A World Out of Time

"Well, fine." Corbell switched off the stag movie and made for the booth.

The second button down created a panel of eight buttons beside the smaller panel.

He studied it. The symbols on those eight buttons might be letters or numbers. He reached, then drew back. "I'm afraid of it."

"Of what?"

"Of this panel in the office. See, there are four white buttons in all the booths. I think that's an intercom, a closed circuit; you couldn't get into it except from the office, or by breaking in the way we did. But there are eight buttons with squiggles on them here in the office.

I think they must be more like a telephone dial, and there's a private number that lets you into the office."

"Reasonable."

"Well, what happens when you dial a phone number at random?"

"In my time there was a recorded voice to tell you you had made a mistake."

"Yeah, we had that too. But in this instant transportation setup you might be sent nowhere! Poof!"

"That would be poor design. Can you find a telephone directory?" There was nothing like that in the booth. Corbell opened the door. Rain and howling wind were blowing into the office. Fat drops plated themselves across his faceplate. He walked around the desk, waited a minute for the water to run off the glass, then began puffing at desk drawers. They didn't want to open. He pried one open and found it half full of gray-green mold. An abandoned apple?

Machines were set into the desktop. Telephone, picture-phone, computer link, what? No telling now. Time and rain had destroyed them.

"I'll have to try pushing buttons at random," he told Peerssa.

"Good luck."

"Why did you say that?"

"To be polite."

Corbell examined the array of eight buttons by the light from his helmet. The booth could kill him so fast he'd never know it. Punch at random? He could do better than that. He chose a button-the fifth, counting across and down, whose symbol looked like an upside-down L. A gallows. He pushed it once, pause, twice, pause, thrice- Four did it. Suddenly there was indirect lighting around the rim of the ceiling.

The door wouldn't open.

A

"You have changed position twice," Peerssa informed him.

This time the door opened.

There were disintegrating skeletons in identical... uniforms? Loose garments, short pants, sleeveless shirts with rolls of fabric at the shoulders. Under the dust the garments looked new, in bright scarlet with black markings. The bones inside were crumbled with age, but they could not have been big men. Five feet tall or thereabouts. Corbell moved among them looking for bullet wounds. No holes in the garments or the skulls... but from the way they sprawled they seemed to have died in a firefight, and they seemed to be human.

He found desks and what looked like computer terminals. A thick sliding door had been melted out of the wall. Beyond it were cells. Their gridwork doors were decoratively lacy, and different on each cell; but they were locked, and there were more skeletons in the cells.

"Police station," he reported to Peerssa. "I was trying for a restaurant. I pushed the same button four times." He heard irritation in his voice. Getting tired? "See, what I didn't want was a number that went nowhere. The numbers the restaurants fight for are the ones that are easiest to remember. At least they used to be."

"The State restricts those numbers to important municipal functions: police stations, hospitals, ombudsmen-"

Corbell stepped through another, larger melted door. Doors beyond retracted before him, and he stepped into a waterfall of rain. He'd finally made it outside. He couldn't see much. A city street.

and occasional heaps of clothing peeking through the mud, skimpy one-piece shorts-and-undershirt garments in every pattern and color save scarlet.

"I'll have to try the other repeating numbers," he said without moving.

"I think it is safe. If you find a number not in use, you will not go nowhere."

"You're willing to risk that, huh?" He still hadn't moved. The rain ran down his faceplate and drummed on his helmet.

"There is an alternative. I have probed the city with my senses. There is hollow space, a system of tu

"What's the point of... ? You think it's a subway system? They'd have stopped using it when they invented the booths."

"If they no longer used the subway cars, they may have kept the buildings as a transportation nexus. Economy."

V

He walked through pelting rain on packed dirt covered by thin mud. It sucked at his boots. He couldn't afford the energy that cost him. He was already too tired.

The streets and buildings were largely intact. He found no more scenes of mass death.

There was a bubble, half glass and half metal, like a Christmas tree ornament twelve feet across. It had smashed against the side of a building and was half full of rainwater. Corbell looked inside. He found spongy upholstery, and a pair of seats. One was occupied. Mud with lumps of bone in it oozed from within a yellow shorts-and-undershirt garment. Corbell forced himself to search the big patch pockets. What he found, he stowed in his tool pouch. He could examine it later.

He walked on.

Later there was an intact bubble, abandoned. It looked intact; the brightwork in the interior gleamed. He tried to start it, but nothing he tried seemed to work. He gave up and went on.

Now there was a tremendous empty lot to one side, with wind weathered stumps of trees and traces of curving paths. A park? To his other side was a wall that went up and up, curving away from view. It curved away from before and behind him too, so that he had no idea how high it was or how wide.

In the mists beyond the office picture window he had thought to trace the outlines of a cube bigger than belief. So: It had been real.

Streets. Why streets? And cars? Corbell began to suspect what he would find at the transportation nexus.

"You are over the hollow space," said Peerssa.

"That's good. I'm tired." Corbell looked around him. Mummified park to the left, wall to the right. Ahead... the wall turned to glass.

An entire wall of glass doors. He pushed through into gloom lit by his helmet lamp.

The ceiling gave no sense of distance: only of random colors that changed with his position. The place was wide. His beam got lost in it. He glanced down at another, confusing light: the glow of dials at his chin.

The temperature was down to 20 C.

"Air-conditioned," he said.

"Good. Your suit batteries will last longer."

"There could be anything in this place," he argued with himself. He opened his faceplate. No heat. Sniffed: a touch of staleness, that was all. "I've got to get out of this suit. I'm tired."

"Drink from the syrup nipple."

He laughed; he'd forgotten it was there. He sucked until his belly felt less empty. Peerssa was right: Half of his tiredness had been hunger.

He pulled himself out of the rest of the suit.

Stepping into the rug was a sudden, thrilling shock. It might be the same as the rotted rug in the office, but it was dry, intact, and ankle-deep. Like walking on a cloud. It felt damned expensive, but there must have been an acre of it here in the foyer of a public building.

"Going to sleep," he told the helmet. He sprawled out in the cloud of carpet and let it close around him.

VI

Gray dawn. He wriggled a little in the luxury of the rug. The ceiling was thousands of shades of color in what seemed to be whorl patterns; you could go crazy staring into it and never know how far away it was. He closed his eyes and dozed again.