The Guard lieutenant whistled under his breath. His loutish face was suddenly drawn and intent. Behind him, all the other guards were looking up with the same expression. They were all slaves, of course; a special kind of slave, with the privilege of bearing arms in Eagles, which made them in some ways superior to any free man; but you could see that any of them would give an arm or a leg to be a person. It almost never happened; it was a measure of the woman's importance to the Boss, that he should offer it.
The woman was Elaine. There was no doubt of that, from the description. It was natural for the Boss to want her accounted for -- any idiot who had her might think himself qualified to lead another revolt. But if that were all, would he take the risk of manumitting slaves?
There was another possible explanation. When Melker's group had obtained a dupe of Elaine, they might have destroyed or hidden the prote at the same time. Misfiling it would have been enough: it would take forever to find one misfiled prote among the billions.
If that were so, then even if Dick's name was on the blacklist -- when things settled down, if he returned with the Boss-wife, that might be enough to buy his immunity. It was something: it was a chance.
Feeling the Guards' eyes on him, he glanced at his watch. "I suppose the plans have been changed again," he said. "I'd better go and check."
The Guard lieutenant nodded gloomily. Dick turned and walked away.
Which way? He had to decide quickly: but the girl might have taken any of dozens of exits from the sector of Melker's suite. There were uncountable nooks and crannies; he had less than a chance in a thousand of guessing the right one.
But when he stopped wondering where the girl might be, and thought of his own danger, he had only one instinct: down.
So much the better. To track a deer, you had to be a deer. Dick boarded the down escalator at the next plaza, thinking, I'm frightened. I've got to hide -- get out of sight, or they'll kill me. Down. Down deep. Make myself small and pull the covers over my head.
Now he was on the lowest residential level. The corridors were beginning to fill up here; he passed a roving squad of Guards, and remembered just in time to straighten his back and let his footsteps fall hard. They looked at him sharply, but let him go: he was a man in uniform, moving as if he had a legitimate errand.
Looking for a way down, he saw a door he must have passed a hundred times without seeing it: two swinging panels, with the green stencilled design that meant: SLOB COUNTRY.
He pushed the door open and was in another world. Dim lights shone on the grime of the high ceilings; the walls were of unfinished cement, and the floors were bare except for catwalks of rubber mats laid end to end. A hum of voices and movement greeted him, together with a breath of stale air, freighted with sour, old smells. For an instant, it was like being back in the holy man's cave, and Dick had a curious sense of double vision -- the dusty fluorescents overhead, and a flickering, oil-soaked wick below; grime and soot intermingling. Then it passed, and he was moving down the main corridor. Half-dressed slobs looked up sleepily from their bunks as he passed an open doorway. From another came the clangor of tinware and a steamy smell with soap and rotten cloth in it. An old fellow in yellow denims came by, pushing a wheeled rack full of kitchenware. Dick stopped him roughly:
"Where's the exit to the lower level?"
"Misser," said the fellow, looking frightened, "there isn't one, excuse me, except the one that has the seal on it. Nobody goes here to below, it's forbidden. It's the Boss's own seal, I will show you."
He scurried ahead, abandoning the cart, and Dick followed into the next corridor and down a half-flight of stairs. The door was grimy with disuse. It was fastened with a hasp and a padlock; the padlock had an embossed design which Dick could feel with his thumb: a "C" with a finicky shape above it, probably an eagle.
"Get me some tools," he said. "A cold chisel and a hammer. I want that door open in less than five minutes."
"Misser, we have no requisition -- "
"Get "em!" shouted Dick. The old fellow ducked away with a gesture of despair.
In a few minutes he was back, in the center of a little knot of other servants. One of them, inevitably, was Frankie. The gargoyle was carrying a toolbox. He looked unhappy. "Misser Jones, you know we not suppose to open that door without the word from the Boss heself. If you got the word -- "
"There wasn't time for that," said Dick. "This is an emergency. Here -- " He felt in his pockets, found a scrap of paper. "Give me a pencil, I'll sign for it."
Frankie handed over the stub of a carpenter's pencil, looking dubious. Dick scrawled, "I take responsibility for opening door in servant quarters," and signed it. The slobs looked at it with varying degrees of incomprehension; probably few of them could read or write. Frankie looked unhappier than ever, but carefully folded the paper away, and took a chisel and sledge out of his toolbox. Three powerful strokes sheared through one arm of the staple that held the padlock. Frankie worked the lock free and stood back, holding it in his palm"
Dick opened the door, saw a glimmer of light at the end of a short passage. "Lock this up again behind me," he said, and stepped through.
At the end of the passage, he found himself in a wide, empty hall. The dim lights in the ceiling were not even fluorescents, but old-fashioned incandescent bulbs; they cast a sickly orange glow that left the place almost in darkness. The air was heavy and still. Silence closed in. Dick felt alone and a little foolish. Suppose the girl hadn't come here at all? Through that door, at least, nobody had come for years. But there were hundreds of possible entrances; if he had stopped to test his hunch by checking each one, it would have taken him forever. Now, at least, he was here; if she had come this way, it ought to be an easy matter to pick up her trail on this side.
He stooped: in the thick carpet of dust there were footprints, but none looked recent. At one side of the room stood several abandoned hand trucks; there were loading bays in the far wall, closed now by metal doors. To right and left were open doorways; nothing was visible through either except darkness, picked out faintly at intervals by more dim yellowish lights.
Dick followed the left-hand corridor past still other doorways, some closed and locked, some open. Through the open doorways, in the dim light, he glimpsed piled, enigmatic masses: once he reached inside and felt the curved smoothness of a table leg. These evidently, were disused storerooms, full of articles once prized but now forgotten. A disturbing echo of memory awakened: Ruell, saying, "He collects collections ... This whole mountain, in fact ... " How deep did these subterranean storerooms go?
Guided by some obscure compulsion, he took the first stairway down.
He found himself in a clutter of objects piled helter-skelter: tables, sofas, chairs thrusting their legs at him; books sliding and squirming under foot as he moved, lamp shades shaking down clouds of dust.
In the distance, someone sneezed.
The sound echoed and re-echoed under the vaulted ceilings. Dick held his breath, listening, and after a moment heard a faraway, sliding clatter. Someone ... someone ... Who else could it be?
He moved forward cautiously, trying to avoid making any noise, but it was useless. A tilted chair slid out from under him, and his foot went through a fragile table-top with a crunching, rending sound.
Instantly, somewhere in the distance, there was a crash and a scurrying noise. Dick swore, wrenched the table-top loose, and clambered in pursuit. His heart was racing; he vaulted a fallen bookcase, danced precariously in a nest of chairs, climbed an up-ended divan. He stopped to listen.