Then he began to scream as both fell down a lightless shaft. Kickaha clapped his hand over Do Shuptarp’s mouth and said, “Quiet! We won’t be hurt!”
The wind of their descent snatched his words away. Do Shuptarp continued to struggle, but he subsided when they began to slow down in their fall. Presently, they seemed to be motionless. The walls suddenly lit up, and they could see that they were falling slowly. The shaft a few feet above them and a few feet below them was dark. The light accompanied them as they descended. Then they were at the bottom of the shaft. There was no
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dust, although the darkness above the silence felt as if the place had not seen a living creature for hundreds of years.
Angrily, the Teutoniac said, “I may have heart failure yet.”
Kickaha said, “I had to do it that way. If you knew how you were going to fall, you’d never have gone through with it on your own. It would have been too much to ask you.”
“You jumped,” Do Shuptarp said.
“Sure. And I’ve practiced it a score of times. I didn’t have the guts either until I’d seen Wolff— the Lord—do it several times.”
He smiled. “Even so, this time, I wasn’t sure that the field was on. The Sellers could have turned it off. Wouldn’t that have been a good joke on us?”
Do Shuptarp did not seem to think it was funny. Kickaha turned from him to the business of getting out of the shaft. This demanded beating a code with his knuckles on the shaft wall. A section slid out, and they entered a whitewalled room about thirty feet square and well illuminated. It was bare except for a dozen crescents set in the stone floor and a dozen hanging on wall-pegs. The crescents were unmarked.
Kickaha put out a hand to restrain Do Shuptarp. “Not a step more! This room is dangerous unless you go through an undeviating ritual. And I’m not sure I remember it all!”
The Teutoniac was sweating, although the air was cool and moving slightly. “I was going to ask why we didn’t come here in the first place,” he said, “instead of walking through the corridors. Now, I see.”
“Let’s hope you continue to see,” Kickaha said
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ambiguously. He advanced three steps forward straight from the entrance. Then he walked sideways until he was even with the extreme right-end crescent on the wall. He turned around once and walked to the crescent, his right arm extended stiffly at right angles to the floor. As soon as his fingertips touched the crescent, he said, “Okay, soldier. You can walk about as you please now—I think.”
But he lost his smile as he studied the crescents. He said, “One of these will gate us to inside the armory. But I can’t remember which. The second from the right or the third?”
Do Shuptarp asked what would happen if the wrong crescent were chosen.
“One of these—I don’t know which—would gate us into the control room,” he said. “I’d choose that if I had a beamer or if I thought the Bellers hadn’t rigged extra-mass-intrusion alarms in the control room. And if I knew which it was.
“One will gate us right back to the underground prison from which we just came. A third would gate us to the moon. A fifth, to the Atlantean level. I forget exactly what the others will do, except that one would put you into a universe that is, to say the least, undesirable.”
Do Shuptarp shivered and said, “I am a brave man. I’ve proved that on the battlefield. But I feel like a baby lost in a forest full of wolves.”
Kickaha didn’t answer, although he approved of Do Shuptarp’s frankness. He could not make up his mind about the second or third crescent. He had to pick one because there was no getting back up the shaft—like so many routes in the palace, it was one-way.
Finally, he said, “I’m fairly sure it’s the third.
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WolfFs mind favors threes or multiples thereof. But . . .”