Though Burton thought that Frigate was too cautious, he had to admit to himself that his speculations were well founded.
"Also," Frigate said, "The two chairs must have been moving when their occupants died. What made the chairs stop?"
"Obviously, the sensors in the chairs," Burton drawled.
"Fine. Then we'll each get a chair and find out how to get used to handling it. After that, what? Up or down?"
"We'll go to the top floor first. I feel that the headquarters, the nerve center of these operations, must be there."
"Then we should go down instead," Frigate said, grinning. -"Your predictions were always of the Moseilima type, you know. The opposite always happened."
The fellow had his way of getting back at him. He knew too much about Burton's Earthly life, knew all his faults and failings.
"No," Burton said, "not true. I warned the British government two years before the Sepoy Mutiny happened that it was coming. I was ignored. I was Cassandra then, not Moseilima."
"Touche!" Frigate said.
Gilgamesh pulled up his chair alongside Burton's a few minutes later. He seemed troubled and not well.
"My head still hurts bad. I see things double now and then."
"Can you make it? Or do you wish to stay here and rest?"
The Sumerian shook his massive taurine head.
"No. I wouldn't be able to find you. I just wanted you to know that I'm sick."
Alice must have struck him harder than she'd intended.
Tom Turpin called to Burton then. "Hey, I found out how they get their food here. Look!"
He'd been fiddling around with a big metal box which had many dials and buttons on it. It was set on a table and was connected by a black cable to a plug in the floor.
Turpin opened the glass-fronted door. Within were dishes and cups and cutlery, the dishes full of food and the cups full of liquid.
"This is their equivalent of the grail," Tom said, his pale yellow face smiling. "I don't know what any of the controls except this does, but I punched all the buttons and in a few seconds the whole meal formed before my eyes." He opened the door and removed the contents. "Wow! Smell that beef! And that bread!" Burton thought it would be best to eat now. There would probably be other devices like this elsewhere, but he couldn't be sure. Besides, they were famished.
Turpin tried another combination of buttons and dials. This time, the meal was a melange of French and Italian and Arabic cooking. All items were delicious, though some were under-cooked, and the filet of camel's hump was too highly spiced for most of them. They tried other combinations with some surprising results, not all delightful. By experimentation, Turpin found the dial which regulated the degree of cooking, and they were able to get the meal well-done, medium, medium-rare, or rare. All except Gilgamesh ate voraciously, drank some of the liquor, and lit up the cigarettes and cigars also provided by the box. There was no lack of water; faucets were all over the place.
Afterward, they looked for toilets. These were in some nearby giant cabinets which they'd presumed had contained machinery. The toilets didn't flush; they were holes into which the urine and excrement disappeared before they hit the bottom. Gilgamesh ate some of the bread, then vomited it up. "I can't go with you," he said. He wiped his chin and squirted water from his mouth into a sink. "I'm just too sick." Burton wondered if he were as ill as he said he was. He could be an agent and waiting until he could slip away.
"No, you go with us," he said. "We might not be able to find our way back to you. You'll be comfortable in your chair." He led the others to the shaft. When he took the chair out over the emptiness, he extended a foot to touch below it. His toes met no slight springiness as in the other shaft. Perhaps the presence of the chairs automatically removed the field.
He pulled the rod back and tipped the disc. The chair moved slowly upward, then swiftly as Burton depressed the disc even more. At each bay he saw more corridors and some rooms. The latter were full of strange equipment, but there were no skeletons until he came to the tenth floor. The chamber he looked into was small compared to the one he'd left. It contained twelve large tables on each of which were twelve plates and twelve cups and some skulls and bones. Other bones lay on the chairs or at their feet.
A huge food-box was on a table in the corner.
Burton went on up, stopping now and then, until he arrived at the top of the shaft. The trip had taken fifteen minutes. On one side was another bay with a corridor outside. On his left was a small corridor which quickly opened into a giant one, at least one hundred feet square. After setting the chair down in the larger hallway, he leaned over the shaft and blinked his lantern three times. The answering flashes were tiny but sharp. Nur, the next one, would not make any stops and so would get to Burton in about twelve minutes.
Burton had never been patient except when it was absolutely necessary and often not then. He got back into the chair and moved down the hall. He'd take a six-minute tour and then return to the shaft.
He passed many open doors, all very large, giving him eye access to small and large rooms, some with equipment, some apparently for apartments. A number had many skeletons; some, a few; some, none. The corridor ran straight for at least two miles ahead of him. Just before it was time to return, he saw on his right an entrance with a closed door. He stopped the chair, got out, withdrew his pistol, and cautiously approached the door. Above it were thirteen symbols, twelve helices arranged in a circle with a sundisc in the center. There was no knob on the door. Instead, a metal facsimile of a human hand was attached to the door where a knob should have been. Its fingers were half closed as if about to seize another hand. Burton turned it, and he pulled the door open. The room was a very large, very pale-green semitransparent sphere surrounded by and intersected by other green bubbles. On the wall of the central sphere at one side was an oval of darker green, a moving picture of some sort. The odor of pine and dogwood rose from the trees in the background, and in the foreground a ghostly fox chased a ghostly rabbit. On the bottom of the largest sphere, or bubble, were twelve chairs in a circle. Ten contained parts of skeletons. Two were bare of anything, even dust.
Burton had to breathe deeply. This room brought back frightening memories. It was here that he had awakened after killing himself 777 times to escape the Ethicals. It was here that he had faced the Council.
Now those beings who had seemed so godlike to him were bones.
He put one foot beyond the threshold, poking it through the bubble with only a slight resistance. His body followed, feeling the same tiny push. Then his other foot came through, and he was standing on springy nothingness or what seemed to be nothingness.
He reholstered his pistol and passed through two bubbles, the surfaces closing behind him, but air moving past him, and then he was in the "Council room." When he got near the insubstantial chairs, he saw that he'd been mistaken. One of the seemingly empty seats held a very thin circular convex lens. He picked it up and recognized the many-faceted "eye" of the man who'd seemed to be the chief of the Council, Thanabur.
This was no jewel, no artificial device to replace an eye, as he'd thought then. It was a lens which could be slipped over the eye. It felt greasy. Perhaps it was lubricated so it wouldn't irritate the eyeball.
With some difficulty and revulsion, he inserted the lens under his eyelid.
The left eye saw the room through a distorting semiopaque-ness. Then he closed his right eye.
"Oooohhhh!"
He quickly opened the right eye.