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Came down to die, he thought. He said, "Peerssa, how do you expect me to die? Heart attack?"
No answer. The helmet was out there by his fingertips. He pulled it close and repeated the question.
"I think not," said Peerssa.
"Why? The State's wonderful medicines?"
"Yes, if one counts contraceptives as medicines. After the founding of the State, there was a generation in which no man or woman subject to inherited diseases might have children. The population fell by half. Famine ended-"
"Heart patients?" His father had died of a coronary! "Certainly the children of heart patients were not allowed to have children. Your genes are those of a criminal, but a healthy one."
"You arrogant sons of bitches. What about my children?"
"Their father was cancer-prone."
So they'd edited Corbell's genes from the human race... and it was three million years too late to do anything about it. Corbell got up, stretched against stiff muscles, and looked about him.
There were rings of couches around freely curved tables that still floated. The couches looked like humps in the rug.
"Nuts," said Corbell. "I could have slept on a couch." He pushed down on a floating table, finally putting his full weight on both hands. He'd lowered the table an inch. When he released it it bobbed up again.
Set within one wall was a row of booths. Corbell went to examine them. The rug-stuff flowed delightfully around his toes.
In each booth were rows of pushbuttons marked with squiggles. A dozen buttons, with the eight marks he'd seen already and four new ones. He pushed a button larger than the others (OPERATOR?) and got no response. Then he noticed the slot.
From the tool pouch of his empty pressure suit he spilled the items he had stolen from a smashed car. A seamless silver lipstick did nothing for him. Handkerchief: faint colors seemed to swirl in the material. Candy wrapper: the hard candy must have melted in untold years of rain; or it could have been drugs or medicine; or he could be wrong on every point. A hand-sized disk of clear plastic, its rim, also plastic, embedded with green ornamental squiggles.
That looked about right.
Which way was up? He tried it in one of the booths. It wouldn't fit in the slot with the markings up. With the markings down, it did. He pushed the larger button and the screen lit up.
Now what? The screens might be the phone books he needed. All he had to do was punch for INFORMATION, without reaching a nonexistent number, and read the answer, in squiggles.
Corbell was sweating. He hadn't thought this out. He lowered his hands and stepped out of the booth.
Well. No hurry. His two-days-plus air reserve was not being used. There was time to explore. And there, far at the back of the lobby, were the stairs he'd expected: broad, well designed by the principles he had learned in his first life, carpeted in cloud-rug. A fright of stairs going down into darkness.
He went back to tuck his helmet in the crook of his elbow and to retrieve the lens-shaped key/credit card. Then he started down the stairs, playing his helmet lamp ahead of him, humming.
With her head... tucked... underneath her arm, she wa-a-alks the Bloody Tower...
The stairs unexpectedly lurched into motion, throwing him back-ward. He sat up cursing. He hadn't hurt himself, but... get crippled here and it would be his death.
Light grew below him.
At first he thought this was the last gasp of an emergency power system. The light blossomed. When he reached bottom it was bright as daylight. He was in a vast open space with a high ceiling and alcoves he thought were shops: a place with the feel of a European train station, but with touches of sybaritic luxury more appropriate to a palace. There were fountains, and more of the ankle-enveloping rug swelling to rings of couches. Along one entire wall- "Peerssa! I've found a map!"
"Please describe it."
"It's two polar projections. Damn, I wish I could show you. The continents are about the way they were when I was in school. These maps must have been made before all that ocean water evaporated. There are lines across them, all from"-he checked-"this point, I think. Most of the lines are dark. Peerssa, the only lines still lighted run to Antarctica and the tip of Argentina and, uh, Alaska." Alaska had been twisted north. So had the tip of Siberia. "The lines run right through oceans, or under them."
He saw that what he'd taken for shops were alcoves with couches and food-dispensing walls. He tried one. When he inserted the plastic disk, a woman's voice spoke in tones of regret. He tried other slots and got the same reedy voice repeating the same incomprehensible words.
Next stop? Down there at the far end, that line of doors.
Thick doors, with slots for credit disks.
He went back for his pressure suit. The stairs carried him up. How the heck did they handle streams of commuters going both ways? He rode back down with the heavy suit draped over his shoulder.
There were lighted squiggles on the map, next to the lighted lines. He memorized the pattern that marked the route he wanted: not to the center of the thawed Antarctic continent, but to the nearer shore. Shores get colonized first.
The doors: Yes, there was the pattern of squiggles he wanted.
The disk: He found it, turned it blank side up and inserted it.
The door opened. He retrieved the disk, glanced at it and smiled. The squiggles had changed. He'd been docked the price of a ticket.
He faced glass within glass within concrete. The end of the subway car protruded slightly from its socket in the wall; it was a circle of glass eight feet across, with an oval glass door in it. Through the glass Corbell saw a cylindrical car lined with seats facing each other and padded in cloud-rug. The front of the car was metal.
He found a disk-sized slot in the glass door. He used it. The door opened. He entered, and pulled the disk out of the other side. The door closed.
"Here I am," he said into the helmet.
"Where?"
"In one of the subway cars. I don't know what to do next. Wait, I guess."
"You aren't going to use the instant-transportation booths?"
"No, I think that was a dead end. Maybe they were toys for the rich, too expensive to be practical, or too short-range. Why else would there be streets with cars on them? The streets were too good and there were too many cars."
"I wondered," Peerssa said. "Four digits in base eight gives only four thousand and ninety-six possible booth numbers. Too few."
"Yeah." There was room for about eight people, he decided, on benches of cloud-rug tinted at intervals in contrasting pastels to mark off the seats. He found another food dispenser, which spoke to him regretfully when he tried it. Behind a half-door that would barely hide one's torso, he found a toilet, again equipped with one of the glitteringly clean metal sponges. He tried that too.
His best guess was that the sponge had an instant-elsewhere unit in it. It cleaned itself miraculously.
There were arms for the benches. They had to be pulled out of a slot along the back and locked.
"There is increased power usage from your locus," said Peerssa. "Then something's happening." Corbell stretched out on the cloudrug bench to wait. No telling about departure time. He would wait twenty-four hours before he gave up. His stomach growled.