He had gated, but where? He could have gone back to Earth Number One, but not necessarily to the same house. Or he could have gated to another place on Earth Number Two. Or, even, to another room in this house.
Kickaha had to get out of this house and after the Beller.
He ran downstairs, through the big room, down the hall, and into the room where he had been kept prisoner. The door through which the Beller had gone was still open. Kickaha hesitated before it, because the Beller might be waiting for someone to follow. Then it occurred to him that the Beller would think that everybody in the house had fled or gone and that nobody would be following him. He had not known about the other prisoner, of course, or he would have looked around to dispose of him first.
He returned to the hallway. One knife lying on the floor had cooled off by then and seemed to be undamaged. He hefted it, determined that it had a good balance, and stuck it in his belt. He leaped through the doorway, his gun ready if somebody should be waiting for him. There was no one. The short and narrow hallway was quiet. The door beyond had been closed, and he pushed it open gently with the tip of his dagger. After the door had swung open, he waited a minute, listening. Before going through, he inspected the room. It had changed. It was larger, and the gray-blue paper walls were gray smooth stone. He had expected that this might happen. Red Orc would change the resonance of the gates so that if a prisoner did escape, he would find himself in a surprising, and probably unpleasant, place.
Under other circumstances, Kickaha would have turned back and looked for the switch that would set the gate to the frequency he desired. But now his first duty was to those in the hands of Urthona. To hell with the Beller! It would really be best to get back to Earth Number One and to get started on the attack against Urthona.
He turned and started to reenter the room where he had been held, and again he stopped. That room had changed, though he would not have known it if the door to the opposite side had not been removed by the Beller’s weapon. This door looked exactly the same, but it was upright and in place. Only this kept Kickaha from stepping into it and so finding himself gated to another place where he would be cut off from both the Beller and Urthona’s captives.
He set his teeth together and hissed rage and frustration. Now he could do nothing but take second-best and put himself in with the Beller and hope that he could figure a way out.
He turned and went back through the door after the Beller, though no less cautiously.
This room seemed to be safe, but the room beyond that would probably tell him where he was. However, it was just like the one he had left except that there were some black metal boxes, each about six feet square, piled along the walls almost to the ceiling. There were no locks or devices on them to indicate how they were opened.
He opened the next door slowly, looked through, and then leaped in. He was in a large room furnished with chairs, divans, tables, and statuary. A big fountain was in the middle. The furniture looked as if it had been made by a Lord; though he did not know the name of the particular style, he recognized it. Part of the ceiling and one side of the right wall were curved and transparent. The ground was not visible for some distance and then it abruptly sprang into view. It sloped down for a thousand feet to end in a valley which ran straight and level for several miles and then became the side of a small mountain.
It was daylight outside, but the light was pale, though it was noon. The sun was smaller than Earth’s, and the sky was black. The earth itself was rocky with some stretches of reddish sand, and there were a few widely separated cactus-looking plants on the slope and in the valley. They seemed small, but he realized after a while that they must be enormous.