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uncertain. They would have no way of knowing what the lights meant. The kitchen taloses would know,
but even if they were asked, they could not reply. They heard orders but had mouths for tasting and
eating only, not for talking.
Kickaha, thinking about this, looked for first aid devices in the cabinets. He soon came across
antiseptics, local anesthetics, drugs, bandages, all he needed. After cleaning his wounds, he prepared
films of pseudoflesh and applied them to stop the bleeding. They began their healing efforts im-mediateiy.
He got a drink of water then and also opened a bottle of cold beer. He took a long shower, dried off,
and searched for and found a pill which would dull his overstimulated nerves so he could get a restful
sleep. The pill would have to wait, however, until he had eaten and finished exploring this place.
It was true that he should not, perhaps, be think-
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ing of rest. Time was vital. There was no telling what was happening in Talanac with Anana and the Red
Beards. They might be under attack this very moment by a BeUer flying machine with powerful beamers.
And what was von Turbat doing now? After he had escaped Podarge, he and von Swindebarn must
have gated back to the palace. Would they be content to hole up hi it? Or would they, as seemed more
likely to Kickaha, go back to the moon through another gate? They would suppose him to be marooned
there and so out of action. But they also must have some doubts. It was probable that they would take at
least one craft and a number of men to hunt him down.
He laughed. They would be up there, frantically trying to locate him, and all the time he would be
underfoot, so to speak. There was, of course, the possibility that they would find the cave near Korad. In
which case, they would test all the crescents left there, and one BeUer at least would soon be in this cell.
Perhaps he was making a mistake in sleeping. Maybe he ought to keep on going, get out of this cell as
soon as possible.
Kickaha decided that he had to sleep. If he didn't, he would collapse or be slowed down so much he
would be too vulnerable. Light-headed from a bottle of beer and three glasses of wine, he went to a little
door in the wall, over which a topaz was flashing a yellow light. He opened the door and took a silver
tray from the hollow in the wall. There were ten silver-colored, jewel-encrusted dishes on the tray, each
holding excellent foods. He emptied every dish and then returned the tray and contents to the hollow.
Nothing happened until he closed the little door. He raised it again a
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second later. The hollow was empty. The tray had been gated up to the kitchen, where a talos would
wash and polish the dishes and the tray. Six hours from now, the talos would place another tray of food
in the kitchen gate and so send it to the stone-buried cell.
Kickaha wanted to be up and ready when the tray came through the next time. Unfortunately, there
were no clocks in the prison, so he would have to depend on his biological clock. That, in its present
condition, was undependable.
He shrugged and told himself what the hell. He could only try. If he didn't make it this time, he would-the
next. He had to get sleep because he did not know what would be required of him if he ever got out of
prison. Actually, this was the best place for him in the universe if the Sellers did not find the cave of
gates on the moon.
First, he had to explore the rest of the prison to make sure that all was right there and also to use
anything he might find helpful. He went to a door in one end of the cell and opened it. He stepped into a
small bare anteroom. He opened the door on its opposite wall and went into another cylindrical cell
about forty feet long. This was luxuriously decorated and furnished in a different style. However, the
furniture kept changing shape, and whenever he moved near to a divan, a chair, or table, it slid away
from him. When he increased his pace, the piece of furniture increased its speed just enough to keep out
of reach. And the other furniture slid out of its way if they veered toward it.
The room had been designed to amuse, puzzle, and perhaps eventually enrage the prisoner. It was
supposed to help him keep his mind off his basic predicament.
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Kickaha gave up trying to capture a divan and left the room at the door at the opposite end. It closed
behind him as the others had done. He knew that the doors could not be opened from this side, but he
kept trying, just in case Wolff had made a mistake. It refused to move, too. The door ahead swung open
to a small anteroom. The room beyond it was an art studio. The next room was four times as large as the
previous and was mainly a swimming pool. It had a steady supply of cool fresh water, gated through from
the palace water supply above and also gated out. Inflow was through a barred hole in the center of the
pool's floor. Kickaha studied the setup of the pool and then went on to the next room.
This was the size of the first. It contained gymnastic equipment and was in a gravitic field one-half that of
the planet's, the field of which was equivalent to Earth's. Much of the equipment was exotic, even to a
man who traveled as much as Kickaha. The only things to hold his interest were some rope&, which
were strung from ceiling hooks or bars for climbing exercises.
He fashioned a lasso from one rope and coiled several more over his shoulder to take with him. In all, he
passed through twenty-four chambers, each different from the others. Eventually, he was back in the
original.
Any other prisoner would have supposed that the rooms were connected to form a circular chain. He
knew that there was no physical connection between the rooms. Each was separated from the next by
forty feet of granite.
Passage from one to the next was effected by gates set inside the doorways of the anterooms. When the
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
door was swung open, the gate was
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activated and the prisoner was transmitted instantaneously to another anteroom which looked just like
the one he thought he was entering.
Kickaha entered the original cell cautiously. He wanted to make sure that no Beller had been gated here
from the cave on the moon while he was exploring. The room was empty, but he could not be sure that a
Beller had not come here and gone investigating, as he had. He stacked three chairs on top of each other
and, carrying them, walked through into the next room, the one with the shape-shifting elusive furniture.
He picked out a divan and lassoed a grotesquely decorated projection on top of its back. The projection
changed form, but it could metamorphose only within certain limits, and the lasso held snugly. The divan
did move away when he walked toward it, but he lay down and then pulled himself along the lasso while
the divan fled here and there. The thick rugs kept him from being skinned, although he did get rug-burns. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]