The guard's eyes and mouth opened wide, his grin changed to a glare, alert and suspicious. At that moment, alarms blared in the cellblock and jailyard.
Angel appeared to stumble, thrusting himself heavily against the guard. Already off-balance, trying to look in two directions at once, the man lurched halfway through the gate. Automatic selenium cell alarms caught the movement and added their wild clamors to the jangling babel from the building. Volumes of dense black smoke poured from doors and windows of the cellblock's lower floors. From above came shrill screams from the trapped inmates on upper floors.
"Fire!" yelled Angel. Then he was running, not through the gate but towards the building.
Guards and prisoners milled in ultimate confusions. Jailyard was a melee, but Angel forced a passage. At the cellblock doorway he paused long enough to make sure that guards were rushing a long ladder of light-metal alloy to the wall.
Inside, he plunged through churning confusions of smoke, sound and invisible solids. In a city as inflammably built as Castarona, fire inevitably creates panic. Equipment must be always at hand. Automatic sprinklers were already deluging the threatened interior with water and chemicals. Angel waded knee-deep in chemical foam to the stairway and ascended against the pressure of a descending waterfall. Voices and metallic alarms mingled in shrill discords.
Groping blindly and colliding with hysterical prisoners, Angel fought up the spiraling cascades of the stairway like a trout seeking the spawning grounds.
At the fourth floor, he got to a window and smashed the glass, then set up a bedlam of howls and shrieks. From below, the light-alloy ladder angled up toward him. Its hooks engaged the window ledge. With a yelp of maniacal joy, he snatched it from the hands of the steadiers on the ground, and gave a series of quick jerks to dislodge the mounting guards and firefighters. With easy strength, he lifted it clear of the ground and rung by rung hoisted it upward. Bat Ferris and Pao Chung grasped it from the roof parapet and held on while he raced upstairs again and helped them drag it to the roof.
The nearest building was just about a ladder-length away.
By prodigies, they raised it to the vertical, then let it slant in the direction indicated. It toppled and swung in a wild arc. There was a bad moment when all three realized that it did not quite reach. Acting instantaneously, Angel lifted the pivot end, hooked his knees to the parapet and extended the ladder by his own length. The far end struck hard, bounced high, nearly tearing Angel from his precarious hold.