Its pace was steady and unhurried. It paused before each doorway and shot a spy beam from its head into the entrance. Manifestly it was going about its appointed task of checking the security of each portal.
Then the sergeant sighed with relief. Rolth had crawled into place and crouched now well above the line of the robot’s vision. If only this patroller was constructed on the same general pattern they knew and could be short-circuited through the head!
But when it reached the next doorway it hesitated. Kartr tensed. This might be worse than he had thought. The thing had some sense perception. He was sure that it suspected his presence. No spy beam flashed. Instead it stood there unmoving—as if it were puzzled, making up its mind.
Was it relaying back to some dust-covered headquarters an alarm?
But its arms were moving—
“Kartr!”
Night sight or no night sight, Kartr had not needed that shout from Rolth to warn him. He had already seen what the patroller held ready. He hurled himself backward, falling flat on the floor of the hall, letting momentum carry him in a slide some distance along it. Behind him was a burst of eye-searing flame, filling the whole entrance with an inferno. Only his trained muscles and sixth sense of preservation had saved him from cooking in the midst of that!
Shakily he crawled on his belly away from the fury. Was the robot going to follow him in and complete its mission?
Hollow sounds of feet pounding—
“Kartr! Kartr!”
He had levered himself to a sitting position when Rolth plunged around an angle in the hallway and almost fell over him.
“Are you hurt? Did he get you?”
Kartr grinned lopsidedly. To just be alive—he winced as Rolth’s examining hands touched skin scraped raw.
“What about—?”
“The bag of bolts? I scragged him all right—a blast hole right through his head casing and he went down. He didn’t reach you?”
“No. And at least he’s told us something about the civilization they had here.” The sergeant surveyed the blaze behind him with critical distaste. “Blow a hole in a city block to get someone. Wonder what they would have thought of a stun gun.” With Rolth’s hand under his arm Kartr got to his feet. He hoped that he had not rebroken his wrist and that the red agony in it was only from the jar of his fall.
“I have a feeling,” he began and then was glad that Rolth had retained a grip on him because the hallway appeared to sway under his feet, “that we’d better get away from here—fast—”
The thought which plagued him was the memory of that momentary pause before the robot had attacked. Kartr was sure that then a message had been flashed from the patroller—where? If the timeless machine had only been performing rounds set him generations before the city had been deserted by its builder—then such a report would be no menace—unless it activated other machines in turn. On the other hand, if the mysterious Ageratan controlled the robots, then the rangers might have successfully met a first attack, only to face other and perhaps worse ones.
Rolth agreed with this when he suggested it aloud.
“We can’t go back that way anyhow.” The Faltharian pointed to the blazing pit of radiation which had once been the door. “And they may just be combing the streets for us, too. Listen, this city reminds me in some ways of Stiltu—”
Kartr shook his head. “Heard of it, but have never been there.”
“Capital of Lydias.” Rolth identified it impatiently. “They’re old-fashioned there—still live in big cities. Well, they have an underground system of links—ways of traveling under the surface—”
“Hm.” Kartr’s mind jumped to the next point easily. “Then we might try going down and see what we can find? All right. And if that patroller did rouse out the guard before you burned him, it will be some time before they can even get in here to see if their tame hunter bagged us. Let’s look for a way down.”
But to their bafflement there seemed to be no way down at all. They threaded rooms and halls, pushing past the remains of furnishings and strange machinery which at other times would have set them speculating for hours, hunting some means of descent. None appeared to exist—only two stairways leading up.
In the end they discovered what they wanted in the center of a room. It was a dark well, a black hole in which the beam of Kartr’s flash found no end. Although the light did not reveal much it helped them in another way because its owner dropped it. He gave an exclamation and made a futile grab—much too late. Rolth supplied an excited comment, reverting in this stress to his native dialect and only making sense when Kartr demanded harshly that he translate.
“It did not fall! It is floating down—floating!”
The sergeant sat back on his heels. “Inverse descent! Still working!” He could hardly believe that. Small articles might possibly be upborne by the gravity-dispelling rays—but something heavier—a man—say—
Before he could protest Rolth edged over the rim, to dangle by his hands.
“It’s working all right! I’m treading air. Here goes!”
His hands disappeared and he was gone. But his voice came up the shaft.
“Still walking on air! Come on in, the swimming’s fine!”
Fine for Rolth maybe who could see where he was going. To lower oneself into that black maw and hope that the anti-gravity was not going to fail—! Not for the first time in his career with the rangers Kartr silently cursed his overvivid imagination as he allowed his boots to drop into the thin air of the well. He involuntarily closed his eyes and muttered a half-plea to the Spirit of Space as he let go.
But he was floating! The air closed about his body with almost tangible support. He was descending, of course, but at the rate of a feather on a light breeze. Far below he saw the blue light of Rolth’s torch. The other had reached bottom. Kartr drew his feet together and tried to aim his body toward the pinprick of light.
“Happy planeting!” Rolth greeted the sergeant as he landed lightly, his knees slightly bent, and with no shock at all. “Come and see what I have found.”
What Rolth had found was a platform edging on a tunnel. Anchored to this stand by a slender chain was a small car, pointed at both ends, a single padded seat in its center. It had no drive Kartr could discern and it did not touch the floor of the tunnel, hovering about a foot above that.
A keyboard was just before the seat—controls, Kartr deduced. But how could they aim it to any place? And to go shooting off blindly into the dark, liable to crash against some cave in— The sergeant began to reconsider that—too risky by far. To face a battalion of robot patrollers was less dangerous than to be trapped underground in the dark.
“Here!”
Kartr jumped at Rolth’s call. The other ranger had gone to the back of the platform and was holding his dim torch on the wall there. The sergeant could just barely see by the blue light. Rolth had found something all right! A map of black lines crossing and recrossing—it could only be of the tunnel system. Having solved much more complicated puzzles in the past they set to work—to discover that this was apparently a way leading directly into the heart of the city.
Ten minutes later they crowded together on the narrow seat. Rolth pressed two buttons as Kartr threw off the restraining chain. There was a faint puff of sound—they swept forward and the dank air of the tunnel filled their nostrils.
6 — THE CITY PEOPLE
“This should be it,” Rolth half whispered.
The car was slowing down, drawing to the right side of the tunnel. Ahead a dim light glowed. They must be approaching another platform. Kartr glanced at the dial on his wrist band. It had taken them exactly five minutes planet time to reach this place. Whether or not it was the one they wanted—that was another question. They had aimed at a point they thought would be directly under what seemed to be a large public building in the very center of the city. If any human or Bemmy force had taken over here that would be the logical place to find them.
“Anyone ahead?” asked Rolth, trusting as usual to Kartr’s perception.
The sergeant sent a mind probe on and then shook his head. “Not a trace. Either they don’t know about these ways or they have no interest in them.”
“I’m inclined to believe that they don’t know.” The Faltharian grabbed at a mooring ring as the car came along the platform.
Kartr climbed out and stood looking about him. This place was at least three times the size of the one from which they had embarked. And other tunnels ran from it in several directions. It was lighted after a fashion. But not brightly enough to make Rolth don his goggles again.