A World Out of Time

I will wait until I am sure you are dead, Peerssa had said. Then I will search other systems for the State.

He would have to bluff. "If he's still in equatorial orbit, we'll have to call from my landing craft." He had to explain equatorial orbits to her by drawing in the dust on the desk. Then she understood.

She said, "We must use the tu

The "phone booth" was too small. Mirelly-Lyra clearly did not trust Corbell that close to her. She held him covered while she drew a symbol in the dust: the crooked pi. "Push this key four times," she said. "Then wait for me. You ca

He nodded. She watched him through the door. He paused to note that four of the eight symbols on the keyboard matched the four he'd seen over the entrance.

He pushed the crooked pi four times.

Zap, he was elsewhere. The world beyond the door snapped into another shape. Vast empty space, rings of couches humping from the floor: Here was another intercontinental subway terminal. Corbell fumbled in the belt pouch of his pressure suit, found a circle shape. His hands were trembling violently. Clear plastic disk: right. With both hands he guided it into the coin slot. He stabbed at the compressed hourglass symbol, 4 4 4 4.

Nothing at all happened. The "phone booth" in the Four City Police Station must be out of order.

Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar stepped into view from another booth and looked about her, eyes narrowed and jaw thrust forward. She saw him, still in the booth with the door closed.

He jabbed frantically at the crossed commas. Remorse, terror, guilt, death-wish flashed in his brain and were gone, and so was the light. In blackness he rammed his shoulder against the door and ran blindly out into...

Corridors... corridors with pale-green walls and glowing-white ceilings. Wide doors with no knobs, only small plates of golden metal that might have been electromagnetic key plates. He turned right, left, right, and stopped, face to a wall, sucking air. Fatigue soaked into his legs like an acid solvent.

Would she know how to trace his "call"? He couldn't know. He ran.

A bigger door at the end of the corridor dropped open to reveal stairs. One long flight ran diagonally between a sheer wall and the tinted glass-mosaic face of the building, with doors at landings along the flight. He froze in fear. If she was out there, she'd see him!

Then he remembered. They'd passed a building with this pattern on its face. From the outside it was a mirror.

He was (he counted) three stories up. He still didn't know what kind of place this was; but it must be some kind of public service facility.

All right. By the time she got here, if she ran as he'd been ru

He stopped, resting, listening.

No sound.

He walked backward down the stairs, stepping in his own footprints as best he could. When the fourth-floor door dropped, he threw his helmet through, then his pressure suit. Then he jumped for it.

He'd left a pair of sloppy footprints, but no other tracks. And now he was on cloud-rug. He stooped to brush away two dusty footprints, picked up his suit and helmet and staggered on.

He couldn't seem to get enough air.

Chapter FIVE: STEALING YOUTH

I

He staggered through clean, geometric, empty, sound-deadening corridors. Doors did not drop for him. Twice he tried holding his plastic disk against what he thought were entrance plates. It was all he could think of, and it didn't work. Whatever this place was, he-or the dead man Corbell had robbed-was not authorized to pass these doors.

The pressure suit became too heavy for him. He dropped it.

He talked to the helmet, but it didn't answer. Where the hell was Peerssa?

Corbell had freed Peerssa from all orders past and future. Corbell had gone unprotected into an unknown environment; had later dropped out of communication. Jaybee CORBELL Mark II: missing, presumed dead. By now Peerssa could be rounding the sun on his way to some nearby star. Searching for the State.

Peerssa's interstellar laser beam could have burned the old woman down as she crossed a street. But Corbell's computer had abandoned him... and Corbell hurled the helmet viciously into the cloud-rug, but not as hard as he wanted, because his hands were still bound. The blind faceplate stared after him as he went on.

His legs were starting to cramp.

The clean air was turning musty with the old smell of something truly dead when Corbell came at last to an open door. He thought the mechanism had failed... and then he saw why. A small hole had been burned through the gold plate.

Beyond the doorway was cruder damage and a richer smell.

It had been a surgery, he guessed. At least, that looked like an operating table with machinery suspended above it, and the machinery included scalpels on jointed arms.

There were crumbled brown skeletons. One, naked, lay in a pool of dust on the table. Two others sprawled against a wall. Their stained and damaged uniforms were in better shape than the bones within. The cloth bore charred slashes that continued into the bones, as if men had been hacked by a white-hot sword. These men had been man-sized, Corbell's size.

The wall behind the desk had a hole in it big enough to drive a car through. Bombs?

Corbell heaved himself up on the table with the skeleton. He rubbed the bandages against a scalpel edge... and behold! His wrists were free.

Now he moved to the great gap in the wall. He was getting his breath back, but his heartbeat was fast and fluttery. What he wanted most was a chance to lie down and rest... until he looked down into the vault.

It was two stories high and windowless. To the left, a thick circle of metal almost the height of the wall, with a stylized ship's wheel set in it. It looked for all the world like a bank-vault door. There were guard posts: glass cubicles set just below the ceiling, and in the cubicles were skeletons armed with things like spotlights with rifle butts.

A bank vault seemed out of place in a hospital.

There were shelves on all three walls, floor to ceiling. The few items still on the shelves were not gold bars. They were bottles. The floor, ten feet below Corbell, was covered with broken glass.

There was a hall-melted metal thing, an animated dishwasher very like the machine that had attacked Corbell and Peerssa as burglars. Other machinery looked intact. There was an instrument console that might have been (given the hospital motif) diagnostic equipment. There was a matched pair of transparent "phone booths," glass cylinders with rounded tops. Corbell saw these and lusted.

The invaders had brought a ladder. He climbed down carefully, treating himself as fragile. Four skeletons at the bottom showed that the invaders had not had things all their own way. He stepped carefully among the bones. As a hospital the place made a good crypt- better than most, in fact. Cool. Clean. No insects, no scavengers, no fungus.

But it wasn't death Corbell was ru

The lights were still on in the vault. Indicator lights glowed on the console. With luck the booths would work, too. He stepped into one and looked for a dial.

No dial, just a button set in a slender post. No choice about where he was going. Corbell wondered if the Norn would be waiting at the other end. He made himself push the button anyway.