There was so much that he could not remember. . .
Oporto said weakly: "Sdeve, ged me a doctor."
"I can't!" Ryeland said bitterly: "If the Plan wants you sick you'll have to be sick."
Oporto's face turned a shade paler. "Shut up! Somebody may be listening."
"I'm not criticizing the Plan. But we have to stay here, you know that."
"Ryeland," Oporto begged, and went into a coughing fit.
Ryeland looked down at the little man. He seemed to be in serious trouble now. Evidently his system was of an ultra-allergic type. Swept clean of disease organisms in the sterile air that blew down on the isolation camp from the Pole, he had been ripe for infection. He was breathing heavily and raggedly, and heat wafted off his forehead as Ryeland brought his hand near it.
"Hold on, Oporto," he said, "It'll only be a little while. Maybe a couple of hours." At a thousand miles an hour, there was no place on Earth much farther away than that.
"I can be dead in a couble of hours," said Oporto. "Can't you ged me a doctor?"
Ryeland hesitated. There was truth to what the little man said. The Plan provided constant immunization for those who lived in areas exposed to disease; but the hypoallergic, like Oporto, might well lose that immunity in a few months. And Oporto had been breathing sterile air for three years.
"All right," said Ryeland wearily, "I'll do what I can. You come with me, Oporto." Booby-trapped the halls might be, dangerous the trip certainly was; but it was life and death to Oporto.
The door opened easily.
Ryeland, half supporting Oporto, looked out into the corridor. No one was in sight. He sighed; he had hoped that they might find a passerby. Oporto babbled: "Steve, what are you doing? Led me alone. We can't go oud here—the colonel warned us!"
"We have to get you to a doctor, remember?" Ryeland scanned the corridor. At the intersections were curious canopied devices like the sun-shelter over a mogul's howdah. Perhaps they were the radar traps; at least, Ryeland couldn't imagine what else they might be. But there was one back the way they had come, and surely there had been no trap there. . . .
No. Ryeland thought it out carefully. The fact that they had been allowed to get to Compartment 93 didn't prove anything at all; quite possibly the traps had been turned off to allow them to pass. In fact, thinking it over, it seemed certain that the one route that would be prohibited would be the corridor going back to the entrance port.
"Oporto," he said, "do you see those doors? I think we can go into one of them."
"You do, Steve? What mages you think so?" the little man asked sardonically.
"Because there's nothing better to try," Ryeland snapped, and dragged the little man with him.
Around his neck the iron collar weighed heavier than ever. If only he were a superman, like that Donderevo whose name stuck half-forgotten in his mind . . . whose fate, somehow, was linked with Ryeland's own.
Who was Donderevo, exactly? The therapists had questioned him so persistently about the man that there had to be some strong reason. Did Ryeland know him? When had he last seen him? When had he received a message from him? What was the message about?
Donderevo was the son of an explorer and trader who had gathered a fortune from the asteroids and the moons of the outer planets, and had built a commercial empire outside the Plan of Man. Ron Donderevo had come to Earth as a student of space medicine at the great technological institute whe're Ryeland's father was a mathematics professor. While he was there, the Plan had annexed the last reluctant asteroids and moons which had remained outside. Donderevo's father had been defeated in a space fight, resisting the annexation. Donderevo himself had been placed in an iron collar, as a result of a student demonstration. Then one day he had disappeared. The legends said that he had somehow removed the collar, and escaped into space beyond the power of the Plan.
Ryeland remembered meeting him only once, in his own father's study. Ryeland was an eight-year-old Technicub. Donderevo was a grown man, a graduate student, romantic and mysterious with his knowledge of far planets and unknown space. But was that enough to account for the questions?
Ryeland had denied receiving any message from him, but the therapists were unconvinced.
In any event, whatever Donderevo might have been, Ryeland wasn't; his collar was on for good, or until the Machine relented.
Ryeland wondered crazily if he would hear the tiny click of the relay before the decapitation charge went off. Would there be any warning? Would he know?
Or would it all be over, literally, before he knew what was happening?
The only way to find out was to open a door and walk through it.
He pushed a door open, selecting it at random from the half-dozen in the corridor. Oporto broke away from him and, surprisingly spry, ran a few paces down the corridor, whirled and watched him with a face of tense anticipation.
Ryeland didn't stop to think it over, he walked in the door; and nothing happened.
Grinning, embarrassed, Oporto trailed after. "That one was all right, huh, Steve?"
Ryeland nodded; but there was no point in recrimination, although there were a lot of things he had in mind to say to the man who had urged him to take a chance—and then ducked out of the way of the possible consequences. But of more immediate interest was the room they were in.
It was about the size of Compartment 93 and empty. It was quietly furnished: A narrow bed, a table with a few flowers, a large mirror, an array of cabinets. A girl's room, Ryeland guessed, but from the relative modesty of its furnishings, not the room of a girl who was part of the higher brass on this de luxe subtrain. Possibly a secretary's room; perhaps a maid's. Whoever she was, she wasn't in.
But there was another door, leading to a flight of steps.
This time Ryeland didn't wait for Oporto. He caught his breath and held it, and when he had passed through and established once again that that particular door was not radar-trapped, he tasted salt and acid on his lip. He had bitten hard enough to draw blood.
But he was through.
The stairs were steep, but it was easy enough to help Oporto up them, with the plunging of the car taking pounds off their weight. They came out into another room, also empty and small.
But this one was sumptuously furnished. It seemed to be a woman's dressing room. It was white and gold, with ivory-backed brushes and combs on a little vanity table, before a gold-rimmed oval mirror. The stairs, Ryeland guessed, were for the use of the personal maid to whoever used this room.
And he heard someone singing.
Ryeland took a deep breath and called out: "Hello there! Do you hear me? I'm looking for a doctor!"
There wasn't any answer. The singing went on, a girl's voice, clear and attractive; she was singing for her own amusement. Every once in a while she would go back and repeat a phrase, pause, then start again aimlessly. And itfider the singing was a sort of musical cooing accompaniment.
Ryeland looked at Oporto, shrugged and pushed the door open.
They looked into a room that was green and silver. Its walls swam with fading, shifting green light. In the center was a round silver tub, six feet across, partly recessed into the floor. From the mouths of carved crystal dolphins tiny jets of perfumed warm water leaped and splashed, in a foam of bubbles, into the tub.
And above the thick blanket of foam protruded one knee, the head and the arms of the most beautiful girl Ryeland had ever seen.
"I—I beg your pardon," he said, awkward and disturbed.
She turned her head and looked at him calmly. On her wet, white shoulders were perched a pair of—birds? No. They were shaped like birds, like doves, but they were made of metal; their feathers were fine silver scales; their eyes were red-lit jewels. The metal things moved restlessly, as the little eyes poked hotly at Ryeland and Oporto. They cooed soft threats, and the rustle of their wings was like thin whispering bells.