"So you're one, too."
"No, sir. Not One-Two. One."
"For Ilmarwolkin's sake," Anana said, "quit your clowning."
They followed One into a large room where there was an open wheeled vehicle large enough for four. The robot got into the driver's seat. They stepped into the back seat, and the car moved away smoothly and silently. After driving through several corridors, the robot steered it into a large elevator. He got out and pressed some buttons, and the cage rose thirty floors. The robot got behind the wheel and drove the vehicle down a corridor almost for a quarter of a mile. The car stopped in front of a door.
"The entrance to the central control chamber, sir."
The robot got out and stood by the door. They followed him. The door had been welded, or sealed to the wall.
"Is this the only entrance?"
"Yes, sir."
It was evident that Ore had made sure that they could not get in. Doubtless, any devices, including 1 beamers, that could remove the door had been jettisoned from the palace. Or was Ore just making it more difficult for them? Perhaps he had deliberately left some tools around, but when they got into the control room, they would find that the controls had been destroyed.
They found a window and looked out into red space. Kickaha said, "It should take some time before this falls onto the planet. Meanwhile, we can eat, drink, make love, sleep. Get our strength back. And look like mad for some way of getting out of this mess. If Ore thinks we're going to suffer while we're falling, he doesn't know us."
"Yes, but the walls and door must be made of the same stuff, impervium, as the room that held the cage," she said. "Beamers won't affect it. I don't know how he managed to weld the door to the walls, but he did. So getting in to the controls seems to be out."
First, they had to make a search of the entire building and that would take days even when traveling in the little car. They found the hangar which had once housed five fliers. Ore had not even bothered to close its door. He must have set them to fly out on automatic.
They also located the great power plant. This contained the gravitic machines which now maintained an artificial field within the palace. Otherwise, they would have been floating around in free fall.
"It's a wonder he didn't turn that off," Anana said. "It would have been one more way to torment us."
"Nobody's perfect," Kickaha said.
Their search uncovered no tools which could blast into the control chamber. They hadn't thought it would.
Kickaha conferred with Anana, who knew more about parachutes than he did. Then he gave a number of robots very detailed instruction on how to manufacture two chutes out of silken hangings.
"All we have to do is to jump off and then float down," he said. "But I don't relish the idea of spending the rest of my life on that miserable world. It's better than being dead, but not by much."
There were probably a thousand, maybe two thousand gates in the walls and on the floors and possibly on the ceilings. Without the codewords to activate them, they could neither locate nor use them.
They wondered where the wallpanel was which the Englishman had used to get away from Red Ore. To search for it would take more time than they had. Then Kickaha thought of asking the robots, One and Two, if they had witnessed his
escape. To his delight, both had. They led the humans to it. Kickaha pushed in on the panel and saw a metal chute leading downward some distance, then curving.
"Here goes nothing," he said to Anana. He jumped into it sitting up and slid down and around and was shot into a narrow dimly lit hall. He yelled back up the chute to her and told her he was going on. But he was quickly stopped by a dead end.
After tapping and probing around, he went back to the chute and, bracing himself against the sides, climbed back up.
"Either there's another panel I couldn't locate or there's a gate in the end of the hall," he told her.
They sent the robots to the supply room to get a drill and hammers. Though the drills wouldn't work on the material enclosing the control room, they might work on the plastic composing the walls of the hidden hall. After the robots returned, Kickaha and Anana went down the chute with them and bored holes into the walls. After making a circle of many perforations, he knocked the circle through with a sledgehammer.
Light streamed out through it. He caustiously looked within. He gasped.
"Well, I'll be swoggled! Red Ore!"
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IN THE MIDDLE of a large bare room was a transparent cube about twelve feet long. A chair, a narrow bed, and a small red box on the floor by a wall shared the cube with its human occupant, Ore. Kickaha noted that a large pipe ran from the base of the wall of the room to the cube, penetrated the transparent material, and ended in the red box. Presumably, this furnished water and perhaps a semiliquid type of food. A smaller pipe within the large one must provide air.
Red Ore was sitting on the chair before the table, his profile to the watchers through the hole. Evidently, the cube was soundproof, since he had not heard the drilling or pounding. The Horn and a beamer lay on the table before him. From this Kickaha surmised that the cube was invulnerable to the beamer's rays.
Red Ore, once the secret Lord of the Two Earths, looked as dejected as a man could be. No wonder. He had stepped through a gate in the control room, expecting to enter another universe, possessing the Horn, the Lords' greatest treasure, and leaving behind him two of his worst enemies to die. But Urthona had prepared his trap well, and Red Ore had been gated to this prison instead of to freedom.
As far as he knew, no one was aware that he was locked in this room. He was doubtless contemplating how long it would be before the palace fell to
Urthona's world and he perished in the smash, caught in his own trap.
Kickaha and Anana cut a larger hole in the wall for entrance. During this procedure, Ore saw them. He rose up from his chair and stared from a pale-gray face. He could expect no mercy. The only change in his situation was that he would die sooner.
His niece and her lover were not so sure that anything had been changed. If he couldn't cut his way out of the cube, they couldn't cut their way in. Especially when they didn't have a beamer. But the pipe which was Ore's life supply was of copper. After the robots got some more tools, Kickaha slicked off the copper at the junction with the impervium which projected outside the cube.
This left an opening through which Ore could still get air and also could communicate. Kickaha and Anana did not place themselves directly before the hole, though. Ore might shoot them through it.
Kickaha said, "The rules of the game have been changed, Ore. You need us, and we need you. If you cooperate, I promise to let you go wherever you want to, alive and unharmed. If you don't, you'll die. We might die, too, but what good will that do you?"
"I can't trust you to keep your word," Ore said sullenly.
"If that's the way you want it, so be it. But Anana and I aren't going to be killed. We're having parachutes made. That means we'll be marooned here, but at least we'll be alive."
"Parachutes?" Ore said. It was evident from his expression that he had not thought of their making them.
"Yeah. There's an old American saying that there's more than one way to skin a cat. And I'm a cat-skinner par excellence. Anana and I are going to figure a way out of this mess. But we need information from you. Now, do you want to give it to us and maybe live? Or do you want to sulk like a spoiled child and die?"
Ore gritted his teeth, then said, "Very well. What do you want?"