Ewen’s fingers scrabbled wildly at the panel set into the machine’s body. It flew open. The android changed its tactics. It whirled and stopped, and repeated the manoeuvre but with random and violent changes in rhythm. The demented gyrations hurled Ewen backwards onto a table. The android’s PD weapon started spraying indiscriminate fire. Ewen snatched up a chair as a shield and thrust it at the android. More by luck than good timing, the chair leg plunged into the opening in the android’s body. There was a dull bang of high power shorting to earth followed by a blinding shower of white sparks and globs of molten metal. The chair leg had melted. Ewen shifted the weapon in his hands and plunged another leg into the panel. There was a much weaker splatter of sparks, and the battle was over. The machine lost lift and smashed down hard on its levitation shoe. Jenine managed to jump clear as it toppled. A table buckled under the machine’s weight.
The wreckage that had been the MANIX crashed to the floor and lay still. Two turns of the bright red rope were knotted below its broken sensors like a garrotte.
Ewen and Jenine stood over their vanquished foe. They stared at each and the wrecked machine, gradually getting over the shock of the encounter. Slowly their haggard expressions changed to grins of triumph.
“Well,” said Jenine, reaching for Ewen’s hand for reassurance. “If we can beat that, we can beat anything. The rope idea was clever.”
Although Ewen had no proof that Jenine’s tampering with the vat and the appearance of the android were related, he secured a solemn promise from her that there would be no more prying and playing about with machinery without consultation and careful deliberation.
They packed the holdall and left the restaurant. Jenine had the coils of rope draped around her shoulders and was clutching a flask which she had found and filled with the soup. Their experience with the MANIX had taught them to exercise even greater caution. They checked the corridor before emerging and stopped several times to listen intently for the faint whirring that would suggest that the aggressive android had friends. They climbed several levels without incident. Despite their slow progress, Ewen was keen to go as high as possible but Jenine begged him to consider resting for the night.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” she reasoned. “If we exhaust ourselves any further, we’ll only make mistakes. We’ve had a long day and my legs are dropping off.”
Ewen conceded that Jenine was right but insisted that they press on. His resolve weakened when they reached a tempting sign that read:
DEEP NOVA SHELTER C. LEVEL 09. EXECUTIVE ACCOMMODATION. BLUE BADGES ONLY PERMITTED ON THIS LEVEL.
The first five doors were locked. The sixth opened into a large, comfortably-furnished apartment. The lights came on automatically when they entered. Jenine shut the discharge tube off.
Ewen’s gaze took in the softly illuminated ceiling, the deep-pile carpet, the open door to a shower room, and the large, inviting bed. “Large enough for you?”
Jenine smiled and nodded.
“I don’t like the way the lights came on,” Ewen observed. “They came on automatically in that eating place, and look at the trouble we had.”
Jenine ignored him. She experimented with the wall switches and discovered that the lights could be controlled at will. She also discovered that the door could be locked on the inside. There was a small table with a working hot plate set into its centre similar to the hot plate in the conference room. She tipped some of the vegetable soup into a glass jug and heated it. A search of a tiny room off the main living proved fruitful. She set the bowls and spoons on the table. Ewen tried to unpack the datapad but Jenine took it from him and returned it to the holdall. She advised him in fairly blunt terms that they were going to shower, eat and sleep, and possibly make love provided he stopped complaining about her 400 portions of vegetable soup, but in any event, do no more exploring until they had rested.
7.
That night Ewen lay awake thinking about the blue dome and how close it must be now. Going over the incidents of that turbulent day and worrying about the information on his datapad not being up-to-date prevented him from sleeping. He slipped carefully from the bed to avoid waking Jenine, and set the room lighting to low. Working from memory, he revised the datapad’s sketch plans. He checked the proximity of the strange nothingness on the seismographs and calculated that climbing the remaining nine levels tomorrow would take them two-thirds of the way to where the nothingness began. He looked around the room.
So what was this huge complex they had penetrated?
Why was it deserted? Why wasn’t it shown on the maps of Arama? What was a nova? What was so terrible about it that so many people had to shelter from it? What people? And why had an android tried to kill them?
So many unanswered questions.
His thoughts turned to the door in the chord-metro tunnel that had led them into this remarkable place. The door had been a mass of rust and had never been opened in… Years? Centuries? It was then that he realised that he had overlooked something so fundamentally obvious that he roundly castigated himself for his blindness and stupidity. The door! It held an all-important clue and he hadn’t even bothered to look. He tried to picture the locking mechanism. The counterbalance was clear enough - he could remember virtually every detail of the lever system. But what of the steel locking tongues? How had they engaged in their slots? The question assumed such importance that he considered waking Jenine. But looking at her sweet face, serene in sleep, with her arm thrown casually across his side of the bed, made him realise that he couldn’t bring himself to disturb her.
He was about to slip back into bed when he heard a faint noise in the corridor. He pressed his ear to the door and wished that he had thought to pack an audio amplifier when he and Jenine had fled from the Centre.
The noise sounded like a machine trundling along the corridor. Unlike the mag-lev monster that had attacked them in the eating centre, this was a wheeled machine. Another machine rumbled by, heavier than the first one.
Ewen remained listening for several minutes until the noises sounded some way off. He set the discharge tube to a low level and cautiously opened the door. The tube wasn’t needed: the corridor was flooded with light. Halfway along the passage a curious machine, low and humped, was working its way industriously along the passageway. It was armed with rotary brushes and suction tubes which it used to scour corners and crevices. No wonder all the corridors were so clean. Ewen’s smile faded when the machine seemed to sense his presence. Unlike the killer android, this robot could see, hence the lights. It did a smart about turn and trundled determinedly towards him, rotary brushes whirring and suction appliances hissing menacingly. Ewen stepped back smartly into the apartment and locked the door. The cleaning android stopped outside and snuffled noisily around the threshold with its cleaning tools as though Ewen had left traces of himself behind that it found particularly offensive. After a minute it lost interest and trundled away.
The machine puzzled Ewen. In Arama people were employed as cleaners. The use of robots was limited to where the work was difficult or dangerous. Why were there no people in this place?
He slipped back into bed beside Jenine. The pleasure he derived from her closeness and warmth soon banished the worrying questions from his mind, and he slept.
8.
The picture on Inman’s screen was from the camera on a service android that had entered the restaurant. He sat before his monitor. His grey eyes were expressionless as he contemplated the wrecked MANIX. He drummed his fingers while considering his options, such as they were.
“The damage to the MANIX is commiserate with a PD weapon fired at point blank range through its inspection panel,” said the Guardian of Destiny computer.
Inman said nothing. So Ewen Solant and his companion had got through the door. The problem wasn’t that the couple had escaped from Arama. Such escapes, though rare, had happened before and had always been dealt with in the approved manner. What was different about this escape was that Ewe
n Solant and his companion had entered a deep nova shelter. It had never happened before.
“And this is Door CM12 near Keltro,” said the computer.
The picture changed to the room which Ewen and Jenine had climbed into after their escape from the chord-metro tunnel. The image panned slowly.
“As you can see,” the computer continued, “there is evidence of disturbance.”
“I checked the door on the metro side,” said Inman curtly. “It was secure. They could not have got through it unless a service android had left it open.”
“None of them are programmed to touch the door,” the computer replied. “And yet there is clear evidence that the fugitives passed through this area. They are the first to escape by this route. There is a low probability that the heavy cannon caused a momentary distortion of the door and its frame that was sufficient to spring the door open.”
“Do you know where they are now?” Inman demanded.
“A maintenance unit has reported an anomaly in a Level Zero Nine executive suite.”
“How long will it take to transfer another MANIX?”
“Two hours. But the intruders are now aware of their weaknesses-”
“I know that!” Inman snapped. He checked himself. He was in danger of getting angry with a machine.
“There is an available option to stop them,” said the computer. “And that is to send a police squad into the shelter complex.”
Inman dismissed the suggestion out of hand. The enthusiasm of the police for shoot-outs could result in serious damage to the shelter.
“Or a squad made up of crewmen,” the computer ventured.
That too met with scathing rejection. Inman was not prepared to expose precious project personnel to the risk of facing an armed couple in the shelter. The lives of skilled men and women measured against the lives of two Aramans or Armageddonists? The equation didn’t balance.
The Guardian of Destiny computer considered this. It agreed and suggested: “They have reached Level 9. They seem determined to go even higher. Therefore there is only one other option left.”
“Show me.”
The information on the screen changed. Inman leaned forward and examined the map that the computer had produced. He pressed his bloodless lips together and decided, with some reluctance, that the computer was right.
9.
Ewen was deaf to Jenine’s protestations that it was insane to return to the lowest level. He insisted that he had to see the door that they had come through came through.
“But why?” Jenine had demanded.
“To see if it’s designed to automatically lock when it’s shut from the outside.”
“Is it important?”
“Yes,” Ewen replied, picking up the restaurant’s coiled rope. “If it automatically locks when it’s shut on the outside, it’s possible that this place is really part of Arama that’s been forgotten. But if the door can only be closed from the inside, then the people that built this complex, or their descendants, may still be in here somewhere. If they’re not, then there has to be another way out. Lateral thinking.”
Jenine gave in. They retraced their footsteps down through the levels to the lowest level and the flight of stairs that had so surprised them the previous day. Ewen turned up the discharge tube’s brightness when they entered the steel-lined room that they had climbed into.
“Something’s different,” Ewen muttered, dropping the holdall and the rope on the floor.
“Looks the same to me,” said Jenine. She went forward and lifted the hatch.
“Can’t you see what’s missing!”
Jenine glanced around the room. “No.”
“The length of steel conduit we climbed up! I put it against that wall and now it’s gone!”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I remember thinking that we might need it in case we had to return this way.”
They knelt by the open hatch and peered down into the switch room where they had huddled together, waiting for the final plasma assault on the steel door that had never come. The light fell on the contactor housing that they had stood on. Beside that was the length of conduit they had used to climb out of the switch room. It was in exactly the same place, but with its end unbent.
Jenine broke the silence that followed their discovery. “I’m tempted to say that maybe we dreamed it all.” She tried to sound flippant but there was no mistaking the strained note in her voice.
Ewen glanced around the room. He lashed the end of the rope to a substantial-looking wall bracket and climbed down into the switch room. Jenine held the discharge tube through the hatch for him while he inspected the conduit without touching it. There was no doubt that it was lying in precisely the same position as yesterday. He picked it up. As near as he could judge, it was exactly the same length as the old piece whose end he had bent to form a cranked end. He glanced up, caught Jenine’s eye and shook his head in bewilderment.
“It looks like a new length of pipe,” he said.
“See if there’s any scratch marks on the door where we bent the pipe,” Jenine suggested.
Ewen looked at door’s locking mechanism and confirmed that around the strongest lever were unmistakable fresh marks from their exertions of the previous day. He checked the way the locking tongues fitted into their slots - the reason for this return visit. The design of the door was such that it was not self-locking when closed from the chord-metro tunnel side: to lock the door meant that it had to be closed from the inside.
It meant that there was another way out of this place.
It also meant that, perhaps, they were not alone.
10.
The restaurant was like the switch room: everything had been restored. The tables and chairs were once again in neat rows. There was even a new rope threaded through the stanchions that marked off the self-service lane. None of the tabletops had burn marks from the MANIX’s PD weapon. Of the MANIX itself, there was no sign although Jenine did find traces of burn marks on the floor where the android had blazed away when Ewen had pounced on it.
Just being in the place where they had been attacked made them both edgy. Jenine agreed that there was no point in examining the vat in which she had cooked 400 portions of vegetable soup. They were glad to get out of the place.
They reached Level 9, where they had spent the night, and continued up to Level 1.
At Level 1 there were no more stairs.
“Let’s rest,” Jenine pleaded. “My legs are dropping off.”
“There’s nothing for it but to try the elevator,” Ewen declared.
They moved to elevator doors. Jenine sat on the floor and watched Ewen. No matter how much he punched the controls, sometimes trying random sequences, the wide, concertina-like doors remained firmly closed. He unpacked some tools and unscrewed the touch control’s escutcheon plate with the idea of overriding the switches. A few tests established that there was no GoD power supply to the system.
The discharge tube that they had been using ever since they had entered the shelter complex suddenly expired. Jenine dug into the holdall and started the second tube. They were now down to one spare. When that was exhausted, they would be condemned to eternal darkness unless they spent the rest of their days in the executive suite on Level 9.
“We’ll have to check every door,” said Ewen grimly. “There’s got to be a way up.”
It was easier said than done. The very first door opened into a huge warehouse whose racks were laden with bedding packs and household utensil kits. Doors from this main warehouse gallery opened into smaller storerooms crammed with electrical spares and appliances, all sealed in tough, airtight bags. It took thirty-minutes to search the entire warehouse complex. By the time they had finished checking another warehouse that seemed to consist of nothing but endless shelves of vacuum-packed refrigeration equipment and associated spares, they were footsore and depressed. An hour later they re-emerged into the corridor from the third warehouse gallery,
having conducted a fruitless search among rows and rows of bulk chemical supplies in giant storage bins.
They rested in the corridor, sitting on the floor with their backs propped against the wall opposite the elevator doors. Ewen tried again to open them but the attempt proved fruitless. It infuriated him to have to admit defeat. They debated whether they should speed up the search by splitting up.
“It means burning two discharge tubes at once,” Jenine pointed out. “And what if another of those androids turns up? Neither of us could cope with it by ourselves.”
“The other point,” said Ewen, “is that for all we know, the exit could be from a lower level. There’s hundreds of places lower down that we’ve only given a cursory check.”
At that moment something wholly unexpected happened.
The elevator touch control panel that Ewen had dismantled and reassembled, suddenly lit up. They both stared at the phenomenon in surprise.
“I have this feeling,” said Ewen tiredly, “that if I get up, it’ll go out.”
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