Dan stood still, thinking. He remembered the official with the carrying case in the corridor overhead, who had said to the angry crowd, "Go to the War Ruler." Dan mentioned the incident and said, "What about this War Ruler and his emergency powers?" * * * * * Kielgaard said, "It looked promising to us at first, but actually that's as if someone should say, 'England is in peril. Go to King Arthur.'" "What?" said Dan, puzzled. "The War Ruler is a myth. A thousand years or more ago, after a terrific internal war, they had a famine. They also had a huge army to disband, headed by a very popular leader. The army apparently threatened to take over the planet, but by a clever gimmick, the government put off the crisis. They announced that their scientists had discovered a way to halt the flow of time after the famine--and the War Ruler marched the whole army loyally into a kind of big mausoleum where they presumably killed the lot of them with a quick-acting gas. That is the War Ruler's Control Center. "Ever since then, they've been making ritual gestures. They stock new arms of standard design nearby, and recruit a number of fresh soldiers to join the old--as a population control measure. To make the illusion complete, they say that any man or woman who sincerely believes the state to be in peril can enter the control center, by passing through a lethal field that kills the insincere and lets the sincere through alive. A number of people have tried it and got killed, so now they don't try any more." "Where is this place?" asked Dan. "If we read your map rightly, that wall in front of you marks the edge of the field surrounding it." Dan set down one of the mataform units and mentally pronounced a keyword. He was in the shelter under the river. An instant later he was back by the wall, a glider and the control helmet in his hands. He clipped a transceiver to the glider and guided it toward a huge, dark-stained building with the look of a fortress. He sent the glider around to the front of the building and saw two huge bronze doors, one of which stood open. There was a totally still, motionless look about the place that Dan did not care for. But the glider had come to a closed inner door and that was as far as it could go. Dan took off the control helmet, drew a deep breath and said a key word. He was standing in the huge hall, before the closed door. He opened the door. Before him was a room with tall slit windows, and as Dan went in, he could see dimly, but, like a man in a hall of mirrors, what he saw did not make sense. Distorted shapes and forms, with bright points and blots of light, shifted as he moved, and shifted again as he moved closer, to see one leg of what looked like a very old, faded table. A heavy cable ran up the leg to the top, where there was a switch, and a bronze plate with the words, "Open Switch."