Vernor's handling of his anti-rocket . . . actually Oily Allie called it a sky-sucker . . . grew smoother, and soon the three of them were hopping several blocks at a time together.
"What's the highest you've gone?" Vernor asked Allie during one such hop. The sky-suckers operated soundlessly, except for the rushing of the air into the tube, so it was easy to talk.
"Up past the clouds a couple of times," Allie answered. "Gets cold up there, though. Windy, too. One time I got all screwed up inside a cloud and came out headed straight down at top speed." Oily Allie chuckled, "The G's snapped the T-bar off when I pulled back up . . . I was hugging the power tube for what they call dear life. My hands were slipping and I couldn't reach the control—"
Vernor had suddenly lost interest in this conversation, and he began scanning the buildings ahead. "There's the plastics factory, Mick," he shouted.
"Yeah. Let's land there and get our bearings."
They landed on the barrel-vaulted roof of the factory. They could hear robots moving about inside. "There's the street the loach coach was driving us on after our scale trip," said Mick, pointing.
Vernor nodded, and they began hopping along the roofs of the buildings lining the street in question. Soon they were above the spot where Kurtowski's bomb had scarred the street's surface. And there was the alley where they'd crawled through the little hole.
One last hop with the sky-suckers and they were on top of the warehouse containing the Professor's hide-out. "Should we blast in through the front door?" suggested Vernor.
"Better not," Mick answered. "He might want to keep using that door. Let's go in through the roof. Allie?"
Oily Allie hefted her laser doubtfully. "It'll take a lot of power. I'll have to run it continuous for a couple of minutes to cut a hole big enough for us."
"Shit, man, we're not going to have to blast any more robots," Mick responded. "Anything hassles us we just turn on the sky-suckers and we're gone."
"O.K." Allie said, switching on the heavy industrial laser. At full power, it was able to cut a circle through the roof's material in a matter of minutes, although the beam seemed noticeably weaker by the time the cut-out disk of roof crashed down into the warehouse.
They peered in. It was indeed the right place.
"Hey, Professor," Vernor yelled, but only echoes answered him.
"His room's soundproofed," Mick pointed out.
"Oh, yeah," Vernor answered. "Well, let's float down on the sky-suckers."
Moments later the three of them were in the aisles of the gloomy warehouse, lit only by the sun streaming in through the hole in the roof sixty feet above them. The fifty foot mounds of crates surrounded them as before.
"I think it was down this way," Vernor said, heading down one of the aisles. Mick and Oily Allie followed him for about twenty yards, and he stopped, "I don't know, maybe it was—"
He was interrupted by a sudden blare of noise. A gigantic forklift was rumbling down the aisle after them. Allie whirled and blasted at it with her laser, but the machine was so huge, and the laser beam so weakened, that the blasts had no effect. Quickly they rose to the roof on their sky-suckers.
At first it seemed that they were out of the machine's reach, but then the prongs of the colossal forklift reared up to some three feet below the flat ceiling. The machine rushed murderously towards them. There was no hope of out-maneuvering it with the sky-suckers, which were designed for up and down movement in open spaces. Quickly they scrambled to safety on the top of one of the stacks of crates, cutting the sky-suckers' power.
The top of the stack was a fifty-foot square, so as long as they kept back from the edges they were safe from the forklift.
"We got to get back out that hole and wait for them to knock out the microwave towers," Oily Allie said. "Thing to do is jump off the other side of the stack and sneak on around that metal mother."
Almost as if it had heard him, the forklift took three crates from one side of the pile on which they were crouching, backed up to a position under the hole they'd cut and forced the crates up so that the top one became wedged in their exit hole.
"What a fucking drag," Mick said, punctuating their stunned silence. The forklift returned and began methodically demolishing their stack; carrying boxes from it to add to one of the other stacks with tireless, mindless industry.
When their stack of crates had been whittled down to the thickness of a few boxes, they jumped down on the opposite side; cushioning the fall with the sky-suckers, which they then used to pull themselves up to the top of the next stack. The machine finished stowing away the crates that remained in the old stack, and then set to work whittling down their new territory.
"And you see what it's doing?" Vernor asked. "It's going to make a solid block of all the crates at the other end of the warehouse so it can chase us around this end."
"This is just really dumb," Oily Allie complained. "I mean if it was really important to me I could probably blast that crate out of the hole."
"Pretend it's really important to you, Allie," suggested Vernor. She aimed the laser and pressed the blast button. The corner of the box charred slightly before the laser finally gave out.
The forklift transferred another load of crates—and the badness of the situation became acute. The new gap in the crate-piles revealed Professor Kurtowski, sitting in an armchair reading a book.
"Look out, Professor!" Vernor yelled, jumping down to his rescue. The forklift tooled forward at the same instant and bumped Vernor with one of its prongs. He'd been leaning down to make a daring Douglas Fairbanks snatch-up of the Professor and was consequently knocked off his T-bar. The sky-sucker shot up to the ceiling and Vernor fell into Kurtowski's lap. Triumphantly, the prongs of the forklift came plummeting down at them. Vernor glanced quickly at the Professor's face to see how the wisest man he knew would meet death.
"That's quite enough, Vernor," Kurtowski said, standing up and dumping Vernor onto the floor with a baffled expression.
"Look out!" Vernor screamed, cowering on the floor as he tensed himself for the splat of the prong on Kurtowski's head. But there was no splat.
There was silence, broken finally by Oily Allie shrieking, "Run, Vernor, run!" then breaking into helpless laughter. The forklift had stopped working.
Vernor stood up. "I guess they finally knocked out those microwave antennas," he explained sheepishly to no one in particular. The Professor was standing in front of him looking from Vernor to the forklift to Mick and Oily Allie, fifty feet above them. Finally he smiled at Vernor.
"And you took Phizwhiz for a ride?" he asked.
"Yeah," said Vernor. "We shrank all the way around Circular Scale. What's been bothering me is how did I manage to come back now instead of the future? I mean when we were half the size of the universe, a second of our time was like a billion years Earth time. But here I am."
"That's a good one," said Kurtowski. "What else?"
"I'm wondering about what adding the scale loop might have done to my mind," responded Vernor. "It gave Phizwhiz a soul, or free will, or something. But I can't quite figure out what it's done to me."
"Maybe you should ask Phizwhiz," the Professor replied.
"He doesn't talk anymore," Vernor protested. "He just sends out this sort of loud static. Anyway, you're the one to ask."
Kurtowski shrugged. "We can work on it. You need your own answers, though, not mine." He gathered up some papers, then shouted up to the others, "If the local robots aren't working, out let's go over to my lab. I've been in here for weeks. Every time I try to go anywhere some machine tries to kill me. This represents, in my opinion, only a slight improvement over having them try to jail me for my own safety."