(We're not dead yet. There's a machine in there that makes the garage ooors go up. That's all I need.) Kit got out the antenna and held it against e door as he might have held a pencil he was about to write with. He closed 15 eyes. (If I can just feel up through the metal and the wires, find it…). 'j'ta and Fred kept still while Kit's eyes squeezed tighter and tighter shut "erce concentration. Inside one garage door something rattled, fell silent, led again, began to grind. Little by little the door rose until there was an opening at the bottom of it, three feet high. Kit opened his eyes but kept the antenna pressed against the metal. (Go on in.)
Fred and Nita ducked through into darkness. Kit came swiftly after them. Behind him, the door began to move slowly downward again, shutting with a thunderous clang. Nita pulled out the rowan wand, so they could look around. There were wooden loading pallets stacked on the floor, but nothing else — bare concrete walls, bare ceiling. Set in the back wall of the huge room was one normal-sized double door.
(Let's see if this one has a lock,) Kit said as they went quietly up to it. He touched the right-hand knob carefully, whispered a word or two in the Speech, tried it, The right side of the double door opened.
(Huh. Wasn't even locked!) Through the open door, much to everyone's surprise, light spilled — plain old fluorescent office-building light, but cheery as a sunny day after the gloom outdoors. On the other side of the door was a perfectly normal-looking corridor with beige walls and charcoal-color doors and carpeting. The normality came as something of a shock. (Fred, I thought you said it was darker here!)
(Felt darker, And colder. And it does,) Fred said, shivering, his faint light rippling as he did so. (We're very close to the source of the coldness. It's farther up, though.)
(Up?) Nita looked at Kit uneasily. (If we're going to get the dark Book and get out of here fast, we can't fool with stairs again. We'll have to use the elevators somehow.)
Kit glanced down at the antenna. (I think I can manage an elevator if it gets difficult. Let's find one.)
They slipped through the door and went down the hall to their right, heading for a lobby at its far end. There they peered out at a bank of_ elevators set in the same dark-green marble as the rest of the lobby. № 01 was there.
Kit walked to the elevators, punched the call button, and hurriedly m(tioned Nita and Fred to join him. Nita stayed where she was for a moment (Shouldn't we stay out of sight here?) (Come on!)
She went out to him, Fred bobbing along beside. Kit watched the elevator lights to see which one was coming down and then slipped into a recess at the side. Nita took the hint and joined him. The elevator bell chimed; doors slid open—
The perytons piled out of the middle elevator in a hurry, five of them together, not looking to left or right, and burst out the front door into the street. Once outside they began their awful chorus of howls and snarls, but Nita and Kit and Fred weren't sitting around to listen. They dove into the middle elevator, and Kit struck the control panel with the antenna, hard. ""Close up and take ofB"
The elevator doors closed, but then a rumbling, scraping, gear-grinding screech began — low at first, then louder, a combination of every weird, unsettling noise Nita had ever heard an elevator make. Cables twanged and ratchets ratcheted, and, had they been moving, she would have sworn they were about to go plunging down to crash in the cellar. ""Cut it out or I'll snap your cables myself when I'm through with you! "Kit yelled in the Speech. Almost immediately the elevator jerked slightly and then started upward. Nita tried again to swallow and had no better luck than the last time. "Those perytons are going to pick up our scent right outside that door, Kit! And they'll track us inside, and it won't be five minutes before—"
"I know, I know. Fred, how well can you feel the middle of the darkness?" (We're closer.)
"Good. You'll have to tell me when to stop."
The elevator went all the way up to the top, the eighty-ninth floor, before Fred said, (This is it!)
Kit rapped the control panel one last time with his antenna. ""You stay where you are,"" he said. The elevator doors opened silently to reveal another normal-looking floor, this one more opulent than the floor downstairs. Here the carpets were ivory-white and thick; the wall opposite the elevators was one huge bookcase of polished wood, filled with hundreds of books, like volumes of one huge set. Going left they came to another hallway, stretching off to their left like the long stroke of an L; this one too was lined with bookcases. At the far end stood a huge polished desk, with papers and Dictaphone equipment and an intercom and a multiline phone jumbled about on it. At the desk sat—
—it was hard to know what to call it. Kit and Nita, peering around the corner, were silent with confusion and fear. The thing sitting in a secretary's swivel chair and typing on an expensive electric typewriter was dark green and warty, and sat about four feet high in the chair- It had limbs with tentacles and claws, all knotted together under a big eggplant-shaped head, and goggly, wicked eyes. All the limbs didn't seem to help the creature's typing much, for every few seconds it made a mistake and went grumbling and fumbling over the top of its messy desk for a bottle of correcting fluid. 1he creature's grumbling was of more interest than its typing. It used the APeech, but haltingly, as if it didn't care much for the language—and indeed the smooth, stately rhythms of the wizardly tongue suffered somewhat, com-ln§ out of that misshapen mouth.
Kit leaned back against the wall. (We've gotta do something. Fred, are you Sl«e it's up here?)
(Absolutely. And past that door, behind that—) Fred indicated the warty typist. From down the hall came another brief burst of typing, then more grumbling and scrabbling on the desk.
(We've got to get it away from there.) Nita glanced at Fred.
(I shall create a diversion,) Fred said, with relish. (I've been good at it so far.)
(Great. Something big. Something alive again, if you can manage it — then again, forget that.) Nita breathed out unhappily. (I wouldn't leave anything alive here.)
(Not even Joanne?) Kit said with a small but evil grin.
(Not even her. This place has her outclassed. Fred, just—)
A voice spoke, sounding so loud that Kit and Nita stopped breathing, practically stopped thinking. "Akthanath," it called, a male voice, sounding weary and hassled and bored, "come in here a moment… "
Nita glanced at Kit. They carefully peeked down the hall once more and saw the tentacled thing hunch itself up, drop to the floor behind the desk, and wobble its way into the inner office, (Now?) Fred said.
(No, save it! But come on, this is our best chance!) Nita followed Kit down the hall to the door, crouched by it, and looked in. Past it was another room. They slipped into it and found themselves facing a partly open door that led to the office the typist had gone into. Through the slit they could just see the tentacly creature's back and could hear the voice of the man talking to it. "Hold all my calls for the next hour or so, until they get this thing cleared up. I don't want everybody's half- baked ideas of what's going on. Let Garm and his people handle it. And here, get Mike on the phone for me. I want to see if I can get something useful out of him."
Nita looked around, trying not even to think loudly. The room they were in was lined with shelves and shelves of heavy, dark, leatherbound books with gold-stamped spines. Kit tiptoed to one bookshelf, pulled out a volume at random, and opened it. His face registered shock; he held out the book for Nita to look at. The print was the same as that in Carl's large Advisory manual, line after line of the clear graceful symbols of the Speech — but whatever was being discussed on the page Nita looked at was so complicated she could only understand one word out of every ten or twenty. She glanced at Kit as he turned back to the front of the book and showed her the titfe pagC. UNIVERSES, PARAUNIVERSES AND PLANES-------- ASSEMBLY AND MAINTE-NANCE,