the blank metal face on the grandfather clock swung back to reveal a group of four dials, each graduated in a different manner, only one of them immediately familiar. barney studied the other three for some seconds, then their meaning suddenly came clear. the big clock had just finished softly talking away the fourth hour of the first day of the first month of year one. there were five figures on the year dial.
he stared at it. a five-year period of—something seemed to be the key to the entire setup.
barney shook his head. key it might be, but not one he could read without additional data. he snapped the cover disk shut on the unpleasantly suggestive dials, and began to go mentally over mcallen's letter.
the business that in twenty-four hours—twenty now—the manner of leaving the cabin would become "apparent" to him—that seemed to dispose of the possibility of being buried underground here. mcallen would hardly have provided him with a personal model of the tube; he must be speaking of an ordinary door opening on the immediate environment, equipped with a time lock.
in that case, where was the door?
barney made a second, far more careful search. three hours later, he concluded it. he'd still found no trace of an exit. but the paneling in any of the rooms might slide aside to reveal one at the indicated time, or a section of the floor might swing back above a trap door. there was no point in attempting to press the search any further. after all, he only had to wait.
on the side, he'd made other discoveries. after opening a number of crates in the storage room, and checking contents of the freezer, he could assume that there was in fact more than enough food here to sustain one man for five years. assuming the water supply held out—there was no way of checking on it; the source of the water like that of the power and the ventilation lay outside the area which was accessible to him—but if the water could be depended on, he wouldn't go hungry or thirsty. even tobacco and liquor were present in comparably liberal quantities. the liquor he'd seen was all good; almost at random he had selected a bottle of cognac and brought it and a glass to the main room with him. the thought of food wasn't attractive at the moment. but he could use a drink.
he half filled the glass, emptied it with a few swallows, refilled it and took it over to one of the armchairs. he began to feel more relaxed almost at once. but the truth was, he acknowledged, settling back in the chair, that the situation was threatening to unnerve him completely. everything he'd seen implied mcallen's letter came close to stating the facts; what wasn't said became more alarming by a suggestion of deliberate vagueness. until that melodramatically camouflaged door was disclosed—seventeen hours from now—he'd be better off if he didn't try to ponder the thing out.
and the best way to do that might be to take a solid load on rapidly, and then sleep away as much of the intervening time as possible.
he wasn't ordinarily a hard drinker, but he'd started on the second bottle before the cabin began to blur on him. afterwards, he didn't remember making it over to the bed.
