Food crammed their dreams if not their bellies. Kickaha was drowsing fitfully, dreaming of eating roast pork, mashed potatoes and gravy, and rhubarb pie when a clicking sound awoke him. He lay on his back for a while, wondering why he would dream of such a sound. He was about to fall back into the orgy of eating again when a thought made him sit up as if someone had passed a hot pastrami by his nose.
Had Ore inserted a new element in the torture? It didn’t seem possible, but …
He got onto his hands and knees and crawled to the little door. He pushed on it, and it swung outward.
The clicking had been the release of its lock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WHILE THEY CLAMBERED down out of the cage, the beamers on the wall tracked them. Kickaha started across toward the door. All four weapons spat at once, vivid scarlet rays passing before and behind him. Ordinarily, the rays were invisible, but Ore had colored them so his captors could see how close they were. Beauty, and terror, were in the eye of the beholder.
Anana moaned. “Oh, no! He just let us loose to tantalize us!”
Kickaha unfroze.
“Yeah. But those beamers should be hitting us.”
He took another step forward. Again the rays almost touched him.
“To hell with it! They’re set now so they’ll just miss us! Another one of his refinements!”
He walked steadily to the door while she followed. Two of the beamers swung to her, but their rays shot by millimeters away from her. Nevertheless, it was unnerving to see the scarlet rods shoot just before his eyes. As the two got closer to the door, the rays angled past their cheeks on one side and just behind the head.
They should have drilled through the walls and floor, but these were made of some material invulnerable even to their power.
When he was a few feet from the door, the beamers swung to spray the door just ahead of him. Their contact with the door made a slight hissing, like a poisonous snake about to strike.
The two stood while scarlet flashed and splashed over the door.
“We’re not to touch,” Kickaha said. “Or is this just a move in the game he’s playing to torment us?”
He turned and walked back toward the nearest beamer. It tracked just ahead of him, forcing him to move slowly. But the ray was always just ahead of him.
When he stopped directly before the beamer, it was pointed at his chest. He moved around it until it could no longer follow him. Of course, he was in the line of sight of the other three. But they had stopped firing now.
The weapon was easily unsecured by pulling a thick pin out of a hinge on its rear. He lifted it and tore it loose from the wires connected to its underside. Anana, seeing this, did the same to hers. The other two beamers started shooting again, their rays again just missing them. But these too were soon made harmless.
“So far, we’re just doing what Ore wants us to do,” he said. “He’s programmed this whole setup. Why?”
They went to the door and pushed on it. It swung open, revealing a corridor empty of life or robots. They walked to the branch and went around the corner. At the end of this hall was the open door of the elevator shaft. The cage was within it, as if Ore has sent it there to await them.
They hesitated to enter it. What if Ore had set a trap for them, and the cage stopped halfway between floors or just fell to the bottom of the shaft?
“In that case,” Kickaha said, “he would figure that we’d take a stairway. So he’d trap those.”
They got into the cage and punched a button for the first floor. Arriving safely, they wandered through some halls and rooms until they came to an enormous luxuriously furnished chamber. The two robots stood by a great table of polished onyx. Anana, in the language of the Lords, ordered a meal. This was brought in five minutes. They ate so much they vomited, but after resting they ate again, though lightly. Two hours later, they had another meal. She directed a robot to show them to an apartment. They bathed in hot water and then went to sleep on a bed that floated three feet above the floor while cool air and soft music flowed over them.