2
Maggie had never suffered from claustrophobia, but she suspected that might change if she spent much longer in this damnable pipe.
When they had started out, Freud in the lead, his eye-beams lighting the way, Maggie had assumed that even if the pipe proved to be quite long, the journey would be, at worst, rather tedious; she was merely crawling on her hands and knees, after all, not doing anything strenuous.
Her knees started hurting after five minutes, her hands after ten. At that point she called a halt long enough for her to pull an old shirt from her backpack, tear it into strips, and wrap the strips around her hands and knees.
Thinking that now everything would be okay, they crawled on. And on. And on.
The pipe never changed. It stretched constantly onward and upward at a barely perceptible angle of two or three degrees, never curving, never branching, never intersecting with another pipe. Its maddening regularity made her want to scream. She began to wonder if they hadn’t been caught in a trap, some clever piece of craft whereby intruders were condemned to retrace the same section of pipe until they went mad.
What made things worse was the smell. Not the smell of the pipe—that was only rust, unpleasant but reassuringly familiar—but the residual odor of the ooze that enveloped Freud. At first this smell was only a minor annoyance, enough to make her wish she had rinsed him off before they started their journey. But over time the foul chemical stench seemed to accumulate in her nostrils, growing thicker and harsher and making her dizzy and nauseated.
A little while ago, she had asked Freud how long it had been since they entered the pipe. Considering how stiff she was and how much her lower back ached—it felt as if someone had punched her in the kidneys—she thought the answer would be somewhere in the vicinity of two hours, maybe three. She was horrified when he announced that according to his internal clock it had been exactly forty-one minutes.
That was all? Not even three-quarters of an hour? She felt like weeping.
Now, as she continued trying, and failing, to come to terms with the idea that they might be condemned to this cramped metal hell for a few hours more, Freud stopped. Not noticing, head hanging wearily down, she continued forward until her hand banged knuckles-first into his heel.
“Ow,” she said, flapping her hand from side to side.
“I apologize,” said Freud. “But we have come to a change in the pipe.”
She looked up. Ten feet ahead of Freud the pipe appeared to end at a blank wall of metal. Maggie’s throat tightened, and tears of frustration welled up in her eyes. Then she noticed that it didn’t end at all; it bent directly upward.
The question was, how far up did it go before ending? Would they be able to climb out, or had their whole journey been for nothing?
They crawled forward. Freud entered the vertical section and stood upright. Maggie joined him. There was barely enough room for both of them.
Two feet above the tops of their heads was a round metal grate. Freud reached up to push it out of the way, but Maggie suddenly had an image of the Marauders gathered in silence around the grate, the orange glow from beneath it dimly illuminating their grinning faces and their drawn weapons as they waited for the flies to bumble into the web.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Turn off your eyebeams for a moment.”
He did. The blackness that ensued was absolute and deeply unsettling. Not a glimmer of light shone anywhere.
“Do you hear anything?” she whispered even more quietly than before. The blackness made every sound seem a thousand times louder.
Freud listened for a moment and then, the volume of his voice lowered to near inaudibility, said, “I hear a faint dripping sound, as well as several small insects skittering across a hard surface. That is all.”
Relieved, Maggie said, “Turn your eyes back on, and let us leave this awful pipe.”
Eye-beams back on, Freud reached up and pushed against the grate. It came up easily, or so it seemed. The way his servos were whining, Maggie suspected that a normal man wouldn’t have been able to budge it.
After Freud moved the grate aside, they climbed out and found themselves at the bottom of a metal vat twenty feet across and forty high. Maggie feared that they wouldn’t be able to get out of it, but as Freud looked around, his eye-beams fell upon a metal ladder that extended up the side. They climbed it, crossed the vat’s five-foot-wide lip, then descended a metal staircase that spiraled down the outside of the vat.
When they were safely down, they looked around and saw that they were in a nearly empty room the size of a football stadium. The vat, which resembled the one they saw in the ruined building at the northeast corner of the complex, occupied the center of the room. Next to it a huge metal hook hung from the ceiling on a chain. Against one wall stood a rusty metal table atop which sat a smashed computer monitor. A filthy blue tarp lay in a heap in a corner. Beyond that there was only trash scattered across the floor: sheets of decaying and bug-eaten paper, empty plastic wrappers with the word “Twinkies” on them, crushed Styrofoam cups, a pen, and, oddly enough, a single brown shoe. Numerous rectangular patches lighter than the rest of the floor attested to where other objects had once stood.
There were three doors. One, in what Freud said was the south wall (it turned out he had some kind of internal compass in addition to everything else), was large and metal and rolled upward on a track. A second in the west wall led to an office full of broken furniture and more rotting paper.
The third door in the vat-room was in the north wall. Beyond it, a door-lined institutional hallway stretched away to the east and west. They saw nothing to indicate which direction might lead to the Marauders, or more importantly to Adam and Dagmar.
“Well?” Maggie said. “Do your sensors detect any particles or suchlike that might help us decide which way to go?”
Freud turned his head down one arm of the hallway, then down the other, then looked at Maggie.
“I regret to inform you that I detect no meaningful particulates in the air. I can, however, tell you one item of possible importance: Given our approximate distance from Yoyodyne when we entered the pipe, the length of the pipe, and the approximate size of the complex, I estimate that we are roughly in Yoyodyne’s center.”
Maggie couldn’t decide whether that made her feel better or worse. It was good because, being in the center, they were an equal distance from all parts of the complex, which might make finding Adam and Dagmar easier. Unfortunately, it also made it easier for the Marauders to stumble across her and Freud.
“Let us head west,” she said.
They headed down the left arm of the hallway.