There was no way to get out. Stephen Lathrop now was convinced of that. Elmer’s city, so far as he was concerned, might just as well have been in the depths of space.
In the three days which had passed since he had stumbled in off the desert, he had searched the place methodically. The central spire had been his last chance. But even before he climbed the stairs he knew it was no chance at all. When Elmer decided to make the place a rattrap, he really made it one.
A web of force surrounded the entire city, extending three feet or so from the outer surfaces. Doors would open, so would windows. But that meant nothing, for one could go no farther.
Buster apparently had given up trying to stalk him. Now, it appeared, the game had settled to a deadlock. Buster didn’t dare to tackle him so long as he had the weapon and he, on the other hand, couldn’t leave the city. Elmer probably had decided on starving him out.
Lathrop knew, deep within him, that he was licked, but that knowledge still was something he would not admit. In the end, logic told him, he would give up, let Elmer wipe out the memory of those twenty years in space, replace them with synthetic memories. Under different circumstances, he might have welcomed such a course, for the things he had seen were not pleasant to remember — certainly Elmer could supply him with a more pleasant past. But the proposition was too highhanded to be accepted without a fight, without at least a struggle to maintain his right to order his own life. Then, too, there was the feeling that if he lost the knowledge of the outer worlds he would be losing something the Earth might need, the opportunity to approach the problem scientifically rather than hysterically, as the Preachers approached it.
He sat down heavily on a step, pulled the weapon from his belt and held it, dangling from a hand that rested on his knee. Although there had been no sign of Buster for a long time, there was no telling when the robot might pop up and once Buster laid a tentacle on him, the game was over.
The weapon was not easy to grip. It was not made for human hands, although its operation was apparent — simply press the button on the side. He shifted it in his hand and studied it. Had it not been for the weapon, he knew, there were times when he would have been tempted to write off that trip through space as the product of an irrational mind.
But there the weapon was, a familiar, tangible thing. For years he had seen it dangling from the belt of the thing that piloted the ship. Even now he remembered how it had flashed in the light from the instrument panel as he knocked it from the grasp of the being, then closed in to make his kill.
He didn’t know what the weapon was, but Buster knew and Buster wasn’t coming near it.