Still without a plan, he ran along the window sill until he could jump down onto the lab bench by the wall, and crossed its acreage of jungle-vine wires and tools standing like cranes to the far end. The rack containing the processors and DNC hardware that he was using was now standing immediately across from him. But a sheer chasm plunging hundreds of feet to the floor separated it from the bench. It was like looking across a Manhattan avenue at a skyscraper, except that it was built from gigantic planes of metal with exposed galleries of green, glasslike walls, and connected to other parts of the city by traceries of cable hanging in fantastic inverted arches. Beyond the rack, he could see himself in the coupler, serene and unmoving, with no visible hint of the turmoil raging within. He ran along the end of the bench frantically, searching for a way.
A bridge! A power conduit led from a service panel at the back of the bench to a distribution box mounted farther along the wall. About halfway along, a bundle of communications cables coming up from below grazed the conduit and then bent to run horizontally into the rack of equipment that Kevin needed to get to. He leaped, scrabbled at the top of the conduit with his arms, but started to slide on the painted metal. Then his fingers found the edge of a seam, and his grip held. He hauled himself up onto the conduit and followed it to where it passed above the cables. There, he faced a jump down, the height of a house. He judged the fall carefully and launched himself off, landing among the cables. A curving bow of trunklike cords hanging in space descended before him, then rose again toward the steel cliffs.
Through the empty building he heard the doors downstairs bang open, and raised voices echoing. He forged ahead, down to the lowermost part of the bridge, then up toward overhangs of green-gold beryllium alloy. Footsteps clattered in a distant stairwell.
Kevin passed through a gate in a castle wall made of metal, into a courtyard lined with enormous cylindrical shapes and colored sculptures. Beyond, he moved through parallel canyons formed between planes of city blocks standing on edge. He recognized electrical couplings and connections all around him, but there was no indication which of them might be vital. In any case, the circuits were like tramlines, the wires as thick as mains plumbing, connector leads like armored power cable. There was nothing that he could hope to break or budge. He came to the edge of a precipice and stood looking around helplessly. The floor that he was standing on vibrated like a catwalk in a ship’s engine room. He looked down.
Below him, a shiny, convex, black wall bulged out from beneath a steel bridge clamped to the structure by bolts that stood up like telephone poles. Silver pipes ran from terminal posts the size of fire hydrants to cylindrical forms outlined vaguely in shadow. He was inside the power subsystem. The pipes he recognized as wires from the mains transformer secondary winding, feeding the rectifiers and d.c. supplies for the entire cabinet.
There was only one thing he could do. Measuring the distance, stretching his arms and legs out wide to bridge the gap, he jumped. . . .
And his world changed to the Test Lab at normal size, with the echo still ringing in his ears of an explosive bang somewhere near his head. His senses took several seconds to readjust to the different dimensions of acoustics and feeling. Then he began fumbling at the headset, his limbs cold and cramped from being still for too long. An acrid smell touched his nostrils. Smoke was wafting from the power control rack of the cabinet next to him where the mec had fried, carried by silent cooling fans freewheeling to a halt. He struggled out of the DNC collar and stood up.
They came through the door from the corridor when he was halfway across the lab, one in an overcoat, the other in a gray parka. “Hey kid, it’s okay. We just wanna talk,” one of them called. Kevin wasn’t persuaded and didn’t stick around to debate the point. The one in the gray parka was waving a gun.