Race Against Time (14 page)

"They could be very close in longitude but far apart in latitude," Meilan said. "Those second figures are 17201 units apart."

Chastened, he considered. "Depends on how much territory each number covers. Maybe we could work it out on a model globe." He looked about but saw nothing that would do. He had lost his impetus, however; seventeen thousand units had to be large, however they translated.

Meilan had been making what appeared to be casual doodles on her sheet of paper as they talked. Now she folded it, then folded it again, her hands working busily. Soon she had an intricately fashioned paper ball—not crumpled but smooth. "Will this do?"

John took it with less enthusiasm than he might have had and sketched light lines around it, careful not to crush or penetrate the paper with the brush. He circled the sphere completely, then circled it again at right angles. "Like quartering an orange," he remarked and realized that he could have ordered an orange from supply or (in case that counted as food and so had to wait for the kitchen compartment) a ball or even a globe itself. "But our globe has a hole at the north pole."

"Look inside. You might see something interesting."

"Like maybe the molten core of the earth!" Laughing, he put his eye to the hole.

Inside, on the opposite side of the ball, was her sketch of his typer. "Ask it," she murmured almost inaudibly.

He looked up. "What?"

"But you have made only two lines on the surface," she said.

He had thought of them as four but decided they were indeed only two, each circling the globe completely. So he made two more circles converging at the same point. "North and south pole."

She looked at him, startled by a memory. "Once I heard—I thought it was nonsense—something about the west pole."

"The
west
pole!"

"The north and west poles. I'm sure, now. The two of them. I listened at night when the Standards thought I slept, and heard—that is all I remember."

"How can there be a
west
pole!" he demanded.

She smiled and pointed to the paper globe. "Here."

"On the
equator?
That's ridiculous!"

She took the globe and brush and began to fill in the westing meridians. Two of the circles duplicated those already established: the equator and one of the four great circles. The other two cut obliquely across these.

"In here," Meilan said, tapping the globe, "is the answer. If you ask."

At that moment the supply cubicle closed off, and the hall cubicle opened, startling them. For an instant he thought they might escape through it but quickly saw that it was an empty shaft with slick walls. They had to have the elevator, and there seemed to be none.

Meilan went up and looked in. "There is a barrier," she said, tapping it. So there was, a transparent panel. The Standards had not overlooked so obvious a weakness in their prison. Or maybe it was the regular protection against falling into the shaft, which could be fogged with an ID key.

John returned to the globe and studied the effect of Meilan's added lines, mildly fascinated. The interlocking networks were regular in themselves but formed irregular shapes. Some were triangles, some trapezoids. A number of angles were right—ninety degrees—but more were acute and some obtuse. "I would get seasick using these coordinates," he remarked. Yet it made a kind of sense, for no north or south, east or west, had to be differentiated. These two sets would do the job. "If the planet matches earth in size," Meilan said, "each of those lines sets off an eighth of it."

"How do you know so much?" he demanded with surprised admiration. "Back in your time people didn't even know the world was round, and here you are talking about planets!"

"I listened more than was proper," she admitted demurely.

"And I never even caught on to the Standards until last year!" He returned to the problem of the globe. "An eighth of it for each line, you say. That would be three thousand miles, about. But those are only the major divisions. Our coordinates have five digits. They must divide it up—how small would that be, in the octal system? I can't visualize it."

"Let me make an abacus." She arranged her game tokens in several columns, like a series of dotted
i
's. Each shaft consisted of five pips, with the single-pip dot a couple of spaces above. She had nine such columns. Then she began moving the pips back and forth, so that some of the dots came down to join part of the stems, and the columns became new formations of three and three, two and four, or even a solid six. John did not speak, for she was obviously concentrating.

"Down to less than one of your miles," she said at last.

"Then that's it! Those five-digit pairs can pinpoint any spot on the planet within a mile." He turned the model about, marking in numbers. "And look! If a point is on that zero line, it has to be at the west pole, the way I've marked it, because that's the only place you can get an intersection."

"That should not be so," she said. "They would not make wasteful coordinates."

He shrugged. "Let's plot our three coordinates and see how it works. How much do you want to bet that Humé and Ala are only a couple of miles apart?"

It worked—except for one thing. There were two locations for every coordinate. They were directly opposite each other, across the globe, twelve thousand miles apart, traveling around the outside—as was necessary for human purposes. They could discover no way to tell which one was correct—assuming that their laboriously worked-out system was in order.

John sighed. Well, it had been only a game. Or
had
it?

Meilan seemed disappointed, too. It was as though she had expected more from him. The way she had tapped the globe, telling him rhetorically that the answer was in it. Actually there was only her sketch of his typer inside. Meanwhile the hall door gaped temptingly, proffering illusory escape, and valuable time was passing.

His eye fell on the typer, the real one, and abruptly he knew what she had been trying to suggest to him. Subtly, so that the Standards would not catch on. So subtly that he had missed her cues himself, and yet so obvious that he had been blind not to have realized it instantly. No wonder Meilan had been disappointed with him. Escape was ridiculously simple—maybe.

COMMUNICATOR: PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING THEORETICAL QUESTION IN T'ANG SYMBOLS. HOW CAN TWO PUREBRED PEOPLE AND A GOMDOG ESCAPE CONFINEMENT IN A TYPICAL STANDARD APARTMENT?

Meilan read the answer. Her shoulders began shaking. John rushed over to her, uncertain whether she was laughing, crying, or choking. It seemed to be all three. He started to ask her about the communicator's message, then caught himself. It would be folly to discuss it out loud; that was the whole point in using the typer and symbols. But what was so emotional about the matter?

After a moment she stood up, pulled open the drawer in the table they had been using, put her hand inside, and removed something. Nonchalantly she passed it into his hand. It was an ID key.

John looked at the desk with dismay. The key had been there all the time! They had never thought to look. Now they had only to take it and phase open the hall barrier and ride right out of the building....

Meilan held him back gently, shaking her head no.

No? But then he understood. Naturally there would be an alarm of some sort the moment they entered the hall. The Standards might have forgotten to clean out the drawer, but they were not
that
careless. But what, then, was the communicator's plan?

"Tell it to execute," she murmured, nodding toward the typer. "Then sleep for an hour."

Baffled, he went to the typer. COMMUNICATOR: PLEASE EXECUTE YOUR PLAN.

Nothing happened.

He drew down a bunk from one of the nonopening walls and lay down, feigning sleep. He had almost missed his cue before, not realizing that Meilan was trying to suggest that he type his query on the communicator. This time he meant to play out the game without a hitch, even though it made no present sense to him.

Meilan lay down on another bunk. He was sure she wasn't really asleep, either. For an hour they lay silently. The hall closed, and the bathroom opened again, but they "slept" through this, too. Canute had no trouble: His snooze was genuine.

When the hour was over (it had seemed like two!), Meilan got up and came to wake him. "The lavatory will be closed soon," she said with maidenly hesitation.

Still ignorant of the meaning of all this, he entered the bathroom with Canute. But as they tried to leave a few minutes later, Meilan stopped him. Silently she guided John back into the main section, where he had regained consciousness amid the foam. She had him lie down on the rough slanted floor. She lay down, too, and Canute was happy to join the fun. There was barely room for them all.

There was a warning light together with a tone as the bathroom hour neared its end. (Actually, he wasn't sure how close to an hour it was, but it was easiest to call it that.) They had about two minutes to vacate, but they did not move. As time ran out, he caught on. How simple!

The apertures shifted. The wall to the right of their original entrance opened. The bathroom was now facing onto a new apartment. Meilan led him into it. John saw that this was number twenty-two—eighteen in decimal reckoning. They were still in the heart of the building but out of view of the monitors—with luck.

"Now we wait an hour," Meilan murmured.

"Won't they miss us in thirty-two?"

"The communicator is projecting a solid image of us sleeping. They won't know we're gone."

So that was what happened after he typed EXECUTE! A camera had photographed a posed sequence for playback after they left. Very neat.

"Suppose the owner of this apartment comes back and finds us?"

"It is unoccupied, and we shall use the hall before any other person can come. The communicator knows about such things. It says there is no alarm in this hall, so we can just walk out. There will be a taxi waiting above."

John shook his head. "This is too simple. There's a catch."

She looked at her paper. Middle Kingdom symbols were printed in tight vertical rows on it. "It says it will modify the plan if anything happens."

"Remember what Pei said—the machine should serve its master. How do we know it's on
our
side?"

She shrugged. "We asked for advice. It gave it."

John wasn't satisfied, but there did not seem to be much of a choice, particularly at this point. Either they followed the printed instructions or they didn't. They had to trust the communicator and assume that if it were not exactly on their side, it was at least indifferent. A machine did not care who operated it, and this was a type of computer.

Yet what about Pei and Betsy? If they had been captured, there would be nowhere for him and Meilan to go. If the others remained free, how could they be found? In fact, this whole easy escape smacked of a Standard device to locate the other escapees. The Standards had tried watching the prisoners, and it hadn't worked, so now there was this. The moment the purebreds rejoined, the jaws of the trap would clamp on them all. But it would not be safe to voice his suspicions to Meilan. He could never foil the Standards that way, for if he were correct, they would still be listening.

He borrowed Meilan's brush and checked to see whether it retained any fluid. He discovered that it was actually a kind of pen, feeding ink into the bristles without dripping. He turned over his coordinates sheet and began sketching octagons.

By the time the hall to number twenty-two opened John had a pretty good idea of the layout of the building. Their thirty-two was surrounded by twenty-one, twenty-two, forty-one, and forty-two in the octal system. This twenty-two was surrounded by twelve, thirteen, thirty-two, and thirty-three. And they were on the fourth floor; he had spotted a plaque identifying it. Now, if he could just discover the coordinates of this building—the true coordinates, not what the Standard communicator might tell them....

But the elevator had arrived. It occurred to John that a power failure in a residence like this would be a very serious matter: no light, no food, and no escape. Probably no air, either, for long.

That got him to wondering just what the power source was. Electricity could account for the appurtenances, but where and how was it generated? He had seen no smokestacks or power lines. And the taxi—nothing he knew of could explain its operation. It had no propeller and no jets, yet it flew.

Meilan nudged him, and he saw that the elevator was beginning to move on. They phased through the panel with the new ID and jumped aboard. Evidently the Standards gave no person more than his share of time for anything!

Then John acted. He touched the button that put the elevator on manual control, overriding its prior directive. Then he guided it down, not up. Meilan stared at him but did not speak.

They halted at the basement. John's hand was shaking as he phased through the gate, but they were in luck: The chamber beyond was empty. A long, level hall stretched away in both directions.

"Find a way out!" John told Canute.

The dog dashed down one hall, sniffing at cross passages. They followed him, passing elevator doors every few feet. John realized that every one of the twenty or more shafts opened at this level, serving over five hundred apartments. It was possible to get to any room in the building from here, but by the same token it was possible for anyone to discover them here.
Hurry,
he thought.

Then Canute turned off, and there was a flight of conventional stairs. They climbed these and found themselves at street level.

But of course there was no street. There was only a forest.

"You had reason?" Meilan inquired once they were out of sight of the building. There was no sarcasm in her voice, just the question. There would have been a real scene with Betsy, but Meilan was smarter and more obliging. Fortunately.

John explained why he had broken up the communicator's plan. "Maybe it was honest, and maybe it was a trap," he finished. "But this way, we
did
escape."