Blixa nodded. “So do I,” she confessed. “But I think it must be nerves. I keep looking around, and I never see anyone. Besides, who could it be? The police wouldn’t follow us, they’d just arrest you. And nobody else would be following us.”
The embassy was quiet, with no light showing in any of the window irises. The building itself, however, was subtly different from the way George remembered it, and he had to study it for a moment before he could be sure what the difference was. That faint uncertainty in the building’s outline, those dim slanting golden lines, like a much attenuated aurora australis—what did they mean? “They’ve put a force field around it!” he announced suddenly.
Blixa nodded. “They installed it yesterday afternoon,” she said.
“Well, then, we might as well go home. Down to the ship, I mean. We certainly can’t get through a force field, pig or no Pig-“
“Who said anything about getting through a force field?” Blixa demanded. “Do be reasonable! Of course we can’t. But there are other ways of handling it. Think! Where are the projectors? I mean, where’s the field coming from?”
“Around the edge of the roof,” George replied after a moment.
“That’s right, the top of the building’s clear.” They had come to the statue of Chou Kleor. Blixa, standing first on one foot and then on the other, took off her sandals and tied them to her belt. “You’d better take off your shoes too,” she said softly. “They might slip on the stone.”
George eyed her speculatively. She had already taken hold of the statue and was pulling herself up by the folds of its basalt cloak. He removed his shoes and followed her.
They stood at last on the statue’s burly shoulder, not more than half a meter below the level of the embassy roof. The roof itself, however, was an uncomfortable distance away. “How are we going to get over there?” George asked, studying the gap.
Blixa shook her head. The climb had winded her, and for the moment all she could do was to hold on to Chou Kleor’s basalt ear and pant.
“Bolt anti,” she whispered as her breath began to come back. “Not much good, but best I could do. Government’s cracked down on all anti sales since the geeksters began using them.” She fumbled with the end of her shari and produced a flat, blunt object like an old-fashioned air automatic. She handed it to George.
He examined it distrustfully. He had always considered the bolt anti-grav the most unreliable of anti-gravitic devices. The anti-gravs in commercial use (most strictly supervised, since geeksters and raubsters had discovered their value in mass levitation of stolen goods) were perfectly safe. But the bolt anti-grav worked on a different principle. Its “doughnut” discharge produced what non-material physicists called a reversed stasis of the object which it hit. The object in consequence became weightless. The difficulty was that there was no practical way of estim a ting in advance when the stasis would return to normal and the object acquire weight again. And, since stasis reversal was potentially harmful to living tissue, all bolt antis had built-in governors preventing their discharge too frequently. Too dangerous for a children’s toy, too ineffective for genuine use, the bolt anti was the perfect example of ingrown gadgetry.
“How are you planning to use it?” George asked.
“I’m going to jump over to the roof,” Blixa said, “Just as I jump I want you to doughnut me with the bolt. I don’t weigh much anyhow, and I’m sure the stasis will stay twisted for that long. After I get on the roof there’s a trap door and steps leading down. The pig is in a room on the second level; I ought to be able to smell it. They’ve got it guarded with a cerberus.”
“How do you know all this?” George asked a little absently. His mind was still on the bolt anti.
“Oh… news gets around.” Blixa’s manner was vague. She leaned out from Chou Kleor’s shoulder and braced herself. “Now when I say, ‘Shoot,’ I want you to doughnut me.”
George looked from Blixa to the bolt anti and back again. She didn’t weigh much, it was true. But… He had a sudden mental picture of her jumping and falling short as the stasis untwisted again. A simple fall would be bad enough, but if she struck against the force field… “I won’t do it,” he said determinedly.
“Won’t do what? Doughnut me?”
“That’s right. It’s too dangerous.”
“No, it isn’t. Anyhow, I’ve got to get the pig.”
“Give me the egg.” Silently Blixa handed him the end of her shari and let him disentangle the object. “I’m going to try the jump,” George went on. “Do you think you can doughnut me?”
“Of course. But it’s a silly idea.”
“Why? I’ve more muscle than you, and I’m used to greater gee, being from Earth. The main thing, though, is that I’ve had training in free jumps. If you’ve never jumped free, you can’t imagine what it’s like.” George did not think it necessary to add that his training consisted of three jumps made one Sunday afternoon at a pastime park.
Blixa frowned but capitulated. “All right,” she said. “Pharol grant it’s reasonable.” She adjusted the bolt’s safety switch. “Now?” she asked.
George arranged his feet carefully. “Now!” he said.
The doughnut hit him amidships just as he jumped. It spread over him in a kind of shudder, a sensation like an intense interior tickling, not painful, but highly disagreeable. Then he was soaring over the roof in a long, long arc, so long that he had time to wonder whether he had miscalculated and was going right over it. At the last moment he slanted down, touched, bounced (“equal and opposite reaction”), and then came down solidly and for good as the stasis reversed itself. He was darned glad he hadn’t let Blixa try the jump.
He trotted back to the side where Blixa was. He motioned to her to throw the bolt anti, and after a moment it came spinning over to him. Blixa had her faults, but she certainly was quick on the uptake.
He found the trap door and opened it. The last he saw of Blixa, she was leaning forward anxiously from Chou Kleor’s shoulder, her hands pressed to her breast. He waved to her reassuringly, and then started down.
The stair was extremely steep and quite dark. George stole down it with his feet turned sideways. At the bottom he found he was in a tiny windowless room with many shelves, probably a janitor’s closet. Sprayers, dusters, grinders and sweepers cluttered the walls. George groped about until he found the door, and slipped out into the hall.
It was very nearly as dark as the closet had been. The only light came from the fluor strips in the cornice. George tiptoed along, listening to snores (this level seemed to be used for sleeping), sniffing from time to time and looking for the stairs. Martian buildings, even public ones, rarely had levitators or even lifts. The lesser gee made stairclimbing less onerous than on Terra, and Martians of both sexes insisted it wasn’t reasonable to avoid exercise. Stairs were good for the legs. George, thinking of Blixa, and the little dark girl he had danced with at the Anagetalia, grinned. This momentary inattention was no doubt the reason why he whanged into the tabouret.
It was a spindly thing, loaded with tinkly, janglv, clinky objects, and George’s collision with it produced a whole series of high-pitched crashes. Things bounced and rolled. The noise of frangible objects breaking seemed to spread out into the darkness like circular ripples in a pond. George, pressed against the wall, thought everyone in the embassy must be awake.
There was a stir in one of the rooms. A man’s voice, thick with sleep, said rumbingly, “What was that?” After a moment a woman’s fuzzy contralto answered, “Just the weetareete, dear. Go on back to sleep.” Somebody turned over in bed. There was a tense silence—and then a gradual resumption of the noises of sleep.