"Come on, Benteley," she muttered, "let's get out of here."
She started blindly from the room, and Benteley struggled to his feet and followed. Her slim shape glided like a phantom between the gloomy objects that made up Verrick's possessions, up dark stairs and round corners where immobile robot servants waited silently for instructions.
They came out on a deserted floor, draped in shadows and darkness. Eleanor waited for him to catch up with her. "I'm going to bed," she said bluntly. "You can come if you want to, or you can go home."
"I have no home." He followed her, down a corridor and past a series of half-closed doors. Lights showed here and there. He thought he recognized some voices—men's voices, mixed with sleepy, women's murmurs. Abruptly Eleanor vanished and he was alone.
He felt his way through a haze of shapes. Once he crashed violently against something. A hail of shattered objects cascaded upon him.
"What are you doing here?" a hard voice demanded. It was Herb Moore, somewhere close by. "Get out of here, you third-rate derelict! Class eight-eight? Don't make me laugh!"
Unnerved, confused by the taunting face, Benteley lashed out. The face crumpled. Then something slammed into him and he was bowled over. Choked and crushed by a rolling, slobbering mass, he fought his way upward, struggling to catch hold of something solid.
"Pipe down," Eleanor whispered. "Both of you!"
Benteley became inert. Beside him Moore puffed and panted and wiped at his bleeding face. "You'll be sorry you hit me. You don't know what I can do."
Stumbling, Benteley retreated in a panic. The next thing he knew was that he was sitting on something low, bending down and fumbling for his shoes. His coat was lying on the floor in front of him and his shoes lay separated from each other by an expanse of rich carpet. There was no sound; the room was utterly silent and cold. In a corner a dim lamp flickered.
"Lock the door." Eleanor's voice came from nearby. "I think Moore's gone off his head. He's out there in the hall shambling round like a maniac."
Benteley found the door and tugged at its old-fashioned manual bolt. Eleanor was standing in the centre of the room, one leg pulled up, unlacing her sandals. As the man watched, awed and astonished, she kicked off her sandals, unzipped her slacks, and stepped from them. For a moment bare ankles gleamed in the light.
Then he was stumbling his way to her, and she was reaching for him.
Much later he awoke.
The room was deathly cold. Nothing stirred. No sound, no life. Through the open window grey morning light filtered, and a wind whipped icily round him.
Figures lay sprawled out, mixed with disordered clothing in heaps. He stumbled between outstretched limbs, half-covered arms, stark-white legs that shocked him. He distinguished Eleanor, lying against the wall, legs drawn up under her, breathing restlessly between half-parted lips. He wandered on—and stopped dead.
The grey light filtered over another face and figure—his old friend Al Davis, peaceful in the arms of his soundly sleeping wife.
A little further on were more persons, some snoring dully, one stirring into fitful wakefulness. Another groaned and groped feebly for some covering. Benteley's foot crushed a glass; a pool of dark liquid leaked out. Another face ahead was familiar. A man, dark-haired, good featured... .
His own face.
He stumbled against a door and found himself in a hall. Terror seized him and he began running blindly. Silently his bare feet carried him along carpeted corridors, endless and deserted, up noiseless flights of steps that never seemed to end. He blundered wildly around a corner and found himself caught in an alcove, a full-length mirror ahead of him, blocking his way.
A wavering figure hovered within the mirror. He gazed mutely at it, at the waxen hair, the vapid mouth and lips, the colourless eyes. Arms limp and boneless at its sides; a spineless, bleached thing that blinked vacantly back at him, without sound or motion.
He screamed—and the image winked out. He plunged on along the corridors, feet barely skimming the carpets. He felt nothing under him. He was rising, carried upward by his great terror, a screaming, streaking thing that hurtled towards the high-domed roof above.
Arms out, he shot soundlessly through walls and panels, in and out of empty rooms, down deserted passages, a blinded, terrorized thing that flashed and wheeled in desperate efforts to escape.
With a crash he struck against a brick fireplace and fluttered down to the soft carpet. For a moment he lay bewildered, and then he was stumbling on, hurrying frantically, hands in front of his face.
Sounds ahead, and a glowing yellow light that filtered through a half-opened doorway. In a room a handful of men were sitting at a table covered with tapes and reports. An atronic bulb burned in the centre, a warm, unwavering miniature sun that pulled him hypnotically. Coffee cups, writers, men murmuring and poring over their work. One huge heavy-set man with massive, sloping shoulders.
"Verrick!" he shouted at the man. "Verrick, help me."
Reese Verrick glanced up angrily. "What do you want? I'm busy."
"Verrick!" he screamed, pulsing with terror. "Who am I?"
"You're Keith Pellig," Verrick answered irritably, wiping his forehead with one immense paw and pushing his tapes away. "You're the assassin picked by the Convention. You have to be ready to go to work in less than two hours."
Chapter VI
Groves continued working at his navigation table.
"Captain Groves, they're coming," Konklin said.
Groves nodded, and then returned to his navigation instruments.
The ship was now thirty astronomical units from the sun. Against the blackness of space bits of cold fire glowed, distant planets and suns wheeling silently round the creaking, lumbering ore freighter.
Down in the cargo hold fog lay over the dozing men and women. The warmth of the reactors had crept everywhere: the vibrating metal floor had become a surface of dull-glowing heat. Within the last few hours dust and water vapour had settled on flushed skins, on pots and pans, and was dripping from the walls to form warm pools.
Bruno Jereti sat running his horny fingers over the threads of a steel bolt. "I'm too old to get excited. If we're going back, that's all right with me."
Mary Uzich lay sprawled out resentfully among the bedding piled everywhere. "All those years of planning and working—and now we're giving up."
"We didn't know Cartwright was going to be Quizmaster." The old carpenter tossed the bolt aside. "I voted to go back myself."
"Then why did you join the Society? What the hell did you come along for, if you're going to back out now?"
Jereti picked up a pipe wrench and examined it intently. "I suppose you don't remember the burnings."
"Burnings! You mean all the books?"
"I mean the other burnings. My grandad used to take me down to watch about once a week. It was sort of a public event, like a park concert."
"What the hell's a park concert?" Mary felt sleepy and sick. The metallic dust choked her throat. "I wish the filter system worked better," she complained.
"I'm talking about the things they burned," Jereti continued. "Television sets and cars and mixers—that sort of stuff. Once a week they burned them. Billions of dollars worth. They had a burning place in the centre of every town. We used to watch the cars and toasters and clothes and oranges and coffee and cigarettes—every goddamn thing in the world—flare up promptly at noon on Saturdays."