Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
And then I felt myself materializing. Around me walls were taking form.
I floated down a foot or two and came to rest upon a new floor. My hand
brushed it. My physical senses were returning. I could feel a floor of
concrete. A vague, shimmering light was near me. It seemed to outline
the rectangle of a window. All around was darkness. Empty darkness.
Soundless, with only the throbbing hum of the mechanism....
I was indoors, in a room. I felt suddenly almost normal, except for the
whirring vibration. I flung the switch again. There was a shock. A
whirling of my senses. Then I sat up; my head steadied. The nausea
passed.
I was back in my own world, in New York City. This was night: I tried to
calculate the time. Derek and I had departed about midnight. This would
be, then some time before dawn. I was in a cellar room, lying on its
cement floor. There was a window, with a faint light outside it. A
window up near the ceiling. A straggling illumination showed me a bin, a
few barrels, a door leading into another room which looked as though it
might be a machine shop.
I sat up, calculating. I was a thousand feet perhaps from the Battery
wall, two hundred feet from the Hudson River. This was an office
building, and I was in one of its cellar rooms, at the ground level.
Near dawn? I tried to calculate what might be overhead. A deserted
office building. Too early yet for the scrub-women. The elevator would
not be running. I laughed to myself. Of what use to me an elevator, if
it had been running? How could I, a midnight prowler, appear from the
cellar of this building, and demand to be taken upstairs! There would be
no elevator, but there would be watchmen. I would avoid them.
I found a door. My heart leaped with a sudden fear that it would be
locked, but it was not. I went through it into a passage and found the
staircase. I made two turns. I tried again to keep my mind on this Space
here. I stood, carefully thinking. I had it clear. I had made no move
without careful thought. The tower with Rohbar was still to my left, and
about directly above me.
I went up the short stone staircase, opened another door carefully. I
was in the dim lower hall of the office building. I found myself beside
the deserted elevator shaft. A light was burning on the night
attendant's table in an alcove, on the other side of the shaft. He sat
there with his back to me. I closed the door soundlessly.
The stairway upward beside the elevator was here. I watched my chance. I
darted around the angle and went up. I met no one. The concrete
staircase had a light at each floor. Four floors up. No, not enough! I
opened the fourth floor door. The marble hall of the office building was
empty and silent. Rows of locked office doors with their gold-leaf names
and numbers. A single dim light to illumine the silent emptiness....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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