The Ethical looked at the door, still kept from opening by the grail Burton had placed there. His face turned red.
"Why didn't you tell me that the doors were still open?"
"I thought about it, but it didn't seem important," Burton said.
"The agents could have come through!"
"No. They couldn't possibly have caught up with us in such a short time. They'll be using sailboats."
"I won't take any chances."
Loga turned the chair away from the door, then turned it back to face them.
"You get that boat out of the entrance while I'm gone."
"Where'll you be?" Burton said.
"I'm going to a control room so I can reactivate an automatically operated aircraft and direct it to the ledge. It'll melt it all down, and then it'11-plug up the cave entrance."
"Go with him," Burton said to Tai-Peng and de Marbot.
Loga glared but said nothing, and his chair turned and flew down the corridor.
Burton led the others into the fog-shrouded room where, with much shoving, they got the boat out into the sea. Then they went back to the corridor, the larger ones squeezing themselves again through the narrow opening above the grail.
"We should've asked Loga to open it all the way," Frigate said.
"I don't think he wants us to know how he opens it," Burton said.
"Still doesn't trust us?"
"With the life he's led, he's conditioned to trust no one."
That, however, wasn't true. Loga, trailed by the Chinese and the Frenchman, returned after fifteen minutes. He got out of the chair and banged his fist on the wall a few inches from the door. At the same time, he said, clearly, "Ah Qaaq!"
The door slid back within the recess.
Burton made a mental note of the exact area struck.
"How did you know that someone wouldn't be coming along and catch you?" he said.
"This door is one big video screen. I also have other screens which look just like part of the walls. They're situated so that I can see up this corridor past its curves for some distance."
They followed Loga into the room. Halfway down it, he stopped, turned, facing the wall, and voiced the codeword again. An apparently seamless part of the wall moved back and they slid into a recess. The room beyond was well-lit and contained some equipment on tables, a large cabinet, and two skeletons. These were pointed toward the door as if they'd been about to leave the room. On the floor by bone fingers was a metal box. It had a number of dials, gauges, buttons, and a small video screen on one side and prongs on the other.
Loga said, "If only I could have sent that signal a few seconds earlier. I would've caught them before they removed the control box."
"But you wouldn't have known that," Burton said. "You would still not have been able to take the chance of killing yourself. By the way, why were the doors closed? Those two would've had to open them to get in."
Nur said, "Since they wouldn't have known the codes, how'd they get in?"
"After seventy-five seconds, the doors close automatically unless countermanded. What happened is that the investigators located this room by tracing the circuits. That would've been a very time-consuming and arduous job because they couldn't use the computer to do the tracing. When they located this room, they must have been using magnetometers, too. They went back to find the tap-in source, and found the programmed open-shut code box. It wouldn't have taken them long to analyze the code."
"But what about the knock accompanying the code? How..."
"They figured that out, too, though it would've taken longer."
He pointed at the cabinet. "The resurrector."
He went in with Frigate at his heels. The American said, "You couldn't use your own power supply?"
Loga stopped and picked up the control box and then walked to the side of the cabinet. He inserted the prongs into receptacles on the side of the cabinet.
"No, I couldn't. I would've liked my own atomic converter so there'd be no wires to trace. But energy-matter conversion and wathlan-attracting require enormous power. The physical-extraphysical interface alone uses enough power to blackout half of the cities of ancient Earth in the late twentieth century."
Frigate said, "How'd you prevent this power drain from showing up on meters?"
"I made arrangements for it not to. To go back to the original question. If the engineers had removed the code box, I wouldn't have been able to get out of the secret room into the corridor. The outer access door is activated by a signal going to another coder-decoder. It was very fortunate that the engineers didn't work on that before they were killed. I lost the signal-generator when I had to abandon my aircraft. But the boats in the cave contain generators. These are automatically started when the sensors detect that the tower is near."
"The door mechanisms wouldn't have used much power. Why didn't you use separate power generators for them?"
"I should have. But it was simpler and more economical to use the main power supply."
He smiled slightly. "I wonder what the engineers made of the codeword. Ah Qaaq is Mayan. The Ah is the article defining the name as masculine. Qaaq means fire. Loga is Ghuurrkh for fire. Perhaps that was what identified me. They might've put the Mayan name into the computer for a search. If they did, they got an answer within a second after insertion of the question.
"I outclevered myself."
He poised a finger over a button. "Gather around. I'll explain the simple operation twice so that there won't be any confusion. You're able to read the markings. When I press this button, that small silvery inset disc will turn on. That indicates that the power is on.
"That larger inset disc by the ON light is a readout frequency meter."
He pressed a button. The smaller disc glowed orange.
"Now..."
The light went out.
"Khatuuch! What is... ?"
Loga put his hand on the box for a second, then ran around to the front of the cabinet. He opened the door and looked in. Even at their distance from it, the others could feel the heat.
"Run!" Loga said, and he limped as fast as he could toward the exit.
When Burton had reached the exit he looked at the cabinet. The control box was melting, and a large cube inside the cabinet was glowing red.
Loga swore in Ghuurrkh and then said, "Those... those...! They fixed it so that when power came on it'd melt the converter!"
Except for Loga and Burton, who'd died so many times that they no longer feared the prospect of death, the others were relieved. Burton could see it in their faces. They knew they'd be resurrected with their wathans attached, but they still loathed the idea of dying.
Burton said, "We have the other resurrector."
"It'll be set up, too," Loga said. He was ashen.
"Can't you fix it so it won't melt?"
"I'll try."
But he failed.
Burton, looking at the molten mass, thought it was time to tell Loga something he'd put off revealing because the resurrectors were more urgent business.
He said, "Loga, when we left your secret room to go after you, I put a bullet by the door to mark its location. The bullet is gone."
There was a short silence. Frigate said, "A housekeeping robot probably picked it up."
"No," Loga said. "If the robots were programmed to do such work, they'd have disposed of the skeletons."
"Then someone else has gotten in!"
SECTION 14
Three-Cornered Play: Carroll to Alice to Computer