He opened the door wider. Both moved forward carefully, glancing along the street outside.
This was one of the main streets of the Depot. Across from them, a hundred and fifty yards away, was the massive white front of the structure which housed the central generators. Approximately two hundred yards to the left, it was pierced by a small entrance door which was the next step on Wergard’s route to their quarters. To west and east, the street stretched away for half a mile before rows of buildings crossed it.
But all this was in semi-darkness now; too dim to let them make out the door in the wall of the generator building from where they stood. A hazy brightness above the line of buildings across the street indicated the rest of the Depot was still flooded by the projection lighting system which was that of the old fortress—wear-proof and ageless. If not deliberately tampered with, it would go on filling the Depot with eternal day-brightness for millennia.
But something had tampered with it and was still tampering with it. As they looked, the gloom along the street deepened perceptibly, then, slowly, lightened to its previous level.
“There can’t be much light in the Pit, of course,” Wergard said, staring up the street to the west. The control section, Danestar realized suddenly, lay in that direction. “It may be trying to improve visibility in the Depot for its perceptions.”
“Or,” said Danestar, “ruin visibility for ours.”
Wergard looked at her. “We don’t have the time left to try another route,” he said. “Whatever it’s doing, we may make a mistake in crossing the street while it’s experimenting. But waiting here makes no sense.”
She shook her head. “The intention might be to keep us waiting here.”
“Yes, I thought of that. So let’s go. Right now. Top speed across. I’ll stay behind you.”
For an instant, Danestar hesitated. Her feeling that the uncertain darkness of the wide street was under the scrutiny of alien senses, that they would be observed and tracked, like small scuttling animals, as soon as they left the shelter of the doorway, became almost a conviction in that moment. The fact remained that they could not stay where they were. She tightened her grip on the handle of the valise, drew a deep breath, darted out.
They were half across when the darkness thickened so completely that they might have moved in mid-stride into a black universe. Blind, she thought. It was an abrupt mental shock. She faltered, almost stumbled, felt she had swerved from the line she was following, tried to turn back to it . . . suddenly didn’t know at all in which direction to move. Now panic closed in.
“Wergard!”
“That way!” His voice, hoarse and strained, was on her right, rather than behind her. As she turned toward it, his light flicked on, narrowed to a pale thread, marking a small circle on the wall of the generator building ahead of Danestar. She was hurrying toward the wall again as the thread of light cut out . . . and seconds later, the wall and the street began to reappear, dim and vague as before, but tangibly present. They reached the wall together, turned left along it. Again the street darkened, became lost in absolute blackness.
Wergard’s hand caught her arm. “Just walk.” He added something, muttered and indistinct, which might have been a curse. They went on, breathing raggedly. Wergard’s hand remained on Danestar’s arm. The darkness lightened a trifle, grew dense again. “Hold on a moment!” Wergard said, very softly.
She stopped instantly, stood unmoving, let her breath out slowly. Wergard’s hand left her arm. She had an impression of cautious motion from him, decided he’d raised the carbine to fire-ready position. Then he, too, was still.
He’d speak when he thought he could. Danestar’s eyes shifted quickly, scanning the unrelieved dark about them. The only sound was a dim faint hum of machinery from within the structure on their right.
Then she realized something had appeared in her field of vision.
It was ahead and to the left. A small pale patch of purple luminescence, moving swiftly but in an oddly jerky manner, its outline shifting and wavering, as it approached their path at what might be a right angle. How far away? If it was touching the ground, Danestar thought, or just above it, it must be at least two hundred yards farther up the street. That would make it a considerably larger thing than her first impression had suggested.
As these calculations flicked through her mind, their object passed by ahead, moved on to the right, abruptly vanished.
“You saw it?” Wergard whispered.
“Yes.”
“Went in between a couple of buildings. Not so good—but it was some distance off. We don’t seem to have been noticed. Let’s go on.”
Wergard had glimpsed another of the minor fire shapes just before they stopped. That one had been smaller—or farther away—and had been in sight for only an instant, on the left side of the street.
“They shouldn’t be too large to get through a personnel lock and switch off a barrier for Thing Number One,” he said as they hurried along a catwalk in the generator building. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean Number One is in this area.”
“Scouts?” Danestar suggested.
That had been Wergard’s thought. The Pit creature could have split off several dozen autonomous sections of itself of the size they had observed without noticeably reducing its main bulk, and scattered them about the Depot to speed up the search for any humans still hiding out. The carbine couldn’t have done significant damage to the alien giant but should have the power to disrupt essential force patterns in these lesser replicas. “They don’t make things easier for us,” Wergard said, “but we’ll have to show ourselves only once more. After that, we’ll have cover. And we can change our tactics a little. . . . ”
At the end of the generator building was the central street of the Depot, slightly wider than the last one they had crossed. It was almost startling to find it normally lit. Directly opposite was the entrance recess to another building. This was the final open stretch on the way to their quarters. Wergard mopped his forehead, asked, “Ready to try it?”
Danestar nodded. She felt lightly tensed, not at all tired. Dread had its uses—her body had recognized an ultimate emergency and responded. She thought it would go on running now when she called on it until it fell dead.
Wergard was wearing a sneaksuit; she wasn’t. It was possible they were being followed, that the light-shapes they’d seen were casting about in the area for the source of the life energy they’d detected here, of which she was the focus. In that case, getting across the central street might be the point of greatest danger. They’d decided she should go first while Wergard covered her with the carbine. He would follow as soon as she was within the other building.
She slipped out the door ahead of him, drew a deep breath, ran straight across the too-silent, bright-lit street toward the entrance recess.
And nothing happened. The carbine stayed quiet. The paving flowed by, and it seemed only an instant then before the building front swayed close before her. Danestar flung herself into the recess, came up gasping against the wall.
A door on the left, Wergard had said. Where?—she discovered it next to her, pulled it open.
For a moment, her mind seemed about to spin into insanity. Then she was backing away from the door, screaming with all her strength, while two shapes of pale fire glided out through it toward her. Somewhere, she heard the distant sharp snarl of the carbine. A blizzard of darting, writhing lines of purple light enveloped her suddenly, boiled in wild turmoil about the recess. The closer of the shapes had vanished, and the carbine was snarling again.
Abruptly, her awareness was wiped out.
“Got your third setting now, I think!” Wergard announced.
Danestar glanced at him. He sat at a table a few feet to her left, hunched forward, elbows planted on the table, face twisted in concentration as he peered at the tiny paper-flat instrument in his left hand.
“Uh-huh, that’s it!” He sighed heavily. “Four to go.”
His right forefinger and thumb closed cautiously down on the device, shifted minutely, shifted back again. It was an attachment taken from Danestar’s commband detector. She had designed it, used it on occasion to intrude on covert communications in which she had a professional interest, sometimes blanking a band out gently at a critical moment, sometimes injecting misinformation.
But it was an instrument designed for her fingers, magical instruments themselves in their sensitized skill, deftness, and experience. It had not been designed for Wergard’s fingers, or anyone else’s; and the only help she could give him with it was to tell him what must be done. Both hands were needed to operate the settings, and at present she couldn’t use her left hand. What had knocked her out in the building entrance, an instant before Wergard’s gun disrupted the second of the two Pit things that surprised her there, seemed to have been the approximate equivalent of a near miss from a bolt of lightning. Wergard had carried her two Depot blocks to their quarters, was working a sneaksuit over her, before she regained consciousness. Then she woke up suddenly, muscles knotted, trying to scream, voice thick and slurred when she started to answer Wergard’s questions. They discovered her left side was almost completely paralyzed, her tongue partly affected. As soon as he could make out what she wanted, what her plan had been, Wergard hauled her down to the ground-level barrier room of the building, along with an assortment of hastily selected gadgetry, settled her in a chair next to the barrier control panel, arranged the various instruments on a table before her where she could reach them with her right hand. Then he went to work on the attachment’s miniature dials to adjust them to the seven settings she’d told him were needed.