They scrambled upward into the narrow black mouth of the ventilator tube.
Another rapped command.
The blast of a proton gun lit the dark tube with brief, intense violet, and spattered fused metal behind them.
It reached them all with numbing electric shocks.
They tumbled ahead into cramped black spaces.
8 With Death Behind
The horizontal passage they followed was formed of heavy sheet metal, square, not three feet high, and as Giles Habibula put it, “black as the gut of a mortal whale.”
They scrambled along on all fours, bruising limbs and heads upon rivets and interior braces.
Giles Habibula was ahead, then Jay Kalam, and Hal Samdu, with John Star behind.
The guards must have delayed to get a ladder—escape into the ventilation system must have found them unprepared—for at first there was no sound of pursuit.
The four dragged themselves through the narrow dark, the strong wind from the fans rushing about them, Giles Habibula puffing like an engine.
“If it branches,” gasped Jay Kalam, “we must turn against the air current.
That will guide us toward the fans, away from the small dividing passages.
We must get past the fans, and out through the intake.
If we lose the way, they’ll have us trapped like rats———”
He stopped.
The wind against their faces had abruptly ceased.
“They’ve shut off the fans,” he whispered bitterly.
“Now we haven’t the air to guide us.”
“I hear voices,” John Star breathed.
“Behind us.
Following.”
“Sweet life’s sake!” wheezed Giles Habibula, later.
“A mortal wall!
I bumped my old head into it.”
“Go on,” said Jay Kalam, behind him, quietly urgent.
“Feel about.
There must be a way.”
“My blessed head!
Ah, yes, there is a way.
Two ways.
‘Tis another passage we’re entering.
Right or left?”
“A blind chance, since they stopped the fans.
Say, right!”
They hastened on for another while, on hands and bruised knees.
A gasp from Giles Habibula.
“My mortal life!
A fearful pit!
I half fell into it.
For life’s sake, don’t push so!
I’m sprawling on the edge!”
“The shaft turning down, it must be,” said Jay Kalam.
“We turned wrong, I’m afraid—the intake must be above.
But it’s too late to turn back.
Feel about.
There should be rungs, a ladder—in case the shafts should need to be cleaned, or repaired.”
“Ah, yes, right you are, Jay.
I’ve found them—and precious flimsy they are, for such a man as I.
Ah, Jay, I should have stayed back in the cells, to let them torture me and starve me and use my poor old body as they would, court-martial me and seal me in their ghastly lethal chamber.