one side and immediately to the control panel.
He flipped it on.
“Defense mode returned to my voice signal cancel only!” he said quickly, entering a series of numbers through the key pad on a control panel. The door slid rapidly shut.
“Defense mode on,” Obie’s voice said, as if from thin air. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you, Ben?”
He chuckled. “Hello, Obie. Well, a little. I—” He stopped suddenly, noting that the dish—the platform used by Obie, the one from which the guests had received their tails and from which he’d received the disguises he used to escape from New Pompeii—was on active, ready to energize.
“Cancel that energize!” he ordered into the operator’s mike. He walked over to the rail and looked down.
He saw a large oval, more than a hundred meters across at its widest by about seventy. A railed three- meter-wide balcony on which were located three control consoles was elevated above it. From the balcony, stairs led to the lower level, in the center of which was a metal disk raised perhaps a half-meter. Above it Obie’s dish hung from its boom.
Ben Yulin gasped. Someone was on the disk—two people in fact. Humans!
“Hey! You on the disk! I’m Ben Yulin! Who are you!”
They looked slightly fearful, glancing at the little dish above them.
“Obie can’t help you,” he called, his voice echoing. “I control him now. Who are you?”
One of the figures sighed. “Hello, Ben.” It was a pleasant, soft female voice. “I guess we’re back to the beginning again. I’m Nikki Zinder, and this is my daughter, Mavra.”
“Well I’ll be damned!”
The Other Side of the Bridge
Renard had tried the system after the door slammed shut, and Wooley had fired a shot, but it was too late, meaningless.
It took the Agitar only a few steps to discover that the bridge was indeed still energized.
“Renard! Come on back!” Wooley called. “Maybe he was lying about those guns, maybe not. But you’ll never get that door open on your own! Why take the risk? The bastard’s double-crossed us and we have to retrench!”
Reluctantly the Agitar agreed with her, turned, and walked back. The voltage pulses struck him repeatedly until he reached the center of the bridge, but to no effect—except that he was fully charged for the first time in many years. It was a heady feeling to carry over eight thousand volts; it made an Agitar male light-headed and gave him the feeling he could do anything. Still, he made his way back to the far end of the bridge.
“Don’t touch me!” he warned them. “I’ll have to discharge some of this, or I’ll kill somebody!”
He finally found a section of metal rail that didn’t seem to be connected by a conductive material to anything nearby, tried a short jolt, then discharged about two thousand volts.
“So, now what?” he asked.
The Ghiskind merged with the Bozog. “I will see if I can get in,” it said. “The electricity and guns won’t hurt me even if I am detected, and if I can get inside I can take his body, I am certain.”
They agreed to let the Yugash try. It floated over the bridge and was soon invisible to them. They waited for several minutes, then watched it return.
“No good,” it told them, again through the Bozog. “The place is solid. No cracks. That door has insulated seals. It’s an entirely self-contained atmosphere in there. And if that computer’s a fraction of what he claims, he can live in there almost forever, even wait us out.”
“This is a hell of a mess, isn’t it?” Vistaru said. “So, now what do we do?”
“I’d say go Topside again until we think of something else,” the Agitar suggested. “For one thing, Belden’s dead. So we haven’t that threat. Second, that’s where all the food and water is. And third, I have to go to the bathroom pretty damned bad.”
There was little else to do. Underside, they were in Yulin’s element. Defeated, they slowly made their way back along the corridor.
To guard against Yulin and any tricks he might pull, and because they were still not certain that Topside held no dangers, they slept in the open in shifts.
Mavra slept solidly, and awoke feeling much better. Her head seemed clearer, her body did not ache so much.
One last commission, she thought determinedly, one I have to handle myself. Nobody else this time. Just me, at least in the brain department. If I blow this one…
But, no, failure was unthinkable. Frankly, she didn’t care what Yulin did with Obie or planned to do, but she cared about this last opportunity, the chance to prove to herself and to the others that Mavra Chang was as good as she’d always believed herself to be.
To succeed here would be to put the final stamp on her life, the proof that Mavra Chang existed as a unique individual, better than them all. With that she could be content to die. Without it, she was already dead. For she knew the moment she’d set foot on New Pompeii that she would never leave it She would not return to the Well World, to be transformed at random into something absurd, a Krommian dancing flower, say, or a Makiem frog— perhaps worse. And if she succeeded, and they all still lived—return? As what? A horse? That would go over big in the Com.
No. Triumph or disaster, it would end here.
The architectural plans of New Pompeii kept flashing through her head. Something must be there, some key, some way to foul things up. She was sure of it.
Apparently unimportant facts kept occurring to her, and she tried to organize them like a great jigsaw puzzle. But she had far too many irrelevant pieces. Her mind raced—the mind the Ghiskind had called the strongest it had ever encountered.
Obie. Obie was the key. Something about Obie. Think, Mavra, think! No, straining’s not the way. Slow down. Relax. Let it come.
And she had it—part of it, anyway.
“Renard!” she said sharply. He’d been dozing and his head came up slowly, sleepily.
“Huh?”
“Remember long ago, when we escaped from this hole? Remember, we stole the ship and started toward the Well World?”
He was still half-asleep. “Yeah, I guess so,” he mumbled.
“Obie talked to us over the ship’s radio. Remember?”
He was suddenly awake. “Yeah, he did, didn’t he?” he responded, understanding.
“Let’s get to the ship,” she suggested.
It was frustrating not to be able to handle the controls. At least there was a central pickup transceiver, not the headsets in the ship they’d used. Quickly she instructed him on the procedures, the radio tuning, power check and the like. Finally, she was satisfied.
“Mavra Chang calling Obie,” she said. “Obie, can you hear me?”
“I was wondering when you’d think of this,” the warm, human voice of the computer responded immediately.
“Never mind the quibbles. We’re not computers,” she responded. “Obie, what’s the situation in there now?”
“Bad,” the computer told her. “Ben has complete control. Oh, sure, I can do this sort of thing, but except on his command, I cannot act on anything that means anything—and I can’t stop him. Worse, Nikki Zinder and her daughter did not move when I told them and they were still here when Ben got into the room. He has captured them.”
