came the same way Craig did,” Adelle said, “but I don’t remember any opening on the left, which would have been my right. The only ones I saw were on my left, and I took them.”
“We still have two possibilities,” Dolan said. “Let’s have a look.”
Carrying the disassembled bed, they moved along the alley and turned right; but the alley they now found themselves in was not the short section both Adelle and Dolan remembered. It seemed to stretch interminably, and they found no side openings at all as they walked along it.
“The slimy blackguards have changed this, too,” Dolan observed.
Mondor exclaimed suddenly, “Let’s get back to the kitchen!”
He turned and ran. Dolan and Adelle exchanged perplexed glances and then followed him. The three of them, still carrying the bed parts, burst through the opening that led to the alley by the kitchen—but there was no kitchen. The alley dead-ended a few feet ahead of them.
“Cut off!” Mondor said disgustedly. “They can change the maze any time they feel like it and do it quickly. The sections probably come out of the floor like the door on the test room.”
Dolan leaned on the headboard and glared at the new wall. “The foul cullions! No, that isn’t adequate. Words fail me.”
“Now I understand why I got lost in the maze yesterday,” Adelle said. “When I started back, they’d changed everything around. I thought I was just being stupid.”
“They did the same to us,” Mondor said. “Those black strips on the floor are located between grooves in the walls. They must be tops of partitions. They can be raised to close off an alley or lowered to extend one.”
“They’re playing with us,” Dolan growled, his face flushed with anger. “They’ve cut us off from food and water, and they can starve us, or make us die of thirst, just for the fun of it. Or they can sit back and enjoy watching us frantically wander about trying to find our way back to the kitchen while they keep changing the maze all around us.”
“Something like that,” Mondor agreed. “We should have expected it.”
Dolan was pounding soundlessly on the headboard with a clenched fist. “This isn’t a psychological experiment. It’s a back-alley exercise in sadism. It’s on the same level with tying cans to a dog’s tail or setting fire to a cat.”
“So what are we going to do?” Adelle asked. “Sit down and wait for fate to intervene? Or go along with the game and hope somehow to outwit them? And if we go along with the game, do we continue to carry this stupid bed?”
“Sitting down and waiting to rot doesn’t appeal to me,” Mondor said.
Dolan was still pounding on the headboard. “I’m not letting anyone play games with me if I can help it. We had an idea for finding a way out of this place, so what are we waiting for? They’ve changed the maze, but we still may be able to find one of the test rooms.”
“We’re certain to find a test room sooner or later,” Mondor said. “I’ll give you odds they’re not through testing us. And it isn’t as though we were trying to climb Mount Everest. We’re just walking around in someone’s screwy basement, and what’s a bed, more or less?”
He picked up the rails and started off. Dolan grimly hoisted the headboard onto his shoulders and followed.
Adelle called after them, “Just a moment. We dashed out of the kitchen without considering what we were doing, and look at the mess we’re in. Let’s think this over before we make any more dashes.”
“The female,” Dolan said to Mondor, “has the weird notion we should use our brains before the fact instead of afterward.”
They piled the bed parts against one wall and sat down on the floor. Adelle leaned back and closed her eyes, but she found it impossible to think. She had just glimpsed the frightening specter of death from hunger and thirst in the basement of a building where they’d been working for weeks, and she found it incredible. She had slid down a chute and left reality behind.
She said slowly, “The notion that Madam and her goons might eventually be stricken with compassion for us is silly.”
“Not silly,” Mondor said. “Idiotic.”
After a long moment of silence, Adelle got to her feet. “All right,” she said determinedly. “They will or they won’t. If they will, they’ll know where to find us. If they won’t, our sitting in a corner and looking miserable isn’t likely to change their minds. We might as well go down fighting. I vote for exploring the maze, and carrying the stupid bed, and looking for traps in the ceiling even though we know they’d stop us if we tried to use one. And—if there’s any possible way to do it—I vote for vandalizing this place so it’ll have to be rebuilt before they can test any more victims.”
Dolan was nodding approvingly. “Right on. We’ll smash the place and go down fighting. I only wish we had someone or something down here to fight.”
“Before we’re finished,” Mondor said, “there may be both.”
CHAPTER 6
Dolan took out a massive pocket knife, opened the awl blade, and began gouging the gray paint on one of the alley’s metal walls. “You mentioned vandalism,” he said cheerfully. He carved the letters RC and the date, checked Adelle’s watch and added the time, and then fashioned an arrow that pointed toward the kitchen and bedrooms beyond the new section of wall.
“‘RC’ means ‘Rest Center,’” he said. “The arrow tells us which way to go. If it’s closed off, at least we’ll know we’re in the vicinity, and it’ll make them do some sanding and painting.”
When he finished, he said to Mondor, “Want to trade?” He shouldered the bed rails and marched off into the maze. At the first turn, he paused to repeat his carving.
While Dolan was enthusiastically mutilating the wall, Mondor stood scowling at the distant end of the alley. “I wonder how large this place is.”
“Having walked from one end of the building to the other several times a day—” Dolan began.
“That wouldn’t give you much of an idea,” Mondor said. “There are wings all over the place, and this sub-basement may be larger than the building. It might even extend out under the courtyards. In any case, it’s certain to be enormously complex. We’d better be prepared for anything. What do we know about Madam and her goons?”
Dolan finished off his arrow, added the date and time, and then turned. “Very little.”
“I know almost nothing,” Mondor said. “That should tell us something, because I’ve worked here for six weeks.”
“Madam had her peculiarities, such as spitefully peddling gossip, but she seemed amusing and harmless,” Adelle said. “As for the others, except for Goon 1, they ignored me completely.”
“Did they ever speak to you?” Mondor asked.
“Never. Not even Goon 1. I caught him watching me too frequently for it to be a coincidence, and I always spoke to him, but he never answered. It seemed odd, but so many things seemed odd about Z-R Publications.”
