Danton wondered about that. He knew one thing—that the test was yet to come for him. He was not sure yet that Keith had not been right....
He followed the woman through a door into a chamber. It was a nice room, Danton thought. A great deal of pleasure had drifted through this room, and in it, time had probably never meant anything. Perfumed incense. Music, drifting, still rising from somewhere, pneumatic couches—but underneath something was cracking open, veins and arteries of power choking, blocked off; but the power had to go somewhere; short-circuit, the madness of a great machine-mind.
The woman had opened a panel, and beyond her, Danton could see the Martian afternoon. He had never seen a Martian afternoon before. It was beautiful, he thought, though he was hardly in a position to study or appreciate it properly. Then he saw what she was doing—the woman was escaping out the panel. There must be some way she was planning to get safely to the ground outside. It seemed to be a long way down.
But she wasn't worried about that.
She jumped. She looked back at Danton, her face pale and twisted, then she jumped. Danton ran, looked out. He looked out just in time to see her body hit. It was too far down for anyone to go that way. Her body bounced a little.
Insane, Danton thought. They had each become such component parts of the bigger machine that very likely they were all going crazy now, right along with the machine. And the machine wasn't going to last much longer either, insane or otherwise. It was beginning to quiver, to shake and shudder, and its metal skin was beginning to groan and twist. Its metal joints were grinding together, its skein nerves wrenching and singing.
Danton looked around hurriedly. He saw the wires again, everything suspended by wires, shiny and strong. He gave a heavy table slab—legless, of course, a suspended disc of metal—he gave it a tremendous shove and it began to swing to and fro; it made a heavy pendulum, swinging wider and wider, and it began to crash into other suspended things, into chairs and into weird sculpture, crashing through structural images and distorted faces of metal. It made a sound like off-key bells bonging and clanging.
Wires finally snapped with a whine and Danton felt the hot sharpness as a strand cut across his arm, sinking in like the slash of a knife. He pushed the table slab to the wall, against the window. He managed to get several strands of the wire tied together by complicated knot designs. He yanked down an ornamental drape that seemed to have a swirling life of its own, made sheaths for his hands from finely-woven metallic-cloth, and looped the wire three times around the metal sheathing.
He slid down toward the ground. It was further down than it had seemed from above. The wind was high and cold and strong. He began to sway dangerously and the wind threatened to tear him from the wire.