch on all the entrances, and if he wanted to clamber down to the ground inconspicuously he would have to wait for the cover of nightfall.
The thought of making the climb in darkness caused Lorrest to press himself closer to the chilling metal of the column and he diverted his thoughts to the problem of getting safely through the next three days. Haran had been right when he said that Vekrynn would spend unlimited amounts of money to pick up a key member of 2H before it was too late. There were not enough Bureau agents on Earth to form a really effective search team, but there was little doubt that the Warden would have enlisted every conceivable Terran agency, legal and illegal, to track him down. A trumped-up criminal charge would be enough to bring in the police, and the lure of really big money would take care of the rest.
Trying to ignore the cold which was spreading through his body. Lorrest analysed his chances of remaining undetected in the city for the greater part of a week and decided they were dangerously low. His best course would be to get off the planet altogether, but as that was impossible he would have to consider isolating himself in a rural area, even though the weather was against him. At another time of the year it would have been easy enough to fill his pockets with canned food and spend the time hiding out in the forest land on the eastern side of the Allegheny range, but there was a limit to what even a Mollanian constitution could stand. It looked as though he would have to find and move into a disused house, and that had its own set of risks.
All this should have been arranged in advance, he thought. We’re a bunch of amateurs, behaving like amateurs. I suppose our excuse has to be that there aren’t any experts in this line—nobody has ever done to a world what we’re going to do to this one.
To his surprise, Lorrest managed to doze for short periods during the two hours he had to wait for nightfall. When he finally decided to return to the ground the steel framework on which he was suspended had become a cube of mysterious darkness, its components patchily illuminated by greenish glimmers from the street. Telling himself that the lack of visibility would help dispel vertigo, he straightened up tentatively. His legs were numb and a tingling stab of pain hinted that the return of blood circulation would be far from pleasant. He gripped the flanges of the column, began a shuffling turn in preparation for climbing down it, then made the appalling discovery that he was getting no nerve signals from his feet. It was quite impossible for him to decide if he was standing squarely on a floor beam or teetering on its extreme edge.