Kickaha crawled to Anana. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be in a minute,” she said. “I don’t have much strength just now. And I got a headache.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Well, at least we’re inside.”
“Never say die, eh? Sometimes your optimism … well, never mind. What do you suppose happened to the man who let Ore in?”
“If he’s still alive, he’s regretting his kind deed. He can’t be a Lord. If he was, he’d not have let himself be taken.”
Kickaha called out to Ore, asking him who the stranger was. Ore didn’t reply. He stopped at the end of the corridor, which branched off into two others. He said something in a low voice to the wall, a codeword, and a section of wall moved back a little and then slid inside a hollow. Revealed was a room about twenty feet by twenty feet, an elevator.
Ore pressed a button on a panel. The elevator shot swiftly upward. When it stopped, the lighted symbol showed that it was on the fortieth floor. Ore pressed two more buttons and took hold of a small lever. The elevator moved out into a very wide corridor and glided down it. Ore turned the lever, the elevator swiveled around a corner and went down another corridor for about two hundred feet. It stopped, its open front against a door.
Ore removed a little black book from a pocket, opened it, consulted a page, said something that sounded like gibberish, and the door opened. He replaced the book and stood to one side as the cage rolled into a large room. It stopped in the exact center.
Ore spoke some more gibberish. Mechanisms mounted on the walls at a height of ten feet from the floor extended metal arms. At the end of each was a beamer. There were two on each wall, and all pointed at the cage. Above the weapons were small round screens. Undoubtedly, video eyes.
Ore said, “I’ve heard you boast that there isn’t a prison or a trap that can hold you, Kickaha. I don’t think you’ll ever make that boast again.”
“Do you mind telling us what you intend to do with us?” Anana said in a bored voice.
“You’re going to starve,” he said. “You won’t die of thirst since you’ll be given enough water to keep you going. At the end of a certain time-which I won’t tell you-whether you’re still alive or not, the beamers will blow you apart.
“Even if, inconceivably, you could get out of the cage and dodge the beamers, you can’t get out of here. There’s only one exit, the door you came through. You can’t open that unless you know the codeword.”
Anana opened her mouth, her expression making it obvious that she was going to appeal. It closed; her expression faded. No matter how desperate the situation, she was not going to humiliate herself if it would be for nothing. But she’d had a moment of weakness.
Kickaha said, “At least you could satisfy our curiosity. Who was the man who let you in? What happened to him?”
Ore grimaced. “He got away from me. I got hold of a beamer and was going to make him my prisoner. But he dived through a trapdoor I hadn’t known existed. I suppose by now he’s gated to another world. At least, the sensors don’t indicate his presence.”
Kickaha grinned, and said, “Thank you. But who was he?”
“He claimed to be an Earthman. He spoke English, but it was a quaint sort. It sounded to me like eighteenth-century English. He never told me his name. He began to ramble on and on, told me he’d been trapped here for some time when he gated from Vala’s world to get away from her. It had taken him some time to find out how to activate a gate to another universe without being killed. He was just about to do so when he saw me galloping up. He decided to let me in because I didn’t look like a native of this world.
“I think he was half-crazy.”
“He must have been completely insane to trust you, a Lord,” Anana said. “Did he say anything about having seen Kickaha, McKay, and myself. He passed over us when we were on the moon.”