Steven also seemed utterly convinced that something was badly wrong. He was certainly yelling as if he believed that his life was in danger.
“Please shut up,” complained Rick, changing tactics. “For Gaia’s sake, let me think!”
After all, he told himself, he was bound to be missed. Chloe, Rosa, and Dieter might already have noticed that he was gone, and might have begun to get worried…except, of course, that they couldn’t know that the cellar was being flooded. They would undoubtedly discover as soon as they tried it that the door was stuck, and they would undoubtedly figure out that it was a side-effect of whatever Dr. Jauregy’s troubleshooting crew was doing, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel any sense of urgency about getting him out. In fact, they might be profoundly glad that they no longer had to listen to Steven’s crying, and in no hurry at all to expose themselves to it again. They might be sitting upstairs right now, joking about his bad luck and his parental incompetence.
It was, he decided, definitely time to get worried.
Rick sat down on the top step, biting his lip anxiously, and began to rock Steven in his arms. Steven continued to cry, but not quite so loudly. The crying seemed slightly less appalling now—indeed, it suddenly seemed to be entirely appropriate, given the situation. It was no longer so excruciating.
“Okay son,” said Rick, looking down into the baby’s screwed-up eyes and making every possible effort to be civil, “we’ve got to think about this logically. The odds are that we’ll be out of here long before that tide of filth is up to the soles of my sneakers, but just in case…just in case, mind you…we ought to figure out some way of attracting attention to our predicament. The three wise men might have got the house’s nerve-net into a terrible tangle, but they can’t have anaesthetized it entirely. We have to wake it up. It’s fighting sabotage with sabotage, but it’s the only way.” He was trying to sound calm, for his own sake rather than for Steven’s, but he couldn’t fool himself. He was scared—really scared.
For a moment he consoled himself with the inspiration that the house’s central supply-tank and reclamation unit couldn’t possibly contain enough water to fill the cellar completely, but no sooner had the elation of this thought buoyed him up than he noticed a distinct whiff of sterilizing fluid in the air.
“Oh pollution!” he said, as his heart skipped a beat. “It’s the water from the pool, too…we really are in trouble.”
Steven just went on bawling, but Rick took that as an indication of agreement. He stood up and descended to the third step, then turned around to lay the baby down on the top one. He wiped his fingers on his shirt, and looked around for something that he could use to hurt the house—not much, but just enough to make sure that the act would not go unnoticed.
Unfortunately, the tool cabinet that was set in the wall beside the staircase wouldn’t open, and all the tools that might have sufficed to pry it open were inside. His anxiety grew, and the nausea induced by the vilely mixed odors of the dirty water made it feel even worse.
“Corruption,” he said, unsteadily. It wasn’t so much the thought that he was going to have to use his bare hands to attack the root-processes as the thought that he was going to have to stand calf-deep in the rising tide of filthy water while he did it. He knew that he would have to snap one of the slimmer rootlets, and the thinnest ones were all close to ground-level.
He looked down at Steven, who was lying on his back like a stranded beetle, kicking his legs and screaming as if he were about to burst.
“All right,” he said. “I’m going.”
He stepped down into the murky water, feeling it ooze unpleasantly into his soft-soled shoes. Two squelching strides took him to what looked like a suitably fragile bundle of root-fibers, and he managed to get his forefinger around a single filament that was no thicker than Steven’s smallest digit.
He pulled at it. Then he heaved upwards with all his strength, bracing himself with his feet. He fully expected the rootlet to break, but his expectation was not based in experience—he had never before had any occasion to try the experiment. The root was far tougher than it looked, and more elastic. It stretched a little, but it didn’t snap.
Rick didn’t bother to swear. He simply forced a second finger around the rootlet, and gathered all his strength, making sure that he would exert the maximum leverage of which he was capable.
He heaved.
The pain in his fingers was indescribable, but he did not relax until he was convinced that it would take less force to tear them off than it would to snap the rootlet. He extracted the two digits with difficulty, and nursed them tenderly while he looked down, furiously, at the stubborn filament. While he watched, there was a sudden surge in the flow of turbid water, and a wave swamped the rootlet.
He realized that he was knee-deep, and that the flow was fast becoming a flood. Four hours had been a hopelessly optimistic estimate even at the time. Now, though he did not pause to measure and calculate, he figured that he had less than forty minutes.
We’re going to drown! he thought, wildly. We’re really going to drown!
Rick was fifty-three years old; nine-tenths of his life still lay before him. Steven was less than six months old…but in spite of the fact that he really did love the child, Rick could not help thinking that his own tragedy was the greater. Steven had hardly begun to be aware of the world, and had no sense whatsoever of the magnitude of his possible loss. To Steven, the present situation was no worse than being offered a bottle with an unfamiliar teat, but to Rick.…
Rick had never been in mortal danger before. He had never felt that he was in mortal danger before. The fact that he was in his own home, and that the only baby he was likely to be licensed to look after for at least two hundred years was with him, depending on him, made the feeling ten times worse than it could have been had he been somewhere out in the wild and still-slightly-dangerous world.
He looked around desperately, cursing the strength and economy of modern design and the careful tidiness of his co-parents. There was not a single object lying around loose, and everything built into the house’s systems was built to last, resistant to any and all attempts at vandalism. He couldn’t see anything that might be used as a lever or a club.
Steven howled and kicked on the top step. Again he struck that horrible, hellish note.
Don’t panic! Rick told himself, knowing that it was already too late; he was in no condition to take such advice.
It had to be something dead, Rick instructed himself, trying against the odds to be reasonable. The problem with the rootlet was that it was part of the living structure of the house, as was everything wooden—even the stairs. On the other hand, all the house’s inorganics were buried deep inside the living tissues, except.…
He struggled back to the foot of the stairway, and up it. His eyes were fixed on the mute and useless screen beside the door. His breathing was ragged and his heart was racing.
He didn’t know how strong the plastic screen might be, but he had seen people hurl objects through offending screens on half a hundred vid-shows, so he knew that it could be done, and that it produced shards with sharp edges.
He also knew that he had nothing to hit it with but his fist, and that those sharp edges were going to do nasty things to his knuckles, but he wasn’t about to wait around hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary.
Rick came back to the second step and braced himself again, laying his left palm flat against the unopenable door. He balled his fist up as tight as he could, ignoring the pain in his two damaged fingers, and psyched himself up for the punch, telling himself sternly that he must follow through, hitting with all his might.
Steven’s howling seemed to grow even louder as Rick focused his attention and let fly.
His fist rebounded.
The shock of the reaction sent a wave of pain through his hand into his wrist and all the way up his arm and he howled in agony. He cursed volubly, not bothering