Johnston gave him a withering look.
“No, I don’t,” Herb said, chastened.
Johnston stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Now that changes things considerably. This is not what we were expecting at all.” He lapsed into a thoughtful silence.
The humming sound rose in volume so quickly that Herb instinctively leaped forward to grab Johnston’s jacket. He caught a flash of yellow and black reflected in the glass before him as a bumblebee pod whisked down the street behind them.
“It’s seen us,” he gasped.
Johnston shook Herb’s hand from his sleeve.
“Don’t be so silly,” he said, then pointed into the atrium. “Come on. We’re going in there.”
Herb didn’t know whether to feel relief at avoiding their pursuer or fear at entering the eerie mall. Johnston seemed completely unconcerned about either. He placed a hand on one of the tall glass doors and pushed gently.
“Stuck. I should have guessed as much.”
Herb could see that the doors were not so much fused together as imprints in the front of the building. They seemed to be one piece of glass that had not managed to separate in two. Wondering what Johnston was going to do next, he suddenly found himself standing inside, right in the center of the atrium, looking up at the high-vaulted ceiling. Silver metal creepers hung above his head. Like everything outside, the building’s interior had the look of stretched and melting toffee. Herb’s mind caught up with events.
“What happened there?” asked Herb, astonished.
“I readjusted our position to be inside the building.”
“How? Hyperspace jump?” Herb was impressed despite himself. “I didn’t think anyone was capable of that degree of control.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Johnston. “Haven’t you realized yet that we’re not really here? Do you think I’d bring our physical bodies into the Enemy Domain? Now come on, we need to get our report back to the EA.”
“What report?”
“The report confirming the fact that the Domain contains-or will contain-civilians. Haven’t you wondered where they’re going to come from?”
“No.”
Johnston gave an exasperated sigh and walked on, past the squashed retail units that surrounded them, heading toward an arch at the rear of the atrium. The walls back here seemed to have melted drastically; they hung down like great folds of cloth. Herb gazed uneasily at the narrow corridor beyond the arch. If he didn’t know better, he would have said they were walking into the building’s throat.
“Are you sure about this?” he murmured.
“We’re heading for the space elevator, right? This is a shopping mall. How do you think the shoppers are going to get here?” Johnston rolled his eyes. “Hyperspace jumps?”
They passed through the arch, Herb’s uneasiness passing along with him. A high-ceilinged hallway lay beyond; four unmoving escalators disgorged from subterranean depths grasping its walls with long metallic strands.
Herb swallowed hard. He didn’t want to risk descending an escalator. At the same time, he didn’t want Johnston to know he was frightened.
“Okay,” he stammered, “which one should we take?”
Johnston was staring at the patterns engraved on the nearby wall.
“If this diagram is a map, as I think it is, I would suggest that escalator over there. If it’s not a map, then you’ll be an extremely privileged young man.”
“Why?” Herb asked, mystified.
“Because you will have been present on the occasion when, for the first time in my life, I was wrong about something.”
Before Herb could reply, Johnston had moved quickly to his chosen escalator and started to descend, his shoes clicking brightly on the polished metal steps. Herb took a deep breath and followed him.
The escalator went a long way below ground. Herb had to concentrate on keeping up with Johnston. Herb had never attempted to be any fitter than the minimum level that the EA’s exercise program instilled in him; indeed, he tended to look down on those pursuing extra fitness as an end in itself. All those wasted kilojoules. He could understand the fact that Johnston was in better condition. What he found galling was the way that the brilliant tapping of Robert’s feet gave the impression he was dancing down the steps.
He was beginning to understand that everything Johnston did was intended subtly to mock Herb in some way. If only he weren’t getting so tired he could pursue that thought further. He wished the escalator would start moving, not that there was any chance of that. Like everything else he had seen in the Necropolis, the steps seemed to be fused with the surrounding structure. Silver-grey strands ran in every direction. Herb wondered what would be waiting at the bottom of the steps. A Lite train station would be the obvious answer, but if they had instead stepped out into the first circle of Hell, Herb liked to think that he would not have been that surprised.
“What is it with this place?” Herb gasped as he clattered on down the steps.
“Haven’t you figured that out yet?” Johnston called back to him. “This whole city is the result of a faulty VNM. You get this happening sometimes with large-scale VNM projects. Maybe errors in the original machine’s design didn’t show up until the nth generation. Or sometimes a machine reproduces badly at the start of the process, and then you get faulty machines making copies of themselves. History lesson, Herb: that’s what happened back on Earth with the first major VNM-built arcology.”
“I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to tell you about this,” Johnston snorted. “Given what you did yourself, you should know all about badly designed machines.”
Herb didn’t rise to the bait. “So this city is a reject. That’s why everything is so misshapen.” He paused for thought. “Even so, this is weird. You’d expect the whole place just to collapse, or maybe not to have gotten built at all. Just end up as a pile of machines.”
“Usually you’d be right. But sometimes the fault is very subtle. That’s what happened here. I would guess that the suicide mechanism isn’t working properly. Everything seems to have formed correctly, but nothing has shriveled away when finished with. That’s why everything is still fused together.”
Johnston idly reached up and patted a silver loop hanging from the ceiling. “Probably why the scaffolding and struts are still hanging around, too.”
“How can you touch that if we’re not here?” Herb asked.
“How can you hear sounds and see things? How come your feet touch the ground? Listen, Herb, when I model something, I do it properly.”
And that, it seemed, was all the explanation Herb was getting for the moment.
“Amazing when you think about it,” Johnston continued. “It helps you grasp just how extensive the Enemy Domain is. I mean, you can see it shaded in on the Star Charts, but that doesn’t give you any real sense of scale. We’re currently walking down an escalator at the edge of an extremely large city on a nondescript planet that has been practically forgotten by the Domain. You’d think it would destroy this place and start again; instead, it uses the planet as a staging post. Ah, well. It has given us an opportunity.”
Johnston reached the bottom of the steps and hurried through the archway into the station beyond.
“Hell’s teeth!” he shouted.
“Robert! What is it?”
Herb clattered the last few steps into the station. He could see something moving.
Johnston was bending to pick up his hat from the tiled floor, an embarrassed grin across his face.
“I forgot what we were for a moment.”
Herb didn’t feel anywhere near so calm. The vaulted spaces of the station roof were swarming with large, metal, spiderlike creatures: thin metal abdomens and long, spindly legs. They moved lazily backwards and forwards, crawling over each other’s bodies. One of them dropped from the ceiling, landing nearby. It turned around blindly for
