where they would go. The knowledge had been at the back of his mind when he first suggested the Historical Museum as a meeting place. He had been involved with the building's design in his work at the Architectural Center. He knew its floor plan above and below ground—its provisions for utilities, its security precautions, its entrances and exits.

Casually he began to walk among the exhibits, pausing to study some of them, then moving on, the girl following silently. They reached a stairway leading to a lower floor. Hendley nodded at ABC-331. Downstairs there were other exhibits, but he quickly located a corridor leading to some storage rooms and, beyond these, to another stairway.

Moments later they were moving quietly through the low-ceilinged room which housed the building's heating and air-conditioning plant. A steel door led to a narrow passage, which opened onto an underground tunnel carrying a maze of pipes.

"There's a service exit," he said. "It leads outside."

"Outside?" Her eyes showed alarm.

Hendley nodded. The safest place was in the sun.

He found the winding metal staircase he was looking for. He led the way up the stairs. Another steel door at the top was secured, but it opened from the inside. Hendley swung the door open. Sunlight blazed down on them. The girl gasped. Her hand came up to shield her eyes. Hendley quickly climbed through the opening and pulled her up after him. He stripped the belt from his coverall and used it as a wedge to keep the steel door from closing completely behind them. Then he stood in the naked sunlight and looked down at her.

"They'll never look for us here," he said.

The girl did not reply, but her slim, small hand slipped into his and squeezed gently. She was squinting against the harsh glare. The sun was a white, hot eye rolling in the sky. Its light reflected in a massive blaze of white from the unbroken curve of concrete towering for some thirty stories above them. In the distance other great concrete cylinders glared in the sunlight. A flat table of bare, baked earth, pale and shimmering, stretched between the featureless buildings like the floor of an enormous oven. Far above, sealed, windowless helicopters droned over the city in a steady stream, their blades beating like wings.

She was trembling.

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