I went deeper into the scrub, looking for a place where I could not only hide but could dare risk sleeping. Six hours of sleep two nights ago seemed awfully far away but the trouble with hiding in the wild this close to a big city is that a troop of Boy Scouts is awfully likely to come tromping through and step on your face. So I hunted for a spot not only bushy but inaccessible.
I found it. Quite a steep stretch up one side of a gully and made still more inaccessible by thornbushes, which I located by Braille.
Thornbushes?
It took me about ten minutes to find it as it looked like an exposed
face of a boulder left over from the time when the great ice flow had planed all this country down. But, when I looked closely, it did not look quite like rock. It took still longer to get fingers into any purchase and lift it, then it swung up easily, partly counterbalanced. I ducked inside quickly and let it fall back into placeÄ
Äand found myself in darkness save for fiery letters: PRIVATE
PROPERTYÄKEEP OUT
I stood very still and thought. Janet had told me that the switch that disarmed the deadly booby traps was “concealed a short distance inside.”
How long is a “short distance”?
And how concealed?
It was concealed well enough simply because the place was dark as ink except for those ominous glowing letters. They might as well have spelled “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
So whip out your pocket torch, Friday, powered with its own tiny lifetime Shipstone, and search. But don’t go too far!
There was indeed a torch in a jumpbag I had left behind me in the Skip to M’Lou. It might even be shining, entertaining fish on the bottom of the Mississippi. And I knew that there were other torches stockpiled straight down this black tunnel.
I didn’t even have a match.
If I had a Boy Scout, I could make a fire by rubbing his hind legs together. Oh, shut up, Friday!
I sank down to the floor and let myself cry a little. Then I stretched out on that (hard, cold) (welcome and soft) concrete floor and went to sleep.
xx
I woke up a long time later and the floor was indeed hard and cold. But I felt so enormously rested that I did not mind. I stood up and rubbed the kinks out and realized that I no longer felt hopelessÄjust hungry.
The tunnel was now well lighted.
That glowing sign still warned me not to go any farther but the tunnel was no longer black; the illumination seemed about equal to a well-lighted living room. I looked around for the source of the light.
Then my brain came back into gear. The only illumination came from the glowing sign; my eyes had adjusted while I slept. I understand that human people also experience this phenomenon, but possibly to a lesser degree.
I started to hunt for the switch.
I stopped and started using my brain instead. That’s harder work than using muscles but it’s quieter and burns fewer calories. It’s the only thing that separates us from the apes, although just barely. If I were a concealed switch, where would I be?
The significant parameters of this switch had to be that it must be well enough hidden to frustrate intruders but it nevertheless must save Janet’s life and that of her husbands. What did that tell me?
It would not be too high for Janet to reach; therefore I could reach it, we are much the same size. So that switch was in my reach without using a stool.
Those floating, glowing letters were about three meters inside the door. The switch could not be much past that point because Janet had told me that the second warning, the one that promised death, was triggered not far insideÄ”a few meters” she had said. “A few” is rarely over ten.
Janet would not hide the switch so thoroughly that one of her husbands, dodging for his life, would have to remember exactly where it was. The simple knowledge that there was such a switch must be sufficient clue to let him find it. But any intruder who did not know that there was such a switch must not notice it.