He got up, praying, and, clinging to the edges of the door, looked around it. Since there was not much smoke, he could clearly see the vehicle against the wall opposite the doorway where the charge had been placed. The explosion had thrust it across the corridor and slammed it against the wall. Star Spoon was unconscious. Burton watched as the car resumed its original speed, grating against the metal wall, and collided with the wall at the next intersection. There it stuck.
Li Po and Frigate, beamers ready, ran around the corners and up to Burton. “I boobytrapped her,” he said. “But we have to get her out before she comes to.”
“Where’s Alice and Gull?” Frigate said.
“No time for that,” Burton said. “Pete, have the hypodermic syringe ready. Po, you come with me.”
Frigate removed the syringe from the case attached to his belt. While Burton held his beamer ray steady on one point of the armor, the Chinese ran to the nearest room to order from the converter a ladder and two stepladders to use to climb up to the car. Burton wanted to take her alive, but he hoped that, if she showed signs of rousing, the hole would have been burned through the shell so that he could put a hole through her body.
However, Li Po returned quickly, and they burned off the i hatch locks while she lay unmoving. Burton crawled in, took the syringe from Frigate, blew the drug into her arm, and used the controls to ease the vehicle to the floor. They carried her into the nearest room, placed her on a bed, stripped her, searched her clothes, and then put her in the converter so that the Computer could probe her neural system. It reported that her brain was too complex to be an android’s.
“I’d say we have her,” Burton said. “Only … what if she’s anticipated this possibility and ordered the Computer to make a false report? She’ll be alive somewhere in this labyrinth.”
“I don’t believe that she would consider that possibility,” Li Po said. “She must have believed that she was invulnerable in her armored vehicle. You have to take some things on faith.”
“No, I don’t.”
Though he thought that Li Po was right, he intended to search the tower thoroughly. Not until then would he be at ease about her.
Leaving Frigate to watch the woman, Burton and Li Po burned off the sealant over Alice’s door. Though not hysterical, she needed a long drink to quiet her nerves. She had thought that she might be imprisoned in the room forever or at least for a time that would have seemed forever.
On the way back to the room where Star Spoon was, they saw Gull’s body lying face up on the floor of the corridor. Li Po explained that Gull had been caught by a ray from the vehicle as Star Spoon was pursuing Burton.
“He must have left the room just as I dived into mine,” Li Po said. “I don’t know why he did it. He told me just before we took our stations that he could not use his beamer. It was all right to kill the androids because they were not human beings, but he could not fight Star Spoon.”
“He should have said so at once and stayed with Alice,” Burton said.
“I think that he probably went out into the corridor to plead with Star Spoon,” Li Po said. “He was as crazy as she.”
After conferring, they decided that it would be cruel to lock Star Spoon up in a room with the hope of curing her insanity. Questioning the Computer, they learned that the cryogenic techniques of the Ethicals far surpassed those of Earth. She could be frozen instantaneously without tissue damage, and so she was. Star Spoon would wait in her casket until the Gardenworlders arrived.
After a day of rest, they began the search. The first room they went to was the one she had left when she set out to finish them off. The Computer would not directly give them the location, but it immediately yielded the records of the passage of the orange light on the diagrams. Entrance to the room on the one hundred and sixteenth level—the Ethicals counted the stories from the top instead of the bottom—was easy. Star Spoon had not closed the door, because she had thought that only she would be alive when her mission was accomplished.