The Two Worlds (29 page)

Cheryl raised her head and watched as Lyn disappeared between the shrubs. "You've got nothing to offer, Larry," she said. "Now
I
could show her a good time that's really different."

"So what's wrong with both of us?" Larry asked.

Lyn's room contained twin king-size beds and was as luxuriously furnished and fitted as every other part of the house. She was supposed to be sharing it with somebody called Donna, who hadn't arrived yet. Inside, she took off her bikini and put on a shirt and shorts. Then she stood by the window thinking for a while.

There was a datagrid screen in the room, but she didn't want to make any calls since there was a good chance it was bugged. Anyway she didn't need to if she wanted to get out because Clifford Benson's people had already anticipated that. Inside her shoulder bag in the closet was a microelectronic transmitter that looked like a powder compact but would send out a signal when she unlocked a safety catch and pressed a disguised button. If she pressed it once, a CIA agent would call the house within seconds, posing as a brother with news of a family emergency and stating that a cab was on its way to collect her. If she pressed it three times, the two agents in the airmobile parked a mile down the road from the front gate would arrive in under half a minute, but that option was for use only if she got into real trouble. But she didn't want to get out just yet. The house was empty and quieter than it would be at any time for the rest of the weekend. There would never be another chance like this for a look around the place with little risk of being disturbed. She sure-as-hell wasn't going to chicken out after a couple of hours with nothing to report, she told herself.

She took a deep breath, bit her lip nervously, walked over to the door, inched it open, and listened. Everything seemed still. As she let herself out into the passage a half-stifled giggle came from behind the door opposite. She stopped for a second; there was no other sound, and she moved quietly on toward the central part of the house.

The passage led through a small den into a large, central, open room that rose the full height of the building, one side a sloping wall of glass panels facing the rear of the house. The room was elbow-shaped, thickly carpeted, and had a sunken floor in front of a large fireplace of brickwork, with areas of raised floors around it angling away to openings and stairways which gave access to other parts of the house.

Muffled voices and kitchen noises were coming from one of the corridors, but she didn't detect any sign of Sverenssen's domestic staff in her immediate vicinity. She slowly examined the furnishings, ornaments, the pictures on the walls, and the fittings overhead, but found nothing that looked out of place. After pausing to replay her mental model of the layout, she picked out a narrow corridor that seemed to lead toward the office wing and followed it.

Eventually, after exploring the system of rooms that the corridor brought her to, most of which she had already seen in the course of the quick tour that Sverenssen had given her, she came back to what seemed to be the only door anywhere that opened through into the office wing. She tried the handle gently, but it was locked, as she had expected. When she tapped it with a knuckle, the sound it produced was flat and solid, even from the parts that looked like ordinary wood panels. They might have been wood on the surface, but there was a lot of something else underneath; that door had been put there to keep out a lot more than just drafts. Without a rock drill or an army demolition squad, she wasn't going to get any farther in that direction, so she turned to go back to the center part of the house. As she began moving, she recalled one of the sculptures that she had seen in the central room. It hadn't really struck her at the time, but now as she thought about it again, she realized that there had been something vaguely familiar about it. Surely not, she thought as she tried to visualize it again in her mind. There was no way it could be possible. She frowned and her pace quickened a fraction.

The piece was standing in an illuminated recess of one side of the brick fireplace—an abstract form rendered in some kind of silver and gold translucent crystal, about eight inches high and mounted on a solid black base. At least, when she glanced over it casually a few minutes earlier she had thought it to be abstract. But now as she picked it up and turned it slowly over in her hands, she became more convinced than ever that its form couldn't be simply a coincidence.

Its lowermost part was a composition of surfaces and shapes that could have meant anything, but projecting up from the center to form the main body of the design was a tapering column of finely carved terraces, levels, and intervening buttresses flowing upward in distinctive curves. Could it represent a tower? she wondered. A tower that she had seen not long ago. Three slim spires continued upward from the top of the main column—three spires supporting a circular disk just below their apexes. A platform? The disk had more finely cut details on its surface. She turned the sculpture over . . . and gasped. There were more details, defining a readily discernible pattern of concentric rings—on the
underside
of the platform! She was looking at a representation of the central tower of the city of Vranix. It couldn't possibly be. But it couldn't be anything else.

Her hand was shaking as she carefully replaced the sculpture in its recess. What the hell had she gotten herself into? she asked herself. Her first urge was to go back to her room, collect her things, and get out fast; but as she forced herself to calm down and her mind to think more clearly, she fought back the feeling. The opportunity to learn more was unique, and it would never present itself again. If there were more, nobody might ever know unless she found it now. She closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath to summon up her reserves of nervous energy to see it through.

She had to find out more about the office wing, but there seemed no way to get inside. Maybe she could get nearer in some other way . . . under it, perhaps? A house like this would surely have cellars. There would probably be stairs somewhere in the direction of the kitchen. She moved across to the end of the corridor leading that way; voices were still audible, but they sounded closed off. Two doors proved to be closets. The third that she tried revealed a flight of wooden stairs going down. She entered, eased the door shut behind her, and descended.

The cellar that she found herself in looked ordinary, with a bench and some tool racks, a storage space, and lots of pipes and conduits. Machinery of some kind, probably a central air conditioner, was humming behind a louvered door to one side. Two other cellars opened off from this one, one in each direction of the two arms of the house; she moved on into the one leading toward the office wing. It was another storage area, full of boxes and leftover decorating materials. A partition wall with a gap in its center screened off the far end. Lyn crossed the area and peered through the gap. The cellar did not continue on beneath the office wing, but ended at a bare wall on the far side of the small space behind the partition. As Lyn looked around and studied the surroundings, she realized that the part of the cellars she had entered was strangely different from the rest structurally, particularly the blank wall facing her.

The line where the wall and ceiling met was formed by a steel girder that must have measured fifteen inches across the flange at least, and it was supported by two more, equally massive members running down the corners and terminating in what looked like solid concrete foundations partly visible along the lower part of the walls and going down into the floor. The ceiling, too, was reinforced with girders and cross ties gusseted at the angles. All was painted white to blend in with the general background of the other cellar rooms, and the casual visitor would probably never have noticed; but to somebody who was looking for the unusual and who had a special interest in that end of the house, the heavy structures stood out unmistakably.

So the office wing itself was not over any part of the cellars but was built on solid ground, and she was looking at one side of its foundation and underpinning. It was built from materials and in a fashion that would have supported a battleship. What could there be upstairs that would have crushed the foundations of an ordinary house and had made all this necessary? she wondered.

And then she remembered the holes she had seen punched through the concrete at McClusky.

A Thurien interstellar communications system contained a microscopic, artificially generated, black-hole toroid when it was switched on and operating.

But that idea was even more insane. The house had been built ten years before. Nobody had heard of the Ganymeans, let alone Thurien, in 2021.

She backed slowly away from the partition and turned dazedly back toward the stairs.

At the top of the stairs she stopped for a while to give the thumping in her chest time to slow down and to bring her reeling mind under some kind of control. Then she opened the door a fraction and brought her eye close to it just in time to catch a glimpse of Sverenssen moving out of sight behind an angle in the wall back near the corner room. He had been turning his head from side to side as he moved, as if he were looking for something . . . or somebody. Lyn immediately erupted into a new spasm of shaking and shivering. Suddenly Navcomms and Houston seemed very far away. If she ever got out of this, she'd never want to leave the coziness of her own office again.

If Sverenssen was looking for her, he would already have tried knocking on the door of her room. The part of her that felt guilty told her that she needed a reason for not being there. She thought for a few seconds, then let herself out into the corridor and went the other way, into the kitchen. A minute later she reemerged holding a cup of coffee and began making her way back to the guest section of the house.

"Oh,
there
you are." Sverenssen's voice sounded from behind her when she was halfway across one of the raised floors around the periphery of the corner room. She froze; had she done anything else, the coffee and the cup would have been all over the carpet. Sverenssen came out of one of the side rooms as she turned to face him. He was still wearing his bathing trunks, but had put sandals on his feet and thrown a shirt loosely over his shoulder. He was eyeing her uncertainly, as if he were mildly suspicious about something but not sufficiently sure of himself to be direct.

"I went to get some coffee," she said, as if it weren't obvious. Immediately she felt like the classic dumb broad; but at least she managed to stop herself from following up her statement with an inane laugh. She was certain that Sverenssen was looking past her shoulder at the sculpture in its recess. She could picture it in her mind's eye with a neon sign in six-inch letters above shouting, "I HAVE BEEN MOVED." Somehow she resisted the compulsion to turn her head.

"I wouldn't have thought that somebody from Houston would be bothered by the sun," he remarked. "Especially somebody with a tan like yours." His voice was superficially casual, but had an undertone that invited an explanation.

For a second or two she felt trapped. Then she said, "I just wanted to get away for a while. Your friend . . . Larry, was starting to come on a bit strong. I guess I need time to get used to this."

Sverenssen looked at her dubiously, as if she had just confirmed his fears about something. "Well, I do hope you manage to loosen up a little before too much longer," he said. "I mean, the whole idea of being here is to enjoy oneself. It would be such a shame if one person allowed her inhibitions to ruin the atmosphere for everyone else, wouldn't it."

Despite her confusion, Lyn couldn't keep a sharp edge out of her voice. "Look . . . I didn't exactly come here expecting this," she told him. "You never said anything about playing musical people."

A pained expression came over Sverenssen's face. "Oh dear, I do hope you're not going to start preaching any middle-class morals. What did you expect? I said I would be entertaining some friends, and I expect them to be entertained and made to feel welcome in a manner appropriate to their tastes."

"
Their
tastes? That's very nice of you. They must love you for it. What about my tastes?"

"Are you suggesting that
my
acquaintances fail to come up to
your
standards? How amusing. You've already made your tastes quite plain—you aspire to luxury and the company that goes with it. Well, you have them. Surely you don't expect anything in this life to come free."

"I didn't expect to be treated like a piece of candy to be dangled in front of those overgrown kids out there."

"You're talking like an adolescent. Do I not have a right to expect you, as my guest, to behave sociably in return for my hospitality? Or did you imagine that I was some kind of a philanthropist who opens his home to the world for reasons of pure charity? I can assure you that I am nothing of the kind, and neither is anybody else who has the intelligence to understand the realities of life."

"Who said anything about charity? Doesn't respect for people come into it anywhere?"

Sverenssen sneered. Evidently it didn't. "Another middle-class opiate. All I can say to you is that whatever fantasies you have been harboring appear to have been sadly unfounded." He sighed and shrugged, apparently having already dismissed the matter as a lost cause. "The opportunity is yours to enjoy a life quite free from worries financial or otherwise, but seizing it requires that you throw off a lot of silly protective notions left over from childhood and make a pragmatic assessment of your situation."

Lyn's eyes blazed, but she managed to keep her voice under control. "I think I just made it." Her tone said the rest.

Sverenssen appeared indifferent. "In that case I suggest that you call yourself a cab without further delay and return to your world of misplaced romanticism and unfulfillable dreams," he said. "It really makes no difference to me. I can get somebody else here within the hour. The choice is entirely yours."

Lyn stood absolutely still until she had fought down the urge to hurl her coffee in his face. Then she turned away and, mustering the effort to maintain her calm, walked off in the direction of her room. Sverenssen followed her coldly with his eyes for a few seconds, then shrugged contemptuously and hurried out through a side door to rejoin the others at the pool.