Hell's Gate

soaking his clothes. But the two vacii that entered the room had not heard anything. They were talking to each other, and one of them had just begun to hiss what must have been the alien equivalent of a laugh. It was letting air out through its toothless mouth, puckering that obscene hole until the escaping air sounded like a leak in a steam pipe. Salsbury wondered, briefly, what a theater full of these clowns would sound like. Then he had no time for divergent thoughts. The laughing vacii stopped laughing abruptly, sucked air in when it saw Salsbury, grabbed the shoulder of the first vacii
        Salsbury fired, caught the first alien in the side, kicking it backwards toward the door jamb. Before he could get a second clear shot to finish that one, the second vacii was gone into the hall, keening a sound that must have carried halfway around this world. There was no doubt it was calling for help.
        No doubt it would get what it called for.
        Even as he stood there listening to the ugly sound the thing made, Salsbury began to hear other voices shouting in the vacii tongue from points up and down the main hall.
        He stepped over the body of the vacii with the weeping, fatal wound in its side and slid the door shut. He looked but could find no means of locking it. Had it had a knob, he could have stuffed a chair under that to keep the thing braced shut, but there was only the recessed handle for fingers to grasp.
        With his back to the door, he surveyed the room just as a rat examines its cage in the first few minutes of its imprisonment. The walls were discouragingly featureless but for the crude unfinished nature of them. There were no doors into other rooms, no exits except that which he could not use. He had a sudden gory vision of the vacii pumping slugs through the door from the other side, into his back. He moved quickly away, behind the desk where he could at least make some sort of stand with a minimum of protection. As his eyes finished the scan of the chamber, they stopped on a small, black square set high in the wall, near the ceiling. His heart pounded like a twelve ton piston, and he stepped gingerly over the shattered vacii until he was standing direcdy beneath the hole. Cool air wafted out. A ventilation shaft.
        The noise from the corridor grew louder. He could tell there was a group of vacii standing beyond the door, not prepared to open it and face his gun yet, but building up the courage and the fire power to take the chance any moment.
        He brought the dead vacii's chair over to the wall, stood on it, bringing the ventilator hole even with his face. He stood on tip-toe, reached into the shaft and levered himself up until his feet were off the chair. He scrabbled with his knees and feet against the wall, tried to drag himself forward with his arms. But he needed something more for purchase. He felt around, stretched his hands and fingers until he found a rugged one-inch shelf in the plaster floor of the shaft. He hooked his fingers over that and pulled, managing to get into the opening to his chest; the ragged edge of the wall cut across his belly, making breathing painful. The way ahead was Stygian and smelled vaguely like the inside of a crypt. He tried to shut off his nose, wriggled forward, kicked with his feet on the edge of the outlet, and sprawled full length in the shaft
        The passage was so narrow that he could not kneel to crawl, but could only stretch out flat and belly forward like an infantryman nervously making his way up an enemy-held beach, expecting a barrage of mortars at any time. Ten feet farther along, the light from the other room behind completely blocked by the bulk of his body, he heard the booming of a gun and the door shredding under the vicious cover of fragmenting slugs. They weren't going to enter that room until they were positive nothing could be alive in it. That was just as well, for that gave him more time to make his get-away. If he could. After all, there was no guarantee this shaft led anywhere. It might even narrow to a little pipe far too small for him to squeeze through. Then they could come in at their leisure. Or gas him and drag him out. There were all sorts of unpleasant possibilities,
        It didn't narrow, though, and struck inward another fifty feet before ending where two other tunnels branched off, one to either side at ninety-degree angles off the main run. There was also a drop shaft from the