Wergard halted ahead of her; and she stopped, watched him cautiously edge a door open, glance out. He looked back, slid the energy carbine from his shoulder, held it in one hand, made a beckoning motion with the other. Danestar followed him through the door and he eased it back into its lock. They had come out into one of the Depot’s side streets. It stretched away on either side between unbroken building fronts, a strip of the dull black dome of the main barrier arching high above.
They darted across the street, ran fifty feet along the building on the far side before Wergard stopped at another door. This one opened on a pitch-dark passage; and, a moment later, the darkness closed in about them.
Wergard produced a light, said quietly, “Watch your step here! The section was sealed off officially fifty years ago and apparently hasn’t been inspected since.”
He moved ahead, rapidly but carefully, holding the light down for her. They were some five minutes from their starting point. Beyond that, Danestar did not know what part of the Depot they’d come to, but Wergard had told her about this building. It had been part of the old fortress system, cheaper to seal off than remove, an emergency unit station which operated the barrier defenses of the complexes surrounding it. If the equipment was still in working order, Wergard would turn on those barriers. Approximately a tenth of Depot would again be shielded then, beyond manipulation by the control office. That should draw the creature’s attention to the area, while they moved on. Their living quarters were in a building a considerable distance away.
Eyes shifting about, Danestar followed the pool of light dancing ahead of her feet. The flooring was decayed here and there; little piles of undefinable litter lay about, and the air was stale and musty. Wergard, in his prowling, might in fact have been the first to enter the building in fifty years. They turned a corner of the passage, came to a dark doorspace. There he stopped.
“You’d better wait here,” he told her. “There’s a mess of machinery inside, and some of it’s broken. I’ll have to climb around and over it. If the barrier system is operating, I’ll have it going within three or four minutes.”
He vanished through the door. Danestar watched the receding light as it moved jerkily deeper into a forest of ancient machines, lost it when it went suddenly around a corner. There was complete darkness about her then. She fingered a lighter in her pocket but left it there. No need to nourish the swirling tide of apprehensions within her by peering about at shadows. Darkness wasn’t the enemy. After a minute or two, she heard a succession of metallic sounds in the distance. Presently they ended, and a little later Wergard returned. He was breathing hard and his face was covered with dirt-streaked sweat.
“As far as I can make out, the barriers are on,” he said briefly. “Now we’d better get out of the neighborhood fast!”
But they made slower over-all progress than before, because now they had to use the personnel locks in the force fields as they moved from one complex section to the next. In between, they ran where they could. They crossed two more side streets. After the second one, Wergard said, “At the end of this building we’ll be out of the screened area.”
“How far beyond that?” Danestar asked.
“Three blocks. Two big sprints in the open!” He grimaced. “We could use the underground systems along part of the stretch. But they won’t get us across the main streets unless we follow them all the way to the Keep and back down.”
She shook her head. “Let’s stick to your route.” A transport shell of the underground system could have taken them to the Keep and into the far side of the Depot in minutes. But its use would register on betraying instruments in the control building, and might too easily draw the alien to the moving shell.
The personnel lock at the other end of the building let them into a narrow alley. Across it was the flank of one of the Depot’s giant warehouses. As they started along the alley, there was a crackling, spitting, explosive sound—the snarl of a defense field flashing into action.
Wergard reached out, snatched the valise from Danestar’s hand.
“Run!”
They raced up the alley. The furious crackle of the force field came from behind them, from some other building. It was not far away, and it was continuing. A hundred yards on, Wergard halted abruptly, caught Danestar as she plowed into him, thrust the valise at her.
“Here—!” he gasped. She saw they’d reached a door to the warehouse; now Wergard was turning to open it. Clutching the valise, thoughts a roiling confusion of terror, she looked back, half expecting to see a wave of purple fire sweeping up the alley toward them.
But the alley was empty, though the building front along which the barrier blazed was only a few hundred yards away. Then, as Wergard caught her arm, hauled her in through the door, a closer section—the building from which they had emerged a moment before—erupted in glittering fury. The door slammed in back of her, and they were running again, through a great hall, along aisles between high-stacked rows of packing cases. And—where was the valise? Then she realized Wergard had taken it.
She followed him into a cross-aisle. Another turn to the right, and the end of the hall was ahead, a wide passage leading off it. She had a glimpse of Wergard’s strained face looking back for her; then, suddenly, he swerved aside against the line of cases, crouched, his free arm making a violent gesture, motioning her to the floor.
Danestar dropped instantly. A moment later, he was next to her.
“Keep . . . down!” he warned. “Way . . . down!”
Sobbing for breath, flattened against the cases, she twisted her head around, saw what he was staring at over the stacked rows behind them. A pale purple reflection went gliding silently along the ceiling at the far end of the hall, seemed to strengthen for an instant, abruptly faded out.
They scrambled to their feet, ran on into the passage.
Even after they’d slowed to a walk again, had reached a structure beyond the warehouse, they didn’t talk about it much. Both were badly winded and shaken. It had been difficult to believe that the thing could have failed to detect them. Its attention must have been wholly on the force fields it was skirting, even as a section of it flowed through the warehouse within a few hundred feet of them.
If they’d been a few seconds later reaching the alley. . . .
Danestar reached into her white jacket, turning up its cooling unit. Wergard glanced at her. His face was dripping sweat. He wiped at it with his sleeve.
She asked, “You’re still wearing the sneaksuit?”
Wergard lifted a strand of transparent webbing from under his collar, let it snap back. “Think it might have helped?”
“I don’t know.” But the creature might have the equivalent of a life detector unit as part of its sensory equipment, and a sneaksuit, distorting and blurring the energy patterns of a living body, would perhaps afford some protection. She said, “I’ll get into one as soon as we reach our quarters. It may have known somebody was around but didn’t want to waste time picking up another human until it found out why the defense barriers were turned on again in that area.”
Wergard remarked dubiously, “It seems to me it’s got picking up humans at the top of its priority list!” After a moment, he added, “The long sprint comes next. Feel up to it?”
Danestar looked at him. “I’d better feel up to it! If we see that thing again—I’m one inch this side of pure panic right now!”
He grunted. “Quit bragging!” He slid the carbine from his shoulder. “It’s that door ahead. Let me have a look out first.”
As he began to unlock the door, Danestar found herself glancing back automatically once more at the long, lit, empty corridor through which they had come, their hurried steps echoing in the silence of the building. Then she saw Wergard had paused, half crouched and motionless, at the barely opened door.
“What is it?” she asked quickly.
“I don’t know!” The face he turned to her was puzzled and apprehensive. “Come up and take a look!”
She moved to where she could look out past him. After a moment, she said, “There are adjustment instruments for the Depot lighting somewhere in the control section.”
“Uh-huh,” said Wergard. “Another item that’s been sealed away for a hundred years or so. But our Number Two Thing in the control building seems to have got to them. I’d like to know what it means.”