"Right here."
"Do you make any sense out of what we've seen so far?"
"I get the impression something's about to snap, but I don't know
what. Or as my experts here tell me, 'It's too early to venture an
opinion.'"
"That," thought Dan, "is likely to be the trouble with this place.
By the time we find out what's going on, it will be too late to do
anything about it. We're going to have to play hunches to crack this
one in time."
Kielgaard said fervently, "_How_ we crack it makes no difference to me,
so long as we _do_ crack it."
* * * * *
While Dan ate, a considerable crowd of people went out the front door,
and two couples came in. The restaurant, however, remained very nearly
full.
"Something tells me," Dan thought, "that there must be a lot more to
this planet than meets the eye."
He got up and walked toward the back of the restaurant. What he had
taken for the rear wall turned out to be merely a wall that divided one
section of the restaurant from another equally large, where waitresses
served individual tables.
A flight of carpeted steps led down to men's and women's rest rooms and
a gently sloping, softly lighted hallway. People were coming up the
hall in considerably greater numbers than they went down, and Dan was
startled to see that they reacted to him exactly as the crowd outside
had, before he had gone into the bookstore to watch them unnoticed.
Dan went to the men's rest room, washed, and inconspicuously studied
himself in the mirror. He looked very much different than he had
before. Why, then, did the people react in the same way?
Dan concealed a mataform unit in the dimly lit lounge outside the
washroom, then went out and down the hall. He had gone perhaps thirty
steps when a lithe man coming the other way saw him, whipped out a gun,
and shouted, "_Death!_"
One instant Dan was walking down the right side of the hall. A split
fraction of an instant later, he had thrown himself to the other side
of the hall.
There was a swift, bright flash.
Someone screamed.
The gun went spinning and Dan had the man on the floor, both hands
locked at his throat. It was a severe struggle for Dan to loosen his
hands.
A crowd gathered so quickly that there was scarcely room to stand. A
man carrying a small box with a handle forced his way through. Dan had
his captive, half-unconscious, on his feet. Improvising rapidly, Dan
said, "I think that was unauthorized."
The man with the carrying case said grimly, "We'll soon find out." He
held the man's fingertips to plates in the case, flashed a small tube
in his eyes, and shut the case. There was a loud clang.
Two powerfully built men wearing armbands with shields stepped up. One
glanced at Dan and said, "Want to finish him? He's yours, by rights."
Someone in the crowd said, "_Question_ him! Find out which side is
behind this!"
The man with the carrying case said sternly, "That's neither here nor
there. The only question is, which side is _right_?"
There was a tense silence. It occurred to Dan that this planet might
not be called Truth for nothing. He was still gripping his captive by
the arms and wanted in the worst way to question him. But how, in this
crowd? And then he remembered that he still had one mataform unit with
him.
The man with the case was saying to the sullen crowd, "Maybe you think
something's wrong. Maybe it is. All right, you know what to do--_go to
the War Ruler_--"
Dan mentally pronounced a key word, then opened his hands as he
pronounced another.
A momentary flash of dense jungle, and then he was in the corridor
again, his prisoner gone.
* * * * *
It all seemed to take a moment to register. As soon as it did, someone
shouted, "Spacerot!" This word acted on the crowd like a blazing
torch thrown into an explosives shack. They began smashing each other
violently around in the crowded corridor. Dan barely recovered his
mataform unit, which had fallen to the floor when he transferred his
prisoner, and had a rough time merely staying on his feet. The savage
pressing and crowding in the jammed corridor seemed to drive the crowd
to hysteria.
Dan realized there was no way to tell when he might get loose. For the
second time, he used the mataform unit to get out of the corridor. This
time he went to the shelter under the river. He got some strong cord,
went to the place in the jungle where his prisoner was, and tied him
up. Then he returned to the shelter, fitted a set of small filters in
his nostrils, and went back to the lounge outside the washroom near
the corridor, carrying a small egg-shaped object. Someone happened
to be looking at the spot where he appeared. Dan ignored the staring
onlooker, went out to the corridor, and found that things were even
worse than when he had left.
He threw the egg-shaped object at the wall of the corridor and ducked
back into the lounge.
There was a loud _bang_, followed by a number of smaller explosions.
Abruptly the lounge was filled with bright points of light and little
popping noises. The air was permeated with a gray vapor. The people
in the room sagged in their seats or collapsed on the floor, and Dan
was very careful to breathe only through the filters in his nostrils.
He mentally said a key word and he was in the corridor, standing on a
mound of unconscious people. He worked till he found the transceiver,
went by mataform back to the lounge, took the transceiver there in case
the lounge should be searched, and walked back through the corridor
over heaps of people, picked up the other mataform unit, and went on
down the corridor.
He wasn't happy about the people behind him. When the concentration of
the drug in the air reached a low enough point, those on top of the
heap were going to come to, then those under them, till there was one
writhing hysterical mass that would be even worse than it had been
before he threw the bomb. The only good feature--if it could be called
that--was that they would all very soon be violently nauseated, with an
urgent need for fresh air, and yet would be too sickened and weak to
head for the outside in a rush.
Thinking this, Dan rounded a corner and came to a dead stop.
* * * * *
Directly before him was a short, wide, high-ceilinged cross-corridor
with half a dozen doors swinging open as people hurried in, walked
a few paces, and collapsed. Either side of this short hall was made
of shiny metal containing numerous slots. As Dan watched, a man came
through a door, and in one automatic motion jammed a coin in a slot,
ripped off a ticket that popped out another slot, then suddenly blinked
and jerked around to stare at the pile of people on the floor of the
corridor. Then he collapsed.
Dan glanced from this man to the wall above the doors, which was
brilliant with lights and moving letters, forming a maze that made him
dizzy to look at:
SKL MACH OPS--80L6h4 S
WANTED ON LEVEL 10
MNL LBRS-647L25h2*MN
*MEN WITH FAST REFLE
PENSES PAID HOUSING
Dan strode forward and through a door with the numeral "1" over it.
Directly before him was a short dead-end hallway that abruptly
vanished, and he was walking toward a crowd of hurrying people in an
immense room.
* * * * *
Glancing around, Dan again felt at home. The immense room reminded him
of Grand Central Mataform Terminal back on Earth. One wall even had
the same kind of huge map of the tunnels and cross-tunnels that gave
underground access to stores in the area. But the map here was even
larger and more complex. Near its face were spidery walks and moving
stairways, so that people could examine individual parts from close at
hand if they wanted.
Dan looked over the terminal carefully, then walked slowly along
looking for a place to hide one of his mataform units. He spotted, near
a door in a corner, a poster on a stand showing a strong young man in
uniform with a series of numbers, apparently dates, stretching out
like a road before him. The stand held a poster on either side, and
there was a place between them where Dan could slip one of the mataform
units. An instant after he did this, he was in the shelter under the
river.
Quickly, he got out a very light, strong two-man tent, an air mattress,
a hypodermic, and a shiny half-globe with web straps at the back.
He immediately went to the spot in the jungle where he had left his
prisoner and found him thrashing furiously in an attempt to get loose.
Dan injected a small quantity of a fast-acting hypnotic drug, and the
man lay still. Then Dan set up the small tent and got the man inside on
the mattress.
It was now getting dark outside, and, with the darkness, there was
a rumble of thunder in the distance. Dan went back to the shelter,
returned with a light, and adjusted the half-globe over the man's
face and head, then fastened the straps behind his head. He inserted
in the man's ears two little thimblelike devices, then said mentally,
"Kielgaard?"
Kielgaard's voice answered, "We'll know in a minute." After a
considerable pause, he said, "Yes, he's responding. Watch."
Very slowly, the man's right arm lifted from the mattress, then dropped
limply.