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This moving box was an open grid. Matt could watch his progress all the way down. Had he been acrophobic, he'd have been insane before the box stopped opposite the airlock.
The airlock was not much bigger than the moving box. Inside, it was all dark metal, with a dial-and-control panel in chipped blue plastic. Already Matt was heartily sick of blinking dials and metal walls. It was strange and discomforting to be surrounded by so much metal, and u
Set in the ceiling was something Matt had trouble recognizing. Something simple, almost familiar... ah. A ladder. A ladder ru
Sure. With the ship spi
"The luck of Matt Keller" had no time to work. Matt dodged back into the airlock. He heard a patter of mercybullets, like gravel on metal. In a moment the man would be around the corner, firing.
Matt yelled the only thing he could think of. "Stop! It's me!"
The guard was around in the same instant. But he didn't fire yet... and he didn't fire yet... and presently he turned and went, muttering a surly apology. Matt wondered whom he'd been taken for. It wouldn't matter; the man had already forgotten him.
Matt chose to follow him instead of turning the other way. It seemed to him that if a guard saw two men approach, and ignored one and recognized the other, he wouldn't shoot--no matter how trigger-happy he was.
The corridor was narrow, and it curved to the left. Floor and ceiling were green. The left-hand wall was white, set with uncomfortably bright lights; the wall on the right was black, with a roughened rubbery surface, obviously designed as a floor. Worse yet, the doors were all trapdoors leading down into the floor and up into the ceiling. Most of the doors in the floor were closed and covered with walkways. Most of the ceiling doors were open, and ladders led up into these. All the ladders and walkways looked old and crude, colony-built, and all were riveted into place.
It was eerie. Everything was on its side. Walking through this place was like defying gravity.
Matt heard sounds and voices from some of the rooms above. They told him nothing. He couldn't see what was happening above him, and he didn't try. He was listening for Castro's voice.
If he could get the Head to the fusion-drive controls-wherever they were-then he could threaten to blow up the Planck. Castro had held out under threat of physical pain, but how would he react to a threat to Alpha Plateau?
And all Matt wanted was to free one prisoner.
... That was Castro's voice. Coming not from the ceiling but from underfoot, from a closed door. Matt bent over the walkway across it and tried the handle. Locked.
Knock? But all of Implementation was on edge tonight, ready to shoot at anything. Under such circumstances Matt could be unconscious and falling long seconds before a gunman could lose interest in him.
No way to steal a key, to identify the right key. And he couldn't stay here forever.
If only Laney were here now.
A voice. Polly jerked to attention--except that she felt no jerk; she did not know if she had moved or not.
A voice. For some timeless interval she had existed with no sensation at all. There were pictures in her memory and games she could play in her mind, and for a time there had been sleep. Some friend had shot her full of mercy-bullets. She remembered the sting, vividly. But she'd wakened. Mental games had failed; she couldn't concentrate. She had begun to doubt the reality of her memories. Friends' faces were blurred. She had clung to the memory of Jay Hood, his sharp-edged, scholarly face, easy to remember. Jay. For two years they had been little more than close friends. But in recent hours she had loved him hopelessly; his was the only visual image that would come clear to her, except for a hated face, wide and expressionless, decorated with a bright snowy moustache: the face of the enemy. But she was trying to make Jay come too clear, to give him texture, expression, meaning. He had blurred, she had reached to bring him back, he had blurred more...
A voice. It had her complete attention.
"Polly," it said, "you must trust me."
She wanted to answer, to express her gratitude, to tell the voice to keep talking, to beg it to let her out. She was voiceless.
"I would like to free you, to bring you back to the world of sense and touch and smell," said the voice. Gently, sympathetically, regretfully, it added, "I ca
A voice had become the voice, familiar, wholly reassuring. Suddenly she placed it.
"Harry Kane and Jayhawk Hood. They won't let me free you" Castro's voice. She wanted to scream-"because you failed in your mission. You were to find out about ramrobot number one-forty-three. You failed."
Liar! Liar! I didn't fail! She wanted to scream out the truth, all of the truth. At the same time she knew that that was Castro's aim. But she hadn't talked in so long!
"Are you trying to tell me something? Perhaps I can persuade Harry and Jayhawk to let me free your mouth Would you like that?"
I'd love that, Polly thought. I'd tell all the secrets of your ancestry. Something within her was still rational. The sleep, that was what had done it. How long had she been here? Not years, not even days; she would have been thirsty. Unless they'd given her water intravenously. But however long it had been, she'd slept for some part of the time. Castro didn't know about the mercy-bullets. He'd come hours early.
Where was the voice?
All was silent. Faintly she could hear her pulse beating in her carotid arteries; but as she grasped for the sound, it too was gone.
Where was Castro? Leaving her to rot?
Speak!
Speak to me!
The Planck was big, but its lifesystem occupied less than a third of its volume: three rings of pressurized compartments between the cargo holds above and the water fuel tanks and fission-driven landing motors below. Much cargo had been needed to set up a self-sufficient colony. Much fuel had been needed to land the Planck: trying to land on the controlled hydrogen bomb of the fusion drive would have been like landing a blowtorch on a featherbed.
So the lifesystem was not large. But neither was it cramped, since the compartments aft of the corridor had been designed for the comfort of just three growing families.
That which was now Jesus Pietro's interrogation room had once been a living room, with sofas, a cardtable, a coffeetable, a reader screen co
Now, upended, the room was merely tall. Halfway up the walls were the doors which had led to other parts of the apartment. The door to the corridor had become a trapdoor, and the door just under it, a closet to hold spacesuits in case of emergency, could now be reached only from the ladder. In the crescent of floor space at the bottom of the room were a long, heavy box, two guards in chairs, an empty chair, and Jesus Pietro Castro, closing the padded lip of the speaking tube at one corner of the box.
"Give her ten minutes to think it over," he said. He glanced at his watch, noted the time.