Kickaha and Anana could not hide their shock. Orc broke into laughter then. When he stopped bellowing, he removed a knife from the sheath at his belt. It was about six inches long and looked as if it were made of gold. He shoved it through the wires, where it lay at Anana’s feet.
“You’ll need a cutting utensil, of course, to carve steaks and chops and so forth. That’ll do the job, but don’t think for one moment you can use it to short out the wires. It’s nonconductive.”
Kickaha said, fiercely, “If it wasn’t for Anana I’d think all you Lords were totally unreformable, fit only to be killed on sight. But there’s one thing I’m sure about. You haven’t a spark of decency in you. You’re absolutely unhuman.”
“If you mean I in no way have the nature of a leblabbiy you’re right.”
Anana picked up the knife and fingered the side, which felt grainy, though its surface was steel-smooth.
“We don’t have to starve to death,” she said. “We can always kill ourselves first.”
Orc shrugged. “That’s up to you.”
He said something to the humanoid robots, and they followed him through the doorway into the elevator. He turned and waved farewell as the door slid out from the wall recesses.
“Maybe that Englishman is still here,” Kickaha said. “He might get us free. Meanwhile, give me the knife.”
Anana had anticipated him, however. She was sawing away at a wire where it disappeared into the floor. After working away for ten minutes, she put the blade down.
“Not a scratch. The wire metal is much harder than the knife’s.”
“Naturally. But we had to try. Well, there’s no use putting it off until we’re too weak even to slice flesh. Which one of us shall it be?”
Shocked, she turned to look at him. He was grinning.
“Oh, you! Must you joke about even this?”
She saw a section of the cage floor beyond him move upward. He turned at her exclamation. A cube was protruding several inches. The top was rising on one side, though no hinges or bolts were in evidence. Within it was a pool of water.
They drank quickly, since they didn’t know how long the cube would remain. Two minutes later, the top closed, and the box sank back flush with the floor.
It reappeared, filled with water, about every three hours. No cup was provided, so they had to get down on their hands and knees and suck it up with their mouths, like animals. Every four hours, the box came up empty. Evidently, they were to excrete in it then. When the box appeared the next time, it was evident that it had not been completely cleaned out.
“Orc must enjoy this little feature,” Kickaha said.
There was no way to measure the passage of time since the light did not dim. Anana’s sense of time told her, however, that they must have been caged for at least fifty-eight hours. Their bellies caved in, growled, and thundered. Their ribs grew gaunter before their eyes. Their cheeks hollowed; their legs and arms slimmed. And they felt steadily weaker. Anana’s full breasts sagged.
“We can’t live off our fat because we don’t have any,” he said. “We were honed down pretty slim from all the ordeals we’ve gone through.”
There were long moments of silence, though both spoke whenever they could think of something worthwhile to say. Silence was too much like the quiet of the dead, which they soon would be.
They had tried to wedge the knife between the crack in the side of the waterbox. They did not know what good this would do, but they might think of something. However, the knife would not penetrate into the crack.
Anana now estimated that they’d been in the cage about seventy hours. Neither had said anything about Orc’s suggestion that one of them feast on the other. They had an unspoken agreement that they would not consent to this horror. They also wondered if Orc was watching and listening through video.
Food crammed their dreams if not their bellies. Kickaha was drowsing fitfully, dreaming of eating roast pork, mashed potatoes and gravy, and rhubarb pie when a clicking sound awoke him. He lay on his back for a while, wondering why he would dream of such a sound. He was about to fall back into the orgy of eating again when a thought made him sit up as if someone had passed a hot pastrami by his nose.
Had Orc inserted a new element in the torture? It didn’t seem possible, but …
He got onto his hands and knees and crawled to the little door. He pushed on it, and it swung outward.
The clicking had been the release of its lock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
While they clambered down out of the cage, the beamers on the wall tracked them. Kickaha started across toward the door. All four weapons spat at once, vivid scarlet rays passing before and behind him. Ordinarily, the rays were invisible, but Orc had colored them so his captors could see how close they were. Beauty, and terror, were in the eye of the beholder.
Anana moaned. “Oh, no! He just let us loose to tantalize us!”
Kickaha unfroze.
“Yeah. But those beamers should be hitting us.”
He took another step forward. Again the rays almost touched him.
“To hell with it! They’re set now so they’ll just miss us! Another one of his refinements!”
He walked steadily to the door while she followed. Two of the beamers swung to her, but their rays shot by millimeters away from her. Nevertheless, it was unnerving to see the scarlet rods shoot just before his eyes. As the two got closer to the door, the rays angled past their cheeks on one side and just behind the head.
They should have drilled through the walls and floor, but these were made of some material invulnerable even to their power.
When he was a few feet from the door, the beamers swung to spray the door just ahead of him. Their contact with the door made a slight hissing, like a poisonous snake about to strike.
The two stood while scarlet flashed and splashed over the door.
“We’re not to touch,” Kickaha said. “Or is this just a move in the game he’s playing to torment us?”
He turned and walked back toward the nearest beamer. It tracked just ahead of him, forcing him to move slowly. But the ray was always just ahead of him.
When he stopped directly before the beamer, it was pointed at his chest. He moved around it until it could no longer follow him. Of course, he was in the line of sight of the other three. But they had stopped firing now.
The weapon was easily unsecured by pulling a thick pin out of a hinge on its rear. He lifted it and tore it loose from the wires connected to its underside. Anana, seeing this, did the same to hers. The other two beamers started shooting again, their rays again just missing them. But these too were soon made harmless.
“So far, we’re just doing what Orc wants us to do,” he said. “He’s programmed this whole setup. Why?”
They went to the door and pushed on it. It swung open, revealing a corridor empty of life or robots. They walked to the branch and went around the corner. At the end of this hall was the open door of the elevator shaft. The elevator cage was within it, as if Orc has sent it there to await them.
They hesitated to enter it. What if Orc had set a trap for them, and the cage stopped halfway between floors or just fell to the bottom of the shaft?
“In that case,” Kickaha said, “he would figure that we’d take a stairway. So he’d trap those.”
They got into the cage and punched a button for the first floor. Arriving safely, they wandered through some halls and rooms until they came to an enormous luxuriously furnished chamber. The two robots stood by a great table of polished onyx. Anana, in the language of the Lords, ordered a meal. This was brought in five minutes. They ate so much they vomited, but after resting they ate again, though lightly. Two hours later, they had another meal. She directed a robot to show them to an apartment. They bathed in hot water and then went to sleep on a bed that floated three feet above the floor while cool air and soft music flowed over them.
When they woke, the door to the room opened before they could get out
of bed. A robot pushed in a table on which were trays filled with hot delicious food and glasses of orange or muskmelon juice. They ate, went to the bathroom, showered, and emerged. The robot was waiting with clothes that fitted them exactly.
Kickaha did not know how the measurements had been taken, but he wasn’t curious about it. He had more important things to consider.
“This red carpet treatment worries me. Orc is setting us up just to knock us down again.”
The robot knocked on the door. Anana told him to come in. He stopped before Kickaha and handed him a note. Opening it, Kickaha said, “It’s in English. I don’t know whose handwriting it is, but it has to be Orc.”
He read aloud, “Look out a window.”
Dreading what they would see, but too curious to put it off, they hastened through several rooms and down a long corridor. The window at its end held a scene that was mostly empty air. But moving slowly across it was a tiny globe. It was the lavalite world.
“That’s the kicker!” he said. “Orc’s taken the palace into space! And he’s marooned us up here, of course, with no way of getting to the ground!”
“And he’s also deactivated all the gates, of course,” Anana said.
A robot, which had followed them, made a sound exactly like a polite butler wishing to attract his master’s attention. They turned, and the robot held out to Kickaha another note. He spoke in English. “Master told me to tell you, sir, that he hopes you enjoy this.”
Kickaha read, “The palace is in a decaying orbit.”
Kickaha spoke to the robot. “Do you have any other messages for us?”
“No, sir.”
“Can you lead us to the central control chamber?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then lead on, MacDuff.”
It said, “What does MacDuff mean, sir?”
“Cancel the word. What name are you called by? I mean, what is your designation?”
“One, sir.”
“So you’re one, too.”
“No, sir. Not One-Two. One.”
“For Ilmarwolkin’s sake,” Anana said, “quit your clowning.”
They followed One into a large room where there was an open wheeled vehicle large enough for four. The robot got into the driver’s seat. They stepped into the back seat, and the car moved away smoothly and silently. After driving through several corridors, the robot steered it into a large elevator. He got out and pressed some buttons, and the cage rose thirty floors. The robot got behind the wheel and drove the vehicle down a corridor almost for a quarter of a mile. The car stopped in front of a door.
“The entrance to the central control chamber, sir.”
The robot got out and stood by the door. They followed him. The door had been welded to the wall.
“Is this the only entrance?”
“Yes, sir.”
It was evident that Orc had made sure that they could not get in. Doubtless, any devices, including beamers, that could remove the door had been jettisoned from the palace. Or was Orc just making it more difficult for them? Perhaps he had deliberately left some tools around, but when they got into the control room, they would find that the controls had been destroyed.
They found a window and looked out into red space. Kickaha said, “It should take some time before this falls onto the planet. Meanwhile, we can eat, drink, make love, sleep. Get our strength back. And look like mad for some way of getting out of this mess. If Orc thinks we’re going to suffer while we’re falling, he doesn’t know us.”
“Yes, but the walls and door must be made of the same stuff, impervium, as the room that held the cage,” she said. “Beamers won’t affect it. I don’t know how he managed to weld the door to the walls, but he did. So getting in to the controls seems to be out.”
First, they had to make a search of the entire building and that would take days even when traveling in the little car. They found the hangar which had once housed five fliers. Orc had not even bothered to close its door. He must have set them to fly out on automatic.
They also located the great power plant. This contained the gravitic machines which now maintained an artificial field within the palace. Otherwise, they would have been floating around in free fall.
“It’s a wonder he didn’t turn that off,” Anana said. “It would have been one more way to torment us.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Kickaha said.
Their search uncovered no tools which could blast into the control chamber. They hadn’t thought it would.
Kickaha conferred with Anana, who knew more about parachutes than he did. Then he gave a number of robots very detailed instruction on how to manufacture two chutes out of silken hangings.
“All we have to do is to jump off and then float down,” he said. “But I don’t relish the idea of spending the rest of my life on that miserable world. It’s better than being dead, but not by much.”
There were probably a thousand, maybe two thousand gates in the walls and on the floors and possibly on the ceilings. Without the codewords to activate them, they could neither locate nor use them.
They wondered where the wallpanel was which the Englishman had used to get away from Red Orc. To search for it would take more time than they had. Then Kickaha thought of asking the robots, One and Two, if they had witnessed his escape. To his delight, both had. They led the humans to it. Kickaha pushed in on the panel and saw a metal chute leading downward some distance, then curving.
“Here goes nothing,” he said to Anana. He jumped into it sitting up and slid down and around and was shot into a narrow dimly lit hall. He yelled back up the chute to her and told her he was going on. But he was quickly stopped by a dead end.
After tapping and probing around, he went back to the chute and, bracing himself against the sides, climbed back up.
“Either there’s another panel I couldn’t locate or there’s a gate in the end of the hall,” he told her.
They sent the robots to the supply room to get a drill and hammers. Though the drills wouldn’t work on the material enclosing the control room, they might work on the plastic composing the walls of the hidden hall. After the robots returned, Kickaha and Anana went down the chute with them and bored holes into the walls. After making a circle of many perforations, he knocked the circle through with a sledgehammer.
Light streamed out through it. He cautiously looked within. He gasped.
“Well, I’ll be swoggled! Red Orc!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In the middle of a large bare room was a transparent cube about twelve feet long. A chair, a narrow bed, and a small red box on the floor by a wall shared the cube with its human occupant, Orc. Kickaha noted that a large pipe ran from the base of the wall of the room to the cube, penetrated the transparent material, and ended in the red box. Presumably, this furnished water and perhaps a semiliquid type of food. A smaller pipe within the large one must provide air.
Red Orc was sitting on the chair before the table, his profile to the watchers through the hole. Evidently, the cube was soundproof, since he had not heard the drilling or pounding. The Horn and a beamer lay on the table before him. From this Kickaha surmised that the cube was invulnerable to the beamer’s rays.
Red Orc, once the secret Lord of the Two Earths, looked as dejected as a man could be. No wonder. He had stepped through a gate in the control room, expecting to enter another universe, possessing the Horn, the Lords’ greatest treasure, and leaving behind him two of his worst enemies to die. But Urthona had prepared his trap well, and Red Orc had been gated to this prison instead of to freedom.
As far as he knew, no one was aware that he was locked in this room. He was doubtless contemplating how long it would be before the palace fell to Urthona’s world and he perished in the smash, caught in his own trap.
Kickaha and Anana cut a larger hole in the wall for entrance. During this procedure, Orc saw them. He rose up from his chair and stared from a pale-gray face. He could expect no mercy. The only change in hi
s situation was that he would die sooner.
His niece and her lover were not so sure that anything had been changed. If he couldn’t cut his way out of the cube, they couldn’t cut their way in. Especially when they didn’t have a beamer. But the pipe which was Orc’s life supply was of copper. After the robots got some more tools, Kickaha sliced off the copper at the junction with the impervium which projected outside the cube.
This left an opening through which Orc could still get air and also could communicate. Kickaha and Anana did not place themselves directly before the hole, though. Orc might shoot them through it.
Kickaha said, “The rules of the game have been changed, Orc. You need us, and we need you. If you cooperate, I promise to let you go wherever you want to, alive and unharmed. If you don’t, you’ll die. We might die, too, but what good will that do you?”
“I can’t trust you to keep your word,” Orc said sullenly.
“If that’s the way you want it, so be it. But Anana and I aren’t going to be killed. We’re having parachutes made. That means we’ll be marooned here, but at least we’ll be alive.”
“Parachutes?” Orc said. It was evident from his expression that he had not thought of their making them.
“Yeah. There’s an old American saying that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. And I’m a cat-skinner par excellence. I—Anana and I—are going to figure a way out of this mess. But we need information from you. Now, do you want to give it to us and maybe live? Or do you want to sulk like a spoiled child and die?”
Orc gritted his teeth, then said, “Very well. What do you want?”
“A complete description of what happened when you gated from the control chamber to this trap. And anything that might be relevant.”
Orc told how he had checked out the immense room and its hundreds of controls. His task had been considerably speeded up by questioning robots One and Two. Then he had found out how to open several gates. He had done so cautiously and before activating them himself he had ordered the robots to do so. Thus, if they were trapped, they would be the victims.