They also located the great power plant. This contained the gravitic machines which now maintained an artificial field within the palace. Otherwise, they would have been floating around in free fall.
“It’s a wonder he didn’t turn that off,” Anana said. “It would have been one more way to torment us.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Kickaha said.
Their search uncovered no tools which could blast into the control chamber. They hadn’t thought it would.
Kickaha conferred with Anana, who knew more about parachutes than he did. Then he gave a number of robots very detailed instruction on how to manufacture two chutes out of silken hangings.
“All we have to do is to jump off and then float down,” he said. “But I don’t relish the idea of spending the rest of my life on that miserable world. It’s better than being dead, but not by much.”
There were probably a thousand, maybe two thousand gates in the walls and on the floors and possibly on the ceilings. Without the codewords to activate them, they could neither locate nor use them.
They wondered where the wallpanel was which the Englishman had used to get away from Red Ore. To search for it would take more time than they had. Then Kickaha thought of asking the robots, One and Two, if they had witnessed his
escape. To his delight, both had. They led the humans to it. Kickaha pushed in on the panel and saw a metal chute leading downward some distance, then curving.
“Here goes nothing,” he said to Anana. He jumped into it sitting up and slid down and around and was shot into a narrow dimly lit hall. He yelled back up the chute to her and told her he was going on. But he was quickly stopped by a dead end.
After tapping and probing around, he went back to the chute and, bracing himself against the sides, climbed back up.
“Either there’s another panel I couldn’t locate or there’s a gate in the end of the hall,” he told her.
They sent the robots to the supply room to get a drill and hammers. Though the drills wouldn’t work on the material enclosing the control room, they might work on the plastic composing the walls of the hidden hall. After the robots returned, Kickaha and Anana went down the chute with them and bored holes into the walls. After making a circle of many perforations, he knocked the circle through with a sledgehammer.
Light streamed out through it. He caustiously looked within. He gasped.
“Well, I’ll be swoggled! Red Ore!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IN THE MIDDLE of a large bare room was a transparent cube about twelve feet long. A chair, a narrow bed, and a small red box on the floor by a wall shared the cube with its human occupant, Ore. Kickaha noted that a large pipe ran from the base of the wall of the room to the cube, penetrated the transparent material, and ended in the red box. Presumably, this furnished water and perhaps a semiliquid type of food. A smaller pipe within the large one must provide air.
Red Ore was sitting on the chair before the table, his profile to the watchers through the hole. Evidently, the cube was soundproof, since he had not heard the drilling or pounding. The Horn and a beamer lay on the table before him. From this Kickaha surmised that the cube was invulnerable to the beamer’s rays.
Red Ore, once the secret Lord of the Two Earths, looked as dejected as a man could be. No wonder. He had stepped through a gate in the control room, expecting to enter another universe, possessing the Horn, the Lords’ greatest treasure, and leaving behind him two of his worst enemies to die. But Urthona had prepared his trap well, and Red Ore had been gated to this prison instead of to freedom.
As far as he knew, no one was aware that he was locked in this room. He was doubtless contemplating how long it would be before the palace fell to
Urthona’s world and he perished in the smash, caught in his own trap.
Kickaha and Anana cut a larger hole in the wall for entrance. During this procedure, Ore saw them. He rose up from his chair and stared from a pale-gray face. He could expect no mercy. The only change in his situation was that he would die sooner.