Faintly, in the distance: clatter, crash.
For what seemed like hours, the chase went on. Dick fought his way a few yards at a tune through the tangle of furniture and crates; stopped to listen; plunged forward again. Soaked with sweat, gasping like a fish in the stagnant air, he paused with one leg up over the ridge of a mountainous sideboard. There was no sound. He gulped air, held his breath for a moment: still nothing but the pounding of blood in his own ears.
He stared from side to side. In all the vast sea of tablelegs, headboards, mirrors, there was no movement under the dim lights. Impossible that she could have escaped from the vault: the nearest doors were almost invisible in the distance. She had gone to ground: she might be anywhere in that hardwood jungle -- crouching under a table, or inside a buried wardrobe; lying still trying not to let him hear her breathing, like a rabbit in a hedge.
He waited, in hopes she would lose her nerve and bolt again, until he had his breath back. Then he began to move slowly and carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible. He quartered the ground patiently, pausing frequently to listen. On the third cast, a tiny sound broke the silence -- the faint creak of wood. Probably she had shifted her position.
Not everybody could stand lying still on a hard surface for long.
There was an open crate full of glass-shaded lamps nearby. He took a chance: he lifted one out, a dusty dumb-bell-shaped thing, and lobbed it in the direction he thought the sound had come from. It burst with a startling crash. Shards tinkled all around.
Sharp-eyed, Dick saw a convulsive movement in the forest of chair-legs. He vaulted an Empire sofa, zigzagged precariously across stacks of nested tables, and found himself looking down into a hollow under a big desk. Curled in the hollow, looking up at him with frightened eyes, was the girl.
"All right, come out," he said.
She rose slowly, dusty and tousled in the dim light. There was something curiously pathetic about her thinness, and the smudge of dirt on one cheek. She had ripped half the skirt off her antique dress, he saw: it was not the costume for scrambling around in the storage cellars.
Her frightened expression changed, doubtfully. "Oh, aren't you -- "
"Dick Jones. That's right." They had met once, at the last briefing, but only for a minute.
She was trying to laugh. "Well, then, why didn't you say so? I mean, all this -- " She gestured helplessly.
"Would you have believed me if I'd told you who I was?" he asked smoothly. "Come on, let's get out of here."
She put her hand in his; her palm was cool and soft. "Where are we going?" she asked as he helped her up. She brushed her long hair back from her forehead. "Can we go back up now? Golly, I must look like an awful mess."
Dick improvised lies about the turnover, which she seemed to accept without question. How young she was! His mind kept coming back to that, newly astonished by the gawky slenderness of her body, or the innocence that showed itself in every word she spoke. Had he ever been that dumb, even back at Buckhill? It seemed unlikely.
He tried to steer a course for the door he had come in by, but when they reached it, it was the wrong one. There was a short stair going down, none going up. A stronger glow of light came from the landing.
The way might be clearer one level down: heaven knew, they could waste days fighting their way through that tangle of furniture. "Come on," he said, taking her arm.
Downstairs there was another vault, illimitable, misty under the bluish ceiling lights. Crates and stacks of all sizes stood at random, but at least there was some space to move between them. Also, there were tracks in the dust that looked recent.
Dick frowned over this. He did not like the idea of meeting anyone before he could get back to the authorities with his prisoner: some officious nobody was likely to take him for the girl's accomplice instead of her captor. However, it was worth the risk to get out of here that much faster. Somewhere on this vast floor there must be an elevator or a stair going up.
Still, the aisle grew narrower and more erratic the farther they went, and the things in the crates began to get very queer, too. Here was a box taller than their heads, through whose dusty, plastic sides they could see, as if frozen in a dirty block of ice, a heap of stuffed animals -- rumpled velvet pelts, button eyes staring, threadbare paws. There were teddy bears, elephants, tigers, lions, monkeys ... all used-looking, not collector's items by any stretch of the imagination, but just junk.
Here was a long case full of books in individual plastic envelopes. Some of the bindings were good, some were even elaborately tooled, but others were scuffed, cracked and torn. Dick paused to read a few of the titles: Treasure Island; Ozma of Oz; Pepper and Salt. Then there was a row of narrow volumes with nothing on the spines but a monogram, "TC." One was rat-gnawed; Dick took it down, pulled the envelope off, and opened it in the middle. Under an exercise in square roots, in a boyish hand, was a riddle:
"What has 22 legs and flies? Ans.: A dead football team."
Under that, a drawing of a knife, the pencil lines deeply scored. Dick shut the book and put it back.
"What is all this?" the girl asked. "Do you know?"
"It looks as if he never threw anything away," said Dick. He glanced at her curiously. Her face was unconcerned; she looked back at him with a tremulous smile -- more aware of him than of anything so remote as the Boss's boyhood.
Curious to think that she had given birth to that boy, who was now the gray toad who ruled Eagles. In fact, if Thaddeus II had been nine or so when that journal was written, then she must have been dead for about four years ... It made him a little dizzy to think about it. All that, so deep now in the past, was nothing but an unrealized future to her: she was twenty again, and looked about eighteen; the best thing that could happen to her, he supposed, was to go through it all over again. A good thing for her that she didn't know.
The floor seemed endless. The sounds of their footsteps were muffled; there was a gray musty smell in the air -- a smell of papers turning dusty and brittle, packed away out of the light. Everywhere stood the plastic-sided boxes and bundles, some still whole, some not. Then the character of the place began to change. They were passing a row of little buildings, standing isolated like so many crates, some faced with stone or brick on one side, bare wood and plaster on the rest. One had a sign over it, "STRIPPEL'S DRUGS"; the door had been carefully sealed, but the glass was broken out of it.
"Can't we sit down and rest for a minute?" the girl asked. "I'm so tired, I could just die."
Against the dimness inside, he could see the outlines of a table and chairs. "Careful." With a hand on her elbow, he helped her through the broken door, bits of glass snapping underfoot. The chairs were of flimsy wood, cheap twentieth century stuff, but they seemed sound, and there was not even very much dust. Probably the interior had been sealed and filled with inert gas until recently.
They sat down, surrounded on all sides by racks, display cases, pigeonholes: candy here, greeting cards, boxes of film over there, yellowing magazines and paperbacked books. The counters were crowded with cardboard displays; some had fallen to the floor. Dick idly picked one up; there were a few tiny bags of peanuts clipped to the front of it. On the back he read: "Say! Mr. Retailer! Here's a colorful counter display box that has been designed expressly to help you make MORE SALES and MORE PROFITS ... " A reconstruction, probably; hardly anything of this kind had survived through the Turnover years.
He was surprised to see the girl's eyes glistening with tears. "What's the matter?"
"I don't know," she said thickly. She leaned her head on one hand, rubbing the heel into her eye. The posture made her neck and shoulders look absurdly fragile; he had an-impulse to put his arm around her. Her pale lashes were quite thick and long; he saw; they didn't show when she was looking up. "Don't mind me, I'm just being silly." Her lips were swollen, her cheeks softly flushed.