She hurried ahead and stopped in front of the object, bending low in front of it. After a moment, she came back and knelt down. “I think we can get inside it. It looks like a ventilation duct or something.”
Derec nodded. He had stopped crawling to get his breath again. His head was spinning dizzily.
When she got down on all fours and moved under him, he let her. She gathered his arms around her neck and maneuvered under him. Then, supporting his weight, she began to crawl much faster than he had, carrying as much of his weight as she could.
He hung on with his arms and closed his eyes against the spray of water.
“Here,” she said, after a few moments.
He opened his eyes into a gaping black opening with no other features. As she eased out from under him, he reached inside and felt for the shape of the object.
“It’s not a straight drop.” She helped him climb inside. “You can feel a gradual incline.”
Derec hesitated, too disoriented to speak but still reluctant to throw himself into an unknown hole.
“Go on, get in before the Hunters see us.”
He was losing all sense of his surroundings. Following directions was easier than arguing. He worked his way inside the opening and then suddenly was sliding downward and accelerating.
All was in darkness. He felt a rushing of air, the smooth pressure of the surface against his back as he slid, and Ariel bumping against him from above as she slid with him. Vaguely, he realized he was too exhausted to feel any fear.
He should have been terrified of winding up in a moving fan blade, for instance, or in the workings of some mysterious robot creation that would convert them both to fertilizer. Apparently he had been on Robot City too long for that. The robots couldn’t allow that much danger to a human to exist here.
No, that wasn’t it, either. The reason was even simpler. Nothing on this planet was more frightening than the chemfets destroying his body from the inside at this very moment.
The sensation of falling continued as they entered some turns, gradual curves, and finally reached a sudden upturn.
In the short ascent, gravity broke their momentum and then they slid backward again. Derec lay motionless, aware that they had stopped in the bottom of this thing, whatever it was. No light reached them at all.
He felt Ariel move a little, probably getting her bearings.
“Derec?” She said softly.” Are you hurt?”
A moment passed before he had the breath to answer. “No,” he whispered. “But I’ve had it.”
“We’re safe now,” she said, feeling for him and stroking his hair.” At least from the Hunters. I’m sure of it. They’ll have to search the entire valley, and every one of these things. And these were popping up every few meters, it looked like… well, every fifty or sixty, anyhow. Without a heat trail to follow, it’ll take them forever.”
“I can’t do it.”
“But we’re onto him! Avery, I mean. I’m sure of it.” She shuffled around and seemed to stand. “You know that upward curve at the end of our…little ride? It’s here and not very high. The duct continues on a level from here. Say, you know what else? There are handholds of some kind on the side opposite the one we slid down.”
“Maybe for service robots to make repairs down here.” He thought a moment. The temptation to go on was strong. Confronting the crazy doctor after all the suffering he had endured…but he couldn’t move. All he wanted to do was sleep.
“I think you’re right,” he said finally. “This is a ventilation duct. From the size and number of them, it must lead to an immense living space.”
“Avery’s home. Robots wouldn’t need it or the produce in the valley. Come on, let’s go. I’ll help you up.”
“You’ll have to go on alone. I honestly can’t move.”
She was quiet a moment. “Do you really want me to go on without you?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” she said slowly. She waited, perhaps trying to think of something else to say. Then she got her arms around him and embraced him very hard, and held on.
He was too weak to respond. After a moment, he felt her let go and stand up. Then she was climbing, and he heard her moving down the ventilation duct away from him.
He closed his eyes and slept.
Ariel felt her way forward slowly with her hands as she crawled, not making any move until she knew what was ahead of her. She was still in absolute darkness in some kind of giant tube that was so far stretching straight ahead on a level course. With Derec unable to move, she was painfully aware that she was the last of their group to have a chance at finding Dr. Avery.
She was not exactly in top condition herself. Her hands and feet were painfully cold and she was drenched from the sprinklers. She was worn out, too, though not sick like Derec was. The climb up the mountainside and down into the valley had taken a lot of energy out of her.
She hoped, with guarded optimism, that her memory was growing stronger. Those weird memory fugues had grown less frequent and she wished fervently that none would strike while she was alone in this thing, whatever it was.
She began to find branches and intersections in the passageway. Without any way to pick one direction over another, she attempted to go as straight as she could. Going in roughly one direction would at least prevent her from wandering hopelessly in circles. She suspected that the intersecting tunnels represented those other openings on the surface they had seen.
After a while, she thought she had picked out a pattern. From what she could feel, smaller tunnels seemed to converge more often and become larger ones consistently to her left. She began to move leftward and discovered that the tunnels were now high enough for her to stand if she bent over.
Now that she was moving in this direction, more tunnels converged around her all the time. Then they started branching out again, some of them splitting off above her. Finally she realized that she could see hints of shapes: dark spaces that represented openings one way, a faint reflection of an inner surface another way.
The traces of a light source shone from just one direction.
She dropped to all fours again to pursue the light source, now more concerned with making noise than with the height of the tunnel.
Around a curve, she reached something recognizable: a covered opening into a room. Barely daring to breathe, she moved as quietly as she could toward it until she could peek through the opening.
It was nearly opaque.
The room was lit, but she couldn’t see much. It was carpeted in brown. Nor could she hear anything.
After the silence had continued, she decided that she would have to risk entering the room. She began studying the edge of the covering to see if she could get it loose. In a moment, she found that pressure on the covering itself caused a hole to appear in the middle. The substance, whatever it was, receded from the hole to fade outward into the surrounding wall until the vent was entirely open.
She let out a sigh of relief that the room was deserted. It was still silent, as well. After shifting around to get her feet out first, she dropped to the floor of the room and looked around.
It was a small room, perhaps only three meters cubed. The brown carpeting went all the way up the walls and covered the ceiling as well. The light came from a globe floating just under the center of the ceiling.
She looked again at the ceiling, then at the walls. The room was not built on right angles. The corners were slightly askew.
A couple of computer tapes were piled on the floor. In one corner, a small stuffed animal of unrecognizable type lay on its side. The room was not being used for anything that she could see.
This was not what Ariel had expected from Dr. Avery.
The door was closed. She held her breath and pushed the stud on the wall next to it. It slid open silently.