neighboring store areas. No Tivi.
I waited another minute, then jogged as far as I could down the mall without getting lost. I huffed back, threading through the crowds, then ran in the other direction, searched, came back. She was gone.
In desperation, I searched the store once again, sat down, waited, got up and paced, sat back down, waited.
The next ten minutes were miserable. If I went looking for her, I'd surely get lost. I couldn't ask anybody. I knew only a few words of Ahgirr, nothing of the mainstream Nogon languages. I could only wait. And wait.
Ten minutes more. Fifteen.
Helpless. Helpless.
It was one of the few times in my life when the notion of panicking didn't seem unattractive. Panic, at least, was action and maybe a release, while sitting there was unbearable torture.
The sheer immensity of the distance between here and home struck like a hammer blow. I was lost-doubly, triply lost. I had blundered through not one, but two potluck portals, and now, inside that maze-within-a-maze, I had found yet another labyrinth to contain me.
I stood up. All right, enough of that crap.
This place was big, but not infinitely so. I would walls and walk and walk and sooner or later Susan and Ragna would find me. They'd send out word, alert the security forces. I was easy enough to spot.
But if something had happened to Tivi, could Susan and Ragna be safe?
I was sure I could find that freight elevator. I did.
There were no buttons to press. Tivi had fiddled with a single knob until the desired level designation had shown on the readout screen: No help to me. I tried remembering what symbol had been on the screen when we entered. Couldn't. Okay. Then it was a matter of fiddling with the damn knob, going along for the ride until this contraption went down at least twenty stories. I fiddled, and the thing went.
Sideways.
Then it stopped and the doors slid open. A few Nogon waiting nearby made motions to enter, saw me, and backed off. The doors closed. Nothing happened.
I spun the knob. The elevator went straight up. I spun the knob the other way. The elevator stopped, groaned, went down diagonally to the right. I kept worrying the control and the thing kept changing direction, going nowhere. Exasperated, I twisted the knob until a likely set of runes showed on the readout. I left it there.
The contraption dropped like a rock. Which was fine, except that I couldn't stop it. I must have given it some priority command. Okay, the hell with it, I'd just go along for the ride.
It was a long ride, straight down. And down. And farther down still. The bargain basement-sale items, hardware, carpet remnants-the Seventh Circle of Hell.
Finally the elevator slowed, sighed softly, and stopped. The doors opened. I peered out.
Compared to the ceaseless roar of the mall, there was silence here. Out of the semidarkness, the quietly efficient whir and hum of machinery came to my ears. It was a world all to its own. Pipes gurgled, motors thrummed and throbbed, fans whined. The strangled scream of a turbine came from my right. But quietly, quietly.
The place was a jungle of pipes and ducts. Here and there, faint trails of steam arose from joints and junctures. Dripping water puddled on the floor in front of the elevator. Dim yellow light came obliquely from a source to the left. Through the riot of pipes I could see branching corridors leading off at odd angles.
This wasn't my floor. I wrenched the oversized, dull-white control knob around until vaguely familiar markings showed on the readout screen. The elevator stayed put. I fiddled with it some more, to no avail. The thing would go up again, if at all, in its own good time. I squatted, leaning my back against the metal wall of the car.
Lost again. Loster and loster.
To kill the agonizing wait I examined Susan's strange weapon. Taking the pieces out of the box, I tried to figure a way to put them together. The largest component of the three looked like a handle-end, and I proceeded on that assumption. The smaller of the remaining two pieces appeared to be a power pack, which fit into the third, a long rod with an adjustable clamp on the end of it. Click, snap, and it was together.
Fine. Now, what the hell was it, and how did it work? Second question first. You held it by the handle and pointed. You crooked your middle finger around this little ring here, and…? Nothing. There were various circular switches on the handle, and I pressed some of them. Nothing. I broke it apart, examined the cylindrical power pack, decided it looked to be in backward, and turned it around. Putting the contraption back together, I pointed it out the door at the floor and squeezed the ring.
A tiny, bright blue discharge sputtered from the end of the rod. That was it. I fiddled with the switches and tried again. The discharge was brighter and more elongated. Further fiddling produced a weaker, shorter discharge.
And that was absolutely it.
The floor was in great shape.
This was obviously not a weapon but a tool, probably a pipe cutter or scoring tool of some kind. Apparently our salesman had been extremely pissed off at us. Why hadn't Tivi known it wasn't a weapon? Possibly because the thing was alien manufactured and designed for non-Nogon use. It didn't look like a typical Nogon tool; I had seen plenty of those.
I pressed switches until it didn't discharge when I pullet on the ring. On safety. I slipped into my back pocket and stood up. I played with the control knob some more. Nothing. I paced inside the car, then tried the control again. No response. I banged on it in annoyance. Hell, don't break it, I told myself, I paced in a circle, giving the knob a good twist every circuit,
Some ten minutes later I decided it was never going to go up again, at least not very soon. I picked up Tivi's cloth sack. Inside was Susan's new torch and another thing that looked like a sewing kit.
I took the torch, dropped the sack and walked out into the pipe jungle, taking a corridor leading to the right. Just as I got far away enough not to be able to run back in time, the goddamn elevator shut its doors and took off. Maybe it had been waiting for me to leave.
I wandered for an hour, looking for a way up. No stairwell, no ladders, no more elevators. Endless passageways through thickets of pipes, ducts, cables, and conduits. The life of the faln throbbed in the darkness all around me. The Nogon had never really left their caves. Vents of steam hissed at me. Strange markings on the walls gave no clue as to where I should go, how to get out. Lost and more lost. The urge to panic was returning.
I stopped and sat on a metal canister left in the passageway, leaned back and rested my head against a warm pipe. I couldn't see a way to the other side of this. I would wander endlessly through an eternal humming night-no one would find.me, ever.
Hey, you'd better stop that, another voice told me.
Right. But I had been worn down. Every man has his breaking point. I was tired of this. Tired of it. I wanted to sleep, get into another dream. I didn't like this one. Whirclickbeep… whirclickbeep, something sounded behind me. Whirclickbeep… whirclickbeep. I was lost in a forest of sounds again. Lost in a cave again. The same cycles were repeating incessantly. Over and over, over and over. Run, chase, run, chase… lost, lost, lost…
… The road is never-ending. I run along it into the night, footsteps echoing from the vast nothingness that slowly envelopes me, that slowly closes me within its dark maw. I run into the throat of the night. Eternal night. Even the stars are gone, winked out, choked out by the miasmal nonbeing that clouds the universe ahead. All that remains is the road, my feet slapping against it. Hard metal, it drains the strength from my legs, but I must go on, I must run. That is the only thing left, the only thing I have. I keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep throwing one leg out, then the other, jogging on, loping on. The things behind will never catch me if only I can keep running. I must. The light behind fades, my own shadow on the road ahead blends with the darkness. I am alone. Running, running… I can't feel my legs. My body is gone. I am pure movement, forward movement without cause, without purpose, but with an inevitable destination. I am in a dark tunnel, rushing forward, my speed increasing, momentum — building. I accelerate into the starless dark trailing slipstreams of blackness. Time winds down and stops while I gain speed. I plunge headlong through eternity, aiming for a nodal point where all lines of force, all threads of being converge. I fall. I gravitate toward the center, toward the knot in the middle of space, the beginning of time. I slide along a web woven of the stuff of night, all lines leading to its heart. I plummet. But as I approach, as I am about to reach my resting point… Sudden tight! Blinding explosion of light! The wavefront
