Skeletons by the hundreds lay on the floor and the upper parts of more hundreds were on the desks or tables. Thigh bones and pelvic bones lay on the seats of chairs, and beneath the seats were more leg bones. Death had struck instantly and en masse.
There wasn’t a single garment anywhere. The people working the experiments had been nude.
Burton said, “The Council of Twelve which interrogated me was clothed. Perhaps they donned their outfits so they wouldn’t offend my sense of modesty. If so, they didn’t know me well. Or perhaps they were required to wear garments when they were in session.”
Some of the equipment on the tables was still running. The nearest to Burton was a transparent sphere the size of his head. It was seemingly without an opening, yet large bubbles of different colors rose from its top, floated up to the ceiling, and burst. By the sphere was a transparent cube in which characters flashed as the bubbles ascended.
They walked on murmuring about the strangeness of the devices. When they’d gone a quarter of a mile, Frigate said, “Look at that!”
He pointed at a wheeled chair which sat in a broad aisle between tables. A jumble of bones, including a skull, lay on the seat, and leg and foot bones were at its base.
47
THE CHAIR WAS OVERSTUFFED/AND COVERED WITH A SOFT MAterial marked with thin alternating pale-red and pale-green zigzagging lines. Burton brushed the bones from the seat with a callousness which drew a protest from Croomes. He sat down, noting aloud that the chair fitted itself to his body. On the top of each massive arm, near the end, was a wide metal circle.
He gingerly pressed down on the black center of the white disc on his right. Nothing happened.
But when he pressed on the fingertip-thick center on the left, a long thin metal rod slid out.
“Aha!”
He pulled back slowly on the rod.
Nur said, “There’s a light coming from beneath the chair.”
The chair lifted soundlessly from the floor for a few inches.
“Press on the forward edge of the disc on your right,” Frigate said. “Maybe it controls the speed.”
Burton frowned because he did not like anyone telling him what to do. But he did use a fingertip to push the metal as suggested. The chair moved toward the ceiling at a very slow rate.
Ignoring the exclamations and several more suggestions, he pushed the lever to dead center. The chair straightened out at a horizontal level, continuing to move forward. He increased its speed, then moved the left-hand rod toward the right. The chair turned with the rod, maintaining its angle—no banking as in an airplane—and headed for the faraway wall. After making the chair go up to the ceiling and then down to the floor, whirling it a few times, and speeding it up to an estimated ten miles per hour, Burton landed the chair.
He was smiling; his black eyes were shiny with eagerness.
“We may have a vehicle to lift us up the shaft!” he cried.
Frigate and some of the others weren’t satisfied with the demonstration.
“It must be capable of even greater speed,” the American said. “What happens if you have to stop suddenly? Do you hurtle on out of the chair?”
“There’s one way of finding out,” Burton said. He made the chair lift a few inches, then accelerated it toward the wall, half a mile distant. When he was within twenty yards of the wall, he removed pressure from the right-hand disc. The chair at once slowed down but not so quickly that its passenger was in danger of being ejected. And when it was within five feet of the wall, it stopped.
When he returned, Burton said, “It must have built-in sensors. I tried to ram it into the wall, but it wouldn’t do it.”
“Fine,” Frigate said. “We can try to go through the shaft. But what if the Ethical is observing us now? What if he can cut off the power by remote control? We’d fall to our deaths or at least be stuck halfway between floors.”
“We’ll go one at a time. Each one will stop off at a floor before the next one goes. He won’t be able to catch more than one of us, and the others will be warned.”
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