"Sharp as the tail of the scorpion your little sister hid in the towel."
Rodriz made a face of dismay. "Ai, yi," he said dolefully, rubbing his rump with one huge hand. "What a brat she was! Do you know, she has three grandbrats already?"
Pembun shook his head. "To me, she's still small enough to walk under the donkey. I couldn't even guess what she looks like, Enri, because as I remember her, her tongue is always sticking out."
"Children," said Rodriz. "Sometimes I think they are bad now, but we were worse." He picked up a slender-necked bottle from the floor, filled both glasses.
"The children," said Pembun.
"Yes, the children." They drank, smacked their lips again. "If only we could all be back in the mountains of Combé," said Rodriz sentimentally. "But a man does what he has to do."
"Some parts of it are less pleasant than others," Pembun said. They both looked at the long, carefully sealed carton that lay across two packing cases against the wall.
"True, old friend. When I think of the hours of labor that went into that alone, not to mention the rest of it! The planning, the secrecy, everything done at night—weeks and months!"
"Still, you don't have to wear it. You should have done this years ago, when I was safely elsewhere."
"There weren't enough of us here then. We were too scattered. But this will not be the last, Jawj, believe me."
"It may be the last for me."
"Courage," said Rodriz, pouring the glasses full again. "Drink, my friend, you're pale, you need it."
There was a rap at the door. A perspiring young man stepped in, closed the door and leaned against it. "In the name of God, when will you be ready? I can't keep them quiet any longer."
Rodriz twisted massively around to look at him. "Gently, gently," he said. "Where is your consideration? A man doesn't do a thing like this like putting on his hat. It takes moral preparation. When he's ready, he'll be ready, understand? They've waited this long, they can wait another minute or two."
"You wouldn't say that if you were out there," the young man said bitterly. He looked from one to the other, opened his mouth again, closed it in resignation and went out.
"Impatience," said Rodriz heavily. "That's the trouble with everybody nowadays."
"All the same, he's right," Pembun said. "If I sit here any longer, Enri, I think I may begin to get a little jumpy. I can't say I'm ready, but hell! let's get on with it."
"One more drink first," said Rodriz, giving him an anxious look. He filled the glasses. "Good will among men."
They drank. Pembun set down his glass with care and stood up. "All right, open it and let's see the damned thing."
Rodriz took a little electroblade from his pocket and began to open the long carton. He turned the lid back. Inside was a folded garment made of heavy fabric with a dull sheen. Pembun ran his fingers over it absently; then the two men lifted the thing out and unfolded it. Rodriz held it up for Pembun's inspection. It was like the empty skin of a great bird. The huge wings hung to the floor, the grotesque, beaked and crested headpiece lolled as if the neck were broken.
Pembun considered it grimly, then sat down on one of the packing cases and began to remove his shoes. Rodriz waited in sympathetic silence while Pembun stripped to his underclothes; then he opened the front of the gray garment and held the legs while Pembun stepped into them. The feet were clawed, monstrous.
Pembun got his arms into the sleeves and held them out; the gray wing-feathers spread with a rustling sound. Rodriz pulled the closure up over the bulge of Pembun's belly; the seam disappeared. "Hold still a minute," he muttered. He went behind Pembun, lifted the headpiece, lowered it carefully over Pembun's head. He walked around in front again, pulled the closure all the way up to the chin.
Where Pembun had stood, a gigantic crested gray bird stared fiercely at Rodriz over a cruel yellow beak. "How do I look?" Pembun's muffled voice asked.
"Magnificent," said Rodriz, his face shining with excitement. "Tes pelloké gri!"
The bright disc of Langtree's hand-flash swung ahead of him as he advanced through the subcellar. The deeper he went, the more he could feel the skin of his back and neck prickling with apprehension. His palms and forehead were growing moist.
Langtree did not like dark, enclosed places. It was his one disability; it dated from some buried childhood experience that the psychs had not been able to dig up. He was coldly aware of it, and had never allowed it to influence any decisions he made while on duty. But in spite of himself, his nervousness increased the farther he penetrated into this maze of subcellars under the old warehouse. He was too conscious of the darkness pressing in beside and behind him; it took an increasing effort to keep from swinging the light around to see what was there.
There had been no sound except those he made himself; he knew there was nothing there in the darkness, staring eyelessly at him… It was not any specific thing he was afraid of, only the darkness itself. The darkness, the underground feeling. If his light should go out—
Langtree's hand tightened convulsively on the flash. The light would not go out. It was powered by an atomic battery, good for a century of continuous operation. In any event, all he had to do was reach a stairway that would take him up into the rear of the warehouse—and there it was, glinting in the light of the flash, dusty gray-painted steps with a tube rail, running up to a massive firedoor.
Langtree darted lightly up the steps, then paused in dismay. The door was crossed by two heavy bars of steel, atomic-welded to the frame on either side.
"Report," said the tiny voice behind his ear, after a moment. "What's the trouble, Langtree?"
Langtree made sure his voice would be steady before he answered. "No entry here without cutting torches," he said. "Stand by." There was a long pause, then: "Negative, Langtree. Find another entrance."
"Acknowledged," said Langtree curtly. He turned, descended the stairs, started deeper into the cellar.
The bobbing disc of his flash went ahead of him; the darkness around it seemed to grow deeper. Now his mental picture of the ground plan told him that he was directly under the part of the warehouse that he wanted to reach, here was another stairway… another fire door, barred like the first. He swung the flash around. The huge space was empty except for a domed metal shape against the far wall. He went on, found a third stairway. It was blocked like the other two.
The blackness seemed to flow in around him very gently, touching his back like cool fog. The thought crossed his mind that if he merely reported there was no practical entrance, it would only mean a delay; no one would ever know; there would be no mark against him on the record… But he had seen what he had seen.
He went back, angling across to the incinerator. The chute was still connected, a metal tube, square in cross-section, about a hundred and twenty centimeters wide, that dropped from the ceiling into the incinerator shell.
He played his flash into the shell, saw the black square hole gaping in the top of the dome. His jaws were clenched; he relaxed them with an effort. "Going up," Langtree said.
On Spangler's console, a large screen now displayed a computer chart made up of dots and interconnecting lines. The red dots represented Outworld residents of the city who could not be located by visiphone; the black dots, those who had responded. The lines between them represented known associations. It was obvious, even at a glance, that the many red dots and the few black ones formed separate networks, with a few linkages between.
"Here's the report from Computing," Makaris said. His face was grim in the tiny screen. "Five hundred seven calls made; percentage of completion has dropped to nine point five. Correlation with the meeting in the warehouse is eighty-seven per cent, plus or minus one."