He struggled wearily up from the couch and went clumsily on hands and knees across the room to the music player. From there he went to the tape cabinets, and to some adjoining shelves where he found a reference printer.
Twenty minutes later found him back on the couch. The fine, golden threads of Il Trovatore were spinning themselves out of the speakers of the music player, the rich canvas of Rubens' "Adoration of the Magi" was displayed in the tank of the tape cabinets, and the solemn heartbreak of Milton's sonnet on his blindness tolled like a slow and shadowed bell from a printer sheet in Paul's hand:
When 1 consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide...
Paul lay there, changing art, music, and poetry for mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and all the fields of man's endeavor. And slowly the life of those who had had something to give to life seeped back into his own drained being, and his strength came back to him.
By the fourth day after his arrival he was back to normal. He got himself a large meal out of the kitchen, and then set about exploring the limits of this prison to which he had been sentenced.
It was about thirty feet in length, and about that same height and width at its greatest points of those two dimensions. Either end of it was a great circle flattened off at the bottom by the chord-line of the floor. One circle overlooked the terminal area of his arrival. The other merely filled up the far end of the living space.
It was this second circle that Paul looked over with interest. The first, overhanging the terminal point of his arrival, presumably simply hid the business end of an accelerator. The second might, however, be blocking the way to an escape route. When he looked closely, he discovered that the second in fact did appear to be something in the nature of a removable cover, held in place by a simple magnetic lock.
He unlocked the cover and the lower half of it swung away from him like half of a huge Dutch door. He walked through it and found himself in a farther extension of the cylinder, three times as big as the living quarters and filled with crated equipment and tools. He let his gaze settle over the tools and crates, and the answer he was looking for became easily apparent to him. This was the material with which the accelerator terminal here could be fitted to transmit as well as receive. He paused to glance at the tickets attached to some of the crates, but they were punch cards notated in a technician's shorthand that he did not know. He went on to the still farther circular wall that ended this division of the cylinder.
This had been sealed with a running bead of plastic weld all around its rim. It was evidently intended to be easily removed, but only by someone who knew how to do so, and why he was doing it.
Paul turned back and searched the second room once more, but there was no message or instruction list in sight.
He went back into the living quarters, and proceeded to make a methodical search of that area. He excavated drawers and investigated files and cabinets. There was no instruction sheet or manual. Evidently, whoever this place had been designed for had been expected to have that sort of information in his head. Paul was standing in the middle of the living-area floor and looking about for some hiding place he might have overlooked, when there was a sound from behind him, from the direction of the terminal area.
He looked. There on the bare and polished surface he saw a newssheet lying, still slightly curled from the printer. He went to it and picked it up.
For a moment he could not imagine what reason had caused the Supe to send it through to him. The headings of the various stories on the front page screamed of riots, panics, and earthquakes. Then, sliding his eye up one column and down the next in automatic speed-reading, Paul saw a small item: WORLD ENGINEER GIVEN EXTRAORDINARY POWERS.
By an unprecedented world-wide register vote, the World Engineer yesterday was awarded authority to freeze the credit numbers and deny all Complex services to rioters and those suspected of disturbing the peace. The Complex-Major tabulated an almost
inconceivable 82 per cent of the total voting population, with 97.54 per cent of those voting registering in favor of awarding the additional authority to the World Engineer.
A tiny item. But Paul frowned. Highly important it was, but that did not seem to him sufficient cause for the Supe to send him the newssheet. Nor - he glanced back at the other stories upon the front page - was the news of widespread emotional disturbances and rioting sufficient. The machine was not equipped to gloat, and surely with Paul imprisoned here as he was, there could be no other reason for informing him about events he was powerless to have an effect upon.
Still puzzling, Paul opened the newssheet to its second and third pages. Then he saw it
By some apparent freak mishap, the printer had failed to bring out the printing on these two pages otherwise than as an unreadable blur, except for one item as small as the front-page item Paul had just frowned over. That one stood out as if framed.
DRONE LOST
The Complex-Major today noted the Information that one of its Springboard drones, carrying automatic terminal receiving equipment to the planet known as New Earth, fourth world of the star Sirius, has suffered a malfunction of the directing system and been lost in space. This drone, which three days ago was noted as being in position to land shortly on New Earth, apparently missed its landing and has fallen beyond that planet under conditions of movement which win carry it out of the Sirian system. There can be no hope of reestablishing contact, notes the Complex-Major, or of recovery of the drone.
Paul dropped the newssheet and, spinning about, strode swiftly back into the farther room. Seizing a tool like a chisel, he attacked the plastic weld around the rim of the circular end wall. The plastic peeled up under his gouging and a thin edge of the metal was revealed. He forced the chisel edge in under the edge of the revealed metal. For a moment there was resistance, and then the chisel plunged through. There was a sudden whistling insuck of air past Paul's hand, the plastic weld cracked loose halfway around the rim, and the lower half spanged sharply on a deep bass note. Before Paul's eyes a horizontal crack ran across the metal, and the lower half of it broke clean from the top and fell into the room.
Paul caught it. It was a thin sheet of light magnesium alloy. He bent it inward and laid it flat on the floor. Then he stepped one step forward and looked out, through heavy glass.
Before him was a rolling landscape under a slightly yellowish sky, an atmosphere hazed with fine dust. Something like tiny, close-packed fern leaves covered the ground and grew thickly and a little larger about an occasional boulder or outcropping of granitic rock. Farther back were low, broad trees whose trunks and limbs looked as if they had been shaped out of dark, twisted cable. The brilliant white points of two Ao-type stars, so close they seemed at the moment to be swimming into each other, peered burningly through the dust haze and made the illumination for the day outside.
From the sight of these and the landscape they lighted - a landscape rich in promise for the yet infant science of terraforming - Paul had no difficulty making the connection between his present location and one of the worlds described in popular articles as destinations for the Springboard drones.
The double star in the sky out there could only be Sirius and its close companion. Which meant that this was New Earth, and the message of the newssheet the Supe had sent him was clear. Paul, and this drone in which he found himself imprisoned, had been deliberately and officially "lost" from the records.