The mob swept on. It was not satisfied by the massacre it had done all that afternoon, by the hundreds of corpses, men, women and children mangled and dismembered. It pulled down hangings, broke furniture into splinters, ripped paneling off walls, smashed lamps and ornaments, tore books. One fixe after another billowed greasy, choking white smoke out into the corridors. The Frankies fought them with Gismo-fed extinguishers and hoses; the corridors streamed water and blood. The fires died, leaving a wet, acrid reek and a black mud of ash; the crowd roared on.
Every window had been smashed, and the cold air of the heights searched in through the doors hanging awry on their jambs; papers blew in gusts down the corridors between the hurrying figures, and the garments of corpses lifted in the wind. Some of the crowd had axes now, the sledges were in use again, and great strips of metal paneling came down with a clatter; masonry fell in choking clouds, marble cracked and thundered.
Transfigured faces shone in the broken light: eyes wide and aglitter, mouths grinning masks of cruelty and triumph, all fixed and all alike. They recognized one another only by their common expression: gardener and room girl, valet, cook and craftsman, they mingled indistinguishably, running and stumbling without fatigue, staring as if drugged, croaking at each other out of their parrot-grins; grimed, shiny with sweat, bloody, blackened and staring, staring.
Dick was one of them. Dressed in rags torn from a dead slave, his face and hands filthy, he ran with the rest. The faces floating around him were like reflections of his own. He had been running and shouting for hours, but he felt no tiredness, and he did not notice that only a hoarse whisper came out of his throat now.
At the beginning, when he had robbed the corpses of clothing for Elaine and himself, he had known that only one disguise would really work: to be one of the mob, to feel what they felt, to think what they thought. He had tried to tell her before they went out into the corridor; there had not been much time. They had been separated almost at once. He had not seen her since.
He had known that the only way to survive was to become one of the hunters. He had done so. He had no identity now, no anxieties for himself, no feeling of separation from the mob around him. Elaine was only a dim figure in the back of his mind. He was a drifting yell, a bright light moving, a, brain full of violence and noise looking for more.
He remembered capering in the Big Plaza, holding something round and dark and shapeless that swung by its long black hair from his fist; and the shouting, joyful faces, the arms and bodies leaping to take it away from him. Then somehow he had got into the Gismo Rooms under the Guard barracks, and in the light of one unbroken fluorescent, someone was passing out bundles of dynamite sticks to the crowd, but he had seen a pickaxe and had taken it instead; and then, without any transition, he was in the Elwyn Conservatory half a mile away swinging his pick crazily through the polished glass screens that stood everywhere, hearing them scream and clatter, seeing the gashed trunks and branches full of glittering shards.
Then there was the time the man came running across the floor, hoarsely shouting, with a woman in his arms, and dashed himself against the cracked Promenade window, breaking it, and fell into the darkness outside ... The running footsteps, the shout, "Yahhh!" and the crash. The footsteps, "Yahhh!" crash of glass, kept going meaninglessly through his brain.
There was a heavy explosion somewhere below, and the floor bounced as if hit with a giant hammer, knocking him off his feet. He climbed erect again, a little sobered and stunned, seeing the faces around him half shocked to reason for a moment. They were in the New Gallery, and he saw the smashed picture frames hanging empty from the walls. Then the crowd was up, confused, in movement now in a new direction, down the steep ramp to the plaza behind the Sports-garden, running hard at the bottom, and exploding out across the empty plaza, mixing with another stream of people on the far side, scattering unexpectedly in a dozen directions -- some across the arcade into Jewelers' Courts, some down the tunnel toward the museum annex, some into the little rabbit-warren corridors that branched every which way from the end of the plaza. Dick found himself, breathing heavily, in a dark low corridor of empty shop window-frames, littered with bits of glass and paper. Footsteps crunched rapidly away into the distance; he was alone.
Across the corridor was a telebooth, doorless, the broken picture tube like a blind eye. On a sudden impulse, Dick lurched over to it and pushed the buttons for a scramble call. The speakers hummed faintly; the circuits were alive, anyhow. Nothing else happened, and when he punched the combination for a relay broadcast outside Eagles, there was no response: naturally, you couldn't use these booths for outside calls unless special circuits were set up through Central Monitoring. He thought about that, aware of his own harsh breathing as he leaned with both hands over the control panel hi the dark little booth. His body was beginning to feel numb with fatigue, now that he had stopped; he was sweating as he leaned there in the dark, orienting himself. Central was only two levels down; it would be easy to get there, but was the chance worth taking? He knew it was dangerous to be out of the crowd like this, out of the protective crowd feeling, but it was, also a chance he might not get again.
Dick hesitated, then levered himself wearily upright and broke into a leaden run down the corridor, setting his face into a staring blankness.
Central was a huge room full of wreckage. All but a few of the picture tubes along the walls had been broken, and the control panels had been attacked apparently with axes -- wiring and components chopped into, drawers opened and the contents spilled, chairs and tables overturned. Dick wedged the door shut and went feverishly from one board to another, trying to find one that was still in operating condition. It looked hopeless; the mobs must have torn through here not once, but half a dozen times.
He stood staring in frustration at the ruined panels. Then he walked slowly once more around the room.
In the corner by the door was a heap of wreckage larger than the rest, where two cabinets had been toppled over, their contents spilling out. He stirred the heap with his foot; under the sliding rubble of glass and pasteboard there was a gleam of something big and undamaged. He fished it out: it was a portable TV, of the kind used for intramural broadcasts in Eagles -- six inches square by eight deep, with its own power pack and antenna, completely undamaged, not even a scratch on it.
He pried open the back, hunted up two adapter cables, and attached them to the TV's binding posts. Time was passing. He trotted back to the control panels, found two jacks marked "BCAST" and "RCVE," and plugged the TV in.
The screen lighted up. It was Channel 3, one of the usual adventure films; he caught a glimpse of a man being bowled over and shaken by a lion. He dialed quickly to Channel 9.
The screen flickered, steadied to show a gray card with a white lettering: "ALL CIRCUITS BUSY." The switch- board's recorded voice said, "This is Rocky Mountain Relay. All circuits are busy, please stand by."
He waited impatiently. The visual display stayed the same; the recorded message repeated itself every few seconds. At last the screen flickered and cleared again: another card, lettered, "YOUR CALL PLEASE." The voice said, "This is Rocky Mountain Relay. Please give your call clearly, naming place and location."
Dick said, "Buckhill, in the Poconos." He added, "Urgent!"
The display changed to read, "THANK YOU." The voice said. "Thank you. Your call is now being relayed. Please stand by."
A minute or more passed. The display changed to read, "SIGNALING," with a disc that lighted up and went out, lighted and went out
After a long interval, the screen flickered and cleared again. Something dark was being withdrawn from the screen; Dick glimpsed a tall figure against the background of a familiar room. He said, "Dad -- "