Betrayer of Worlds Read Online Free PDF Page A

they would brim with fire detectors and suppression equipment. There wouldbe fire alarms, and they would not sound like hysterical humans. Nessus wasn’t buying it.
    Louis tried to take heart from his failure. Shouting “fire” had involved more forethought than anything else he had done since stepping aboard.
    No door: he must be in a teleport unit. The circle on the floor beside Nessus: was that what Nessus called a stepping disc? Had the circle by the resistance camp been that dark, Louis could not imagine how he would have seen it. That disc had been the color of—
    He scraped aside some of his filth with a shoe.
That
color.
    Of course: he had flicked from one stepping disc to another. Craning his neck, he saw most of the cylinder’s cap was the same light color.
    Hmm. Another stepping disc affixed to a clear ceiling. That disc shimmered.
    He reached up and brushed his fingertips lightly over the ceiling disc. It had a film of some sort, he decided. A molecular filter. Something to admit oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. Three hours in this little enclosed space—without fresh air he would have died by now.
    Too bad the filter didn’t remove the stink.
    Finagle! Here he stood between stepping discs and he had just now thought about any of this? Add confusion to his withdrawal symptoms.
    How did Nessus control the discs? He had plunged a head into a pocket just before disappearing from the jungle. A device in his pocket, then.
    Louis had no such device. He clasped his hands behind his back, pretending not to notice their renewed shaking. Maybe the discs also had built-in controls, underneath or out of sight along an edge.
    Top and bottom discs were almost flush with the cylinder sides. Louis could scarcely force a finger between disc and wall, but he sensed a slight recess in the edge. There might be controls within, but even if he found them, he could not see what he was doing.
    With which disc would he experiment? Not the one that kept him breathing, even if he could manage to detach it. He’d have to try the disc on which he stood.
    How could he upend it?
    That disc in the jungle had been a bomb. Blind experimentation might explode this one. He would try it anyway. It wasn’t as though he had a lot of choices.
    He’d have to get above the disc.
    He set one foot against the wall, set his back against the other, and raisedhis other foot. Slowly he climbed. The creep upward, pressing hard against the walls, made back and leg muscles scream. Like rock climbing, he told himself. Never mind that this cylinder is as slippery as glass; the fall couldn’t really hurt him.
    From maybe twenty-five centimeters above the floor, he reached around his hips, toward the floor. He jammed all four fingers into the gap at the edge of the disc—and one foot slipped. He cracked his head as he splashed into the filth.
    He tried again with the same result.
    Nessus didn’t hear or didn’t care.
    With feet spaced a bit farther apart, Louis managed on his third try to stay suspended as he forced the fingertips of his right hand into the gap. The disc lifted, breaking suction with a disgusting slurp. Then it slipped from his grasp and he fell.
    The shakes got him again. Louis lost track of how many times he made the attempt. Finally he had the disc angled upward at about twenty degrees. With his back and leg muscles trembling from strain, he crept higher, wondering if he could possibly climb high enough to set the disc on its edge.
    He couldn’t.
    The disc slipped and fell. Wham! He slammed onto the disc, the breath knocked out of him. But not before he had glimpsed the disc’s underside in the mirror. The disc’s bottom was dark, like the circle outside the cylinder.
    That circle, presuming it was a stepping disc, was upside down. If it operated at all, transferring there would teleport him
into
the deck. Doubtless Puppeteers built fail-safes to prevent that.
    Surrendering to the shakes, Louis let depression wash over