Dan strode forward and through a door with the numeral "1" over it.
Directly before him was a short dead-end hallway that abruptly vanished, and he was walking toward a crowd of hurrying people in an immense room.
Glancing around, Dan again felt at home. The immense room reminded him of Grand Central Mataform Terminal back on Earth. One wall even had the same kind of huge map of the tunnels and cross-tunnels that gave underground access to stores in the area. But the map here was even larger and more complex. Near its face were spidery walks and moving stairways, so that people could examine individual parts from close at hand if they wanted.
Dan looked over the terminal carefully, then walked slowly along looking for a place to hide one of his mataform units. He spotted, near a door in a corner, a poster on a stand showing a strong young man in uniform with a series of numbers, apparently dates, stretching out like a road before him. The stand held a poster on either side, and there was a place between them where Dan could slip one of the mataform units. An instant after he did this, he was in the shelter under the river.
Quickly, he got out a very light, strong two-man tent, an air mattress, a hypodermic, and a shiny half-globe with web straps at the back. He immediately went to the spot in the jungle where he had left his prisoner and found him thrashing furiously in an attempt to get loose. Dan injected a small quantity of a fast-acting hypnotic drug, and the man lay still. Then Dan set up the small tent and got the man inside on the mattress.
It was now getting dark outside, and, with the darkness, there was a rumble of thunder in the distance. Dan went back to the shelter, returned with a light, and adjusted the half-globe over the man's face and head, then fastened the straps behind his head. He inserted in the man's ears two little thimblelike devices, then said mentally, "Kielgaard?"
Kielgaard's voice answered, "We'll know in a minute." After a considerable pause, he said, "Yes, he's responding. Watch."
Very slowly, the man's right arm lifted from the mattress, then dropped limply.
Dan said, "You can handle it all from that end?"