Hell's Gate

say something, his courage might snap and go tumbling down around his feet. He was working on sheer grit at this point, his sense of reason momentarily suspended. He could not risk a glance at those green eyes or that crooked tooth.
        He slid the door open, looked into the corridor beyond, stepped through, and slid the door shut on the messy scene in the projection room.
        
        The vacii, being an alien race with alien heritage and with, certainly, alien patterns of thought which would not be ever totally conceivable to a man, did not build in any way similar to human architectural concepts. Salsbury had noticed, while in the prober room, that there were no straight walls here, no perfectly angled corners. That room had been like the inside of a very large igloo, white, slightly rough like pebbled ice, and domed. The walls were not regular, but cut with nooks and crannies, tiny blind ends where things were stored, where equipment was built in, or where, oddly, there was nothing but emptiness. It was as if the place had been hacked out of stone; it had the feeling or a cave, not a room. No, more than that. It was the kind of building one might expect man-sized insects to build.
        The hallway was no different. It was much like a tunnel, large enough for three people to walk abreast and still leave a foot on each side, boring straight away in both directions. The light was dim and yellow and came from glowing stones set at regular intervals in the rounded ceiling. He hesitated only a moment, then turned and walked left in search of a stairwell. If vacii had stairwells.
        Thirty feet from the projection room, he came to an abrupt halt and listened intently; he picked up the screeching, giggling noise he had caught a sliver of moments before. It was loud and clear now. He judged it was coming from somewhere just ahead, off to one side, probably from a connecting passageway. It continued, a keening babble. Two separate babbles; vacii speaking in their native tongue. The sound of it chilled him, and he thought of them more as lizards than ever. Their tone, the syllables of their native language spoke of claws and caves, of scaly love-making and slimy burrows of antiquity. It was so unhuman, so much more unhuman than their appearance, that it nearly unnerved him, almost froze him to the spot.
        Which would have been disastrous.
        Then they were so close he could hear their broad, splayed feet slapping against the cold floor. Any moment, they would appear ahead of him, would look up, perhaps gasp, then spread the alarm… Unless he killed them. But if he had to start stashing bodies in closets this soon, he would be discovered by some janitor before he had finished with the operation. He looked around anxiously, caught sight of a closed door five feet ahead. He bounded to it, trying to land silently on his toes, and slid it open, his gun still in his hand.
        Luckily, the place was empty and dark. He stood against the wall, slid the door shut and waited. A few moments later, the voices passed the door, heading back the way he had come. He stood sweating, trembling, waiting until he could not hear them before returning to the corridor.
        Then he had a bad thought.
        What if they were going to the projection room? And found the bodies. And found Lynda. And…
        He slid the door part way open and peered after them. They came to the prober room, passed it without slowing. A hundred feet beyond that, they turned into a side corridor on their right. Their voices faded, faded and were gone at last, letting the oily quiet of the place slide back over the walls.
        Acting the part of the cat burglar, slinking, eyes slippery inside his sockets, ears primed, gun hand nervous, Salsbury went into the corridor and hurried along, looking for stairs. Fifty feet from the room in which he had hidden, he found a stairwell, looked both ways down the hall to be certain he was still unobserved, then started up the steps.
        He found he could not look up the well to see if there was anyone above him, but the construction also made his own position safe from anyone higher on the stairs. The steps themselves seemed to be hacked from the wall, rugged, white, worn slightly yellow-brown in the center with the tread of vacii feet. There was a landing fifteen steps up, another and another. Thirty flights and fifteen stories later, he came to the end of the