Hansen's car was speeding toward a large building on what had been the outskirts of the capital twenty years before. Now it was a bland residential district, not dissimilar to the one from which Solbarth had spun his webs of theft and murder.
The building was marked as Consensus property on the maps Hansen had viewed in the course of his duties, but there were many Consensus buildings in any planetary capital. A warehouse, Hansen had thought; and he would still think the great three-story block was a warehouse, except—
Except that two creatures had ordered the Commissioner of Special Units into an aircar that they were driving straight into the front wall of the building.
Hansen opened his mouth to protest—and closed it again, because there was nothing he could say that the spindles didn't know already.
The warehouse was an old one, built of clay and a plasticizer which hardened after extrusion. That technique created a solid structure of surpassing ugliness even when new.
The aircar was about to hit the dark dun building at 200 kph. The smear Hansen made would scarcely be distinguishable from the stains and earth tones already an indelible part of the wall's texture.
He forced his muscles to relax. So be it. A pedestrian in the street looked up in amazement.
The aircar shot through the 'wall.' Hansen felt a momentary chill. They were in a lighted tunnel whose circular sides made the drive fans rumble.
"Where are we?" Hansen demanded. The noise of the damaged car was even worse in this enclosure than it had been in the open air, but he knew the spindles could hear him if they wanted to.
No answer rang in his mind. They shot past a pair of cross-tunnels. Half a dozen workmen carrying unrecognizable tools glanced up at the aircar. One of the faces turned toward Hansen was inhuman: blue, scaled, and as expressionless as those of its companions.
"Where are we going?" Hansen cried. He didn't even expect an answer.
He'd been a powerful man, a few minutes ago. In some ways—in some circumstances—the most powerful man on Annunciation.
He looked at the things beside him in the car and wondered whether any man in the Consensus really had power.
The spindles were shrinking. When Hansen first saw the creatures, they had been taller than he was; now they were only about the length of his thigh. They sputtered like electronics on the verge of failure, and the scenes within the fabric of their bodies were becoming increasingly clear.
Hansen looked away.
The tunnel ended in a white-tiled rotunda which appeared so abruptly that Hansen felt the car braking before his eyes focused on the change in scenery. Two figures waited for them, both human—
Not human. Both of the figures were male androids. One was as beautiful as the dawn, while the other was a squat, hideous travesty of humanity with thick, twisted limbs. They might very well have come out of the same production batch.
The rotunda had a high, domed ceiling. There were eight archways leading from it—all of them closed by bronze doors, including the arch by which the aircar had just entered.
"Please get out, Commissioner Hansen," said the voice in Hansen's skull. The aircar bobbled a few centimeters above the floor instead of settling with the shut-down fans.
"This way, please, sir," said the handsome android. He had to shout to be heard over the racket the car made.
The android was speaking with his mouth. At least that was a change for the better. . . .
Hansen got out of the vehicle. It sped off into—through—another doorway.
The spindles who'd escorted the Commissioner had shrunk to hand's breadth height. They were giving off sounds of sizzling, fiery anger as they disappeared.
The rotunda was almost silent when they and the aircar were gone.
"This will only take a moment, sir," said the misshapen android, raising the flared nozzle of the apparatus he carried. "Please hold still."
"What are you—"
"Please hold still," said the handsome android as the nozzle hissed an opalescent bubble which wobbled and grew without detaching itself from the apparatus. The android reached around Hansen and guided the edges of the bubble like a couturier with a swatch of cloth.
"Now, sir," said the ugly android, "if you'll step carefully onto this . . . ?"
Hansen lifted his feet so that he was standing on the doubled thickness of the bubble's lower edge.
He understood, now. They were blowing him a temporary atmosphere suit, a membrane of polarized permeability. Oxygen could pass in, while carbon dioxide and other waste gasses passed out no matter what the composition of the encircling atmosphere.
A useful tool for chemical emergencies or even fires, though the membrane didn't block heat. Temporary suits could keep people alive in hard vacuum for as long as the oxygen level within the bubble remained at a breathable level.
The hideous android smiled as he continued to extrude the material. Hansen supposed the expression was meant to be friendly.
The handsome attendant took a palm-sized device from his belt. He gathered the flattened bubble over Hansen's head in his slim hands and touched the edges with the tool, mating them with a faint sputter.
The seam was a quiver of light when Hansen moved and made the bubble tremble. His mind told him falsely that his lungs had to struggle to breathe. He controlled his expression, but he could feel his heart rate rise.
"That's right, sir," said the ugly attendant. "Now, if you'll just walk this way . . . ?"
The attendant had shut off his apparatus. Now he gestured toward one of the archways. His skin had the utter pallor that some androids tried to conceal with cosmetics; but whatever his skin color, this creature couldn't have been anything that sprang from a human womb.
Hansen obeyed, walking deliberately so that the flexible membrane could billow ahead of his motion. He could see and hear normally, except for a slight shimmer in the air and the hint of distortion at the seam.
The Commissioner's senses were overloaded with hormones from the gunfight, from the capture that should have been the crown of his career no matter how much longer he served the Consensus—
From all that had happened since.
"Why is this happening to me?" Hansen shouted. "Why are you doing this?"
The handsome attendant shook his head blandly. He'd put the sealing device back into its belt pouch. "Don't worry, sir," he said. "Just step through the portal."
Would the bronze doorleaves open, or would—
Hansen stepped through what had seemed to be solid metal. There was an instant of chill. He thought he saw the crystalline pattern of the atoms themselves, but then he was through the door and standing in a darkness more intense than that of the core of his brain.
Light bloomed, a flush of pink so faint that for an instant Hansen thought the illumination was an accident of his optic nerves—synapses tripping to relieve the oppressive black.
The color was real. He could see again.
Almost-color sublimed in all directions from a stalagmite of ice that grew out of a floor as smooth as a bearing race. Hansen couldn't see any walls, but the ball of light—fading as it expanded—swelled across a dozen other cones of ice.
Hansen braced himself. When the pink glow touched him, a voice in his mind said, "There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen."
Other stalagmites were scaling away drifts of color as weak as the nimbus of sunlight about a butterfly's wings. Each was a separate pastel, each so pale that only by comparison could they be differentiated.
"I don't belong here!" Hansen cried. "If there's been a crime, let me out of here and I'll deal with it."
Hansen could see that there was no door behind him now, nothing but vacancy and a plain like a mirror.
Green ambiance washed over him. "There was a world," said a different voice in his mind, mellifluous and a trifle arch. "It had been charted. Humans could live there, we thought—"
Orange light. A voice like a whip. "The Consensus thought. Captain Rolls led a unit to do a final examination. They—"
Pink neutrality again: "They vanished. A crime has been committed."
Motes of light drifted upward like fog without finding a ceiling. Hansen tested the floor with his toes. It was solid, unyielding. It felt cold, even through his boots and the double insulating layers of his airsuit.
Almost all of the cones were glowing now as they discharged their burdens of thought and near-light.
"Listen and learn, Commissioner Hansen," said blue certainty in the Commissioner's mind. "We sent another team under Captain North, trusted personnel who had dealt with crises on a dozen other worlds to be colonized. Faithful—"
"Faithful servants of the Consensus," quivered a red voice. It reminded Hansen of the lip-smacking tones of politicians who demanded tough measures but who'd never stood in an alley after a firefight and realized how little there was to a human being after the life goes out of him. "North had cleansed worlds, seeded them—changed weather patterns, raised continents, crushed all opposition to the Con—"
"The Consensus," whispered violet. "North reported that he had succeeded again, that we should send a colony at once, that all was prepared for settlement. He said that we should call the planet Northworld, that it was his right that the planet receive his name."
Blue fog drifted over Hansen. "We sent the colony, because—"
"—because he was a faithful servant," rejoined the red tones. "Ruthless and skillful, a servant to the needs of the Consensus. But North and his team had not returned from the planet, as they reported, and the new colony—"
"The planet vanished," said pink light. "There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen. The colony has been stolen, the planet has been stolen."
"Northworld has been stolen," thundered Hansen's mind in the organ tones of all dozen shades of light at once. "You will determine why, and you will cure the problem."
The plain on which Hansen stood was boundless, but he no longer thought it was empty. There were shapes in the far distance, hinted bulks as huge as storms on a gas giant.
"This is nothing to do with me," Hansen cried with fatalistic recklessness. "The colony wasn't sent from Annunciation, North wasn't—was he?—from here. I have my duties. Let me return to my duties."
Light like yellow sunshine washed over him. If glaciers could laugh, the sensation in Hansen's mind would have been that cold laughter. "Your duties are to the Consensus, Commissioner Hansen," said a voice. "The Consensus demands that you deal with this event. You have been chosen from among—"
"From among many," said violet light. "From among all the planets of the Consensus, from all the peoples. . . ."
"Records have been searched," said the cold blue voice. "The Lomeri settled the world in past ages—"
"The lizardfolk settled Northworld in past ages," said pink, "but no Lomeri were there when the exploration unit arrived. There has been—"
"There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen," purred a pastel so faint that it might have been either brown or mauve. "When Rolls' exploration unit landed, they found a waterworld with necklaces of islands—"
"Island necklaces and no other land," the yellow light said. "But North reported a world with 46% of the surface area land."
"And now the world is gone and North is gone, and they have taken with them the colony," said pink. "There has been a crime, and you must solve it—"
"Cure the crime," insisted the red voice. "Deal with the criminals with the full rigor of the Consensus, for the will of the Consensus is the law of the universe—"
"For all the universe except Northworld," resumed blue. "That world does not recognize the Consensus, nor do the Lomeri—"
"The Lomeri who were lizards and who have been dust," rasped the orange voice, "for a thousand millennia before there were men. And before the Lomeri there were other settlements, we are sure of it—"
"The Consensus is sure," whispered violet, "though that past is a far past even for the Consensus."
"Far even for us. . . ." the voices of color murmured in unison.
Hansen felt the chamber shiver like a sigh. His feet were becoming cold, and it was not merely his imagination that the membrane around him sagged. It was voiding the carbon dioxide Hansen exhaled without a corresponding influx of oxygen.
"This isn't my job," Hansen said. "I don't—"
He paused. He was at the center of a glowing ambiance that continued to expand indefinitely, like the ball of plasma generated by a nuclear weapon between the stars.
"Send a fleet, s-sirs," he continued, afraid to choose a term for the entities which spoke here with him. "I'm a man, a cop. I don't find planets. You need a—"
"There was a fleet," said a voice as scales of light shimmered away from the brown/mauve stalagmite. "A fleet and a fleet—"
"—and a fleet," echoed the pink voice. "Humans in the first fleet, and they vanished—"
"Though drones," said blue, "had penetrated the area where Northworld should have been, and the drones reported nothing. Therefore we sent—"
"The Consensus sent a second fleet," said the red voice, "crewed by androids and ready to destroy anything it met in the dead zone, the region—"
"The region that had flouted our majesty, our Consensus," resumed the violet voice. "And when the androids vanished without warning, without report, we sent a third fleet that was a great machine in itself but which lived and thought, though—"
"Though not as men think, and not part of the Consensus," chuckled the yellow voice. "And it vanished, Commissioner Hansen, as though it had never been . . . and though machines that are no more than machines ignore the area and pass through it."
Hansen felt the pressure of thoughts, of words, all around him. The airsuit was no protection. His whole body was becoming numb.
"Fleets have failed," said the red light, "so we are sending you. We will arm you, Commissioner Hansen—"
"But the fleets were armed," shivered tones of deep green light. "You will be alone, so you may penetrate the defenses unnoticed—"
"Penetrate the mystery . . . ," brown/mauve murmured.
"You are the best for the task," boomed all the colors together. "On all the planets of the Consensus, in all the Consensus."
You are resourceful/Commissioner Hansen is resourceful/The Kommissar is resourceful, rasped/purred/said the voices pounding Hansen's mind.
And then, in a single thought so smooth and steely that it could have been Hansen's own—and perhaps it was Hansen's own thought—
"Commissioner Nils Hansen will execute the will of the Consensus. . . ."