by Larry Niven
If only I’d read more science fiction! Well, coming from another planet gives me some leeway—“I really thought I was the first man to reach the galactic core,” he said. “Your trip wasn’t even in the records.”
“How old are you?”
“About six hundred,” he said offhandedly. “Our years. In Earth years that’s about—” Don’t get tricky. Count on her not knowing much about the Earth she came back to. “—five hundred and thirty. How about you?”
“Nearly two hundred. My years, not Jupiter years.”
“I’m surprised you never ran out of medicines.”
“The children let me take my supply with me into zero-time. I keep them there so that they will not spoil.”
A thrill ran up Corbell’s neck. She’d keep the food there too, cooking it in large batches and then stopping time for it. That way her meals would always be freshly cooked. And that private jail of hers must be very close to one of the “phone booth” termini.
“What was your sun?” she asked.
The only sun he could even spell was Sirius. “I never heard it called anything but ‘the sun,’” he said. “Just how much did you learn about the real immortality, the one the dictators used?”
“Only that. When a dictator died it was through violence.” She scowled. “Such events were remembered. My lawyer told me stories of one dictator warring on another, of war spreading to their families. Old stories from far before his time. From the sound of it, the dictators no longer served the State, even then. Only themselves.”
“Like Greek gods” he said. He heard the gap: Mirelly-Lyra’s box had not translated his remark. “Powerful and quarrelsome,” he amplified. “Mortals did well to bow when the gods passed and otherwise try not to get caught in the wheels.”
He glimpsed details of scenery as they flashed past. Green and brown hills. Groves of dwarf trees. He looked for birds, but saw none. They went over a sharp crest, and Corbell’s stomach dropped away.
The car sped down toward what even Peerssa would have called a city.
It showed black outlined in red, with the red sun almost behind it. There had been a geodesic dome. A piece of the frame, a dozen linked hexagons, lacy-thin, still stood along one city border. But the city itself retained the dome shape. In the center of a polar coordinate grid of streets sat an enormous cube with bulging sides: the transportation nexus. Spires and glass slabs sloped away from it; the tips of the tallest buildings defined the shape of the lost dome.
A tall glass slab near the center had fallen against the great cube, where, bent in the middle, it leaned for support like a drunk against a large friend. Otherwise this city, Four City, was almost undamaged. One City had largely been ruins. Perhaps Four City was younger than One City; perhaps its dome had protected it from the elements longer.
Green dwarf forest and green-and-gold grassland, the vegetation ran downslope to surround the city on three sides. It stopped sharply at a nearly straight borderline that ran past the city’s far edge. Beyond that line, a five-to-ten-mile width of barren borderland stretched to meet the bright blue of ocean.
Strange, Corbell thought. Then it came to him that Four City must have been built before the world grew hot and the oceans receded. It was that old, anyway. But something else was strange about Four City. It had not spread out along the shore. What must once have been a curved line of beach was bare of buildings. No roads joined it to the city. Corbell, peering, made out regularly spaced black dots that might have been “phone booths.”
He asked, “Do you know this city well?” Play tour director. Where’s your private jail, Mirelly-Lyra?
She said, “Yes.”
He dropped it. “From here we go to the west coast of—”
“I know. My machines watched your landing.”
He had almost grown used to the car’s reckless speed, but when they swooped into the city his composure self-destructed. The streets had teeth: big chunks of fallen masonry, jagged sheets of glass. The car swerved around them, tilted forty-five degrees and more to take corners, straightened and tilted again, while Corbell strangled the padded bar.
The Norn studied him with shrewd old eyes. “You’re badly frightened. I wonder what your people used for transport.”
“Phone booths,” he said at random. “For long-distance travel we used dirigibles, lighter-than-air craft.”
“You traveled so slowly?”
Sweating, he said, “We weren’t in a hurry. We lived a long time.” For an instant he considered telling her the truth. Get it over with. Her deal could work for him. They would use her medicines to make him young. Young Corbell would search out the dictators’ immortality while frail old Mirelly-Lyra waited it out in a rocking chair. It made good sense.
But Mirelly-Lyra was crazy.
The car swerved violently, ducked under something huge and solid. Corbell looked back. Embedded in the street like a Titan’s spear was a girder of Z-shaped cross section. It was as long as the average Four City skyscraper was tall.
The car slowed and eased to a stop beneath the great rectangular face of an office building. Corbell let his death grip relax. The old woman was prodding him with the cane, gesturing him out. He got out. She followed.
The design of windows on the face of the building was not rectangular; the panes (largely missing) were laid out like a pattern in stained glass. And there were curlicues above the great glass doors. Corbell, still shaking in the aftermath of terror, pulled himself together. He needed to remember these; they might be an address. Two commas crossed, an S reversed, an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends, and a crooked pi.
Two sets of doors dropped into the floor to let them through, then slid back up.
Mirelly-Lyra took them through a lobby padded in cloud-rug, then through a corridor lined with handle-less doors. “The lifting boxes don’t work,” she explained. They climbed stairs: three flights, with pauses to rest. They were both panting when Mirelly-Lyra turned down a hallway.
Corbell’s fingers worked steadily at a button on his undersuit.
He’d been wearing it since Don Juan took off. He’d washed it several hundred times. He twisted and twisted at the button. One thick flexible “thread” joined it to the fabric. It would have to part all at once.
More doors without handles. Mirelly-Lyra stopped beside the sixth door. She pressed something in her hand against the center of the door. As the door swung open she put the unseen thing back in a pocket and gestured. Corbell passed through ahead of her. He dropped the button as his fingers brushed the jamb.
It was the first big risk he’d taken. He had no choice. He had to be able to re-enter this place.
Mirelly-Lyra kept her eyes on Corbell as the door closed behind her. It closed on the button…and she didn’t notice. Corbell was looking around him, everywhere but at the door.
Desk covered with widgetry; cloud-rug; “phone booth”; picture window. The offices were mass produced too. There were minor differences. The “phone-booth” door was transparent. The picture window was intact, and rain had not ruined the desk or the rug.
Corbell’s pressure suit and helmet had been dumped on the desk. He picked up the helmet in his bound hands. He called, “Peerssa! This is Corbell for himself calling Peerssa for the State.”
There was no answer.
“Peerssa, please answer. This is Corbell calling Peerssa and Don Juan.”
Nothing. Not a whisper. And Mirelly-Lyra was watching.
“My ship may be around the other side of the planet,” he told her. But Peerssa set up relays! “Or the autopilot may still be holding an equatorial orbit.” But he wasn’t, he’d changed it! Where was Peerssa?
Then he remembered. Mirelly-Lyra had altered the subway system. Wherever Corbell had come out, wherever he was now, it wasn’t where Peerssa had aimed his instruments. As far as Peerssa was concerned, Corbell had never emerged from the subway system.
I will wait until I am sure you are dead, Peerssa had
said. Then I will search other systems for the State.
He would have to bluff. “If he’s still in equatorial orbit, we’ll have to call from my landing craft.” He had to explain equatorial orbits to her by drawing in the dust on the desk. Then she understood.
She said, “We must use the tunnel cars. Take your pressure Suit. Mine is in the terminal.”
The “phone booth” was too small. Mirelly-Lyra clearly did not trust Corbell that close to her. She held him covered while she drew a symbol in the dust: the crooked pi. “Push this key four times,” she said. “Then wait for me. You cannot outrun my cane.”
He nodded. She watched him through the door. He paused to note that four of the eight symbols on the keyboard matched the four he’d seen over the entrance.
He pushed the crooked pi four times.
Zap, he was elsewhere. The world beyond the door snapped into another shape. Vast empty space, rings of couches humping from the floor: Here was another intercontinental subway terminal. Corbell fumbled in the belt pouch of his pressure suit, found a circle shape. His hands were trembling violently. Clear plastic disk: right. With both hands he guided it into the coin slot. He stabbed at the compressed hourglass symbol, 4-4-4-4.
Nothing at all happened. The “phone booth” in the Four City Police Station must be out of order.
Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar stepped into view from another booth and looked about her, eyes narrowed and jaw thrust forward. She saw him, still in the booth with the door closed.
He jabbed frantically at the crossed commas. Remorse, terror, guilt, death-wish flashed in his brain and were gone, and so was the light. In blackness he rammed his shoulder against the door and ran blindly out into…
Corridors…corridors with pale-green walls and glowing-white ceilings. Wide doors with no knobs, only small plates of golden metal that might have been electromagnetic key plates. He turned right, left, right, and stopped, face to a wall, sucking air. Fatigue soaked into his legs like an acid solvent.
Would she know how to trace his “call”? He couldn’t know. He ran.
A bigger door at the end of the corridor dropped open to reveal stairs. One long flight ran diagonally between a sheer wall and the tinted glass-mosaic face of the building, with doors at landings along the flight. He froze in fear. If she was out there, she’d see him!
Then he remembered. They’d passed a building with this pattern on its face. From the outside it was a mirror.
He was (he counted) three stories up. He still didn’t know what kind of place this was; but it must be some kind of public service facility.
All right. By the time she got here, if she ran as he’d been running, the old lady would be exhausted. She’d want to go down. So did he, and she’d guess that. He went up. At the fourth story the door dropped for him, then closed as he passed it. He climbed another flight, then looked back and saw footprints in the dust.
He stopped, resting, listening.
No sound.
He walked backward down the stairs, stepping in his own footprints as best he could. When the fourth-floor door dropped, he threw his helmet through, then his pressure suit. Then he jumped for it.
He’d left a pair of sloppy footprints, but no other tracks. And now he was on cloud-carpet. He stooped to brush away two dusty footprints, picked up his suit and helmet and staggered on.
He couldn’t seem to get enough air.
CHAPTER FIVE:
Stealing Youth
I
He staggered through clean, geometric, empty, sound-deadening corridors. Doors did not drop for him. Twice he tried holding his plastic disk against what he thought were entrance plates. It was all he could think of, and it didn’t work. Whatever this place was, he—or the dead man Corbell had robbed—was not authorized to pass these doors.
The pressure suit became too heavy for him. He dropped it.
He talked to the helmet, but it didn’t answer. Where the hell was Peerssa?
Corbell had freed Peerssa from all orders past and future. Corbell had gone unprotected into an unknown environment; had later dropped out of communication. Jaybee CORBELL Mark II: missing, presumed dead. By now Peerssa could be rounding the sun on his way to some nearby star. Searching for the State.
Peerssa’s interstellar laser beam could have burned the old woman down as she crossed a street. But Corbell’s computer had abandoned him…and Corbell hurled the helmet viciously into the cloud-rug, but not as hard as he wanted, because his hands were still bound. The blind faceplate stared after him as he went on.
His legs were starting to cramp.
The clean air was turning musty with the old smell of something truly dead when Corbell came at last to an open door. He thought the mechanism had failed…and then he saw why. A small hole had been burned through the gold plate.
Beyond the doorway was cruder damage and a richer smell.
It had been a surgery, he guessed. At least, that looked like an operating table with machinery suspended above it, and the machinery included scalpels on jointed arms.
There were crumbled brown skeletons. One, naked, lay in a pool of dust on the table. Two others sprawled against a wall. Their stained and damaged uniforms were in better shape than the bones within. The cloth bore charred slashes that continued into the bones, as if men had been hacked by a white-hot sword. These men had been man-sized, Corbell’s size.
The wall behind the desk had a hole in it big enough to drive a car through. Bombs?
Corbell heaved himself up on the table with the skeleton. He rubbed the bandages against a scalpel edge…and behold! His wrists were free.
Now he moved to the great gap in the wall. He was getting his breath back, but his heartbeat was fast and fluttery. What he wanted most was a chance to lie down and rest…until he looked down into the vault.
It was two stories high and windowless. To the left, a thick circle of metal almost the height of the wall, with a stylized ship’s wheel set in it. It looked for all the world like a bank-vault door. There were guard posts: glass cubicles set just below the ceiling, and in the cubicles were skeletons armed with things like spotlights with rifle butts.
A bank vault seemed out of place in a hospital.
There were shelves on all three walls, floor to ceiling. The few items still on the shelves were not gold bars. They were bottles. The floor, ten feet below Corbell, was covered with broken glass.
There was a hall-melted metal thing, an animated dishwasher very like the machine that had attacked Corbell and Peerssa as burglars. Other machinery looked intact. There was an instrument console that might have been (given the hospital motif) diagnostic equipment. There was a matched pair of transparent “phone booths,” glass cylinders with rounded tops. Corbell saw these and lusted.
The invaders had brought a ladder. He climbed down carefully, treating himself as fragile. Four skeletons at the bottom showed that the invaders had not had things all their own way. He stepped carefully among the bones. As a hospital the place made a good crypt—better than most, in fact. Cool. Clean. No insects, no scavengers, no fungus.
But it wasn’t death Corbell was running from. It was a silver cane and a change more humiliating than death.
The lights were still on in the vault. Indicator lights glowed on the console. With luck the booths would work, too. He stepped into one and looked for a dial.
No dial, just a button set in a slender post. No choice about where he was going. Corbell wondered if the Norn would be waiting at the other end. He made himself push the button anyway.
Nothing happened.
He cursed luridly, pushed out of the booth and tried the other. The second booth didn’t even have a door, and there was fine dust floating in it. What the hell?
What was this place? The drugs on the shelves must have been incredibly valuable. Four human guards and a metal killer, a single door that looked like it would stand off an atomic attack, an instant-elsewhere booth with only one terminal and another booth you couldn�
�t get out of…an invading army willing to go up against all that, with bombs…and suddenly he knew where he must be.
It was a double jolt.
Those shelves must have held dictator immortality. And they were bare.
Everything fitted. Of course you’d store geriatric drugs in a hospital. The booths must lead directly to dictator strongholds—and even they could only appear in the closed booth. If the man in the booth wore the right face, someone outside could dial him into the booth that had a door. If not, he was a sitting duck for the laser weapons.
And the vault door might well stand an atomic attack. But thieves had come through a wall—and maybe they’d used atomics too. Did Mirelly-Lyra know about this place? She must. She’d have kept looking until she found it.
And so would Corbell, and she knew it: The Norn herself had told him about dictator immortality. He had to get out of here.
Exhaustion had become an agony. He would climb the ladder if he must, if he could, but he tried the vault door first. And it was open! All of his strength and weight were just enough to swing it wide. The invaders must have left by the door they could not enter.
So did he, very gratefully. The line of “phone booths” was on this floor. He had walked a zigzag path from there; he might have trouble finding his way back—
He saw the booths as he rounded a corner. And he saw Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, holding her cane like a gun and squinting at something in her other hand. Just before he ducked back he saw her look up at the ceiling with her teeth bared.
It wasn’t him she was tracing. It was his pressure-suit helmet.
Peerssa, good-bye. Corbell counted to thirty, then stuck his nose around the corner. She wasn’t there. He tiptoed through the cloud-rug to the next intersection and peered around it. She wasn’t there either, and he crossed the intersection at a leap and was in the nearest booth with the disk in his hand.
Mirelly-Lyra would not have liked the way he was smiling.
