also noticed that the level of the water was slowly rising. The house was evidently experiencing difficulties in the waterworks.
Rick’s first supposition was that the three investigators in the nursery must already know about this problem, given that they had taken over all the house’s systems, but then he remembered that the lar had stubbornly insisted that nothing was wrong in the nursery. Perhaps, given Mr. Murgatroyd’s declared allegiance to the philosophy of better-be-safe, they should be told.
Rick climbed back up to the cellar door, which had closed automatically behind him, and brought his knee up to tap the control panel.
The door didn’t open.
Rick cursed. He hung the loudly-squalling Steven over his shoulder, switched the feeding-bottle from his left hand to his right, and tapped the panel again with his fingers.
The door still failed to respond.
Rick turned to the screen beside the door and poked the keyboard beneath it. The screen remained dead, as he had expected. The men in the nursery had presumably switched off the circuitry for some arcane purpose of their own.
He turned around to look back at the waste-chute. The portal was still open, and the water level had now reached its rim. Water began to spill over. While Rick watched, the floating ultrawoolly was carried over the lip of the precipice, and fell soggily to the floor, where it sat lumpenly in a rapidly-spreading pool of discolored liquid.
“Pollution!” said Rick, with feeling. “Pollution, corrosion and copulating corruption!” The obscenities seemed oddly ineffective, given their incipient literality.
He knew that there was no point at all in shouting for help. The house was well-designed, and the walls and ceiling were far too efficient at damping out sounds.
He realized that he was trapped.
* * * *
Even though he knew there was no point, Rick yelled for help; there seemed no harm in trying. In the meantime, he struggled to think of something more likely to get results.
Steven responded to the unexpected competition with a moment’s startled silence, but then began to compete with a will, increasing his own efforts to be heard. Within seconds he began to hit that note. The din was too appalling to be tolerated, and Rick shut up.
Steven didn’t. Rick gritted his teeth and tried to shut out the sound, but the screams went deep into the core of his brain.
Rick went to the top of the cellar steps and kicked the door, very hard. Nothing happened, and he kicked it again, even harder. Then, holding Steven carefully at arm’s length, he rammed it with his shoulder.
The door absorbed the brutal mistreatment with dignified ease, swallowing the sound of the impacts. The blows had discharged a little of Rick’s frustration, but he wasn’t sufficiently masochistic to keep going until he did himself an injury.
“Shut up, you little bastard,” he said to Steven, with asperity. He had never before dared speak aloud to the baby in such hostile terms, but he felt that he might as well take what meager advantage he could of the fact that no one could hear him. He didn’t mean it, of course—not really.
He looked down at the floor, which was now covered by a thin scum of something horrible. The scum was slowly being elevated by the water on which it floated. He watched it for a minute or so, watching the meniscus climb the knobbly walls of the root-complex. He estimated that the level was now rising by about a centimeter per minute, and noted that the flow seemed to be increasing. His feet were less than a meter above the surface, and he knew that he wasn’t much more than a meter-and-a-half tall. His mental arithmetic could do the simple averaging well enough, but he didn’t know how to figure in the possible effects of the accelerating flow.
“Shut up!” he said to Steven, in a low but fierce tone. “This is serious. If we aren’t out of here soon.…”
At a centimeter a minute, he knew, they would have four hours. Four hours, looked at dispassionately, was a long time, but Rick already knew that it was the highest possible figure. The faster the rate of flow was increasing, the quicker that four hours would become three, and then two…and all the while, it was also being eroded by actual elapsed time. Rick looked about him at the cellar, whose narrow passages and dim lighting had always made him feel slightly claustrophobic. His mental arithmetic wasn’t up to calculating the actual cubic capacity of the room, but the looming root-processes and the thick central trunk of the house had never seemed more massive.
Steven also seemed utterly convinced that something was badly wrong. He was certainly yelling as if he believed that his life was in danger.
“Please shut up,” complained Rick, changing tactics. “For Gaia’s sake, let me think!”
After all, he told himself, he was bound to be missed. Chloe, Rosa, and Dieter might already have noticed that he was gone, and might have begun to get worried…except, of course, that they couldn’t know that the cellar was being flooded. They would undoubtedly discover as soon as they tried it that the door was stuck, and they would undoubtedly figure out that it was a side-effect of whatever Dr. Jauregy’s troubleshooting crew was doing, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel any sense of urgency about getting him out. In fact, they might be profoundly glad that they no longer had to listen to Steven’s crying, and in no hurry at all to expose themselves to it again. They might be sitting upstairs right now, joking about his bad luck and his parental incompetence.
It was, he decided, definitely time to get worried.
Rick sat down on the top step, biting his lip anxiously, and began to rock Steven in his arms. Steven continued to cry, but not quite so loudly. The crying seemed slightly less appalling now—indeed, it suddenly seemed to be entirely appropriate, given the situation. It was no longer so excruciating.
“Okay son,” said Rick, looking down into the baby’s screwed-up eyes and making every possible effort to be civil, “we’ve got to think about this logically. The odds are that we’ll be out of here long before that tide of filth is up to the soles of my sneakers, but just in case…just in case, mind you…we ought to figure out some way of attracting attention to our predicament. The three wise men might have got the house’s nerve-net into a terrible tangle, but they can’t have anaesthetized it entirely. We have to wake it up. It’s fighting sabotage with sabotage, but it’s the only way.” He was trying to sound calm, for his own sake rather than for Steven’s, but he couldn’t fool himself. He was scared—really scared.
For a moment he consoled himself with the inspiration that the house’s central supply-tank and reclamation unit couldn’t possibly contain enough water to fill the cellar completely, but no sooner had the elation of this thought buoyed him up than he noticed a distinct whiff of sterilizing fluid in the air.
“Oh pollution!” he said, as his heart skipped a beat. “It’s the water from the pool, too…we really are in trouble.”
Steven just went on bawling, but Rick took that as an indication of agreement. He stood up and descended to the third step, then turned around to lay the baby down on the top one. He wiped his fingers on his shirt, and looked around for something that he could use to hurt the house—not much, but just enough to make sure that the act would not go unnoticed.
Unfortunately, the tool cabinet that was set in the wall beside the staircase wouldn’t open, and all the tools that might have sufficed to pry it open were inside. His anxiety grew, and the nausea induced by the vilely
