They returned to their chairs and flew slowly down the curving corridor. Burton was beginning to feel that their tour was very informative, even if often puzzling, but useless. This was no way to go about finding X.
What else could they do? There were no directories on the walls, and they couldn’t read them if there were. It was frustrating and futile to proceed in this manner, yet they just couldn’t sit around in one place and hope that X would find them. If he did, he’d be armed with some irresistible weapon. No doubt of that.
On the other hand, they had been fortunate in locating the residences of the twelve and of Monat Grrautut and the dome entrance. Perhaps, the place where X did his experiments or a control center he used might be near his apartment.
They came to a closed door and passed it. There would be many thousands of such in this vast place. They couldn’t afford the time to open every one.
But when he was thirty feet beyond it, Burton raised his hand to signal a halt.
“What is it?” Alice said.
“I’ve a certain feeling, a strong hunch.”
He lowered the chair to the floor.
“I’ll just take a moment to check this out.”
He pressed a button on the wall by the door, and the door slid soundlessly into a recess. Beyond was a cavernous room with much varied equipment on tables and, against the walls, many cabinets. There was only one skeleton. A violent explosion had evidently caught someone as he was passing by a cabinet or doing something with it. The top of the cabinet had been blown off, judging from the outwardly twisted metal, the pieces of some glassy substance on the floor, and metal pieces inside the skeleton. It lay twenty feet out from the wreck, and under the bones were dark bloodstains.
Just beyond the skeleton }he blast had knocked a star-shaped metal construction from the top of a table. It lay on the floor emitting what looked like many-colored heat waves.
Straight ahead of Burton and near the center of the room was a flying chair. It was on the floor and tenantless, one side to him, and fresh bloodstains on the arm.
Just beyond the chair was a great revolving disc on a cylinder about two feet high. Cabinets and consoles were on its perimeter. In the center was a fixed platform. A man sat on a chair of some semitransparent stuff in the middle of the fixed platform. Before him was a console with a sloping instrument panel and several live screens. He was adjusting a dial, his eyes fixed on the largest oscilloscope. His profile was to Burton.
Burton put a finger to his lips and with the other hand gestured at his companions to get off their chairs. Then he unholstered his revolver and indicated that the others should do the same.
The operator had long fox-red hair, a pale white skin, and the eye presented to Burton lacked an epicanthic fold. If the man hadn’t been so fat, Burton might not have identified him. Fat, however, couldn’t be removed in such a short time.
Burton walked slowly through the door and toward the man. The others were fanning out, their guns ready.
When they were within sixty feet of him, the man saw them. He reared up out of the chair, grimaced, and sat back down. His hand shot out, dived into a recess under the panel, and came out holding a strange-looking device. It had a pistollike butt for gripping, a barrel about a foot long and three inches in diameter, and a sphere at its end the size of a large apple.
Burton cried out, “Loga!”
He ran forward.
49
THE ETHICAL ROSE AGAIN AND SHOUTED, “STOP! OR I’LL FIRE!”
They kept on running. He sighted along the barrel through the transparent sphere, and a thin scarlet line shot soundlessly from the sphere. Smoke curled up from the shallow arc drawn on the metal before the group.
They halted. Anything that could melt that metal was very impressive.
“I can cut you all into two with a single sweep of this,” Loga said. “I don’t want to. There’s been far too much violence, and I’m sick of it. But I will kill you if I must. Now… all of you turn around in unison and throw your weapons as far as you can toward the door.”