Dannerman nodded thoughtfully, but said only, “Fast work. Dopey must have real good production facilities.”
When he stopped there, Pat gave him a perplexed, maybe even an unfriendly, look. “Is that all you have to say about it?”
He shrugged; Jimmy Lin answered for him. “What’s to say? We’re just Dopey’s damn test audience, aren’t we? And we did our job for him. He listened to everything we criticized, and he changed the message around to suit. Now-“ He turned and faced the wall, cupping his hands around his mouth. “-are you listening, Dopey? Okay, then listen to this. You got it right this time. It’s fine the way it is, so don’t bother us with any more revisions; just keep the food coming.” He turned to Dannerman, grinning. “Does that about cover it? Because if it doesn’t we could-“
He didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence, because he was interrupted. Abruptly the ground began to tremble. Everyone who was standing suddenly began to reel; Jimmy grabbed Martin Delasquez’s shoulder to steady himself, nearly bringing them both down. “Oh, hell,” Jimmy grunted, his voice as shaky as the floor. “They’re doing it again.”
The odd thing, Dannerman thought, was that this time he hadn’t heard any explosion, just the sudden uneasy twist and slide in the floor beneath him. But the tremor was a big one. Some cans of something or other on top of their stacks of supplies were jarred loose and clattered to the ground. Rosaleen sat down abruptly. There were yips of surprise from at least two of the Pats. Then it was over.
No. Not quite over. Just as everyone opened their mouths to tell each other that this one had been an unusually bad one, all right, something else happened. The mirror walls flickered and changed color. Jagged streaks of bright red danced around them like slow lightning flashes; that permanent diffuse pale glow from overhead darkened and their only light came from the radiant walls as they turned lurid orange in one spot, blotchy bright red in another. For a moment they seemed to go almost transparent, and through the nearest one Dannerman saw, or thought he saw, a shadowy ziggurat of bright metal. A Doc was standing there transfixed, all of its arms raised toward the sky in what looked like abject terror.
Then the colors faded. The faint visions from outside clouded and disappeared. The steady overhead glow returned, the walls became featureless mirrors again and everything was as it had been before. Everything but the prisoners, at least; but they were all shaken and bewildered. “What in the name of God was that?” Martin Delasquez angrily demanded of the room at large.
Rosaleen was the one who tried to answer. She was getting back to her feet, wincing, with one of the Pats helping her on either side. “I think it must have been some kind of a power failure,” she said soberly. “I do not think that is a good sign.”
At least they had a new topic of conversation to keep them busy for a while. In fact, they had two of them. One was the debate on what caused the tremor, why the power had seemed to fail and make the walls go all weird-some new questions, some just repetitions of the familiar ones about just what the hell was going on here, anyway. Whatever it was, it clearly was something that mattered to them. It made Dopey jittery and, no doubt, it threatened their own fragile security as well. But that particular discussion had nowhere to go; all anyone had to contribute was unanswerable questions and speculations, none of them very satisfactory.
The other area of discussion, Dannerman thought, was more productive. During that momentary lifting of the veil some of the captives had caught glimpses of what lay beyond the wall. None had had time for a clear view, but most had seen something. What they saw depended mostly on which way they happened to be facing. Patrice and Jimmy Lin were out of it, because they had been looking the wrong way and hadn’t seen anything at all, but each of the others had at least a hazy impression to report.
It was Rosaleen Artzybachova who interrupted the hubbub with a suggestion. “Listen, please. Each of us should do his or her best to draw what we saw before we forget. Then we can compare notes.”
Patsy bobbed her head at once. “Good idea,” she said, reaching for Rosaleen’s pen, and then paused long enough to give Dannerman a questioning look. “Is it all right for us to do it this way? Or should we be trying to keep the drawings covered?” she asked.
Before Dannerman could respond Martin answered for him. “Why do you ask Dannerman for permission?” he asked, giving Dannerman an unfriendly look. “It is obvious that there is no point in hiding such drawings. Who can doubt that Dopey knows what is outside the wall far better than we do, so what information could he gain?”
Patsy was still looking expectantly at Dannerman. He shrugged. “I guess that’s true,” he said, though his own reasons had little to do with what Dopey already knew, and a lot with whether all their secretive note passing had served any useful purpose.
When they began drawing it turned out that Martin had seen the same metallic tower as Dannerman, though it was hard to recognize the thing in the man’s crude, kindergarten-style drawings. Rosaleen, on the other hand, produced a workmanlike engineer’s view of what looked as much like a row of file cabinets as anything else Dannerman had ever seen. (“They were tall, though,” she said. “At least three meters, and there was something fuzzy that I couldn’t make out on top of them.”) Pat and Patsy had had the benefit of a year of art in college, and both provided neat sketches-an elongated, two-domed metal object for Pat, looking a little like a steel camel hunkered down to the ground; for Patsy a broad corridor between more rows of the file-cabinet objects, with something that might have been a vehicle a score of meters away. “It wasn’t moving,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure it was some kind of a car. And there was somebody, well, something, standing outside of it.”
Patrice, looking on enviously, commented, “You know, it looks a little like the way Dopey brought us in here.”
“I thought so too. And the person, or whatever, that was standing there-it could have been a Doc. Like die one you saw, Dan.”
He nodded abstractedly, his attention on the handful of drawings. Patsy was still watching him, her expression quizzical. “Dan?” she said. “Are you all right?”
He looked up. “What? Oh, sure.”
“You’re not talking much.”
That was the simple truth, not to be denied; but he wasn’t yet prepared to say why. “I’ve got something on my mind,” he said, truthfully enough; and then, when Patsy suggested maybe he should write it down, he could think of nothing better to say than “Not yet.”
All three of the Pats were looking at him, the expressions on their faces less friendly than they had been. They thought he was being hostile, he knew, but could think of nothing useful to do about it. Rosaleen, who had been watching silently, felt the tension. She coughed. “If I can propose something we ought to do?” she suggested. “Each of you, which way were you looking when the wall went transparent? If we compare notes maybe we can make a kind of map of what’s around us.”
It was a sensible proposal. As they all began trying to recall just which way they had been facing, they included Dannerman in the conversation civilly enough; but that was as far as it went. And when, some time later, Pat began to yawn, she didn’t look toward Dannerman. All three of the Pats curled up close together, and Dannerman did not sleep that time with any warm and pleasing head on his shoulder.
By the time he woke up Rosaleen had completed making a fair copy of the map their collective glimpses had produced. Of course it wasn’t complete. In the center Rosaleen had drawn the hexagonal cell they were in, with each side numbered counting clockwise from their main point of reference, the area they had set aside as latrine. Dannerman’s tall tower was at Side Two. There was nothing at One or Three except Rosaleen’s small, neat question mark; Four was the cabinet things she herself had observed, next to them at Five Patsy’s broad corridor and at Six Pat’s angular steel camel.
He handed the chart back to Rosaleen with gratitude. “Good work,” he said.
She nodded, and forbore to ask any questions. She turned away-not hostile; simply accommodating his desire to be silent-and limped back to show it again to the others. Dan-nerman watched her go with a frown. How long had Rosaleen been limping? And how long would it be before this very old lady began to show other signs of distress? If a chance ever came for them to escape, would she be able to take it?