was an irrelevancy, or at most a fringe phenomenon of little importance. Was the heat from the cutter distorting the window frame and causing…?
A second hole appeared in the glass, and an incredible thought was born in Hasson’s mind.
He spun round and saw Barry Lutze on his feet on the landing. Lutze still had one hand pressed to his forehead, his face was a fearsome bloody mask, and he was using the gun — the gun Hasson had neglected to kick clear of his body. In the act of turning Hasson, driven by pure instinct, hurled the thermal cutter. It flew in a series of eccentric whirls like a binary sun spinning around an invisible companion, touched Lutze’s side, clattered down on to the floor in a fountain of sparks and disappeared into the open pit of the stairwell. Lutze, who had already been lurching unsteadily, fell to the floor. A single convulsive twitch flailed his four limbs simultaneously, then he was motionless, converted in an instant from a human being into something that could have no connection with life.
Hasson, who had been under the impression that the cutter had practically missed Lutze, ran to the body. The fleeting contact, the casual feather-flick from the sun-blade, had gouged a diagonal, smoking, ruinous furrow through Lutze’s chest. This time, it was obvious, there was no need to deprive him of weaponry. Suppressing his natural reactions, Hasson strode to the stairwell and looked down, searching for the cutter, but was unable to see it. There was nothing but a complex tunnel of descending perspectives, obscured by smoke and patchily lit by shafts of hellish light. Swearing hopelessly, he ran back to Theo, who was still standing by the window looking stunned and frightened.
“We’ve lost the cutter,” Hasson said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “Do you know the way out of here?”
Theo shook his head. “There’s a door in the roof somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. Somebody always led me in and out.”
Hasson weighed the odds, balancing one vision of dread against another, and came to a decision. “Come on, son, we’re going down and we’ve got to go fast.”
He took Theo’s hand and dragged him towards the stairs. The boy tried to hang back, but Hasson was too strong for him and in a few seconds they were committed to a perilous plunge into the noisome lower regions of the hotel. Having surrendered himself, Theo did his best to match strides with Hasson, but the task was an impossible one for a blind person and their descent became a sequence of mutual collisions, near-falls and extended ankle- twisting slides. Only the fact that the banisters had been installed on those flights saved them from disastrous spills into the central well.
With each successive landing the heat, fumes and noise grew more intense, and when they finally reached the second floor Hasson was appalled to find that it had begun to disintegrate. Some of the slabs were humped like sand dunes and beginning to glow at the edges. Violent tremors coursed through the structure, accompanied by awesome low-frequency groans which suggested that the floor would fall through at any second.
Hasson pushed Theo towards the aperture in the large window. lie gripped the boy by the shoulders and turned him round to face him, at the same time activating his CG unit. The function light on the control panel at Theo’s waist remained dead. Hasson’s gaze traced a practised line over Theo’s flight equipment, and came to a foundering halt at the dips which should have held the power pack. He felt his face contort with shock.
“Theo!” he shouted, thunderstruck by the magnitude of the discovery. “Your power pack I Where’s your power pack?”
Theo’s hand groped around the empty clips. “Barry took it… Mexico… I forgot.”
“It’s all right — there’s no harm done.” Hasson found his lips dragging themselves into the wan semblance of a smile at the inappropriateness of his words as he disconnected his own power pack and fastened it to Theo’s harness.
“I just forgot,” Theo said. “When I heard about Dad… What are we going to do?”
“We’re getting out of here, as planned,” Hasson told him. “You’re going first and I’ll come after you when I grab another pack.”
Theo’s face turned towards the blazing interior of the hotel, blind but cognisant. “How can you…?”
“Don’t argue,” Hasson ordered, completing the electrical connections and bringing the vital pea-sized dome of radiance into being at Theo’s waist.
“We could try it together,” Theo said. “I’ve heard about people going piggyback.”
“Kids.” Hasson pushed him into the rectangular aperture. “Not grown men like us, Theo. Together we’d be way outside basic modular mass. And anybody’s who’s as keen on flying as you are ought to know all about BMM and field collapse.” “But…”
“Outside! I’ve set you at what ought to be just under height maintenance power for your weight, so when you get out there just let yourself float away and sink. Now …gol” Hasson shoved Theo as hard as he could, sending the boy tumbling into the cool black sanctuary of the night sky. Theo, feeling himself topple, added the impulsion of his own legs, turning his exit into a kind of sprawling dive which carried him well beyond the field interference radius, out above the jewelled geometries of the city. He swam in a soft sea of air.
Hasson watched him curve away out of sight, then became aware that the floor slab under his feet had begun to shudder and stir like something possessed of life. He moved off it towards the stairs, feeling curious rather than immediately threatened, and in that instant the slab exploded into fragments. Some pieces fell to the floor below, others were carried upwards in a roaring gout of fire which made the landing as bright as day and seared the moisture from Hasson’s eyes. He threw himself on to the staircase and ran for the upper floors, expecting at any second to find himself treading empty space. Other ominous rumbles coupled with an increase in the general brightness told him that the structure of the hotel was beginning to succumb to the onslaught on an increasing scale.
He tried to increase his speed, forcing his thighs to reach high with every stride, and his breath began to come in raucous, throat-tearing gasps. When he had been running for what felt like a very long time a new fear began to manifest itself, a fear that he might unwittingly have passed the level on which Lutze’s body lay. Or, or, supposing that Lutze had managed to survive a second apparently mortal wound, even for a short time, and was no longer on the landing? Looking upwards, Hasson saw that he was reaching the point where the metal banister ceased to skirt the edge of the stair and he was able to establish his position. He stiff-armed himself away from the wall on to the next expanse of floor and experienced a moment of profound relief when he picked out the inert form of Lutze lying exactly where he had last seen it.
Crossing to the body, he dropped on to his knees and cast about him, expecting to locate the oblong mass of Theo’s power pack either in Lutze’s clothing or on the floor nearby. He was unable to find it. He raised his head and extended the scope of his search, only to discover that in the fitful and uncertain light every piece of litter and builder’s rubble promised to be a power pack and almost immediately revealed itself to be something else. A bomb exploded on one of the floors he had passed seconds earlier, producing the now familiar upsurges of flame and horizontal billowings of dust and smoke. Accompanying the blizzard of paper and plastic scraps there came a heaving of the floor, an uneasy sense of loosening.
Hasson realized that even in the period of dire extremity he had been indulging one part of his nature, claiming the luxury of fastidiousness. He rolled Lutze’s body on to its side, exposing the black-lipped obscenity of the fatal wound, and unclipped the power pack from the dead man’s harness. The unit itself and the electrical connectors were slimed with dark blood. Hasson stood up, clutching the unit to his chest, and loped wearily towards the stairs.
His upward progress was now complicated by the absence of a banister. The prolonged and punishing exertion was robbing his legs of both strength and control. There was an increasing tendency for his knees to buckle and for his feet to come down some distance from their point of aim — but with no balustrade at his side the slightest stumble could have resulted in a one-way trip to the inferno of the first floor. Into the bargain, he was now in a section of the hotel which, for all he knew, had not been traversed since Morlacher had planted his over-powered booby traps, which meant there was a new risk of being swatted into oblivion by an unseen hand. The remnants of his powers of thought told him it was a hazard that would have to be accepted — to get out of the hotel he would have to go all the way to the roof and find the exit used by Barry Lutze and the other aerial trespassers. It was a dismal and dangerous prospect, but the only one open to him.
Having managed to project his thoughts a short distance into the future, Hasson — above the agonised pumping of his thighs and the bellows-sound of his breathing — began to speculate about whether the stair he was climbing would terminate in a doorway to the roof. There had been plans for roof gardens and swimming pools, so it was likely that there would be provision for public access by stair as well as by the elevator service. Spurred on by the hope of perhaps suddenly and easily finding himself outside in the clean starry air, Hasson turned his gaze upward, wondering if he would be able to identify the top landing when it came into view.
In the event there was no difficulty. The entire top storey of the hotel was filled with an impenetrable, rolling layer of smoke and fumes which extended almost from floor level up to the invisible ceiling.
Hasson sank down, winded, on the flight of steps which slanted on to the uppermost floor, feeling like a man under siege as he took stock of his surroundings. The underside of the metres- thick blanket of smoke was defined with surprising sharpness. It shifted and heaved and puckered like the surface of a slow-boiling soup which was being seen through an inverting lens, and there was a thin stratum of clear air between it and the floor. Peering horizontally through the translucent sandwich, Hasson was able to discern the beginnings of yet another flight of steps at the opposite side of the landing. The treads were narrower than those upon which he sat, and the conviction grew in him that they led directly to a door which opened on to the hotel roof.
He forced himself to remain at rest for the space of a few more breaths, gathering oxygen into his system, then he stood up, locked his chest muscles, and ran for the ascending stairway. His feet found the steps seemingly without his guidance, and he hurled himself blindly upwards, going as fast as he could, aware that even one inhalation of the reeking blackness surrounding him could result in calamity. Almost at once a new thought occurred — how could he be sure that the stairs he was now on followed the same layout as those below? How did he know he was not about to plunge over an unguarded edge? Fending the thought off he kept running, trailing a hand along a roughcast wall, until he reached a small landing and a metal door. The door was bolted, padlocked, immovable.
Almost grateful that the door, because of its patent solidity, had not tempted him to waste time in trying to force it, Hasson turned and ran back the way he had come. He reached his starting point just as his lungs were giving out and hunkered down on the steps. Tatters of acrid smoke clinging about him flayed his nostrils and throat, triggering a bout of coughing. He clung to the steps until the convulsions ended, a part of his mind disdaining involvement, using the moments of astral detachment to analyse the situation.
From the moment he had entered the Chinook Hotel his life had depended on interplays of forces. Some of the factors he had contended with had been human, others had been purely physical — and not all of them had worked entirely to his disadvantage. The design and topography of the building, for example, had conspired to give him some respite, some time to manoeuvre. A fire was like a primeval jet engine, needing air intakes and an efficient exhaust before it could attain its full deadly splendour. The fact that the roof of the hotel remained unvented and intact — as evidenced by the trapped pall of smoke — had denied the fire the upward exhaust it craved, slowing its progress, cramping its natural style. Had the layer of smoke and fumes not been able to form, he, Rob Hasson, would no longer be alive, having been engulfed and incinerated at a much earlier stage. It was unfortunate-though no indication of malice on the part of the physical world — that the same toxic cloud was now making it impossible for him to search for the only escape route to the outside universe…
Far below Hasson a cataclysm overtook part of the edifice of sloping stair beams upon which he was poised. There was a gargantuan shuddering and thundering which suggested that whole flights of stairs were breaking free of their supports and dropping like carelessly released playing cards. Currents of hot gas geysered up through the central well beside him, churning the overhanging canopy of smoke.
Hasson uttered an involuntary moan as the staircase on which he was perched gave a tentative lurch. He crawled forward on to the floor proper, pressing himself downwards to stay within the wafer of lucid air, holding his breath each time a disturbance enveloped him in the smothering lower reaches of the cloud. Even at floor level the air was now so polluted as to abrade the tissue of his lungs, and he began a slow steady coughing. A lurid redness began to pulse in his vision.
Hasson blinked his eyes, squinting ahead through his two-dimensional continuum, making the belated discovery that the shifting red light was not a subjective phenomenon, but something that had its origins in the external world. Driven by impulses beyond his understanding, he squirmed forward, towards the source of the intermittent radiance. Eventually, an incalculable time later, he found himself lying on the shore of a circular lake.
He shook his head, trying to restore a sense of scale, the ability to relate to his environment.
What he was seeing was not a lake, not a pond, not a pool. It was… an elevator shaft.
Hasson looked down into the shaft — narrowing his eyes into slits to combat a hot upward draught — into its dwindling, receding telescopic sections, the alternating concentric rings of darkness and orange fire which had at their distant hub a small, black, unwinking eye.
The eye hypnotised him, beguiled him, seduced him.
Hasson broke free of it with an effort and turned his attention to the massy oblong block of the power pack still clutched in his left hand. He rolled on to his side and, working with the languid
