"Get the hell away," roared Snap. "We've had our orders; we don't want
any from you."
"Gregg Haljan and Daniel Dean are paged on the mirrors."
Someone in the city wanted us; our names were appearing on the various
mirror-grids publicly displayed throughout the city in the hope that
we would answer.
"That's different," said Snap. "Answer it for us, that's a good
fellow. We're busy."
"It must be important," the orderly insisted. "The caller registered a
fee at the Search Bureau; that's how they located you here. He paid
the highest fee to search you. An emergency call."
It was against the law to invoke the services of the Search Bureau
unless based upon actual impending danger. "We'll take it," I said.
"Come with me." He turned to the left and down the corridor.
We hastened with him to a corridor cubby. Upon the audiphone there I
was at once connected with a voice, and an anxious man's face with a
two-day growth upon it.
"Haljan! Thank God you answered. This is Dud Ardley. Me and Shac are
here. Listen, this is the lower cellar corridor, Lateral 3, under
Broadway. Me and Shac just have seen your girls down here."
News of Anita and Venza! I could see in the mirror-image, behind Dud's
head the outlines of the little public cubby from which he was
calling. He and his brother, on some illicit errand of their own in
East Side lower Manhattan, had seen figures alighting from a
fare-car. They had caught a glimpse of the faces of Anita and Venza.
The girls were hooded and cloaked; a hooded man was with them. The
fare-car quickly rolled away, and the hooded figures, suddenly
becoming invisible within their magnetic cloaks, had vanished.
"S'elp me, we couldn't do nothin'. You know we take no chances with
the police by carryin' cylinders. So I paged you in a hurry."
"Dud, that's damn nice of you. Where are you now? Tell me again."
The Ardleys, knowing nothing of the events of this night, supposed
that the girls were being abducted, and decided I should be informed.
"Damn right, Dud. We'll come at once. You two wait for us?"
"Sure. If you got instruments, maybe we can track 'em. It wasn't a
quarter of a mile from here, over toward the river. Plenty of rotten
dumps down there."
"Wait for us, Dud. We'll come in a rush."
I slammed shut the audiphone. Snap, beside me, had heard it all. He
shoved the astonished orderly out of the way.
"What's the nearest exit-route out of here?"
"To the city roof, sir. Up this incline."
We dashed up the spiral incline, through a low exit-port, and were in
the starlight of the city roof.
* * * * *
"Connect it, Gregg! You can't tell; her message might come over any
minute."
I tuned my coils to the seldom used oscillation frequency which Halsey
had told us Anita's transmitter was sending.
"Anything, Gregg?"
"No. Dead channel."
The air, in Anita's channel, was bafflingly silent.
We had been challenged by a roof-guard when we appeared from the upper
port of the Conclave Hall; the city roof was not open to public
traffic. But with our identifications, he found us a single-seat
hand-tram, and started us southward on the deserted route.
It was a cloudless night, with stars like thickly-strewn diamonds on
purple velvet. The city roof lay glistening in the starlight. In my
great-grandfather's time there had been no roof here; the open city
was exposed to all the inclement weather. But gradually the arcades
and overhead viaducts, cross balconies and catwalks which spanned the
canyon street between the giant buildings became a roof. It spread,
now terraced and sloped to top the lofty buildings, like a great
rumpled sheet propped by the knees of sleeping giants. Some of the
roof was of opaque alumite, dark patches, alternating with the great
glassite panes which in places admitted the daylight.
Our little tram sped along southward, wending its way over the
terraces. Save for the guards and lookouts in their occasional
cubbies, and the air-traffic directors in their towers, we were alone
up here. The roof was tangled with air-pipes, line-wire conduits,
aerials, arterial systems of the ventilating and lighting devices. As
far as one could see the ventilators stood fronting the night breeze
like listening ears. There were water tanks, great cross-bulkheads and
flumes to handle the rain and snow. A few traffic towers maintained
order in the overhead air-lanes. Their beacons shot up into the sky
when the passing lights marked the thinly-strewn trinight traffic.
We were stopped at intervals, but in each case were passed promptly.
"Nothing yet, Gregg?"
"No."
Anita's channel remained empty. It was, I suppose, no more than ten
minutes during which we sped south along the grotesque maze of the
roof; but to us it was an eternity. If only some message would come!
"I'll pull up here."
"Yes."
I gathered up my little audiphone, thrust it under my dark flowing
cloak. If only our cloaks were magnetic!
We leaped from our car. "In a rush, Haljan?" asked a guard.
"That's us. Orders from Mr. Brayley."
We left him and plunged into a descending automatic lift. A drop of a
thousand feet; we shot downward past all the deserted levels, past the
ground-level, the undersurface transportation lanes, the sub-river
tubes, the sub-cellar, down to the very bottom of the city.
"Come on, Gregg. Two segments from here."
We advanced at a run. At this hour of night, hardly a pedestrian was
in evidence. It was an arched vaulted corridor, almost a tunnel, dimly
blue-lit with short lengths of fluorescent tubes at intervals on the
ceiling. For all the vaunted mechanisms of our time, the air here was
heavy and fetid. Moisture dripped from the concrete roof. It lay on
the metal pavement of the ground; the smell of it was dank, tomb-like.
There were frequent cross-tunnels. We turned eastward into one of
them. For a segment there were the lower entrances to the cellars of
the giant buildings overhead. We passed a place where the
tunnel-corridor widened into a great underground plaza. The sewerage
and wire-pipes lay like tangled pythons on its floor. Half across it,
by the glow of temporary lights strung on a cable, a group of
repairmen were working. We passed them, headed in to where the tunnel
narrowed again and there were now occasional cubby entrances to
underground dwellings.
It was a rabbit warren from here to the river, haunted by criminals
and by miserable families, many of whom never saw the daylight for
weeks at a time. The giant voices of the city hardly carried down
here, so that an oppressive silence hung upon everything.
"That next crossing, Gregg. They said they'd wait for us there."
Occasional escalators led upward. In advance of us was a narrow
intersection. There were a few lights in the bullseyes of the
subterranean dwelling rooms, but most of them were dark.
"Easy, Snap. Not so fast."
I pulled Snap to a walk. We edged over against the tunnel side. We had
passed a small lighted audiphone cubby, evidently the one from which
Dud and Shac had paged us. They should have been here waiting; but
there was nothing but the empty, gloomy tunnels.
"Something is coming!" Snap clutched at me; we drew our cloaks around
us and waited in a shadowed recess. Down a side incline, a segment
behind us, a small automatic food truck came lurching. It pulled up at
an arcade entrance. Its driver slid the portals, deposited his cases
of food, locked the panel after him; and in a moment he and his truck
were gone up the incline.
We heard, in the ensuing silence, a low groan near at hand; then
abruptly it stopped. We saw, within twenty feet of us, two dark
figures lying on the pavement grid in a black patch of shadow where
the mailtube came down in a curve and disappeared into the tunnel
wall.
We bent over the figures of two men. They lay together, one half upon
the other, black-garbed figures with white, staring faces. One
twitched a little and then lay still.
They were Shac and Dud Ardley.
"Murdered, Gregg! Good Lord!"
Both were dead, but we could see no marks on either of them.