He'd been as wrong as a man could get about the Solmen on Titan, all
right. The security police who'd booked them and brought them here
hadn't said much, but it took little enough intelligence to reason that
the Tinker Flagship, having discovered that the tender wasn't to be
overtaken, had simply broadcast an all-planets bulletin. He'd been a
fool to put down at a regular spaceport. He'd just walked straight into
it. And now it was simply a matter of waiting for either another tender
or the Flagship itself to come and get them. He wasn't sure what would
happen to Deanne, but for himself, a murder charge, surely.
That accounted for the cell they'd assigned him to. It was unlike the
Proky jails in more ways than one; as escape-proof as the tomb itself.
Kane even had the feeling that the cell was watching him.
He rolled over on his back, examined the rivetless steel ceiling with
his eyes. And all the walls and the floor were the same, save for the
tiny vents at the far edge of the ceiling for air circulation, and the
almost microscopically fine lines in the near wall that outlined the
foot-thick cell door.
He surveyed the walls, ceiling and floor again, and the only opening
was the air duct, far too small for a man to crawl through, even
without its solid looking louvres.
Suddenly, Kane remembered the ruse he had employed aboard the
Flagship. Instantly he was on his feet. He hauled the pallet beneath
the tiny grilled spot in the ceiling, and standing on it, was barely
able to touch the louvres. The Solmen of Titan grew taller than those
of Terra. He had stripped himself to the waist, and folded the firm
fabric of his Cadtech tunic into a solid wad. Then held it against the
air vent with all the strength of his fingers until his arms ached!
The cubicle grew stuffy, and sweat trickled maddeningly down across his
bared ribs.
* * * * *
He relaxed the muscles of his arms just as a faint draft flitted across
his back. The door was sliding silently open behind him!
He was through it almost before the wadded tunic he had dropped hit the
floor behind him.
He kept moving with all the strength that was in him down the long,
wide corridor.
But there were no guards. Peculiar.
Suddenly a strange vibration shook the corridor floor. Probably
something in the planetoid's artificial gravity rectifier that needed
looking after. Lord, if the ITA took care of the rectifier the way it
did the air conditioner alarm, everybody'd soon be floundering in the
normal, unpleasantly-slight gravitation of the tiny planetoid. A man
would be lucky if he weighed forty pounds!
The corridor trembled again, this time more violently; it threw him
momentarily off balance, and he could not regain it before the next one
hit and sent him sprawling.
He struggled to his knees, and there was a terrible rending sound above
him. He looked up. A jagged rent was splitting the corridor even as he
watched! A 'quake of some kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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