When he turned around again there was a door. It was oddly shaped and unlike the door he had hewn through, but clearly a door all the same, and it was open.
McCray regarded it grimly. He went back in his memory with meticulous care. Had he not looked at this very spot a matter of moments before? He had. And had there been an open door then? There had not. There hadn’t been even a shadowy outline of the three-sided, uneven opening that stood there now.
Still, it led in the proper direction. McCray added one more inexplicable fact to his file and walked through. He was in another hall—or tunnel—rising quite steeply to the right. By his reckoning it was the proper direction. He labored up it, sweating under the weight of the suit, and found another open door, this one round, and behind it—
Yes, there was the woman whose voice he had heard.
It was a woman, all right. The voice had been so strained that he hadn’t been positive. Even now, short black hair might not have proved it, and she was lying face down but the waist and hips were a woman’s, even though she wore a bulky, quilted suit of coveralls.
He knelt beside her and gently turned her face.
She was unconscious. Broad, dark face, with no makeup; she was apparently in her late thirties. She appeared to be Chinese.
She breathed, a little raggedly but without visible discomfort; her face was relaxed as though she were sleeping. She did not rouse as he moved her.
He realized she was breathing the air of the room they were in.
His instant first thought was that she was in danger of asphyxiation; he started to leap up to get, and put her into, the small, flimsy space suit he saw slumped in a corner. At second thought he realized that she would not be breathing so comfortably if the air were full of the poisonous reek that had driven him out of the first room.
There was an obvious conclusion to be drawn from that; perhaps he could economize on his own air reserve. Tentatively he cracked the seal of his faceplate and took a cautious breath. The faint reek of halogens was still there, but it was not enough even to make his eyes water, and the temperature of the air was merely pleasantly warm.
He shook her, but she did not wake.
He stood up and regarded her thoughtfully. It was a disappointment. Her voice had given him hope of a companion, someone to talk things over with, to compare notes—someone who, if not possessing any more answers than himself, could at least serve as a sounding-board in the give-and-take of discussion that might make some sort of sense out of the queerness that permeated this place.
What he had instead was another burden to carry, for she was unable to care for herself and surely he could not leave her in this condition.
He slipped off the helmet absently and pressed the buttons that turned off the suit’s cooling units, looking around the chamber. It was bare except for a litter of irrelevant human articles—much like the one in which he himself had first appeared, except that the articles were not Jodrell Bank’s. A woven cane screen, some cooking utensils, a machine like a desk calculator, some books—he picked up one of the books and glanced at it. It was printed on coarse paper, and the text was in ideographs, Chinese, perhaps; he did not know Oriental languages.
McCray knew that the Jodrell Bank was not the only F.T.L. vessel in this volume of space. The Betelgeuse run was a busy one, as F.T.L. shipping lanes went. Almost daily departures from some point on Earth to one of the colonies, with equal traffic in the other direction.
Of course, if the time-lag in communication did not lie, he was no longer anywhere within that part of the sky; Betelgeuse was only a few hundred light-years from Sol, and subspace radio covered that distance in something like fifty minutes. But suppose the woman came from another ship; perhaps a Singapore or Tokyo vessel, on the same run. She might easily have been trapped as he was trapped. And if she were awake, he could find out from her what had happened, and thus learn something that might be of use.
Although it was hard to see what might be of use in these most unprecedented and unpleasant circumstances.
The drone from Jodrell Bank began again: “Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is Jodrell Bank responding—”
He turned the volume down but did not dare turn it off. He had lost track of time and couldn’t guess when they would respond to his last message. He needed to hear that response when it came. Meanwhile, what about his fellow-captive?
Her suit was only a flimsy work-about model, as airtight as his but without the bracing required for building jet propulsors into it. It contained air reserves enough, and limited water; but neither food nor emergency medical supplies.
McCray had both of these, of course. It was merely one more reason why he could not abandon her and go on … if, that is, he could find some reason for going in one direction preferably to another, and if a wall would conveniently open again to let him go there.
He could give her an injection of a stimulant, he mused. Would that improve the situation? Not basically, he decided, with some regret. Sleep was a need, not a luxury; it would not help her to be awakened chemically, when body was demonstrating its need for rest by refusing to wake to a call. Anyway, if she were not seriously injured she would undoubtedly wake of her own accord before long.
He checked pulse and eye-pupils; everything normal, no evidence of bleeding or somatic shock.
So much for that. At least he had made one simple decision on
