Satisfied that she was headed toward the exit, Burton backed away a few feet from the door. Then he lost consciousness; he never heard the explosion.
When he came to, his smitten senses not yet fully recovered, he was coughing on the burning fumes pouring around him. He sat up, his back against the wall, and tried to get up but failed. His strength had gone for a walk and his wits had scattered like picnickers before the sudden appearance of a bear. When he did manage to get up, he staggered across the room, the air of which was getting somewhat clearer as the air-conditioning sucked the smoke away. The screen still glowed, showing the orange ball down the corridor around the corner. He dimly realized that this was where Li Po and Gull were stationed.
At least, he knew who he was and where he and the others were. His movements were slow, though.
“Got to get out there, get her,” he *aid. His lips had moved with the thoughts, but he could not hear his own voice any more than he could hear the voices of himself and Isabel, his Earthly wife, from the past-display on the wall near the door.
By the time he had reached the door, he could think clearly enough to know that something had gone wrong. The explosion had been far more violent than it should have been. Could he have miscalculated so much, or had something unforeseen happened? He looked around the side of the doorway, realized then that he had dropped the beamer, went back to retrieve it, and returned to the doorway. The smoke was a thin veil now. He could see the far-strewn pieces of the vehicle on the floor. The sphere had been made of some shatterable material. The explosive lining the opening nearest Burton had gone off. Probably, a piece of the machine shot through this opening had activated the fuse. The additional explosion had doubled the effect of the shock waves, but even that was not near enough to account for the violence that had knocked him out.
The vehicle must have contained a large amount of explosives, and this had gone off when Burton’s trap had erupted. Or perhaps it was a coincidence that the explosives in the vehicle had gone off just as the vehicle cleared the entrance shaft.
The thing operating the vehicle had been an android, the exact duplicate of Star Spoon, who had sent it ahead as a sacrifice.
Burton’s head still hurt. His thoughts had been climbing a steep hill, struggling to get to the top, where they could re-form and become a potent force. Most of them had gotten up the hill, but they were not yet organized enough. Why had the past-display accompanied the false woman and not the real one?
Slowly, it came to him that she must have sent the android out first. And the idiot Computer, identifying her as the real Star Spoon, had sent the past-display along by her side. Then the real woman had emerged from her hiding place … she must have muffled her features in a hood or masked them … and she had come up an unmined shaft.
There she was, coming around the corner of the intersection from the corridor where Li Po and Gull were stationed. She was, as he had expected, inside a spherical armored flying machine, the duplicate of the android’s. If she had been masked, she was not now. Unlike the android, her face was expressive, set in a demon’s smile except for the lips, which moved as she talked to herself.
The machine came to the middle of the corridor just past the walls of the shaft—he could see through its openings—and it stopped, then made a quarter-turn so that she faced down the corridor. What had happened to Li Po and Gull? Were they still groggy from the explosion? Or had they foolishly attacked her as she passed them? He had no way of knowing; he would have been deaf to any cries.
The machine, moving six feet above the floor, came to the one closed door. It stopped and turned. A barrel slid out from the box beneath the seat, went through a hole in the sphere, and shot out a violet liquid. His mental processes were still sluggish; he should have recognized the fluid at once as the sealant. She was entombing the people that she believed were in the suite. Or, if she was not sure they were in there, she had to carry out this operation anyway.