Another codeword would make the picture emit the odors abounding near the photographer, though the viewer was usually better off without these.
Directly in front of Burton was a treestump on which someone had painted a symbol, a green eye inside a pale yellow pyramid. This had not been in the original film; it marked the entrance to Loga’s apartment.
“If he’s got the door set for his codeword only, we’re screwed,” Frigate said. “We’ll never get in.”
“Somebody got in,” Burton said.
“Perhaps,” Nur said.
Burton spoke loudly, too loudly, as if he could activate the opening mechanism by force of voice.
“Loga!”
A circular crack ten feet in diameter appeared in the wall. The section moved inward a trifle, then the section became a wheel and rolled into the wall recess. The scene on it did not fade out but turned with the surface.
“It was set for anyone who wanted to enter!” Alice said.
“Which was not the right thing to do,” Burton said.
Nur, the little, dark, and big-nosed Moor, said, “The intruder may have overridden the codeword and then reset the mechanism.”
“How could he have done that?” Burton said. “And why?”
“How and why was any of this done?”
They went cautiously through the opening, Burton leading. The room was a forty-foot cube. The wall behind the desk was a pale green, but the others displayed moving scenes, one from that planet called the Gardenworld, one of a tropical island as seen from a great distance, and one, which Loga must have been facing, of a daytime thunderstorm at a high altitude. Dark angry clouds roiled, and lightning spat brightly but silently from cloud to cloud.
Incongruous in the clouds, the active screens hung glowing, still displaying the rooms of the tenants.
Red pools glistened on the desk and the hardwood floor.
“Get a sample of the liquid,” Burton said to Frigate. “The computer over there can analyze it.”
Frigate grunted and went to a cabinet to look for something with which to take a specimen. Burton walked around the room but saw nothing that looked like a clue. It was too bad that the other viewers had not been on. However, whoever had done this must have made sure that they were not active.
Nur, Behn, and Turpin went to search nearby rooms. Burton activated the screens that would display these rooms. Doubtless, none but the three would be in them, but he wanted to keep an eye on them. If one person could be turned into a liquid, why not others?
He stooped and passed a finger through the wetness on the floor. When he straightened up, he held the tip of the finger a few inches from his eyes.
“You aren’t going to taste it?” Alice said.
“I shouldn’t. In some respects, Loga was rather poisonous. It’d be a strange form of cannibalism. Or of Christian communion.”
He licked the finger, made a face, and said, ‘The mass of the Mass is inversely proportional to the faith of the square.”
Alice should not have been shocked, not after what she had gone through on this world. She did look repulsed, though whether it was by his act or his words he did not know.
“Tastes like blood, vintage human,” he said.
Nur, Behn, and Li Po came into the room. “There is no one there,” the Chinese said. “Not even his ghost.”
Aphra Behn said, “Dick, what did Loga say?”
“I don’t think he could have said anything. You saw him crack and melt. How could he have spoken after that?”
“It was his voice,” Behn said. “Whoever said it, what did it mean?”
“I tsab u. That’s Ethical for ‘Who are you?’ “
“That’s what the Caterpillar said,” Alice murmured.
“And Alice in Wonderland couldn’t tell him,” Burton said. “The whole event is crazy.”
Frigate called them to the console in the corner.
“I put the specimen in the slot and asked for identification. There you are. You couldn’t identify an individual by his blood in a.d. 1983, but now …”
The console screen displayed, in English, as Frigate had requested: INDIVIDUAL IDENTIFIED: LOGA.
Beneath that was the analysis. The liquid was composed of those elements which made up the human body, and they were in the proper proportions. Flesh had indeed turned into liquid.