But then there was nowhere to move. They were in the subtrain station, the great cold, vaulted shed where the enormous electron-flow-driven globes waited to carry their passengers through tunnels in the earth, across a continent or under a sea. But no globe was moving.
They brought Gann to a platform, ten security guards forming the detail that surrounded him; then they waited. Boysie Gann could see that the station was a military base, because of the armored guard boxes beside the troughs, and because of the black Technicorps uniforms on everyone. That was understandable enough; this was the depot that served the Planner himself, the one nearest his tunneled-out mountain retreat. But what was not understandable was that there were neither arrivals nor departures.
Behind him, a track lock closed with a wheeze of leaking air. A Togetherness girl froze her automatic smile as she caught sight of his collar, and hurried past. The guards in their radar horns gazed vacantly after her.
"Look," said Boysie Gann, "what's the matter? What are we waiting for?"
"Shut up, you," growled a Machine Sergeant of the guards. But he had a worried look. One of his men said something to him; the sergeant replied in an undertone. All Gann could catch was: . . trouble in the tunnels somewhere. Now shut up. When they're ready for us, we'll know."
The great forty-foot bubbles waited silently in their passage cradles, and Boysie Gann stood regarding them. Wherever he was going, it was probably somewhere far away. Short-haul trips were seldom by way of the subtrains. The great atomic drills of the Plan had tunneled straight-line passages from all major centers to all others, sometimes relayed, sometimes piercing nearly through the nickel-iron core of the Earth itself in a single non-stop thrust from Sidney, say, to Calcutta. The great freight and passenger globes reached speeds so great that Coriolis force was their principal adversary; the electrostatic hoops that banded the evacuated tunnels were double and triple strength on the side against which the earth's' rotation tended to throw the spheres. Via the sub-trains, no point on Earth was more than a few hours away from any other ...
Boysie Gann became aware of a confused mutter of excitement, and focused his eyes on what was going on in the subtrain shed. A great dull freightsphere was sliding gently into the station, emerging from the mouth of a belt-ringed tunnel.
"About time they got 'em going again," grumbled the Machine Sergeant. "All right, let's move out. They'll be letting us board now."
The sergeant was right. Within ten minutes they were in a subtrain globe, settling down in a passenger compartment. But there was a wait of nearly a quarter of an hour more before Boysie Gann felt the gentle lurch that meant they had begun to move.
His guards were more relaxed, now that they were in the subtrain. Gann could not very well escape them now, not when there was nowhere to go but the interior of a forty-foot sphere, with nothing outside but great electrostatic hoops in an airless tunnel, whizzing by at speeds of thousands of miles an hour. A couple of the guards disappeared, came back with self-satisfied smiles, and relieved the others. Clearly there was a Togetherness canteen on the globe. Even the radar-horned sergeant looked somehow less inimical, more like a human being.
Above all things, Gann wished he knew what had happened to Sister Delta Four. There had been a moment there, while the pyropods were attacking, when she had seemed less like a cold-hearted servant of the Machine and more like the girl he had kissed at Playa Blanca. He dreamed of getting her back—of somehow winning favor with the Machine and receiving the great reward of Julie Martinet's release . . .
It was only a dream. Considering his position now, it was an insane one.
Gann realized that he should be devoting every second's thought he could to planning—to trying to understand what had put him in this position, and what he could do. But it seemed quite hopeless. He had the giddy sensation that the universe had gone mad. From that first moment on Polaris Station, when he had followed Machine Colonel Zafar down to the methane snowball, events had carried him helplessly along; they made no sense to him, but there was nothing he could do to help interpret them. Their incomprehensibility was intrinsic. It was not that he was lacking in comprehension, it was that the things which had happened were not to be understood in the sane, sensible terms of life under the Plan of Man. . . .
He felt a giddy sensation again, and this time it was not in his mind.
Boysie Gann leaped to his feet in alarm. He could not help thinking of the strange queasiness that had preceded his twenty-billion-mile drop into the Planning Machine's catacombs ... the same sensation, just before the pyropods struck . . .
But this was not the same thing at all. The lurching, twisting sensation he felt was simply explained. The subtrain car had come to a stop. It was hanging now, spinning slowly, between the charged hoops of its airless tunnel.
If Gann had been in any doubt, the cries from outside his room, the shouts of guards within, removed that doubt quickly. Everyone on the subtrain globe seemed to be shouting at once. "What's the matter?" "We've stopped!" "Great Plan, we're a couple of hundred miles down! The temperature—" "Help me! Let me out of here!" The voices were a confused babble, but they all had in common the warning knife edge of panic. There was terror on that subtrain car—terror that could not be calmed with words, for its base was all too real.
The Machine Sergeant comprehended the situation at once. With a jerk of his radar-horned head he bawled at his squad: "Come on, outside! Those sheep'll stampede if we don't keep 'em in line!"
Boysie Gann was left alone. Outside he could hear the Technicorps guards shouting orders at the terrified travelers on the subtrain. No one seemed to know what had happened. They had stopped; that was all. Hundreds of miles below the surface of the earth, the rock outside hot enough to melt aluminum, the pressure great enough to crush diamonds into dust if the electrostatic hoops ever faltered—they were stopped. Whatever it was that had disrupted the service before they left the station was probably disrupting it again.
The only difference was that now they were where no help could ever reach them, where if the fields in the hoops failed they would be dead in the least fraction of a second—where even if the field maintained itself they would be dead in a few days of asphyxiation, unless they could move.
Then, abruptly, there was another lurch, and they were moving again.
As the great forty-foot sphere gathered speed and stability, Boysie Gann became aware that he had been hardly breathing. There was a great cry of thanksgiving from the people outside his room. One by one his guards came back, chattering and laughing, seeming almost human. They did not include him in their conversation, but they did not go out of their way to keep him out. One of them even disappeared for a few minutes, then came back with a tray of drinks from the Togetherness canteen . . .
And then the.great globe shook again. Shook—crashed into something that shrieked of destroyed metal—slammed to a jolting, smashing stop. Gann and the guards tumbled across the room, hurled against the wall like thrown gravel.
Boysie Gann heard screams and a rending sound of the metal of the great sphere being crushed. "We've had it!" someone shrieked. "The fields have failed!" And as he went deep into black oblivion (not yet feeling pain but knowing that he was bleeding; he had struck the wall too hard to get up and walk away), Gann had time for one last thought: He's right, thought Gann; this is the end.
When, some indeterminate time later, he opened his eyes and found himself still alive, he was almost disappointed. Gann was in an emergency hospital. Stiff white bandages covered part of his eyes; his head ached as if a corps of drummers were using it for practice; he could see, under the shadow of the bandages, that one arm was encased in a balloon-cast.